Main Engine Cut Off - T+321: Artemis II, New Glenn’s First Reflight, Blue Origin’s TeraWave, and Tory Bruno’s Job Switch

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Artemis II is on the pad, and I can’t stop thinking about it. So I guess listen to me think in the open? Also, a ton of Blue Origin news—the next flight of New Glenn will feature a flown booster, they’ve announced constellation plans under the name TeraWave, and Tory Bruno has left ULA to join the team at Blue.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Matt, Fred, Will and Lars from Agile, Kris, Lee, Jan, Frank, Miles O’Brien, Josh from Impulse, Theo and Violet, Ryan, Joakim, Stealth Julian, Heiko, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Better Every Day Studios, Joel, Steve, Joonas, The Astrogators at SEE, Pat, Warren, Natasha Tsakos, Russell, David, Donald, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsNASA’s Moonbound Artemis II Rocket Reaches Launch Pad - NASAFinal Steps Underway for NASA’s First Crewed Artemis Moon Mission - NASAIs Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight. - Ars TechnicaBlue Origin makes impressive strides with reuse—next launch will refly booster - Ars TechnicaNew Glenn-3 to Launch AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird Satellite | Blue OriginBlue Origin on X: “Our lunar lander is headed to the Lone Star State! ⭐ Blue Moon MK1 departed from Florida today, bound for @NASA_Johnson's Thermal Vacuum Chamber A, where it will undergo testing at the same facility as the Apollo spacecraft.”Another Jeff Bezos company has announced plans to develop a megaconstellation - Ars TechnicaFirst Take: What We Think Blue Origin’s TeraWave Actually Is (and Isn’t)In a surprise announcement, Tory Bruno is out as CEO of United Launch Alliance - Ars TechnicaBlue Origin on X: “We’re pleased to announce that @torybruno is joining Blue Origin as president, National Security, reporting to CEO Dave Limp. Tory will spearhead our newly formed National Security Group.”The 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 Blue OriginWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

I'm Anthony Colangelo. I've had a couple of things that I've been thinking about and some stories that I haven't covered on the show here that I thought were worth ruminating on for a couple of minutes. Some things that sort of came up in the conversation the other day with Casey Dreyer about Artemis 2. I find myself just thinking about Artemis 2 a lot. And appropriately so, I would make the argument

that we're all underappreciating Artemis 2, probably because it's dominated the conversation for so long, not the mission specifically, but the program generally. And I think that leads us to underappreciate what's about to happen with this mission. So I wanted to talk about that for a little bit. And then there's been an absolute flurry of Blue Origin news that I haven't really talked about because it happened over the holidays and into the early part of the year. And it's worth now kind of summing up all of that because I think they are more interrelated

stories, then they seem, you know, disparate stories. But there's also just a huge amount of momentum coming out of Blue Origin lately, which is, got a lot of us off kilter, I would say. It's, it's a new thing to have in the market here, and that's awesome. So worth talking about a little bit of each of that here on the eve of the snowpocalypse of 2026. It looks like we're about to get a foot of snow, or, you know, plus or minus six inches there. So it could be a couple of snow days here. So it could be a couple of snow days here and uh those are not the best for recording when he got two little boys that are making lots of noise now so let's dig in um Artemis two like i'm saying we're all under appreciating this humans are going back to the moon and that is awesome and it is so tight up with our

presentism of arguing about sLS Orion and about the program generally that that's i feel weird about it. And I can't, you know, I'm going to let myself just feel both of those things simultaneously, like still have all of my criticisms of the program, still someone that thinks the gateway should go entirely, still has opinions about how the landers should go and all that. And also, this is an awesome mission. This is really cool. People that are not into space are going to get into this and think that it's awesome, that humans are going and flying around the moon for the first time in many of our lives in a very unique way. You know, a free return trajectory, I think, is less cool than going into lunar orbit, but it's still a very cool thing. I remember the Artemis I mission, you know,

when we had the imagery from Orion as it was in DRO and hanging out even very far from the moon, the images were very captivating. They had the cameras on the end of the solar panels. They had a really good sense for what would be good imagery of that mission. And it was. It totally delivered. And now I'm thinking about the imagery that will come both from within the capsule but also outside when there are humans there. And they're flying 4,000 miles away from the moon. And they've got these shots that make the moon feel like a place more than what it looks like to us in the night sky. And that's a really, really cool thing that I think if any other, you know, Casey said this the other day that no one's even gotten close to trying this other than the United States. and we would react so much differently as a space industry

if anyone else was doing it, but NASA again. And I think that's kind of worth stopping on as well because, yeah, it's a different industry now than it was in the 60s and 70s. But so much of the moment right now is this geopolitical conversation and, you know, a race and all that kind of stuff. And yet we've got four people that are about to fly around the moon

in a matter of months, right? When exactly is it going to happen? I don't know. I tend to be someone who's like, it's going to happen a lot later than we currently think. Where we stand right now is that NASA is setting up for a wet dress rehearsal on February 2nd. Seems to be the target date that's at least mentioned once or twice. They have that as a no later than date,

but I've also heard people talking about February 2nd. So, you know, if that happens, and then you've got crew 12 that has been accelerated to a slot that, makes it look unlikely like SLS will launch in this February window, which is 6th, 7th, 8th, 10th, and 11th. If they don't make that one, they've got an early March window, they've got an early April window, they've got an early May window. So sometime in the next number of months, this thing's going to happen. And the photos that will come from it are going to be spectacular. And the vibes of the mission from people that are not arguing about SLS Orion every day are going

to be something that we're not normally presented with. And that could be anyone, right? Like my five-year-old got really into this idea of this mission the other day when I was explaining to him what's going on, how cool it is, yada, yada, right? He's really into that. And he doesn't care about my arguments about, yeah, but this rocket's dumb because whatever. And the roadmap for the overall program is this. Now, there are moments, though, that that's going to matter. My apocalyptic scenario for Artemis II, obviously there's really bad case scenarios.

And I'm going to set those aside because I find them incredibly unlikely. the Orion Heat Shield review that happened a couple of weeks ago that Eric Berger attended. I think that piece is really worth reading in Ars Technica. If you have not read that yet, Eric Berger got to go and sit in this big review of the heat shield data with Jared Isaacman and many others in the agency talking about where they're at with the heat shield and why they're confident in it for Artemis too. And he was, you know, from the beginning of the day to the end of the day, convinced of the research and the data collection that they've done. Others have other opinions about it. I'm setting those cases aside for right now, because they're also not really worth talking about. But the scenario that I think is potentially apocalyptic for the program and the manifest

overall right now is Orion launches into its initial orbit, boost to the high Earth orbit where they're going to check out the environmental control systems for a day before they go and do the free return trajectory around the moon. It is that orbit that I think is the most alarming prospect. If they end up in that orbit and they don't actually go for. TLI. They have to de-orbit because something's wrong with the control system. Some crew systems are not working right. They don't want to commit to that four, five-day portion of the mission, I guess almost seven-day portion of the mission because of something that they're seeing in the system,

and they come back home early. That's the scenario, I think, that's most disruptive for this program, because you had a good flight of Orion. You had a good flight of SLS, but it wasn't enough to achieve the moon. Right. And then you're really far away. from the next set of hardware being ready. We are a long way away from the next set of hardware being ready because there's going to be a review period there in terms of, okay, what happened with the mission that we need to go look at and fix?

How does that actually shake out on the next Orion that we're building? The next Orion has a docking system and has a new heat shield. It's got a lot of changes. So the changes then mount and the time mounts, right? I mean, if you go back to the Artemis 1 time frame and think about how far away they said Artemis 2 was, we're way past that already. There was a huge delay there from the heat shield and everything else that happened between now and then, but it's as much farther away from Artemis 1 than they wanted it. And you have to imagine that's going to be the case with Artemis 3 as well. Landers aside.

And so that's the moment I think that's most critical for the program is that, you know, are there going to be changes to the overall architecture, whether or not Artemis 2 completely? the free return trajectory, yes. Will there definitely be changes that happen if it does not complete the free return trajectory? Absolutely yes. That is a thing that shakes up the program very dramatically. And it's also, it would be a, that's, from public visibility-wise, that would be a big failure to make all this big noise about going out to the moon and doing this thing where you're flying by the moon at an altitude, you're farthest humans ever, you're the fastest humans ever, all these superlatives that they've stacked on top of this mission. And then you don't achieve any of those things. That's the case where, you know, everyone's embarrassed about how the mission went

with this much prep and this much run-up. And that's the moment at which the criticism we've all had, even people that like SLS, I've had the same criticism of the flight rate is too low. There's not enough hardware to have the flight rate that we want. It's all really expensive. So the missions can't really happen at a density that really matters. If any of those scenarios play out, that's the time at which that argument would make its way out into the public of like, why is it another couple of years until there's this next mission? Why aren't we flying in a couple of months? Because people that don't check in on human spaceflight a lot, right? They might know, hey, all the moon landings happened within a couple of years. And to tell them,

okay, but between now and the next Artemis mission might also contain all of the crude Apollo missions in time, right? Think about how all the moon landings happen. right, 1969 and 1979. That amount of time may elapse between Artemis 2 and Artemis 3. So I'm trying to be aware of these aspects. I'm very rambly right now, but I'm trying to be aware of these aspects of the public's going to think this mission's really cool, and that's a huge opportunity for NASA and space generally. It's also really interesting from a geopolitical messaging perspective to have everyone arguing about who's going to be back on the moon first, and you've got NASA like, well, we're already flying by it with people. I'm trying to be aware of what's going to

come off well to the public and then what are the possibilities in which the kind of dirty laundry of this program would be exposed to the public. And the scenario of only making it to that high elliptical orbit and then coming home, that's the one I'm most scared of. Because it, it, it, I mean, most scared of in terms of, you know, I'm not, it's not like a scary thing, right? That's why they built it in the mission. And also, I think the effects that would come from that would be long term beneficial. So maybe I'm not that scared of me. This is like my hairbrained theory, couple of years ago with the James Webb Space Telescope that I thought the most interesting thing for human space flight would have been if something went wrong with the deployment of James Webb Space

Telescope because we would have been like dedicated to flying there and fixing it. I really do think that would have happened and I thought it would have been an interesting scenario for history to see. This is the same kind of deal. Like, I really want to watch these humans fly around the moon, but I'm kind of interested what would happen if they only made it to that elliptical orbit. I don't wish that on them. I really, I honestly truly do want them to fly by the moon. moon because I really do want to see people fly by the moon in my lifetime. And, you know, we're 34 years in here at this point. So, like, what's to say it's going to go better the next 34 years if we keep going this way? So I really, really do want them to make the mission. But I'm just

trying to think through all these scenarios and how it might play out in public. And I don't know, I have a hard time focusing on other space news right now. I'm going to be honest. Like, we're on the verge of a human lunar mission. That is really cool. And I feel bad that I feel like it's underappreciated by the people that talk about this all every day. But we've just been around and around these arguments so many times about SLS or Ryan that, I don't know, like, we're not going to talk our way out of this program. We're not going to politic our way out of this program. The only way out of, if you have criticisms of this manifest like I do, the only way out of it is to fly your way out of it. And flying Artemis, too, is part of that, because we're not

really going to get any decisions out of the Isaacman administration on landers or anything else like that until we fly this mission. There's not going to preempt this mission with announcements like that. But at the same time, the fact that Sean Duffy in his interim NASA administrator capacity throughout this whole let's accelerate the landers concept, that gives Jared Isaacman some political capital to go play with to see how, you know, and what are these acceleration plans. And to see what pieces he has at his disposal to decide something about the future of this program, it does inject a little energy, it could inject more resources depending on what the funding situation plays out like. It could inject some more options to the program

overall. And that's just an interestingly dynamic situation when you're looking at it as somebody who wants to get the right pieces in place to build a more interesting program. You have political capital to go spend under the guise of accelerating the lunar program. And I think Isaacman has shown in the early days here to be game to play the political game, right? He's going on newsmax. He's going on anywhere that we'll have him, honestly, but he's going on newsmax and talking up President Trump's space record. And even doing so in ways that I grimace about. I don't know if it was a tweet or in that Newsmax interview, but, you know, he listed off the things that have happened in space policy under President Trump's two terms, including, you know, assigning the responsibility

of returning human spaceflight to the American soil to President Trump. When it's like, come on, man, we all know the deal, right? But at the same time, he knows the political game that is there to be played. And that's gross. You can criticize that, too, but he also is, you know, dealt a hand here on how he has to play things. So, like, I try to criticize the reason he has to go say that, not him foresaying it. But my point is he's pretty good at playing politics. He had a near political death scenario play out over the last year and clawed his way back to being the head of NASA.

So, you know, knowing that he's good with these political pieces, if he has political cover to say that this is under the guise of accelerating Artemis Landers, but what the effect is it's kind of hastening the thing that would unlock a really interesting Artemis roadmap, he's going to take that shot. But none of that happens until Artemis 2 flies. And at the same time, we can cheer it along because it is a really cool mission. So I'm, I've got all this bouncing around my head. And like I said, I'm having a hard time looking at the other space news and being interested in it because it is just so cool that we're here flying humans to the moon. So, I don't know. I thought that was worth expounding on a little bit. Before we dive into the Blue Origin

news, of which there is an absolute ton. So before we do that, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports main engine cutoff at main engine cutoff.com slash support. There are 900 and some of you across Patreon and Substack now where everyone's getting, the new signups are heading over to the substack, which I think is a pretty rad platform for what we're putting out. So thank you all so much to the 33 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Matt, Fred, Will and Lars from Agile, Chris, Yon, Frank, Miles O'Brien, Josh from Impulse, Theo and Violet, Ryan, Joe Kim, Stealth Julian, Hico, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Ashtonaut, Better Everyday Studios, Joel, Steve Eunice, The Ashtagators at SE, Pat Warren, Natasha SACOS,

Russell, David, Donald, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this possible. It is a huge boost to what we do here, so I appreciate it very much. All right, the Flurry of Blue Origin news, a lot of stories going on. So just this past week, a couple of big announcements from them. One, they have shipped the Lunar Lander, Endurance, from Florida over to Houston for thermal vacuum chamber testing, which is going to happen. And then they'll set up for launch from there.

So the lander is not unexpectedly trickling a new glen or two down the manifest. But the fact that this thing is on the road to thermal vacuum chamber testing is awesome. that's going to be a mission that I'm so intrigued by to see how they pull that off and if they're successful landing it. That's going to be a huge mission in the year. It could be, you know, Artemis 2 is going to dominate the year. That could be number two most interesting mission this year. So definitely keep in our eyes on that. But in the meantime, they are replacing the payload on New Glenn 3 with a satellite for AST Space Mobile, one of their Bluebird satellites, Bluebird 7, which is identical to Bluebird 6 that launched in December on an Indian vehicle.

We'll talk about ASD Space Mobile another time, but the interesting part of this mission from a blue origin perspective is that they're going to be reusing the New Glenn 2 booster on New Glenn 3. So the landing that they did just a couple of months ago, never tell me the odds, that's the booster that landed successfully. they are reflying it, you know, a handful of weeks later, honestly. So it landed November 13th, and they've got this turnaround. They say late February right now, Eric Berger says it'll be slipping to March or so.

So, I mean, a very small handful of months to go and refly this thing is a ridiculously short turnaround, especially for the first booster that they're going to go refly, the first one they got back. I mean, SpaceX got back their Falcon 9 booster the first time, and they didn't fly that one again. It's sitting outside the headquarters. The second one that they got back, they eventually did go refly, but it was almost a year later. So, you know, you can chalk that up to, you know, is that a, is that due to the, you know, technological advancements that they made in New Glen, the way it recovered, the way it's recovered, the fuel that it uses is much less dirty than, you know, RP1 liquid oxygen like the Merlin's

use. It's a lot cleaner burning. Is it, is it because they have experience, and Jake floated this the other day on Autonominal, they have experience getting the new Shepard boosters back up and flying. And they, from an operational perspective, did actually learn a lot from recovering those boosters, building out what things they need to be on watch for in terms of where and in terms of typical items that might need some work, that they're able to learn a lot from that from an operations perspective to help them refly sooner. Was it just that the booster looked really well? It flew really well, and it pulled it off successfully, and it came back in really

good shape. The first Falcon 9 booster, you know, was pretty beat up when they were inspecting it. And they have incorporated a lot of learnings over the years. Is it just the fact that, you know, New Glenn, they kind of got it right out the gate, at least to the extent that it's possible to go refly this thing? It's another thing that's just this building momentum from Blue Origin that is awesome to see. All of a sudden, here they are, flying New Glens, landing New Glens. They've got a lunar lander going into vacuum chamber testing. These other announcements talk about and the second, like, there's just so much momentum in the Blue Origin camp right now that it's creating a really interesting environment and it's really fun to follow along with. And, you know,

if they're able to go fly this thing in early March even, I mean, if they fly it before almost a year later, it's impressive based on history of people reflying orbital rocket boosters. If they fly it six months after it land at the first time, also very cool. Now, early days on in the new Glenn program, I had heard that there was going to be very very, few New Glenn boosters produced. At one point, somebody was like, there's going to be two first-stage boosters at any moment, and that's all we're producing. We're not producing them at rate. That had changed over the years, and now, you know, they have more of a production line set up for these things. But still, I mean, remember when Rocket Lab was pursuing reusability with electron, a lot of the

messaging around it was, we need this from a production cadence standpoint, that it's really expensive and it takes a long time to produce first-stage boosters. So getting these back actually increases our quote unquote production rate and lets us fly at a higher rate than we would otherwise. Is that the case with New Glenn as well? You would think it is even more so because that thing is an absolutely enormous booster. So, you know, are they reflying this because the other one's not ready? And they, this one looks pretty good. And they're like, yeah, you might as well go fly it if we got the shot. So it will be interesting this year to see, number one, do they get up to something like a monthly cadence? Even every two or three months would be impressive for a ramp up of flight rate.

And of that, how often are they reflying versus flying a new booster? Because I think those two questions, the answers to those will kind of give us a good indication on the overall health and velocity of the New Glenn program. Are they producing these things at a rate where they can up their flight rate significantly? Are they flying the booster stock that they have even close to the flight rate that they want to hit? Because everyone says we're going to do one launch, we're going to do six launches, we're going to do 12 launches, we're going to do 24 launches, right? there's a hockey stick chart that everyone puts out.

We never really see that. So, you know, big answers this year from New Glenn perspective, but coming out the gate with reflying one is a really interesting sign. The other thing that happened this week was that Blue Origin submitted their paperwork for a megaconstlation. Now, a significantly different kind of megaconsolation than Starlink or Amazon Leo. And the intrigue here is, hey, Blue Origin's also doing a megac constellation.

and, you know, isn't there another Bezos megaconstellation? That's sort of everyone's initial reaction. But obviously, leave it to none other than Caleb Henry to write the post that makes a lot of sense of this. So first the basics. This is Blue Origins TerraWave Network. It's over 5,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, 128 satellites in medium Earth orbit. and it's really intended to be an enterprise government customer backbone type of constellation, not a consumer constellation.

So they are not going to be selling direct to consumers like Starlink and like Amazon Leo. This is really meant to be backbone infrastructure. And that's what a lot of Caleb's posts about this is, and it says Caleb. I think it says it's by Quilty Spaces Space Editorial Board, but I assume Caleb had a big part. I should text them before I say that, but I assume he had a big hand in writing that and the thinking behind it, but it's a great write-up I think is worth reading. I have it in the show notes. But the line that they have in there, this is infrastructure, not retail connectivity. That's the line that makes so much sense to me. When you think about the way that Blue Origin had been

messaged about for a long time by Jeff Bezos was that we're building the infrastructure of space akin to the infrastructure that he built Amazon on top of, which were, you know, he's always pointed to credit cards, shipment companies or organizations like USPS and UPS and FedEx, and then the existence of the internet. That taking those three things into account, he was able to build a business that has become wildly successful and then branched out in a million different directions. But he wants to, at least historically, this was his thing, right? He had two things that he said, Earth should be a national park. to move heavy industry off Earth, and he wants to build infrastructure so that entrepreneurs in space have that same infrastructure that he was able to build on and sort of pay it forward in that way. And that's something he's said a million times going all the way back to when he founded Blue Origin. That's always resonated a lot with me. And this really clicks into that

perspective as well, is that, you know, if you're somebody who is an optimist about the space market generally. It's a pie that is growing, right? It is not a zero-sum game where we're carving up the same pie over and over again. The pie is going to grow. And there will be more and more of a need for backbone connectivity like this. In some cases, even selling connectivity into Amazon. You know, maybe Amazon would be an anchor customer of Blue Origins TerraWave. I think that's very much in the cards here. And the infrastructure angle is where it started to make sense for me for this to be a Blue Origin project. And, you know, there's so much that had been made over the years of Amazon not having their

own launch system, so much so, you know, that was rumored of, oh, yeah, are they going to buy Blue Origin? Are they going to buy ULA? No, they ended up just buying all the available commercial launch capabilities that the Western world had to offer. But for a while, it was thought that they would have to buy their own launch services provider. And in this case, with Blue Origin, having your own home.

homegrown product that you're launching on your own stuff is a really good way to create a good business and to, you know, and you have a lever there that others don't have, right? SpaceX has a huge advantage in the market because they're able to fly their own satellites, build their own satellites, fly their own satellites, launch their own satellites, you know, start to finish. It's a SpaceX jam. And that's a huge benefit that others don't have. So if Blue Origin kind of sees a pathway in a unique area of the market that plays really nicely with their business model and their mission overall, then like, well, it makes sense to me. It didn't at first, but then I've come around to it. Now, you factor in another interesting thing that happened over the December, January

time period, which is Tori Bruno left ULA and joined Blue Origin as the head of the National security group. So when it was first announced, I and seemingly everyone else was really thinking about this from a launch perspective. And I couldn't figure this story out for a long time of like why, number one, I understand Tori Bruno leaving ULA. I don't really think there's a lot left there for him to do, to get enjoyment out of. I don't know. I don't see it. It was not a great year for ULA. So, you know, people were like, was he fired? It didn't seem that because they did mention out the gate, he's got another opportunity. So to me, it was going to go in this direction where the other opportunity was something that ULA was like, okay, I know you wanted the transition

out for two weeks, but like you've got to leave right now. Like someone's packing your box and you're out of here right now. It seemed more like that than he walked into a board meeting, they got in a fight, and he got fired. Again, I was struggling to get my head around this of like, what does Blue Origin gain out of this? Because, you know, the advantage they're going to have over ULA is there regardless of which company Tori Bruno works for. You know, they're going to enter that national security launch market. And I don't really see a lot of people that see a scenario where Bloorgin doesn't unseat ULA as the other provider.

But then I got a couple of notes, and then I saw this thing about TerraWave, and then there was some more reporting that I saw somewhere else about the national security group that Bloorgin was forming and Tori Bruno was going to head. and it makes so much more sense to me to think about it disregarding launch entirely. Think only about the other things that Blue Origin might be after, whether it's TerraWave being a government product, very akin to the space development agency's transport layer

where you're sending data around in your own network and to your own endpoints. That could be a very huge overlap between what TerraWave provides and what the Space Development Agency and organizations like that want to see out of that sort of data transport service. The other thing is Blue Ring and some of the spacecraft that Blue Origin have talked up. You know, selling that into the defense market would make a lot of sense, whether that's Golden Dome or otherwise. And then you've got to remember that Tori Bruno has only been a launch services guy for 12 years, right? He

joined ULA in 2014, but his entire career before that was in missile defense at Lockheed. He was the program manager for terminal high altitude, I forget bad, I forget with the full acronym minutes, I got close. But he was a missile defense guy and a national security guy

forever and then eventually became CEO of ULA and got in the launch services and there is big overlap there, but it's not like he was a launch services guy his whole career. He was a missile defense and national security guy. So going back to that version of Tori and Blue Origin becoming a

provider of services to the national security market that goes beyond launch. That's, that's probably where all the value is. We don't know a lot of answers about TerraWave yet. Like, is Blue Origin going to build those satellites all in house, or, you know, are they going to have K2 space build their medium Earth orbit satellites, since that does seem to overlap heavily with what K2 has talked up? How much of that is going to be built in house? You presume that 5,000 satellites, they're going to want to build those in house. They don't want to buy 5,000 satellites. It would be hilariously funny, So if Amazon built their satellites in-house and bought launch elsewhere and Blue Origin bought their satellites elsewhere but had launch in-house, that would be the most funny way that this

could shake out. So I guess I should leave that option on the board. But when they're working on something like this, you could see how they might want to sell those same sort of satellite buses into the space development agency and contract that way, not just selling services to the government, but actually providing in the same way that SpaceX does with Star Shield, that they could provide this hardware to the government in addition to the services that they're providing. And Tori Bruno running all that arm, that makes a lot of sense with me. Now, is Blurgeon going to turn Blue Ring into a test target for the Golden Dome? I mean, I guess

maybe. I don't know if it's as direct of a, you know, an equivalence of like rocket lab taking electron and turning it into a suborbital hypersonic test platform target vehicles for missile defense programs. I don't know if there's an easy one-to-one like that, but anything is possible, and Blue Origin does seem to get pretty expansive in the stuff they want to take on. So, you know, that could shake out that way. But anyway, all this is to say, the Bloor Origin momentum is huge. They had a great last year. They seemed to be off to a great start this year. That's a one of the most fun storylines that's going on these days. And the other one is just, man, we're flying humans at the moon.

I can't, I honestly am like just catching up to that being a reality after spending so many years, almost 10 years, arguing about how and who and where and all the stuff that we've argued about SLS Orion for so many years. I don't know, I'm just embracing humans going to the moon. So there you have it. That's what I got for you. If you're in the path of the snowstorm, good luck, good shoveling. And if you've got questions, hit me up on email, Anthonyatmanendringcottoff.com.

You want to support the show, main engine cutoff.com slash support. And otherwise, I'll talk to you next time.