Main Engine Cut Off - T+30: SpaceX Nearing Falcon 9 Return-to-Flight

Episode Date: November 23, 2016

All signs point to SpaceX nearing a return-to-flight mission for Falcon 9. I discuss what to watch for in the months ahead, and read some email. SpaceX prime Falcon 9 rockets for December return | NASASpaceFlight.com With rockets on the move, SpaceX still aiming for 2016 return to flight | Ars Technica Matt Desch on Twitter: “A beautiful sight. Stage 1 arriving in California for our launch. Soon, very soon... Rainbow was a nice (and fitting) touch! #IridiumNEXT” Chris B - NSF on Twitter: “SpaceX ramping up to RTF. Falcon 9 S1 spotted en route to Vandy (Iridium NEXT). Next S1 and S2 (Echostar-23?) on the McGregor test stands.” Main Engine Cut Off Weekly, Issue #5 The Space Review: Enabling a Mars settlement strategy with the Hercules reusable Mars lander Space Shuttle Decision, 1965-1972, by T. A. Heppenheimer 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 and this is the week that we will find out whether or not I'm horribly bad luck for SpaceX or not because I'm going to spend most of the show talking about what's coming up next for SpaceX in the next few months. They're getting close to return to flight. Once they get back flying, it's going to be an interesting few months. So I'm going to break that down today. But the last time that I did something like this, the last time I spent a show talking about what's coming soon for SpaceX was on August 31st, 2016. If you're listening to this show, you probably remember what happened on September 1st, a mere 24 hours after I posted that episode,

and that was when a Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad. So, you know, I remember getting a message from Jake from Wee Martians the day after that and said, well, so much for your episode this week. And that's how I felt too after that and said, well, so much for your episode this week. And that's how I felt too after spending a whole episode talking about what's coming next for them and the day after everything changing with that explosion. So hopefully nothing like that happens again this time. I'm pretty confident that it won't, but here goes nothing. To start off, there's been a flurry of things happening this week in SpaceX land. They've had the first stage arrive for their next launch at Vandenberg.

That is the launch of Iridium Next. That seems to be the one on tap for a return to flight mission in mid-December. So just about two, three weeks out from where we are now, maybe a little bit more than that. They're not really nailing down a date yet for that, but that looks to be the next launch. This was confirmed by the head of Iridium, who tweeted that the first stage for their rocket, for their launch, has arrived at Vandenberg. The second stage is there already. The payloads are there. So the entire flight stack for this launch is at Vandenberg ready to go. That leaves them with some integration work to be done, some test fires to be

done. And that would be very interesting to watch because this is the first time that Vandenberg will be flying a mission with the sub-cooled propellants. The last mission they launched was Jason-3 way back last year, so that was the previous version of Falcon 9. That was the one that went out, landed on the drone ship, but one of the legs failed, causing it to fall over and explode once it did topple over. This launch will be very interesting, very telling for them, because they spent a lot of time upgrading the launch pad at Vandenberg. They, I think, got it ready for Falcon Heavy. We haven't had any direct confirmation of that yet, but that was part of the upgrades they were doing was to

support the newest version of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. So this will be a great launch to get a look at what they're doing out west, to see where their infrastructure's at, and to get them back flying again after the AMOos 6 incident back in September. Iridium itself is under a little bit of pressure to get these satellites up and flying because some of their old fleet is failing right now. They're under some investment pressure. There's a couple of different scenarios there that are playing into Iridium really wanting to get their satellites up and flying. really wanting to get their satellites up and flying. And it's also important to note that there are going to be a lot of Iridium Next launches from SpaceX over the next year,

because they do have a series of flights to get their entire constellation up in orbit. So this is the first Iridium mission of that set, but we will certainly see more coming out of Vandenberg over the next 12 months. It'll be interesting to see what kind of return we have on those boosters because this is not going to GTO. This is going to a higher orbit than the ISS, but nothing like GTO. And they're also, they're not maxing out the payload capacity for that orbit itself. So there should be sufficient margin for a return to launch site. The Air Force has not yet given them clearance

to land at Vandenberg. They were building a landing pad out there. We haven't seen pictures of that lately. We haven't seen the status of that lately. But they did get environmental clearance from the FAA to fly back to Vandenberg and land. They need Air Force clearance as well to be able to land back there.

So until then, we'll be seeing drone ship landings, but in the future, maybe next year sometime, we'll start to see return-to-launch site landings for the Iridium flights. That's at least what it seems to be heading towards based on the payloads, based on the orbits, all of that kind of stuff points to the fact that they would be able to get back to the launch site.

So all that said, they are making progress towards this return to flight mission. There's been reports out of McGregor of things exploding in a good way. They've been doing a lot of testing for those COPVs that were the cause of the MO6 incident. They've clearly found the way to trigger that reaction again. Hopefully that means good things for the investigation, that it is a process issue. And that is clear that it is a process issue based on the fact that they're shipping hardware out from McGregor to launch sites right now. If it was a vehicle issue, then that first stage would have been heading back to Hawthorne to get refitted and maybe a little bit of design change.

But the fact that it headed from McGregor to the launch site means that this is a process issue that they're sorting out. There is nothing wrong with the vehicles. So that's a good sign in itself that these things were back in McGregor for testing. They are being able to reproduce that issue in McGregor and these stages are now being sent to their appropriate launch sites. That to me sounds like we are getting close to the end of the investigation. It'll be interesting to see if NASA and the FAA and all those parties that were involved sign off on this investigation. There was that drama surrounding the CRS-7 investigation that the NASA official on the investigation team did not sign off and say that it was the strut that caused the

issue solely. There was other factors at play. All that's been talked about before, so I'm not going to get into it too much here. Just to say that when this investigation does get wrapped and a report comes out, make sure you give it a look over and see who signed that report, what they said inside of it. It should be very interesting to see what comes out of that. sign that report, what they said inside of it. It should be very interesting to see what comes out of that. The latest date that we've seen for the return to flight is December 17th. That is not yet confirmed by SpaceX, but that is the date that's been floating around the typical rumor mills that we follow for all this kind of info. So that seems like a good target. It's still a few weeks out. That first stage just got to Vandenberg, so my guess is they'll start doing some testing with that. They might even roll the first stage and the second stage out to the pad

to do some pad checks before they're even ready to do a static fire or anything else related to the actual launch campaign. They're probably going to want to test out the launch pad itself after all of the work that's been going on there the past year. We'll see some of that happening. It's typically tough to get photos out of Vandenberg because of its placement and its security around it and all of that, but the important events seem to be watched by the SpaceX fans and followers out on the West Coast, so we'll follow along with that,

but we should start to see some pretty concrete things coming in regards to that flight over the next week or two, if they are going to make a mid-December return to flight. Beyond that, the next first and second stages are in this test stands down in McGregor, Texas. Right now, the payload for that flight looks to be Echo Star 23 flying out of Pad 39A. That'll be the first launch from there since the space shuttle. That could change. The payload could change for that. There are a lot of people vying for that position for the Floridian return to flight of Falcon 9, but most likely it's going to be Echo Star 23. Now, right now, all the typical rumor mills are seeming to point towards that launch

happening at the end of December. These stages are up in McGregor, which should mean that they will be out on their way to Florida over the next week or two, which would be in line for an end of December launch, maybe beginning of January. That'll be the first launch from 39A. The pad will be ready to support that launch. They'll probably again, like Vandenberg, want to do some testing before they're ready

for the actual launch campaign. So they might roll a booster out, maybe even a reused one, or a not yet reused one, but a recently flown core that they have out on the East Coast. Maybe they'll roll one of those out to do some testing, make sure all of their connections are good and make sure the fueling procedure is going to go just fine. Get all of that stuff sort of worked out before they have a flight ready booster coming out for launch. So again, there's a lot of people keeping an eye on that pad out there and seeing what's going on we should see some activity around that pretty soon it seems like the pad's getting close to ready so that'll be really exciting to see all that activity happening

out at 39a to see something on that pad again getting ready to go it'll be interesting to see how they change their operations from what they were doing at pad 40 to what we'll have to do at 39A, the way that they're handling payloads, the way that they're using the hangar there that they've been storing all of their flight cores in. They're going to need to clear that out or at least make some room for the new cores to come into to get out to the pad. They'll probably do some payload integration in there as well. So there's a lot of activity that's going to be new that we haven't seen yet from SpaceX. So it'll be fun to watch the way that they get 39A in action. And it's going to be really exciting

to see them roll a booster out to that pad to get ready for launch. If they are able to return to flight from Vandenberg in the middle of December and then get a launch off from 39A towards the end of December or even in the beginning of January, that would put them right back in their two-week cadence that they were at before the AMO-6 incident, or at least leading up to the AMO-6 incident. They were getting close to their once every two weeks cadence. So this would certainly start them off that way. Obviously, these are two different pads, so it's a little different than when we were looking at a two-week cadence on pad 40 itself. They're going to have these two active pads that are flying some different missions.

So, you know, that might be kind of grading it on a curve a little bit, but it does show that they are ready to jump right back into this and get going on a reliable and consistent flight status. It'll be great if they were able to keep that up. It's going to be tough because I'm sure there's going to be things they did discover on each pad that they're going to need to work out before the next flight or even before the flight that we're about to see. So, you know, there certainly could be a week or two week slide here and there if they do have some issues they need to work while they're getting ready for these launch campaigns. But

all in all, they seem to be approaching this return getting ready for these launch campaigns. But all in all, they seem to be approaching this return to flight in a very confident manner. They are scheduling this kind of stuff out in a way that says they are not nervous about getting back to flight, or they are not. I don't want to say that they're not cautious getting back to flight, because certainly they're being cautious, but they are ready to get back into this. They've worked out what they need to. They've figured out what the cause of AMO6 was, and they've figured out how to get around that and how to fix that issue. And they're going to dive right back into their manifest

and get going again, because the most important thing at this point going forward is reliability and flight rate. I've been harping on it for, you know, half a year or more now that those are the things that we need to look for. A lot of the excitement around the landings, you know, that was extremely exciting last year. It's still exciting. It's always going to be exciting, but we have a lot of boosters now in hangars ready to be reflown.

We're probably going to see the first reflight of a booster in January with SES-10. So the landings are going to be entering their operational phase, not as much the groundbreaking experimental phase. We're going to be looking at the landings for the operations side, not the technical and experimental side. That's going to shift focus a little bit for what I talk about on this show, what we all look at as SpaceX fans and followers. That's going to be the focus is reliability and flight rate. Can they get reliable? Can they get consistent? Can they get on a schedule the way that ULA is? Obviously, ULA is scheduled a little bit slower than what SpaceX is aiming for, but can they get on that regularity? Can they get every two to three weeks flying a mission

out of one of the pads and consistently do it safely and get everything there operationally? SpaceX has put themselves in a very, very tough spot. I don't want to say that, you know, another failure would be completely catastrophic, but right now they really, really, really cannot handle another failure. They need to get back on the horse. They need to get flying and they need to get consistent and they need to prove to the doubters out there that they can be a reliable launch provider and that you can have a reliable launch provider at a low cost. That is their mission to prove it. That is going to be their main focus. We may see some of the reusability things take a backseat in terms of PR focus and things like

that. They are probably going to want to talk up the reliability and, you know, and kind of put a lot of effort into that side of things, if only for PR, you know, and that sounds like something that I would be bashing them for, something that would be easy to give them, you know, to give them some flack for that, oh, you're doing this for the PR. But really, that is what they need to focus on over the next few months here, is that they can be reliable, they can be consistent. That is the direction they need to head, and that is what we're going to be watching for over the next few months. As I said, they're still going to go ahead with the reflown booster on SES-10. That'll be the

first time they're reusing one of these cores. So the reusability aspects will still be present in their roadmap, but as I said, it's going to move into the operational side and not so much the experimental side because we have so many boosters on the ground. We have so many boosters in the workflow, in the flight line, getting ready to go that it's going to be a segment of their operations, not something that is going to grab all of the headlines as it has in the past. Now stick a pin in the reflown cores bit for a second. I'm going to get back to that when talking about Falcon Heavy, but just keeping in mind that that's something that is happening still, even if they're going to focus on reliability

and consistency over the next few months. The reflown aspect is still going to be a big thing, so stick a pin in that. We'll get right back to it. But first, I want to talk about the launch pads that SpaceX will be using over the next few months. We've already talked about Vandenberg. We've already talked about 39A. Pad 40, the launch pad they had been using up until that explosion, the one that was destroyed in that explosion, the initial reports made it sound like that pad was going to need to be entirely rebuilt from the ground up, you know, ripping out concrete and everything. It doesn't sound that bad anymore after a couple of additional reports.

Some of the rumors say that that pad would be operational again by summer-ish time frame. So, you know, not necessarily near term, but within the next year that would be back flying again, which would give them three active pads. Vandenberg is obviously a very special case that, you know, people flying to sun-synchronous orbits or polar orbits or highly inclined orbits can fly from. But all of their GTO missions, all of their commercial missions, their NASA missions to the space station are going to be flown off the East Coast. So here's how I see everything breaking down once the three pads are active. Pad 40 is probably where they'll fly all of their commercial flights out of,

meaning the geostationary communication satellites that they make a lot of money from, and even the commercial cargo flights with Dragon up to the ISS. Those will probably all go back to flying out of Pad 40. That leaves Pad 39A for Falcon Heavy, which we'll talk about in a second, and for Dragon 2 flights in preparation for flying crew up to the ISS and for flying Red Dragon in 2018 or beyond. So that's probably how they'll use the two pads out in Florida. That does leave the Texas launch site unaccounted for. Now that's something that's more long-term. We don't know an exact date yet, but you know, you're probably looking at 2018 or beyond for that launch site being ready to fly

flights. They'll probably fly a lot of GTO flights out of the Texas launch site once it's up and running. Maybe even Mars flights, depending on what they need to do. The lower inclination would help for both of those kinds of things. It wouldn't make as much of a difference for something like an ISS flight, since that's at a high inclination orbit. So, you know, once that's operational, we'll see how things shift around. But as far as the three pads, that's really promising because it lets them have an operational pad where they're doing all of their day-to-day business operations, commercial flights, NASA flights, while leaving pad 39A for their more exploratory stuff,

which we'll get into now. Aside from reliability, the next big focus for SpaceX has to be Falcon Heavy. And I say that because, you know, not because of commercial reasons. They've upgraded Falcon 9 so many times that it's capable of flying nearly the heaviest commercial geostationary satellites that they need to fly today. Falcon Heavy is not so much of a draw for that market, but it's absolutely critical for all of their Mars ambitions. So this is going to be the next big focus for SpaceX, as it has been in the past, but they've kind of been derailed time and time again. Falcon 9 ate into the market share of Falcon Heavy, and then through a couple of different issues, they've gotten sidetracked a little bit. So Falcon Heavy really needs to get on as the highest priority thing

once they're back flying, because it's just absolutely critical for all of their Mars flights. To go hand in hand with that is Dragon 2. You know, that's in the works for commercial crew flights, but it's also going to be used as Red Dragon, as the missions to Mars, the initial missions to Mars, with all of the supersonic retropropulsion, entry, descent, and landing, all of that stuff going on with it. These two things really make up the brunt of focus for SpaceX over the next couple of months to years. Now, back before when I said put a pin in the reflown cores thing,

that's what I wanted to get back to here, because TICOM 8, that flight that went off a while back, the core that was landed after that flight is the one with the crushed leg. It came back from sea at a slight tilt because of the leg. The crushable core in the leg had been destroyed during the little bit harder than normal landing. That core is reusable, and it was something that was kind of a mystery for a while because nobody knew exactly what was going on with it. It was sent back to Hawthorne.

The latest info we have points to the fact that it's being refitted to fly as a side core on Falcon Heavy. So that would be a reflown core as one of the side boosters on the original, on the first Falcon Heavy flight. the original on the first Falcon Heavy flight. Now that's a really cool thing to be able to say that we reused a core as the side booster on this first flight of Falcon Heavy and it certainly points to the fact that they were at their limits of as far as their production line goes and that the Falcon Heavy demo flight was not going to take away from the production lines as much as it could so you know if TICOM 8 was something that they wouldn't just up and reuse, but could be flown as a side booster on demo flight, and that made more sense to keep their production lines flowing better, you know, that's a decision

that I'm not sure how it was made, whether it was made from a technical decision, a operations position, or a purely experimental demonstration point of view. Tough to say how that decision was made, but it is a cool note to know that Falcon Heavy will fly with at least one side booster, being a reflown core. As of right now, the Falcon Heavy flight looks to be slated for the middle of next year. Obviously, six months from now is exactly the time slot that it's falling in. So the old joke about Falcon Heavy that it's always flying in six months. That is true in this case. I think we're about six months out from that. If they're getting back to flight in December, that date would probably hold. But

again, you know, they might wait for that demo flight until pad 40 is back operational so that they can shift, you know, all of their commercial operations to Pad 40 to free them up time-wise for 39A in the first flight of Falcon Heavy. That would be my guess of how things shake out. So if Pad 40 is back in the beginning of summer and things shift back to using that pad, then maybe Falcon Heavy gets off from 39A. There's still an outside chance that the original Falcon Heavy flight

could be a Vandenberg launch. It's tough to say how they're feeling about that because of the recovery of the boosters. They want to get back as many of these first stages as possible. Out in Florida, they've been building another landing pad. They could fly two back to land and one to the drone ship downrange. It would be tougher to do that sort of thing, obviously, out in California, where they may only have one landing pad, and they don't even have clearance yet for a return to launch site, and they only have one drone ship. So it gets a little tough to try to organize that for recovery purposes. Maybe they

do something where they expend one of the cores in an effort to get it flying sooner out of Vandenberg and kind of put that debate to rest on when Falcon Heavy will actually fly. So that's sort of an update overall on where SpaceX is today and what's up for them in the next couple of months. I wrote a bunch more about SpaceX, maybe not a bunch, but at least a good bit more about SpaceX in the latest issue of Main Engine Cutoff Weekly that was issue five. I'll have a link to that in the show notes over at mainenginecutoff.com. So that's about it for the SpaceX updates today. I want to get into some of

your email feedback on some of these weeks where there's not a huge topic to talk about. I want to do some more email and bring that into the show a little bit more. So we're going to get to that in a second. But first, I wanted to say thank you so much to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Miko is where you can go to help support the show, the blog, the podcast, the weekly issues that I'm doing. All of that is supported by Patreon and Patreon only. This is a 100% listener and reader supported thing that I'm doing here. So if you want to help support the show, head over to Patreon and give as little as $1 a month. All of your support really, really helps. And I want to give a special thank you to Pat and Matt and one other anonymous executive producer

of Main Engine Cutoff. They're supporting at $10 a month, and I am hugely thankful for their support. So thank you so much to the executive producers of Main Engine Cutoff. And with that, let's get into the email. Now, these two emails I'm going to read are about the topics from the past few weeks, which are the RFIs surrounding SLS and Orion. In general, I want to hear from more of you out there. If you've got thoughts on any topic I'm talking about on the blog or the podcast, send me an email, anthonyatmainenginecutoff.com. And I'm going to be doing these email segments

from time to time. If we have more time in one show or if we just get a lot of interesting email to read out, I'm going to do this more frequently. So if you've got any thoughts on what I'm covering or even stuff that I haven't covered yet, but you just are bursting to talk about, send an email in anthony at mainenginecutoff.com and I'll probably be doing more of these segments on the show in the coming months.

So first up from Garrett here about the RFIs that I was talking about in the past and where they might be headed in the future. The last show I was talking about how these things might be applicable beyond SLS and Orion, and he emailed in to say this. Beyond heavy lift and deep space habitats, one major hurdle has not yet been picked up, cargo landers.

And so when this article was published outlining a NASA Langley study to look at a reusable, methalox-powered, Mars orbit to surface and back lander capable of landing 20 tons of payload. It really grabbed my attention. And he inserts a link here to the Space Review,

an article about the Hercules lander. I will put a link to that in the show notes. MainEngineCutoff.com. Check out that article because it's very interesting to read. And the Hercules lander itself is pretty awesome. It's got a lot in common with something like SpaceX's ITS. You'll see the way that it enters and propulsively lands

has a lot of similarities to something like that. A bit smaller scale, but definitely worth a read. Back to Garrett's email. I really feel that this could be a massive opportunity not just for crewed spaceflight, but for the industry as a whole, as it could move straight towards reusable, in-orbit, refuelable upper stages with NASA providing the support for competitive development of those. Given an open RFI, SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Masten, they could all provide solutions to this general concept that would support both their own needs and the mission needs of NASA

and international partners. I really hope we see some kind of program like this in the future. Thanks, Garrett, for the email. That is a great point. Obviously, landers are something that NASA has not put a lot of effort into yet over the past few years, as much as the private sector has with SpaceX, Blue Origin, Masten, all of that work going into VTVL. It would be great to see a NASA program really take this on full-throated. They're doing it in a smaller scale for some of the lunar stuff that we're seeing around the small payloads to the

moon and things like that. It would be great to see them do it almost like they did commercial cargo, commercial crew, where they're saying, you know, start here on cargo and move up to crew and keep it at a human-sized scale the whole time. It would be really cool to see a program like that. And I think, you know, beyond a deep space habitat, that has to be the next location that they go for these kinds of programs. So thanks again for the email, Garrett. I really appreciate you emailing in. And here's another one from Alistair. Now, he touched on some of the same stuff that Garrett did, but towards the end of his email he was talking about reusability in general and as it applies to the commercial market,

and I thought some of his comments there were very interesting and worth discussing. Now Alistair agrees with reusability in general, he sees that as the future, but wanted to play devil's advocate a bit to talk about the way that Arianespace and ULA, to a lesser extent, are not yet going all in on reusability the way that SpaceX and Blue Origin are. From the email, in the 1970s, President Nixon ordered NASA to go all in on the space shuttle, taking on the idea that the price of space travel would drop. In anticipation of this drop and to make the program a success, the shuttle program was given a massive amount of commercial launches. However, the shuttle turned out to be hugely expensive, and Europe, who had bet on their expendable Ariane class, secured a lot of contracts coming out of that.

Now, with a lot of hype for people over at SpaceX, Ariane has re-adopted their wait-and-see approach to reusability, waiting for Falcons to be reflown, seeing if costs do drop to a point that would affect the market or they would wait it out for a repeat of the space shuttle incident now that was an interesting way to look at it to kind of try to apply it back to the previous era i don't necessarily agree with that because of the environment that the space shuttle was created in nasa's original intention for the space shuttle was a in. NASA's original intention for the space shuttle was a fully reusable vehicle. It was almost like a large plane with a smaller plane on it that was actually the orbiter. The large plane would take it up, almost like we're seeing with the Virgin

Galactic stuff, and then the orbiter would fly up from there to orbit, the large plane would come back to land, etc. etc. It was a fully reusable thing as envisioned by NASA with straight wings and smaller payload bays and all this kind of stuff. Once it got into the program, the development cost for it was going to be so high. To get that thing up and running was going to be so high on the front end, and the tail end would be a very low operating cost. That was not politically viable. See all of the past episodes about political capital and support and all that kind of stuff. A huge upfront cost with a less cost on the trail end, that was not politically viable at that time. In fact, if NASA were to do it alone, none of the program would have happened.

The program really only happened once the Air Force got involved and kind of ran through some of their own requirements and formed what the shuttle is today. They sort of sculpted the way that it was built with a delta wing, with a payload bay the size it was, and even, you know, in certain ways, solid rocket boosters and things like that. It was really a compromised thing from what NASA originally intended because of the requirements of the Air Force and because the requirements that the cost of it be spread out over a long period of time. Nobody wanted to be the president that signed a huge investment on the front end for something reusable that would later cost very little to fly. It was easier to stretch the costs out over time and trade off a huge upfront investment for something that was higher on the backend, but sustainable, or at least in their words, sustainable because it didn't have these huge peaks in cost. So all that's to say, I don't necessarily agree that this is really an echo

of that time because SpaceX, Blue Origin, the others that are going all in on reusability, they are putting the investment in up front. They are putting their time, energy, and money and all the resources that they possibly can behind reusability on the front end for lowering costs later. That was not something that the government was ever going to support or could support because of the way that politics works. They are never going to be able to put in the amount of money necessary up front to make it in the long term when it comes to a government program like the shuttle. Private companies are able to do that. Obviously, the scales are a bit different when you're talking about these projects because of the way that private institutions work versus public institutions.

of the way that private institutions work versus public institutions. But the theory is, you know, you're investing more upfront for less expensive things on the tail end. And that is what these private companies are doing now. They are doing it the way that it needs to happen if it's ever going to be successful. That was not the way the shuttle worked. The shuttle was a compromise between NASA and the Air Force. And when I say a compromise, the Air Force came in and kind of rolled over NASA's concerns and basically got the program funded for NASA out of Department of Defense needs. So for that reason, with SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the like, putting the money in up front, doing all the work on the front end to have a lower cost in the long run, I think this is a different era entirely. And it's going to have a different outcome than the long run. I think this is a different era entirely, and it's going to

have a different outcome than the shuttle did. The shuttle is not very applicable to this era, only because of, you know, the forces that were at play are so different between then and now that it's hard to make any connection between the two. You know, the shuttle was partially reusable, so there's a connection there, but in general, the forces at play, the dynamics at play, they are not really one-to-one comparable at all. But I thought it was an interesting point to kind of bring up because the past few weeks I've been talking about political support versus financial support, public versus private, things like that. And this is a good example to see the difference in how these programs were started and carried out and projecting forward how they will turn out into the future.

On this topic of the shuttle and the history of it and all that, one of my favorite books, it's quite long, quite lengthy, but it's really awesome. It's called The Space Shuttle Decision, and it's a history of the space shuttle from 1965 to 1972, written by T.A. Heppenheimer. I'm going to have a link for that in the show notes over at mainenginecutoff.com. It is an incredible book. It's so detailed about the way that the shuttle was envisioned, developed, and decided upon, and kind of all of the politicking that went into creating it, all these different things I was talking about with the Air Force and the different forces at play there. I would highly recommend reading that book

because it's very interesting as a history lesson and also to apply to current environments like we're seeing here. So thanks very much to Garrett and Alistair for the email. And I want to hear from you on these topics and others. Please email in anthony at mainenginecutoff.com and I will read out your emails on the show in the future. With that, that'll be it for me this week. Thank you so much for listening to

Main Engine Cutoff. Thank you so much for coming here week in, week out, and supporting what I'm doing here. Again, you can find the show notes over at mainenginecutoff.com. Check out the blog over there. Check out Main Engine Cutoff Weekly Weekly and follow on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. Thank you very much for listening and I will talk to you next week.