Main Engine Cut Off - T+323: The Artemis Roadmap Shakeup

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a sweeping roadmap change to the Artemis program this morning—seemingly cancelling the EUS, Gateway, and all SLS upgrades, and instead pursuing the once-and-future annual launch cadence of SLS. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—David, Russell, Pat, Better Every Day Studios, Joonas, Josh from Impulse, Theo and Violet, Steve, Jan, Will and Lars from Agile, Miles O’Brien, Kris, Fred, Stealth Julian, Frank, Joakim, Ryan, Warren, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Joel, Lee, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Donald, Natasha Tsakos, Heiko, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics NASA shakes up its Artemis program to speed up lunar return - Ars Technica NASA Adds Mission to Artemis Lunar Program, Updates Architecture - NASA NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on X: “President Trump gave the world the Artemis Program, and NASA and our partners have the plan to deliver. We will standardize architecture where possible, add missions and accelerate flight rate, execute in an evolutionary way, and safely return American astronauts to the Moon…” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on X: “…and this is how we’re going back.” Teams Begin Artemis II Repairs in Vehicle Assembly Building - NASA The Show Like the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack! Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Follow @[e-mail] on Mastodon Listen to MECO Headlines Listen to Off-Nominal Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Artwork photo by Blue Origin Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. And it is a huge day. Probably the most momentous day of the Artemis program thus far with NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announcing a major overhaul to the roadmap very much in line with things that have been floated a lot in the critical of SLS community, I would say. You know, I think a lot of this stuff were thoughts that Jared Isaac had shared before, before he was the administrator of NASA before he was even the nominee for the administrator of NASA position. A lot of these things are things I've floated on the show. Others have written.

Eric Berger's heard from NASA sources that they were considering. And it all centers around the idea of canceling the Block 1B of SLS. That is the exploration upper stage. That is the new mobile launcher. That is the co-manifested payloads that would lead to gateway. Some of those things, not specifically mentioned today in the update from Jared Isaacman, but all indicated by the plans. The idea here from the NASA positioning of this is to be able to actually achieve a higher flight

rate of SLS than they would otherwise, where you've got, you know, right now you've got these incremental upgrades between launches, so you lead to three, four-year gaps between flights of SLS, and everyone ever has said that is unsustainable. For a while in the early parts of the program, SLS was talked about as having an annual flight rate, and they've never even gotten close to achieving that, nor have that really on their roadmap for another half a decade or decade before they're actually flying every year. And that's a combination of switching out an upper stage, having a new mobile launcher, then having to wait for these co-manifested payloads to fly.

You know, the aggregation of all those things, the Orion, the SLS, the upper stage, the boosters, the payloads that go on the upper stage to be manifested at Gateway, gateway itself launching. All those things snacked up in a way that we've talked about time and time again on this show as being really difficult to actually achieve. annual flight rate. And then you have the fact that the vehicle is really hard to launch. Artemis 2 is back in the VAB to undergo some fixes after they had a successful second wet dress rehearsal and then a helium leak right after it that resulted in them rolling back to

the VAB to go and fix that issue before they're going to go for another launch attempts in hopefully early April. So there is so much to unpack. There's more to unpack than I probably will even remember to get to in this show, to be honest. This is a, a quicker than I usually do a show after a big news story. I usually like to let it settle in because there's always kind of two waves, right? There's the initial announcement and then a couple of days go by and other statements trickle in. A little bit of information leaks out here and there. You get the full picture, and then we come on here and do some analysis of the story. But I can't say I didn't expect this. Last night on Off Nominal, I said, I think he might

announce that EOS is canceled. And boy, howdy, was it. That's the centerpiece of the announcement here. But I thought it would be good to flick the mics on and walk through some of the thinking and just think through different pieces. How does this impact every individual piece of this? Because there's a lot of stuff I didn't even mention in the intro here. So let me do my best attempt at running through all the different pieces of this announcement. First up, like I mentioned, cancellation of upgrades to the SLS. What Jared Eisenman kept saying is they want to get to a standardized vehicle. They don't want upgrades between flights. They want to get to a vehicle that is the same every time you fly it so that you can fly it more regularly. What he was referring to was a block one-like

arrangement. What he has released after this has a visualization of an SLS with what kind of looks like a Centaur 5 on top, which is something that Eric Berger had written about before at Ars Technica. I think he's been on the show talking about that. So moving to that for Artemis 4 and beyond, because NASA has two of these ICPS stages, the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, they have two of those left for Artemis 2 and Artemis 3. Those are derived from the Delta 4 vehicles. They already are produced and ready to roll. And importantly, the production line is shut down for those.

There will be no more ICPS vehicles. So it's kind of weird to refer to it this way, but what Isaacman keeps saying is that they're going to move to a standardized vehicle for Artemis 4 and beyond. And then they would lock at that state. There is not going to be this crazy upgrade path that we've heard from SLS, which they would have moved to the block 1B that has the expiration upper stage. Eventually they would have moved to the block two that has different solid rocket boosters and newer versions of that with higher thrust and all this other stuff. And then eventually they would get to this 10 meter faring. There was a whole roadmap of upgrades. The statement here is that they are locking the SLS design and moving forward so that they can fly it. I mean, he's said annually, even more than that, he's indicated. every 10 months, kind of was the indication. But the point of that is to simplify the SLS so that they can fly it more frequently, so that the rest of the program gets unstuck in many different ways. So the Artemis 2 and 3 vehicles would use that existing upper stage.

Artemis 4, 5, and anything beyond that if they do exist would use this new upper stage. So we'll talk about that in a second. Artemis 3 is no longer going to land on the moon. There is going to be a very Apollo 9-like launch, which would launch. which would launch Orion on SLS into low Earth orbit and dock with one or both of the landers in low Earth orbit. This would be Starship and Blue Moon, and they say that's mid-2020.

There's a lot of schedule questions. Let's get to that in a minute. Artemis 4 would become the first lunar landing mission, and that is in 2028, and he's even floated the potential that there would be a second lunar landing mission at the end of 2028, so this is where we start to get to fantasy land to some extent. and what else?

Oh, this Artemis 3 mission in low Earth orbit would also potentially, if things are ready, test the Axiom space suits out for the first time. So you're doing a lot of things on that Artemis 3 mission. Jared Eisenman's posing of that was that the step between Artemis 2 and 3 going from a free return trajectory to a full-blown lunar landing is way too much,

and that NASA has always done things more incrementally and achieved a lot of interim objectives and test objectives and learning in that process of moving out methodically. And the idea here would be to get, number one, Orion has never flown with a docking system. So that would fly for first in Artemis 3. They would actually dock with one or two lunar landers in low Earth orbit. They'd be able to test the spaces suits and the environmental control systems on the landers, the systems of the landers themselves, the ability to control them, you know, all the different things that you need to exercise that you would have needed to need to, to do in lunar orbit last time. Now you do them in Earth orbit. Things are a little safer. We can learn

some lessons and, you know, hopefully make positive progress towards an actual lunar landing. And then beyond that, you would go to an Artem S4 landing. It was mentioned in the press conference that an uncrewed landing would still exist for one of these landers. So there's a ton of accelerations from the lander side of things here. And I think that schedule, you know, we need to look at that a little. closer of how close to reality is any of that. But all in all, just to start at a high level, I think this is a enormous announcement for the Artemis program. It is incredibly impactful. It is solving a lot of the worst issues of the SLS program and really putting the pressure on the program itself to deliver in its current format. And that's an interesting thing,

an interesting way to pose it. You know, you couple this with the the event a week or two ago where Jared Isaacman came out to talk about the Starliner incident and reclassified the Starliner flight as a type A mishap. There's a lot of talk about exactly what that means and what that clarification entails. But I think it's important to just note the demeanor of Jared Isaacman in those instances where it was very much, you know, the messaging there was NASA needs to take more responsibility internally for the way that these things go down and not just put everything off onto the contractor. You know, a lot of this has been made of, and this is mostly his word, some of my words, of this being Boeing's fault and

Boeing screw up. And his point was NASA also could have done a lot better in that process and could have managed the situation more. And I thought, I honestly thought the tone and the positioning of it was more important than the actual words said in the Starliner saga in that case, right? Because Jared came out in a very kind of like stern mood where he was very serious and saying like we need to own up to these things. We need to take more responsibility and actually have agency in these matters in a way that we haven't in the past. There was some really directed, directly worded things about past NASA management, including all the way up to the administrator indicating Bill Nelson at that at that point in time, screw ups and unprofessional behavior in the higher ups at NASA that clouded their job. judgment and decision making on the Starliner fiasco. So I package all that up in that I don't have

a ton of analysis around that particular event because what has not been said about Starliner yet, but the messaging has been very consistent in the last couple weeks, which is NASA could have done better all along. And a lot of these situations that were in, we could have navigated better if we were honest and if we said what should have been said at the time and we approached it from a position of honesty in terms of there's a lot of things that could say on shows like this

and in writing like I keep referring to that NASA will never admit and in the last couple of months there's been a lot more admissions from NASA of yes SLS has a really slow flight rate yes we have a lot of these technical issues whereas before it would have been positioned of like well this stuff's really hard

hydrogen's really tricky we don't you know this is a new vehicle it's experimental there's a much more aggressively worded positioning around this is slow and this isn't right and we need to actually go out and talk about this stuff honesty. The positioning of it has been very notable. And again, the positioning here has been very notable from Jared Isaacman to say this is an unacceptably low flight rate. SLS will fly once every three years on the current

trajectory, we have all these interim upgrades, we need to stop that, we need to fly more frequently, and we need to pull the whole program in by way of more frequent flying. Now, it gets into, do you agree with that roadmap? I think that the decision to bail on Block 1B is exactly the right decision. All of the ills of the Artemis program are the things that lean in the direction of waiting a really long time for a very expensive upper stage that doesn't really add a whole lot of value for anything beyond the Lunar Gateway.

A program that's going to sink billions of dollars into a near lunar base rather than just a lunar base when I think the international community at large, all the commercial community here in the U.S., and even the astronauts themselves, really just want to go to the moon. I've talked about this a million times,

so I don't need to belabor the point, but I do think there is a huge amount of funding and momentum that can be regained by bailing on that whole branch of the Artemis program and refocusing on the lunar surface. The other thing that I've said a lot, and I've said very recently, was that the only way out of this program

is to fly your way out of it. So anything you can do to hasten those competitors to come online, anything you can do to hasten the ability to fly your way out of it is a good thing. Saying, I'm going to give NASA the chance to fly SLS once a year, like they said they could at the beginning of this program, and let them decide if they're going to pull that off or not.

You know, that's really like a put your money where your mouth is kind of thing, right? You said at the beginning of this, you would fly once a year. I'm simplifying your roadmap in the future so that you can fly once a year. Can you do it? I really do think that's an undercurrent here, not the positioning he said, but I do think the kind of put up or shut up moment here is, okay, go fly once a year. because I'm going to figure out how to wrangle these political movements that's happening within NASA and the authorization bills and some of the stuff that I'm about to talk about. I'm going to go wrangle that stuff and clear the path for you to fly this vehicle once a year. And we're going to put pressure on the contractors to have their parts ready to meet you up in orbit. So go fly once a year. NASA's going to do that. I'm going to rebuild the internal structures here. We're going to tighten the gears around what we're actually working on so that we can fly once a year. Go do it.

I think that's a huge, huge thing that is being put back on NASA from Jared Isaacman. There's this whole like accountability and responsibility movement from Jared Isaacman and putting a lot of expectations and responsibilities on NASA in a way that they've let themselves off the hook of in the past. And I think that's awesome because it's going to be clarifying if nothing else. It's either going to be an organization that rises to that challenge and embraces somebody that's bold enough to go and make. these decisions and actually achieves that, or it's going to be incredibly apparent that that's just not the way this is going to work anymore. And either of those results is awesome, right?

Because we're either getting a really interesting program to move forward and actually make some progress on a speedier timeline in a more dynamic way, or you're getting a very clarifying statement that even under these circumstances, this program is not workable, so we have to move on. and that's a really clarifying direction for NASA to take. Because, let's say SLS flies once a year. Okay, are you confident that just flying once a year is enough of a flight rate to fix the things that are wrong with the program? All these fueling leaks that we're dealing with,

the rollout to the pad, and not knowing whether you're going to fly next week or in four months? Because that's what the SLS is in right now, right? They rolled out to the pad. They might not fly until April. We don't even know if they can fly in April. So the, and then you factor in the lunar launch windows, right? They get one week a month where they can do this because of the lunar launch windows plus the vehicle constraints.

You need to be able to. If you have an organization that wants to fly every 10 months, like he's floated, you need to be able to know that you can hit your launch window. Right now you roll out and you're like, well, it might be next week. It might be in four months. Literally, that is where we're at right now. Is flying once every 10 months enough to fix that? because even at every 10 months, SLS is still among the least frequently flown vehicles in the industry. It's not every two days like their friends down the Cape. It's not even every two months,

like some of the other friends on the Cape. It's way slower than even ULA has been in the last year. And they have fueling issues. So I'm unconvinced that merely flying once a year is enough to say, well, at least we are exercising this hydrogen fueling capability once a year so we have less issues. I still think they're going to have those same issues. So as part of the standardization of SLS, is there, I didn't get to ask this question today, but I think it called on for a question, but my question would have been, does that mean more than just the upper stage that they're going to this new upper stage and that's what the standardization is?

Are there other changes that you would make to the vehicle so that you don't have these other fueling issues, or are we just going to have to deal with that all the time? Because if your accuracy of predicting a launch date for SLS is plus or minus two months and you're trying to fly every 10 months, that's a big change. chunk of your annual cadence, eaten up by variability about how the valves felt that day. Now, in terms of the chess pieces that they're playing with here, right, a lot of questions were asked of what is NASA, or how did Congress respond to NASA's desire to do this? How did the contractors respond to NASA to do this? Because, you know, the biggest question mark

around this is Boeing's feelings on the exploration upper stage contract being nilled, right? If that's getting truly canceled, which they were very mum to say anything about specific contractors are contracts today, which I thought there was a lot of not talking about it for somebody that's saying we're going to be so transparent about all these things. And, you know, I think Twitter posts with a lot of details on fueling leaks is one thing, but then going on a press conference where you're announcing roadmap changes and saying, I'm not going to talk about any particular program here, even though I'm heavily indicating that several are canceled, is kind of a weird take. Um, so, you know, not going to give them too much crap for that,

but it does feel weird when they constantly were saying, I'm not going to talk about that today. But Boeing's reaction to that is going to be one thing, right? Now, are they appeased by saying, well, we're canceling the exploration upper stage, but we're going to fly a core stage every 10 months, so you're going to get a lot more business by way of that? Is that good? And then maybe on the mobile launcher that we were building for the block 1B, well, it's not going to be block 1B, but we do need a second mobile launcher. So please go and adapt that mobile launcher to be the standardized block 1. maybe that's rebuilt for the new upper stage, and they're happy because their stuff gets transformed.

And then the biggest other logjam is this gateway thing, the Lunar Gateway, you know, got two something billion dollars in the big beautiful bill in the summer, thanks to Ted Cruz, that got fully funded. Can Jared Eisenman transform that to be a moon-based program? Can the Gateway Office become a service habitat office? Because gateway is canceled, for sure. Right? They're putting out these graphics of,

here's how we're going to go back to the moon in 2028, and they're showing only lunar surface habitation. They aren't showing the gateway. They're showing starship. They're showing blue moon landers. They're showing SLS. They're showing the SLS with the new upper stage. They're showing Orion. They're showing new glen. But all they're showing is a lunar surface habitat. There is no gateway. Gateway's out for sure. The question is, can they smoothly transform the gateway office to be the lunar surface habitat office, and will Ted Cruz and the Texas delegation be happy about that? Can they transform this EUS contract to be something like the, or what I floated off nominal yesterday was EUS is the same diameter as the core stage? Can you turn EUS into a fueling

test article so that you can actually fuel more than once a year and continually work out your ground systems so that when you're ready to launch a vehicle, your ground system is ready to do it? Maybe that's it. We just haven't heard that part yet. If that comes true, I'm going to be partying that I absolutely nailed it yesterday and off-nominal, but we'll find out when we get there. So there is still, you know, this isn't just set and done. This is a really big statement by Jared Isaacman and the team at NASA, but this is not over yet. I really don't think so. But putting this kind of pressure out into the world, I think is absolutely awesome for the Artemis program. They're taking big swings about what they can achieve, right? We're going to fly

Artemis II sometime in the next several months is the idea. And then next year, fly to low Earth orbit with another Orion, another SLS, and two lunar landers ready by mid-20207. That is hard to believe. Very hard to believe with where all these programs are right now. Is it worth analyzing too much exactly how wrong they're going to be? No, but that's a really wild statement to make. And then to say next, and then the year after that, both of those landers are going to get crews into them and onto the lunar surface. That is a really wild statement to make.

that you're going to launch four SLS vehicles in the next... What is that? Even, you know, chalk it up to how many months is that, if I can count live on the air? It's like 30-something months. Did I do the math right? Right? 12 of 27, 12 of 28, and then a couple here. Yeah, 30-ish.

32-ish. We're going to launch four SLSs in less time than elapsed from Artemis 1 to 2. That's wild. That is a wild statement to make. and if that's true, if that does happen, what an indictment of the exploration upper stage? Would there be more confirmatory evidence that that was a cluster of a program than if we're able to fly four SLS vehicles between when I talk to you right now and the end of 2028? Now, some other things I'm wondering is that, you know, they're massively simplifying and

streamlining the Artemis roadmap. Are there other areas of NASA's human spaceflight programs that need to similarly be streamlined and standardized and eliminated to make this possible. If you're flying a crew every year or less to the moon, are you still going to have this big low-Earth orbit program? Are we still doing commercial space stations? Are we still doing ISS? Are we maintaining all of that as well as doing this? Or does the funding and the resource allocation that Leo would take, do you need to reallocate

that over to the lunar initiative? You know, are some of these things that really haven't been talked about much, are they still in the cards? Or if this whole accelerated and amplified manifest comes true, do we shed some of those programs? I would be perfectly happy if we shed the low Earth orbit program and purely pushed on with, let's build the whole moon base. NASA has seemed to be very, you know, not into the idea of funding commercial space station. The commercial space station companies can't really figure out how to make that business work. So if you're able to, in the world where you're only flying once every three years, I say, you know, yeah, keep on your low Earth orbit program because otherwise you don't have that many astronauts flying to space and you're an organization that wants to employ astronauts.

That made sense. If you're really pulling this off and you're flying at least yearly, do you need those other programs? Because the other aspect is, like I've said before, any acceleration of the Artemis Lunar Lander programs accelerates the things that offset the need for SLS. you're flying starships all the time. You're flying enough starships to refuel Lunar Lander to fly. Cruise out to Lunar Lander. You could fly enough dragons, certainly, to fly out to a starship that's waiting. You're flying enough new glens to launch a bunch of blue moons. You're flying enough new glens to launch other payloads. You are flying enough things to offset the need for SLS.

That's the truth of it, right? So any interesting acceleration in this program also increases and accelerates the timeline for the things that replace SLS in the long run. which has been openly stated by people that yeah you know the roadmap is probably going to change over the years as different things on and off ramp in the industry and different capabilities come on and offline so if you do pull off four SLSs between now in 2028 you've also pulled off a lot of starship a lot of new glen launches and a lot of things that would replace SLS in the long run do you also then pick up those capabilities as you go and say now we're flying four crews to the

moon every year because we have the capability to put them on other vehicles, and these other vehicles fly more frequently than the once a year course stage that can come through and get fueled on the pad and launched, so we're able to do a lot more of these things. And then if you're in that world, do you still need the low Earth orbit program? Or do you have enough crews headed out to the moon? That you don't really need it anymore. And that nobody really is, is that the Apollo applications of this era, right? You don't want to be assigned to Apollo applications. famously from for all mankind, I might as well be at a desk in Siberia. That's how Apollo applications looked at the time, and that is probably going to be where Leo

lands if this vision comes true, because again, to rise the tide of Artemis to the point at which Artemis could fly on SLS this many times, you've also got a lot of other things at your disposal. And everything works together in that way, because if you're Jared Isamon, you're able to pull off all these different moving pieces to get Congress and contractors and everybody, even the people at NASA that work there that don't agree with this program, which I imagine there are a lot of them. If you're able to get all of them on the same page and moving in this direction, you've built a rising tide in the industry that has so much momentum and so much mass heading to orbit

that you're able to pull off more than just the crude SLS launch a year. And you have to pick up those capabilities in flight and actually roll with them and continue to fly crews. Because if there's a possibility of putting astronauts on the surface more than just tied to the one SLS launch, somebody is going to take advantage of that, whether that's NASA or whether that's what I would have formally said as Jared Isaacman as a private individual, but probably would be somebody else if that opportunity was there. This is just a massive shake-up of this program in a way that not only puts pressure on the areas that need pressure, but it actually makes everybody come to terms with the realistic storylines at play here and get on the record in a way of how they think this stuff should

play out. And that might be Jared Isaacman's superpower of making people go out into a podium and say into the microphone the thing that they're supposed to say. Not that they're supposed to say, but they need to say because it's the truthful thing. That's what they did with Starliner. That's what they did today with Artemis. He's out there in front of, you know, in interviews, Christian Davenport had an interview with CBS, like a 20-minute sit-down with Jared Isaacman, where he's talking about how flying once every three and a half years is unacceptable. That was the plan up until yesterday. The that was embraced by everybody that's run NASA, that's been in the higher ups of NASA, everybody was fine with that plan until yesterday. So the ability for Jared Eisenman to

actually turn this stuff into reality, like this is what we were hoping for with the Isaacman NASA. It hasn't been there for a couple of months as he's settled in. I thought the Starliner moment was the first time we've seen the actual administrator, Isaacman, where it was handled differently than every other administrator would have handled that. And then this is obviously the second one, it was hot on the heels, so only, what, two weeks separated between the Starliner event and this one. These are the moments where you're seeing the difference, and the things that a lot of us hoped Jared Eisenman would push NASA to is coming to fruition here. Now, what is the anaphylactic response to that from all the parties who we might think

are really against this plan? We're going to see, because there's an authorization bill, make it its way through Congress. I would expect to see some statements over the next couple of days, I would expect to have some hearings about this particularly, right? This plan to shake things up. If everybody is honky dory with this because they're getting a little bit of what they're interested in, Jared Eisen would be the greatest political operator in NASA history. Like, this could go down better than the James Webb era. Like, in terms of playing all these different competing interests and contractors and congresspeople, it would be truly remarkable to pull this kind of thing off, because it has been so stale and stagnant for so many years,

even when people were out there trying. You know, you had Mike Pence saying, if our current contract just can't do it, we'll find ones they can. Guess what happened there? Absolutely nothing. Nothing changed about the program. 2024, came and went. No lunar landers.

If this one sticks, this is wild. Because it's just going and doing the thing that, like, you know, we dream about and talk about on this show. You're just going and doing the thing. And somehow, you've done it and not immediately get a rejection from the injection from the industry. That's the part that we've got to figure out now. Like, is Boeing, everyone out is out there posting, you know, press releases and

Twitter statements about how they are all in. Jared Isamon saying, I talked to all the contractors, everybody's supportive of this. You know, was the Boeing thing all wrapped up in that? Hey, I'm going to go out and reclassify the Starlanders of Type A mish hap. I'm going to put it all on NASA. And then I'm going to go out and say how NASA has screwed up the Artemis Roadmap to now. I'm not going to lay any of this at your feet, but you're getting the S-Slex, or you're

getting the Explation Upper Stage canceled. and I would suggest that you support that. Like, was that how it went? Or was it, you know, this is what happens. You guys still got Starliner. You're getting a bunch of more core stages. So that's the decision. I hope you support it.

Understand if you don't, but this is the way we're moving. Like, what is the tenor there? Are we going to see congressional wrangling that indicate where Boeing's at in the matter? That's the stuff that we're going to see now. It's going to be a crazy couple of weeks. I'm sure I'm going to do a part two of this

because there's a lot of my head. I'm sure I missed something that I was thinking. thinking all day, but I wanted to get you something quick about how I'm feeling about this. I am absolutely energized about the dynamism this injects to the program, the potential outcomes that this would result in. I think it's just all forward momentum because at least something's different. We're doing something. We're making some progress here by way of forcing people's hand to say, we're going to fly annually, and the payloads are going to be ready for us, and the vehicles are going to be ready. And if they aren't, let's see how it shakes out.

And I think that's a pretty awesome way to put responsibility and accountability onto the people operating these programs and say, you said you could do it before? Let's see if you can do it. And if you can, boy, do you have an interesting program. All right, y'all. That's what I've got here. I thank you all so much. This episode is produced by 33 executive producers over at main engine cutoff.com slash support. Thanks to David, Russell, Pat, Better Everyday Studios, Eunice, Josh from Impulse, Theo and Violet, Steve, Vian, Will and Lars from Agile, Miles O'Brien, Chris, Fred, stealth Julian, Frank, Jo Kim, Ryan, Warren, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Joel Lee, Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut, Donald, Natasha Sacco's, Hico, and Four Anonymous Executive Reducon. Thank you all so much for the support for the support for the support for the been some big juicy ones lately, including more talk about the Starliner stuff, more talk about SpaceX saying we're doing moon, not Mars, a lot over in the Miko Headlines feed. So check that out

if you want. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.