Main Engine Cut Off - T+314: Jockeying for the Artemis 3 Lander, and the NASA Administrator Position

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Thinking through the chaos that has ensued over the NASA Administrator role, the Artemis 3 lander acceleration movement, the SpaceX Starship HLS update, and a bit on how we actually got here.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Donald, Stealth Julian, Jan, Theo and Violet, The Astrogators at SEE, Joakim, Steve, Matt, Fred, Lee, Joel, Kris, Ryan, David, Josh from Impulse, Warren, Heiko, Pat, Russell, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Joonas, Better Every Day Studios, Will and Lars from Agile, Natasha Tsakos, Frank, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsSpaceX - UpdatesSpaceX teases simplified Starship as alarms sound over Moon landing delays - Ars TechnicaWhy did NASA’s chief just shake up the agency’s plans to land on the Moon? - Ars TechnicaElon Musk just declared war on NASA’s acting administrator, apparently - Ars TechnicaHow America fell behind China in the lunar space race—and how it can catch back up - Ars TechnicaChina completes landing and takeoff test for crewed moon lander - SpaceNewsChina completes second hot-fire test for new moon rocket, including engine restarts - SpaceNewsTrump pulls Isaacman nomination for space. Source: “NASA is f***ed.” - Ars TechnicaThe 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 NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to manage and cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo here for a spooky Halloween edition of the show. There has been so much drama lately in the jockeying for both the Artemis 3-lander, the NASA administrator position, and then most recently an update out of SpaceX on the starship human landing system vehicle that has been a long-awaited update, I'll say. You know, I talked a little bit about this with Miles O'Brien on the last two shows ago now, but there's been a lot to catch up on, so I want to dive a little deeper into it. But to start, I think it's important to remember how we got here in this position, because

there's a trio of things that happened that led us here, and it's important to remember each one of those because I think it's easy to say well we got here because Sean Duffy the acting administrator of NASA the current Secretary of Transportation went on TV and started throwing SpaceX under the bus that is one of the elements but how did we get here is

more important than that I think to start with the thing we've talked about all year Starship had a terrible beginning of the year right the string of failures they had an explosion on the test stands a stalled you know momentum on their roadmap from

what we could see, because again, we see a lot out of Starship. And as we now know in this update that we got that I'll review from yesterday, there's a lot going on that we don't know. There's a lot of updates we don't hear out of SpaceX and a lot of things that we can't just see from Highway 4 in Boca Chica. So that dominated the early part of this year. In May, Jared Isaacman's nomination was pulled as the NASA administrator, which led to a lot of opportunism in people seeing this is their chance to either push their agenda forward that Jared Isaacman was not as supportive of when he was out there talking to public. You saw, you know, Ted Cruz and the Johnson Space Center contingent getting a huge package within the one big beautiful bill, $10 billion. A huge push

on the Lunar Gateway, on SLS-O-Ryan generally, on the way they view the Artemis program, the things they find important. And that was supplemented. fundamental funding, right? It's like the one piece of funding that's actually passed this year, because here we are in a government shutdown. We're a month in at this point. And that was right in and around the same time that Jared Isaacman's nomination was pulled. So that was, there was political upheaval in the higher ups at NASA. And then you got into early August, China doing a test of their lunar lander, and very beautiful looking engine test that they had this lander rigged up in this test device. They were testing different thrust patterns, different

contact cutoffs, a lot of the things that you'd want to see if you're developing a lunar lander followed shortly thereafter in early September by a Long March 10 hot fire, the vehicle that is going to take their lunar program out there. Now, this was a shorter first stage. This was a test article that had the seven engines they would use on the Long March 10 rocket, and they're testing, you know, the launch pad out, the firing systems. But, you know, that's very analogous to things that we would see here if we had open access to a lunar vehicle program. And here we are now almost early November, and things are a little fluxy, right? And SpaceX saying they just need a little more time to figure it out.

This is an early November reference that I think maybe two of you will understand. But that's what you do when you're in this part of New Jersey. Shout out, Ace Enders. But I really do think it's that mix that led us here. I don't know if we are here if even one of those things didn't happen, right? If Starship had an amazing year, are we here? If Jared Isaacman is confirmed as anast administrator, are we here? If there wasn't a one month long period of time where it looks like all the sudden

we're having a Chinese lunar landing Sputnik moment that led to a hearing in Congress with Jim Brynstein, among others, very old, spacey thinking crew these days talking about how we're definitely not going to beat them to the moon, and we need to start thinking about different plans, then taking that show on the road to different conferences. All of that came, you know, right after these two tests out of China. So if you change any one of those elements, are we here right now? I don't think so. So where are we right now, right? Sean Duffy goes out. There's two branches of the storyline. One is that Sean Duffy really wants to remain the NASA administrator. We had Eric Berger on Off Nominal yesterday talking about a lot of this. I think it's worth going

to listen to that as well. Even if you're someone that doesn't like our hijinks at Off Nominal, I think that show is one that leaves a lot of our jokiness out and is a great conversation with Eric. But his view is that, and I can't disagree with many of this, which is why I'm going to relay. He's got great sources, but also a great viewpoint on this, that Sean Duffy wants to stay in place, at least beyond Artemis II, because he likes the ability to go out in public and have a better public image of himself and raise his profile in a way. That's different than when he goes and talks about plane crashes or air traffic and issues or, you know, flight delays or whatever. Like, most of the stories that you're going

to be put out in public for as the Secretary of Transportation are bad stories or negative stories or things that people are mad about and things that actually impact people's lives and they're very mad about. Port, you know, port shutdowns was a hot topic of the last couple years. It's very, like, think of a thing that Pete Buttigieg did that he got good press for. And I think Sean Duffy's in that same spot. I think the first day on his, on the job for him, I think was that crazy helicopter airplane collision in D.C. That was maybe like his first day on the job. So the motivation here from the Sean Duffy side, I can get that,

that NASA is a place where you are pretty much only going out and having a uplifting public image or message that is uplifting to the general public. So Eric says he thinks he wants to remain on Beyond Artemis 2, which puts us into the, you know, springtime, right? They're in February, April, at the latest. Assume that it launches sometime between March and May, and that's the time frame that he's thinking there. At the same time, there's a huge push to get Jared Isaacman renominated.

He's had meetings with Trump. I didn't believe any of this at the beginning. Now I'm coming around that, yeah, I guess this is really a thing that's happening. Sergio Gore, the person who was responsible for pulling Jared Isaacman's nomination in the weird springtime political, upheaval that we had where Elon Musk was ousted and they were trying to, you know, kind of cleanse, I guess, of the Elon Musk'sites that have not yet been confirmed. He's been, I think he's now the ambassador to India or something. He's been shipped to the other side of the world.

And so maybe that's part of why Jared Eisenman's coming back into play here. But there's a big contingent of people trying to get Isaacman renominated. And it sounds like even President Trump is, you know, amenable to this and that they've had good meetings. Now, Sean Duffy has cozied up with this Johnson Space Center contingent and the traditional contractors of the NASA side of things, which side note, I feel like it is a weird situation. If you knew that the president was leaning in the direction of the more Jared Isaacmans of the world, supportive of commercial spaceflight, of rethinking the way things are done at NASA, being critical of the position NASA is in right now, and yet positive about what

could be in if a couple of changes were instituted. If you know that was what carried weight with the president and the people around him, and your job is to try to go from acting administrator to just be the administrator, or at least make him not renominate someone, why would you decide the easiest path there is to start a fight and go make partnership with, you know, the kind of other side of NASA, the other thought process here of how NASA should run, and team up with people that have been historically antagonistic to President Trump. You know, I mean, go and look at the relationship between Ted Cruz and President Trump over the years.

And look at the relationship between the Jared Isaacman thought thread of NASA and the Ted Cruz side. Not analogous. So the fact that Sean Duffy thought, I guess the calculus was like, I need a political wing to back me and strongly support me. This is the one available, and I'm going to go that way. That's interesting. If I were him, I would have said, let me adopt all of the things that Isaacman is doing, but do it in a way that is more appeasing of the person I want to nominate me.

So I can't get my head around that yet. That's the one part I can't figure out here. But whatever the case is, these are the battle lines that have been drawn. This is where we're at. So what Eric has relayed to us in his reporting and on the show yesterday is that in this process, when it was getting closer to looking like Isaacman is going to be re-nominated, Sean Duffy reached out to a lot of the other people other than SpaceX in the industry and said, listen, I need your support.

I'm trying to be the head of NASA. I'm going to be pushing back against SpaceX and standing up for the rest of the industry in a way that people feel is needed right now because SpaceX has completely dominated not only NASA contracting, but the industry generally for the last couple years. And so he goes out on TV, the weekend, right after the weekend, I guess, that all this talk about Jared Oskine was happening, or maybe it was the weekend. he was on TV and goes and says I'm opening up the contract for this Artemis 3 lander we've got to figure out how to get the moon before China lands and SpaceX is behind schedule it's not going to work out in time China is going to beat us you had the former head of NASA out in Congress and then conferences saying China is going to beat us to the moon this time around and we can't have that happen so he has thrust this new push of let's try to get a lander faster than Starship seems be doing it right now. And with that was lobbying from the old space world, right, the Lockheeds, the Northup Grummans, and talking about the fact that they can do a government option lander,

a cost plus contract that would build a lunar lander in 30 months to be able to then go and fly the Artemis 3 mission without waiting on the Starship roadmap to come together, which is, you know, a lot of orbital refilling tests that are going to happen in 2026 with Starship V3 here. the starship human landing system needs to be flown and put together flown refueled out loitering around the moon before Orion comes and meets up with it and then goes down to the surface and then comes back so there's a lot of complexity in how many flights we still don't know how many flights and people use that as a negative about starship where I'm like whatever we'll figure this out when they actually start flying nobody I don't think a good argument for we don't know how many flights

Starship needs to fill up its tanks I don't think a good argument is We don't know how many it is. I think a better argument is they don't know yet, but who do you trust to fly as many times as they would need to? The company that just flew more launches than the space shuttle ever flew in a single year and is launching every other day or whatever? Like, it's a terrible argument to say, well, SpaceX can't fly that many times when they're actively flying a ridiculous number of satellites, a ridiculous number of launch vehicles,

a ridiculous number of human spaceflight missions. They're doing more than everyone in the industry. So the criticism of, I don't believe that they'll be able to do as much as they say they'll be able to do. That is a really bad argument. Now, if you want to say they're behind and there's a long to-do list, that's different than saying the fundamental idea here of them flying frequently with reusable spacecraft and actually pulling this off, that's a slippery slope that I don't think really holds up to anyone testing that as a theory. And so this gets into the criticism that I think a lot of people out there were sending to me and Miles O'Brien is that the to-do list that we know about SpaceX and the openness that they've had around the things that they've already done, I think some of the fact that we got an update out of SpaceX yesterday because of all this political pressure and because their proposal to NASA on what they would do to speed up. their lunar lander or a speedier approach to Artemis 3, they put this update out right after they submitted that, right after all this political pressure. If they would have talked more openly

and shown parts of those updates that they've done and the work that they've done there, if they would have shown that even through the course of the year that they've had, I think that changes the perspective that a lot of people would have within and even outside the industry. Because we can assume a lot of this stuff was going on, but SpaceX not talking about it, is not beneficial to them. If they were to openly show the tests that they list in this update, right, they listed a whole bunch of things that they've done recently on the HLS system, right? They talk about doing, they've done environmental control, life support, thermal control system testing.

They've done a landing lake drop test of a full-scale article at flight energies onto simulated lunar regolith. And they would have showed that. I think people would feel differently about where they are with the human landing system. If they would have shown the Raptor lunar landing throttle test demonstrating a representative thrust profile that would allow Starship to land on the lunar surface, that would show that as they've done it, then I think people would feel differently. And this is why I'm saying that SpaceX is not as open as they could be. We feel they are open because they work in the open at Bocca, and we can roll up to them on

Highway 4 and take videos of what they're working on and hope that they leave the door open and see what they're putting together. And we have cameras from NASA spaceflight and others that can see what's going on at McGregor. There's this mystery tent at McGregor, which seems to be what this regolith area was testing. But if SpaceX, by not putting that out, that is not beneficial to them.

But if they are truly, like, working in the open, like they seem to indicate they want to, more so than other companies, then how much of this argument do you head off by doing that? because this entire update from SpaceX I have the link to the show notes if you haven't read yet it's long

I hate their website in terms of readability it's really hard to read but the whole thing is about how much SpaceX has done right we've done more than everyone else we're investing more than everyone else we've done more historically than everyone else

we've flown more than everyone else we've built more launch pads than everyone else we've built more vehicles than everybody else I get it right I'm reminded of that scene from crucification where the daughter's like grandpa he worked really hard on it it's like so do washing machines

that's the vibe of this update, right? Look how much we've been doing. And that is a defense on one front. But it's tough when the criticism is, yeah, but you have a lot more to do, right? If you write big checks, you got to cash big checks. SpaceX wrote an enormous check here on what the starship system is, how it works, and what it's capable of. And nobody doubts what it's capable of. But what people are doubting right now is that you've had a rough year, and we didn't see any of this stuff that you just wrote about yesterday. And so how are we? we to, if we're going to judge you by the openness that you show on live streams and the ability

to show all this different flight activity that's happening, we can't judge you on the list that you just wrote it down for us yesterday if you didn't tell us about it this whole time. And so I really do think if they were more open about this stuff, it would have been strategically better for them right now, and they would have been able to position not defensively like they're doing, but offensively throughout the year. And yeah, our flight tests are not going great, and we're still working on what we need to for orbital refilling. But look at all this other stuff that we're also making progress on. Because up until last week, I heard people saying that SpaceX had a shockingly little number of people working in the human landing system, which,

for me, that doesn't worry me as much with SpaceX, because what they're good at is not getting concerned about the items that are too far away from what they're currently solving. They're really good at solving, what's the next thing that we need to solve? Let's solve that as quickly and efficiently and expertly as possible. And then we move on, and then we move on, and then we move on. And they aggressively go through a roadmap because they're capable of achieving these things on a time frame that everyone else can dream about. They are the outlier in the industry.

They move the goalposts on themselves because they are so good at what they do. That is the situation that they're in right now. other people get credit when they launch a rocket two or three times a year right how many have they launched how many starships do they launch this year and we're all like yeah but you didn't really get to the refilling part right and that's unfair you can say but it's fair because we're judging them on the SpaceX curve and so good work begets a good work right you've got to that's the positioning that they've given themselves the industry right now and i think that's important for them to remember. They've, you know, the Elon Musk influence of it all of being

very averse to doing interviews and doing updates that other people ask for and only doing it on your own terms, there are times when that's really negatively impacting the view that people have of what Starship is up to. And if they were more open about these updates, I think we'd be in a better position now. Now, all that said, right? Let's shift focus a little bit to, all right, where are we, and what is the actual game plan from here with this whole acceleration situation that's going on? I'm still of the belief that Starship's going to be the fastest way to do this, that the SpaceX strategy behind all of this is still going to turn out to be the fastest way. So I would be way more on board with keeping the course and even doubling

down on the direction things are heading right now. Then I would be by saying a 30-month plus government option is going to be faster than SpaceX where they are with Starship working out the remaining details, or that the architecture based on Blue Moon Mark 1 that includes many different landers and coordinating them on the surface, that that's going to be a faster path when we've had a new Glenn launch and one coming up soon and then maybe a lander in the early part of next year. So I really do still feel that the Starship of this all is going to be the fastest, is going to be the most long-term benefit. and should be the thing that we are focused on because it changes the game for the

Artemis program if and when this works out. But I do, I'm also susceptible to the fact that there is a big strategic importance, a big geopolitical importance to not having the Chinese lunar program significantly out in front of the U.S. and international partners program. There is there would be a massive shift in, even if it's just the political vibes of the world, that would be a really big deal. And so I'm not, I'm not ignorant to that. But I also think we give, almost in the way that I've just talked about the way that Starship is not open, or SpaceX is not open about the HLS work that's going on here, I think the closeness of the updates we get out of the Chinese program, we paint in the details as, oh, wow, the rest of this

must be going really well, too. And we paint in the negative space of a starship update as, I guess they're not doing a lot there because they haven't updated it on us, updated us on it. And so I think the closer we get to what looks like China beginning this campaign to go land on the moon, rather than building and developing and testing the vehicles like they're in right now, I think there's going to be things that go wrong that take longer, things they need to fix. So I would bet the landing happens farther away than anyone would predict. And that's easy to say. I hate saying that, right?

Because everything in space is late. But I would bet there's other stuff going on internally and things that will happen internally that we won't know about, but that will delay the schedule. That has happened with every spaceflight program that has ever existed in the whole world. and so the fact that we think oh yeah but the the chinese long march 10 driven program that one's going to go like super smooth and they're going to have no issues with it i think is a little funny to try to compare the artemus program to that and say everything's going to go well there ours is going to be a decade delayed now that's good motivation it's good political messaging

but i don't think that's a realistic way to look at it so when you're comparing you know if these other options that are going to cost $10, $20, $30 billion to do a cost-plus government lander, if that's going to pull the schedule in two years, there's no chance that's worth it. Right? Now, if your point is to go

a fast lunar landing, if your point is to cut the SpaceX industrial complex off its knees and rest control back toward the way that NASA used to work, then sure, that you've decided that's what you're going for, and then that's worth it.

But if the goal is really to accelerate a program, you know, I don't necessarily think that's worth it. And this is leaving aside the fact that the space suits, we have no idea really what the status of the spacesuits are from Axiom space. There's obviously still, you know, Artemis 2 yet to fly. What if something happens on Artemis 2? What if the heat shield does have problems that need to be rethought? What if there's an issue with one of the systems on Orion

and they don't boost themselves out to the free return around the moon? What does that do to the roadmap here? Will Orion then be ready for Artemis 3? But let's just keep a focus on the landers right now because this shows already 20 minutes and I have no idea how much longer I'm going to talk, but I hope you like working this out with me. So I'm more of a...

Let's keep the course here and, I mean, if we want to accelerate it, let's see what SpaceX wrote at the end of this update of we've got ideas on how to accelerate and simplify the starship roadmap here. So one of the last sentences in this update from SpaceX. response to the latest calls, we've shared, let me read this whole paragraph, actually. Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis 3 have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national

priorities. In response to the latest calls, we've shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the moon while simultaneously improving crew safety. I strongly believe that the end of that sentence is SpaceX saying, we're, we've got a mission architecture that excludes Orion and SLS. And maybe it's dragon based where we launched the HLS system to Earth orbit. We refuel it entirely. Then we launch crew on a dragon up to Starship. We fly Starship directly to the lunar surface. And then when it's done the mission on the surface, it launches the lunar orbit where we refill it again with a fully fuel vehicle. And then it boosts back to Earth from there. And we

get around Orion heat shield issues, we get around SLS flight rate, we fly on known systems, we take the entire crew down to the surface, we eliminate the loiter time needed in lunar orbit where the HLS system would be waiting for Orion to get there for months or weeks at least. And we cut out a lot of these things that are probably design constraints on Starship that drive up the cost complexity and the development timeline in ways that undercutting that might be more beneficial. And if you're SpaceX and you are in the position where you feel completely attacked by a NASA and political environment in which, you know, this update goes on at length about

how much we are doing and investing of our own money, almost in a like, to use the words of a person involved, have you said thank you at once? It kind of had that vibe for a good portion of this update. So if I'm SpaceX and I feel that way and you want me, to submit some paperwork on how I would do this faster, like, you know, F me, F you. I'm going to tell you that what I would do is cut your part out of it. My part's going great. How is your part going? That's, you know, and maybe that's a little bit in the direction of what we've talked about in the past that SpaceX has, has in many ways achieved escape velocity from reliance on NASA, right? If NASA were to pull, let's say everything sours, right? NASA pulls the Artemis 3 contract.

I think SpaceX would say like, all right, screw it, we're going on our own. We're doing our own thing. We're doing our own mission. We are maybe even just focusing solely on Mars, and we're going to go make our own progress because we have a NASA level of funding out of Starlink these days. The revenue coming in from Starlink is like NASA levels, right, not to profit, and that they can't all use it. But just in terms of scale, the revenue is astronomical there.

If they're able to pull out investment from Starlink at the level that NASA was investing in Starship, then, I mean, what are we doing here? So, I don't know, I could very much see SpaceX being in the position of saying, you need us more than we need you. So here's what we think. We think our part's the good part. And we're going to double down on that. And if you want to double down on your part, then good luck finding something else that's going to work in time. And also, good luck finding the money to fund that. Because we're out here talking about a government shutdown when nobody can decide about funding the government, and also, let's do a $10 billion, $20 billion program to fund a lander in 30 months. Right. Now, again, they did the one big

individual bill where they slipped $10 billion in and they reassured that the gateway is there. So maybe these parties can find the money for this. But to think that's going to go just like the Chinese lunar program, perfectly, without delay, right on schedule, is a complete rejection of history in spaceflight. So I wouldn't be shocked if the stuff that SpaceX submitted is more aggressive than other people in the industry would submit. Now, on the other fronts, right, we've got a Blue Origin program that they've responded. Lockheed put out statements they've been working on stuff.

I'm sure others, like Northrop and the other big contractors, there's probably a Boeing thing involved somewhere. Maybe there's not because of the issues they've had elsewhere, but you assume any of the big contractors threw something in here. Maybe Dynetics was back with something. Maybe there's like a ULA partnership with the, you know, the Vulcan Dynetics lander that didn't pan out the first time. Maybe they got something in mind and maybe they've rethought some things since that proposal and they have something that would be proposed here. I mean, maybe there's, maybe that impulse lander. You know, we heard about this impulse space lunar lander program that was going to be a

couple of tons, very blue moon mark one. Maybe they've got something, they would say, hey, yeah, we'll throw our hat in the ring. So how's this all going to turn out? Man, I don't know. It's a really bizarre time, right? This is all happening amongst the government shutdown, amongst the power struggle for the head of NASA. And, you know, maybe this shakes out to be a lot of noise that was really just the equivalence

of when Jim Brinstein tweeted to SpaceX, like, it's time to deliver on Dragon. Stop worrying about Starship, it's time to deliver on this. Maybe this is trying to shake out some additional, I don't know, velocity. For us, updates out of the Starship program. For the other side, maybe there are things that are unhappy with, right? how they're going. Maybe they have seen that most people are focused on the general starship system and not the HLS subsystems. And maybe the best thing out of this is giving SpaceX the ability to say, we're going to hot rod some of this program, we're going to change some of our architecture

to make it faster. Maybe they didn't have the permission for that before, and this gives them the permission to cut a couple things out of the roadmap or out of the concept operations that make it faster for them, and it gives them a little more leverage over those within NASA that have been pushing back against it. It's such a wild time, though, right? We've got New Glenn on the pad for their second launch, for they're launching some spacecraft that are bound for Mars, and then their third flight is supposed to be the first lunar landing attempt of Blue Moon Mark I.

If that launches and lands on the moon before Artemis 2 flies, right, if they pull it off late winter, early spring, and then we've got Starship. v3, let's say, kind of the same time, right, late winter, early spring, and you got Artemis 2 happening, all at the same time. That's a wild couple of weeks in space. And let's even just consider throwing the Jared Isaacman thing in there, right? If we, right now, the government shutdown is going to delay all things related to a nomination like this. But, I mean, any day, the president could nominate him again. But then he's got to make it through the whole system. and Ted Cruz has to be the one that says, yeah, let's get him up here for a hearing again,

or confirmation at least. He's already done his hearing, so maybe they don't need a new one, but let's hold his confirmation vote for a little while because, you know, the Sean Duffy angle here, he wants to be there for Artemis II. We're going to hold it up until, let's not go ahead to confirm him until March or April. So he comes in after whatever's happened here with the shutdown. maybe there's a continuing resolution for the full year. The president budget requests usually do in like the February-March time frame. So Jared Isaacman has lost, you know, half his potential tenure here at NASA. And then he's staring down a midterm election year, which then immediately goes into the

next presidential election cycle. So he's got maybe one year in between those two things where he can exert a pretty big influence. And it will likely happen after whatever's going on here has at least a decision. to made. You assume that if all this is happening in October here, that it's not going to, we're not going to hear nothing about it until May, right? Something's going to be decided. Something's going to be stated. Something's going to change, whether or not that means the new funding arrives for it or not. There's going to be some announcements before you would be confirmed. So I just think

he's being put in a really terrible position if he is to get another nomination, if he is to get confirmed. That's a really rough spot. You've been given a budget. you've been given some decisions on the HLS system, you've been given decisions are in the art of its architecture. How much of that can you go change in a positive direction on a really short timeline with maybe one productive year left in the tenure? And maybe, you know, 40 chess is, Isaacman's got a good relationship with the White House, which includes J.D. Vance, who's hoping to go run in the next presidential election and win. Maybe Jared is hoping to align himself that way so that he gets a six or ten years.

span as NASA administrator. And if so, you know, that's an interesting time for him. So, yeah, I mean, this is me just thinking through the chaos of this moment, but it's wild times. It is a really, really wild circumstance, and I truly don't know how it's going to shake out,

but if it's me, I'm doubling down on the starship of it all. I do think it would benefit SpaceX a lot to be working on this update list out in public way more than they have been. And, uh, and, uh, and, you know, I, it's, it's just a, you know, I do, I do think they could be more open. And people defending that by saying, well, no one else is either. I'm saying, well, yes, SpaceX, you are better than that. You are better than those others that don't want to work out in the open that, that, that are scared to put updates out, um, if it's not exactly perfect.

you know embrace what you were doing before and work out in public and if you want to put an update out that says look how much we did that's so much more than everyone else i agree with you but show us actively and show it publicly all the time so everyone continually sees that that is beneficial to you that is using your strengths to your advantage and i think that would have changed this get this conversation that we're having right now out in public now would it have changed everything no because there's politics that are going to politics but would it have changed the positioning and the way that you can go and actually communicating about that, I very strongly think so.

So there's a bunch of thoughts for you on where we are with the Landers and the administrative position. I hope you enjoyed the show. We'll be back next week with more headlines. We've got some other interviews in the works, some of which I even hinted about this episode, and I'm looking forward to some of those things hidden on the podcast feed. But until then, thank you all for listening.

this episode was produced by 32 executive producers. Thanks to Donald, Stealth Julian, Jan, Theo and Violet, the Astrogators at SCE, Joe Kim, Steve, Matt, Fred, Lee, Joel, Chris, Ryan, David, Josh from Impulse, Warren, Hiko, Pat, Russell, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Unis, Better Everyday Studios, Will & Large, from Agile, Natasha Sacco's, Frank, and four anonymous executive producers, along with 800 and some others over at main engine cutoff.com slash support. Join up there. You'll get that episode of Headlines of talking about. That'll be out on Monday or so.

as well as every other show that I do on that feed. It's a great way to stay up on all the space news and support the show. So I thank you for all those that are supporting. I could not do it without you. It's a 100% listener-supported show. Truly a unique thing out here in the industry, so I appreciate it very much. And I'm really excited for some of the things that you've got coming in the home stretch of the year here.

So stay tuned for some good times on the show. But otherwise, hit me up on email, anthonyatmanaging cutoff.com. If you've got any questions or thoughts, and I will talk to you soon. See? Oh, me. Oh. And... ...and...

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