Main Engine Cut Off - T+325: Ignition

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

There was a lot of news in NASA’s Ignition event last week, and I break down what actually matters: not whether Jared Isaacman’s timelines are realistic, but how this new roadmap strips away architectural dependencies and forces the real bottlenecks into the open. I talk through Gateway’s cancellation, the possible path away from SLS and ICPS, what this means for lunar landers and international partners, and why NASA’s new philosophy feels so different from the past. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Steve, Joel, Kris, Josh from Impulse, Will and Lars from Agile, Warren, Natasha Tsakos, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Lee, Joonas, Better Every Day Studios, Russell, Fred, David, Donald, Frank, Miles O’Brien, Jan, Joakim, The Astrogators at SEE, Stealth Julian, Theo and Violet, Matt, Pat, Ryan, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics Ignition - NASA Ignition: NASA's Plan for The Moon - YouTube Ignition: NASA's Plan for Science and Discovery - YouTube Ignition: NASA News Conference (March 24, 2026) - YouTube NASA kills lunar space station to focus on ambitious Moon base - Ars Technica We got an audience with the "Lunar Viceroy" to talk how NASA will build a Moon base - Ars Technica Cavossa: CLD Companies Want Stability, Not a New Plan – SpacePolicyOnline.com With Artemis Changes, Europe is Left Holding the Bag 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 NASA/John Kraus Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo. A ton of news to break down out of the NASA Ignition Event last week. We've also got Artemis 2 on the pad. About a day away from starting fueling as I record this, if all goes well. So I'm sure we'll be talking about that a lot. I don't know really what I'm going to do yet. We haven't had this kind of level of a human spaceflight mission in my podcasting era here. You know, maybe I'll throw on the mics each night and talk about what happened that day in the flight

and just sort of do a live blog, as it were, as we go. We'll see what kind of the, how much information we're getting out of the mission itself. If we're not getting a ton out in terms of a live feed, not necessarily like a live stream, but just a feed of what's going on with the mission. Maybe there's not a ton to talk about, and maybe it's every two or three days, but it's so exciting that, I don't know, something will appear in your feed. I don't know what form or shape that will take, but we'll find out. But first, a ton to talk about out of ignition.

kind of funny thing, right, where we knew a lot of the news going into this event, and yet a lot came out as well. Some pieces were confirming things that we might have theorized about, things that we've said, well, it's obvious that this other announcement means this other announcement. We were able to do the matching of this leading into the event, but we got actual confirmation of that in many cases. And then I think the unveiling of the entire overall vision in terms of what they want to achieve with this roadmap was a lot clearer. And I think there's a couple ways to look at it. You know, if you're somebody out there who believes all of the numbers and timelines as stated, I love you for that. I do not believe any of the numbers or timelines stated, right? And if you've

been listening to show for a while, you know that is my least favorite sentence to say because I hate talking about timelines, especially with regards to this kind of story. I think there's differences in talking about a delay, such as the ULA Vulcan issue that we have right now, where that's grounded for several months and the Space Force is reconsidering what they need to do for their launch capacity, that's a story where the delay is the story, and that really matters. On this other front, a delay of an overall grand architecture is kind of the least interesting thing ever, because everything in the world is always delayed because humans can always think of things that might go wrong, but they can't think of all the things that will go wrong,

and all the things that will take time, and it's not even worth analyzing, because it doesn't change the positioning of that architecture, really, in the landscape. Now, on the SLS side of things, all of the delays that we've seen to this point are things that we've pointed to and said, those are the weak points of this program. So every SLS delay was confirmation of the storylines that many of us have been talking about. A delay, like we're seeing with Vulcan, is a story in itself,

but looking at a timeline like this and saying, well, you know, it might not turn out on that schedule. It's like, yes, obviously. And that's the least interesting thing to unpack. So I'm going to kind of ignore that, to be honest, because I do think the real achievement of what the ignition roadmap could be aimed at is different than just landing this amount of moonlanders in this amount of years. I think this is pointing in a direction that sets them up for success down the line, even if that success does not become apparent under the Jared Isaacman era of NASA. And that's an interesting balance to consider as well, because it's different than every other presidential administration that's handled space in my lifetime,

really, and every other NASA administrator that has handled space in my lifetime as well. Now, Jared is saying a lot of the same things that we're going to do all these things in my administration, but I do think there was a couple of quotes coming out of the event and the press around the event that indicate what the real thing we should be focused on is. I want to start, though, with the fact that Jared Isaacman's superpower remains the ability to get NASA officials to go up in front of a podium and speak the truth that we have been seeing from the outside for several years, right? Even if you're a huge supporter of the SLS-Oryon, you know the criticisms of these. And those criticisms have never been talked about publicly until the Jared Isaacman era of NASA went out and said, the vehicle flight rate is too low, it's hard to fuel, this is a tricky program to manage,

and we have a lot of problems, but we're working on it as best we can. It was never stated that plainly. It was always couched in spaces hard, we're doing new things, right? There's always some sort of preface they give to it, whereas the Isaacman era, its hallmark is going to a podium and saying what needs to be said. And that started with the Starliner press conference when they re-designated that a type A mishap. In some ways, I think that was the perfect table setting for everything that we've seen since then. They sort of closed the door on the Starliner era there and righted, corrected the record. And then they've taken that same approach in the Artemis roadmap shuffling as well,

where they go out and they actually talk about things the way that it sounds when I have people on this show when we talk about it. when I just get on here and talk about what I'm seeing in the program, the statements there sound a lot more similar to what we've been hearing outside of NASA than what we've been hearing inside of NASA for all these years. And there's one comment from the press conference at Ignition that completely floored me. I don't often go to clips during this show, but I want you to listen to this again. This is a question from Eric Berger, and the answer completely floored me. and I'm shocked that more people have not talked about this.

So let's listen to this together. Eric Berger, Ars Technic, a question for Amit, I think. Just curious where the NASA workforce is today, sort of from a confidence standpoint, from sort of an attitude standpoint. 2025 was a very difficult year for the space agency for a number of reasons. I won't go into them, but I think we all know them.

There's now finally some clear leadership. but today, and in the last few weeks, you've announced some really wrenching changes to how the agency does, and I think some of them are probably pretty good, but it's changing people's lives and the things that they've been working on, which has been a problem for NASA in the past. So I'm just

wondering, like, where is the workforce, you know, in your opinion, you talk to them, you were here, you've been here a long time, you know them, how are people sort of dealing with this change? That's a great question, Eric. I would say in general, the workforce is hungry for leadership and they've got it now the clear vision is there

I mean everything we're doing now is I mean and to your point about like we're changing things around we're making kind of reallocations and we're we're being honest about where we are in a lot of other cases I would say generally speaking almost all the workforce is also very appreciative we've had feedback saying that some of the things we're saying are like therapy to them in terms of like things that we've known but we just haven't been able because of the constraints we've been living under to kind of deal with So that's been a thing that a lot of folks have been just kind of like, wow, we can say what we think and do the things that we know we're supposed to be doing, the idea that we're going to bring, you know, the spirit of what we're doing, you know, getting people closer to the work, stop watching things and start doing things again, I think is really energized the workforce tremendously. Now, he's right. But to go out and say in a press conference that you couldn't say things for years because of the constraints on you is,

not surprising because we've identified that. But to say it so plainly is, again, the hallmark of Jared Isam's administration is that not only go out and say that this is the way that things are, but also declare the fact that you couldn't say it previously. That's crazy. That's like an unbelievable dark mark on the last, what, 10, 20 years of NASA if he's saying that just talking about the program and its challenges and what we'd rather do is like therapy to people within NASA is a crazy admission to make. And I think Jared Isabin's point this whole time,

right, with Starliner and with Artemis, is that a lot of those constraints are imposed by NASA themselves, that there's this thing that they've had for years where there's this unified front and there's no gap between NASA and the contractors of any particular program. And they had to present a unified front so no one ever could blame each other. because they would ask NASA about a problem, and they would say, well, you've got to go ask the contractors. And then you'd go ask the contractors, and they say, well, you've got to ask NASA because it's their program. And then you just don't get any information out. And all they say is, space is hard, and these are tricky things. We're doing the best you can. The teams, I'm proud

of the teams work. And they couldn't say these things because of the constraints on them. Now, is that political constraints because they didn't have political support to go out and name these things out in the real world? Maybe. But Jared's point is, those are also NASA constraints. NASA doesn't have to be this agency that just doesn't talk about things that they're disappointed about how they're going. And, you know, we have seen that attempted where Bridenstein might go out in Congress and say that we want to do depose and gets yelled at by, you know, Senator Shelby. Or Mike Pence goes out and says, if these contractors can't do it, we'll find ones that can. And that gets pretty roundly rejected by everybody else in the system. So it's not like there

haven't been moments where what Amit's saying there has been shown to be true. But just to say it so plainly like that is wild, absolutely wild. And I thought it was a great table setting for the things that I want to talk about out of ignition. So the key news stories, if you have listened to this long and you haven't read the news, right? Gateway officially canceled and used for parts in other programs. We did get confirmation after the event that mobile launcher 2, the stop work order has been issued there, so they are no longer working on that. And there's some commercial space station stuff that we'll talk about at the end where NASA went out and offered a new option for what to do about the end of ISS and the commercial Leo destinations program and also dunked on the concept

of a commercial Leo market, which is another can of worms. We did get confirmation that CENTAR-5 is going to be the upper stage for SLS, maybe, because also, in this event, it was slipped under the radar that the ICPS, the upper stage for SLS right now, and the early version of SLS here, might not be used on Artemis 3, which is the mission to low Earth orbit to test out Orion with the landers. They might not need to use ICPS to get Orion into low Earth orbit. And they might save the ICPS for Artemis 4, which makes the Centaur 5 schedule a little easier. But if you couple that with a story that Lauren Grush had in Bloomberg, where they talked about the starship plan for the lunar landings,

part of their simplified and streamlined approach, which NASA hasn't enlightened us about yet, was that Orion and Starship would meet up in Earth orbit, and Starship would take both of them to low lunar orbit to stage out of there for the landing. If you do that, and you don't need ICPS to get to low Earth orbit for Orion with Orion, you don't actually need SLS, because do you remember the time that Orion went to Earth orbit? not on SLS. So they totally under the radar

showed you the lane to no more SLS. Well, it'd get to low Earth orbit and we'll handle it from there. That's a pretty viable option for the future. Especially when they're talking about the fact that beyond whatever it is in law right now, Artemis 5, they'll be going with a more commercial launcher approach for the whole architecture. Now, some people think that means just launching the crew

on Starship or just launching the crew on a dragon, but it could mean launching Orion on a heavy lift launch vehicle like New Glenn, getting it to Earth orbit, and then having Starship or the Blue Moon Tugs take it from there. What came of Gateway was a lunar surface program, the moon-based program, so the habitation modules could be refactored and revised for use on the lunar surface. The power and propulsion element is going to be remade into SR1 Freedom, a spacecraft powered by nuclear clear power heading to Mars by the end of 2028, also taking a bunch of ingenuity class helicopters to Mars as a little cherry on top. And then the, what's the other part of gateway that I'm forgetting about? Oh, just generally, the fact that if there's no gateway, NRAHO, the neorectal

linear halo orbit is out, and the landers don't need to stage out of there. So we've already seen that Blue Origin is thinking about a different polar orbit that's much closer to the surface than NRHO. And as I just mentioned, Lauren Gresham Bloomberg has this story about Starship taking Orion from Earth orbit to low lunar orbit to stage out of there. So NRHO is out of the stack as well, which does greatly simplify the program overall. So we got great confirmation all around of those things, right? They haven't officially said that Gateway was canceled. Now, they just say it's paused. We might rekindle it, but they've also didn't split it in half and use it for parts in these other programs. So if that's not canceled, I'm not sure what is. The biggest surprise was this

mention of the ICPS maybe not being used for Artemis 3, which opens up the door for non-SLS launches of Orion in the future. And then there was this big increase in the commercial lunar payload services program that was talked about, you know, increasing up to tens of landers a year. I mean, they rolled out this plan to land 20 or 21 moon landers by the end of 2028, right? These are the numbers, to me, that sound like total fantasy land. Launching four SLSs in Jared Isaacman's tenure as NASA administrator, which is not even a full term. You can't just flick these things on like a light switch. Right.

But I've said this before, and I think this event was even more confirmation of it because they said it explicitly in an interview after the fact that I'll read you a quote from in a second. The idea here is that the NASA leadership and the NASA portion of this program has cleared out all of the roadblocks and interdependencies from this architecture. If you remember old Artemis 4, the amount of things that need to be ready for Artemis 4 to fly is staggering. It was an whole SLS with a new upper stage, there was a gateway module on there, there was another lander, there were more space suits, even potentially a rover or a logistics mission on the surface. There were so many different things that everybody could play scheduled chicken and nobody was taking the blame as being the one that makes that mission later. That mission was never going to fly because there were so many things involved.

Also, gateway itself, I guess, right? Gateway itself, gateway logistics being there. there were so much in that one mission. And that's just drives your schedule out the window. And so what the leadership here is done, right, is cleared the roadmap entirely, removed all the interdependencies, removed all the reason that anyone could give them for being late on their piece other than raw execution. So we're going to fly SLS as frequently as he can. We're expecting to see one or both landers in orbit next year. We're expecting an annual or better cadence from SLS right out of the gate? Because guess what? All along, SLS has said, we can do an annual cadence. All along, SpaceX has been saying, we can get Starship flying at flight rates pretty soon.

All along, we've heard from Blue Origin how many new glens and blue moons they can launch per year. All along, we've heard from the clips providers that we can fly multiple landers a year, and we've yet to see anyone attempt more than one a year, right? I've got to check the Intuit machine schedule, but I don't think anyone's flown twice in the same calendar year. So all of these things, that have been said by the contractors. Oh, also, axiom that our space suits aren't going to be the reason that Artemis 3 is late. That's a thing that they said a bunch. And SpaceX has said, our lander's not the reason that Artemis 3 is going to be late. Everyone's been saying for years that they can do this, that they have what it takes to do the schedules that could be promised.

And what Jared Isaacman and NASA have done is said, go do it. We've cleared out all the political roadmaps, roadblocks, we've cleared out the budgetary roadblocks because we've got mass political support behind this new initiative, and we've got a bunch of money that was assigned to us last year in the summer in the Big Beautiful Bill, and we can now, I've got to pull up the correct terminology, we can now repurpose, reprogram, reconfigure, or reassign those assets to other parts of the program. We've gotten all this political support to take the Gateway program and put it on the surface, and we've untied you all from anything connecting your pieces of the mission. So instead of the Artemis 4, you know, jumble that we had before,

fly your lander when you're ready, SpaceX. Fly your lander when you're ready, blue origin. We'll have an Orion waiting for you in orbit, or, you know, roughly thereabouts. Even the moon-based program, they specifically said, not all these things are going to be connected into each other because the integration of those pieces is what makes connecting to the ISS, for example, really tricky. And it would make it even trickier on the surface. So we're just going to land near each other. So fly when you're ready. And you told me you can be ready on the schedule that we're asking right now, so go do it. There are no more excuses to hide behind, or no more other third parties to blame for why your piece is late, because we've cleared out

all the roadblocks in front of you, and we've given you full authority to go fly on the schedule that you've told us. And then what, right? Because like I said, I don't believe these schedules. I don't think you can turn this on like a light switch, but I don't criticize NASA for that, Because again, they are taking all the checks that have been written from these other contractors and companies for all these years and said, all right, let's organize our schedule and our program to be able to do that. So Eric Berger of Ars Technica had an interview with, let's see, I'm going to get the order of his names wrong. Carlos Garcia Galan, right, the Lunar Vice Roy, as Jared Isamon joked. But he's the manager of the Moonbase program. And he had this interview in Ars Technica, and I want to read you.

a quote here where Eric asked, what's the most pressing thing you want to do to tackle this first? You know, the cadence of launches and landings that we previewed today is not in our experience base at NASA. It's very demanding. I think it's important. It's critical that we set it that way to identify the stress points. We want to find the choke points that are slowing us down. It's the same with human transportation, with demanding two landings on the moon a year. Like, what is it that prevents us from doing that? We need to identify that. In my case, for the moon base, it's the entire industry of people doing launches, in space transportation, landers, payloads, rovers. So is it the supply chain? Is it the manufacturing capacity? I want to work with our partners

to identify the stress points so we can actually tackle them. And close after that is bringing in our international partners and identifying where they want to play. So very expressly stating that the goal of clearing all these roadmaps is to figure out what the slow parts are. Because before you could hide behind all these other pieces. So SLS didn't look slow because Orion was slow. And Orion didn't look slow because SLS was slow. And Starship definitely didn't look slow because those were so slow, and the spacesuits didn't look slow because Starship looked slow. Everyone could hide behind each other because there were too many interdependencies. So by doing this, they're literally saying, in interviews, we want to figure out which one of you is the slowest. And if we get

to the end of Jared Eisenman's administration, and we haven't done a single lunar landing, but we have a ton of data like this, like we took all the constraints off of these programs, and this is what happened. We flew one SLS. It was the one that was already scheduled to fly in my administration. and they couldn't provide us flight hardware that was ready to go in time. If we get there, that's a pretty clarifying answer. If we get to the end of 2028 and not a single lunar lander of the HLS program is in orbit, that's a pretty clarifying statement on where they're at. If Axiom hasn't delivered the suits and they can't test the suits on a hypothetical Artemis 3

that might fly in 2027, pretty clarifying statement. Like, every answer you get out of this is really clarifying for the next administration in line. and I think that's the key part here is that there's an achievement here I mean number one I've already declared mission accomplished in that the gateway program has been canceled along with mobile launcher 2 and we've opened up billions of dollars of money within the NASA pool to be applied elsewhere in more productive ways and we've also unhitched all of that unhelpful stuff in the roadmap that was tied to gateway in mobile launcher 2 in my view we've unhooked that from the rest of the program so that alone I think would have been a major victory of the Jared Eisenman era. But if we also operate under this philosophy for the next two years, that the constraints are gone, fly as quickly as you can, you have the money you need, you have the schedule you need, you have the authority to proceed, and in this interview elsewhere, they say, we are providing you top cover to go do what you need to do, pull in the centers and the contractors that you need to actually go and

move on these things, we'll just have a massive amount of actual confirmatory evidence, rather than just conjectures from podcasters like me or conjectures from senators, you know, we actually will have real data and said all the constraints were off and they still couldn't deliver. And then how do we refactor the program? So this is a very important move forward in the philosophy behind this and how this feeds forward into the next thing. So in some ways, I find it, I mean, it's great that they want to go out and they say, we're going to do all these things in two years. and they need to kind of have that inspiring vision. But at the same time, I really do wonder,

do they truly in their heart think that this is possible to hit these numbers? Or again, are they saying, well, everyone has said that they can do this at this rate. So we need to plan on it. And then when they're wrong, we need to point that out as well. And that's the second rubric I want to grade the Jared Isaacman era at, right? It's really easy to go out and state how broken these. programs were when you came in because they weren't your decisions. I mean, in many cases, they're openly saying the previous administration and criticizing them more openly than

I've seen past NASA's. And so I don't want to say it's easy to go get the political support for this new roadmap, but it's easy to stand there and criticize these old programs because I've done it for years, and so has Jared. What it's going to be harder is going out and still telling the truth in this way when it's your programs that are behind schedule. When we don't hit these schedules, how does the Isaacman NASA approach the truth-telling at that moment? Now, I think the kind of skeleton key he's given himself is that they very clearly put distance between themselves and the contractors in a way that in the unified front era of NASA the past 20-something years, there was no difference between NASA and Boeing in a press conference about Starliner. We started seeing a little bit of gap there last year.

but there's been no distance between NASA and the contractors in any press conference about these very behind schedule, very over-budget programs. Now the statement is NASA is going to hold its responsibility to the highest level possible, and we are going to hold ourselves accountable for the decisions that we made and approved, and we're going to speak plainly about that, and then it's on the contractors to do the same about their part. Does that distance help them tell the truth when it's their program behind schedule. I hope so. I hope that's the new part that we're getting to, but that's going to be the piece that in like 2027, 2028, that's how I'm going to be grading the Isaac Minera here.

Now, in the gateway side of things, right, we've talked about what do you do with the gateway program and the partners that are committed to that, and there's a lot of worry around that. The international partners, partners have already committed to the gateway program. We can't cancel it because they're already committed to it. I was thrilled that in this event, they said, a thing that I've thought for years, which is, given the choice, no one's picking lunar orbit, everyone's picking the surface. The international partners are contributing to the gateway because it's there to be contributed to because they want to fly to the lunar surface. They want to be part of the Artemis program. The lunar surface is a better destination. I'm pretty sure they'll

figure out what they want to contribute to the program because they really do want to land on the moon. And Japan was way ahead of the curve on this, right? Jackson's been talking for years about building this pressurized rover that will be part of surface missions. They've had their site clearly said on that. Now, the state of the program is another thing that I don't have a lot of intel on, and I'm not sure that anyone really does, but they've been right about their directionality. And even from Europe, they've talked about different things they can contribute, like this Argonaut program, which is a large cargo lander they've talked about, and they started a fund pieces of, I mean, the habitation modules that they've been building for Gateway,

can those pressure vessels be converted to something that we can use on the lunar surface? Seems pretty likely, so I don't think they'll really be out and out about it. biggest one would be Canada, right? Everyone's made a lot of big deals that, well, they spent a billion dollars on this arm that's going to go to the gateway. What are they going to do with it now? I don't know, but they've got an astronaut boarding a rocket tomorrow to go around the moon, so I'm pretty sure they'll be happy about that. And they'll figure out other robotics we might need on the lunar surface because we're going to need them. So I do think it's true that the international partners are interested in the lunar surface.

And how exactly that breaks down is going to be something to track, right? it is risky in that you are putting a big architecture change out into a political environment. And when you do that, one of the options is always cancel our involvement and not spend the money on it. That is definitely a thing that you open up, is that you are rethinking this decision, which allows them to rethink their decision to fund that program at all. Now, is that going to be a huge, you know, that doesn't seem to be the weak point of this architecture as design. I'm not looking at all this architecture that Jared Isman rolled out and be like, man, the European habitation contributions are really the thing that will make or break this entire political

structure and technical roadmap in front of us. Nothing against Europe. You love your pressure vessels, and I would love to see them on the lunar surface, but that isn't the point. I mean, specifically, like I just said, we've unhooked all the interdependencies. So that isn't the thing that I'm looking at and saying, well, that's the weak point in the whole program. It would be great if it's there and they can do it on time and hit their right budgets and provide something that being landed on the surface. but if they decide not to, I don't know that that really changes the overall architecture or overall mission here for the lunar base. Now, I have less of an opinion or insight for you on the SR1 Freedom spacecraft idea, this nuclear power driving the PPE module out to Mars, delivering

a cache of ingenuity class helicopters. I like the way that it was talked about in that they tried to design a program that would push back against all the reasons that the needs nuclear power programs in space have faltered before. I thought that was a really concise explanation of the architecture they've decided upon. And I think it's a cool program. And I think it's one of those things that, you know, if you look at the list of things that NASA should be working on, this definitely feels like one of them. I'm just not, I'm not much of a nuclear propulsion is the key to everything guy. I don't necessarily feel like any of the reasons that these architectures haven't worked out in the past or that even the Artemis architecture has designed

right now wouldn't work out, is nuclear propulsion. Now, if it arrives and it works great, then that's awesome. It does open up some opportunities, but it doesn't feel like the thing that's holding us back at the current moment in time. So I'm open to it. I just honestly don't have that much of an opinion about it, to be real. All right, quick talk about commercial space stations, because this was the kind of weirdest section of the day, to be honest.

NASA went out and publicly stated that they don't see a commercial space space. space station market existing right now. They don't see the boom of the market that was always promised. All this talk of in-space manufacturing and bio-pharmaceuticals and tourism, right? It's kind of funny that the head of NASA is a guy that's paid for two missions that would be classified under tourism and is like, hey, there's not a tourism market. That is a little bit funny. And there's a funnier thing in a second that we'll talk about as well. But, you know, I can't disagree with NASA, but I also think it's a really shitty place to go and talk about it in this way, right? It did not, didn't really seem to fit the vibe of the rest of the, of the, well, in some ways it did kind of

fit the vibe, right? Because NASA's saying, go prove it about the lunar architecture. And they're saying with the commercial space station market, if you got data that says otherwise, then we're happy to hear it. And to be honest, anything I've heard from inside these companies is, yeah, we haven't really figured out the business case yet if NASA's not paying a huge portion of the fare. I've heard that from within companies that have canceled their space station programs, right? And there's definitely different takes on it right now where you've got VAST going about a different way than the others have, and the free-flying stations have had a different track record. than something like Axiom who's looking at attaching to the ISS.

Maybe it's the constraints of the ISS that's dragging them down in that way, and the others seem to have a better approach. But I just think NASA has been, I would have rather them say, look, we just don't have the money for this. And with a lunar base program like this and the horizon, we don't think there's a huge value in contributing even this small amount to a market. if we can't, if this amount of money does not move the needle for the market overall. So we're happy to see one start up and flourish, and there's a lot of innovative ideas out there

that have promised. And we've certainly helped to contribute some funding there, and we will continue to do so with Space Act agreements, smaller agreements where we can move the needle for these companies. But right now, there's a huge amount of investment capital flowing into this market. There's over a billion dollars in the last few months that have been committed to these companies. So we don't think this is the right spot for NASA to invest right now. We're happy to buy missions when they are there, but we don't see us as having the budget or really the will to be the development money behind this market. We see that it is taking off because look at all this investment capital and we will be customers when it's there, but we don't have the money

to fund this at the level that we would need to really contribute to its development. I would rather that be the message because it's true. All those things are true. But, it still kind of feels like this is the one section of a giveaway to the old space world to unlock all of this roadmap, right? Maybe is this the reason that Ted Cruz got behind this? Because the ISS got a life extension to 2032, and the Axiom space portion of this feels like a huge giveaway to them. NASA says we're going to go out and acquire another module where all these commercial space

stations can be docked. So we're going to get a module that has a few docking ports to allow expansion. It sounds a lot like they're describing buying the Axiom one module, buying it from Axiom and flying it to the ISS and attaching it, and then letting everyone attach to that module. It certainly sounds like that. So I put the life extension to 2032 for ISS, this sort of dunking on a commercial space station market

and an acquiring of what is a likely acquiring of an Axiom module. Like, maybe there's the Ted Cruz, you know, they give back to Ted Cruz for all the other stuff that's going on in this roadmap. because it certainly feels like Axioms getting away with some stuff here. Right? Not in like a, well, I was going to say not in a devious way, but I mean, pretty excellently architected if so. Because the other aspect here is that Axiom space is not getting nearly enough talk on the Artemis roadmap. There was no talk about spacesuits.

We talk about all this redundancy everywhere else in the program, and there's zero talk about spacesuits. Now, on one hand, I get it, because Isaacman would be up there saying, we're going to add a second space suit provider, which is basically him announcing that they're going to fund a SpaceX EVA suit program when he's the guy that wore the EVA suit. He bought it the first time.

He wore it the first time. And now he's like, let's make that the moon landing suit. I kind of get it that he's maybe afraid to go out and take that stance because of everything that's been talked about about Isaac Min and Musk, yada, yada. But the fact that Axiom has didn't come up other than we hope the spacesuits

are ready in time for Artemis. three. That's it. All these other companies are taking this flack. You're destroying a commercial space station market openly. And the best you've got for the spacesuits is we hope that their space suits are ready next year. There's no updates, nothing. No pressure in all these other cases. You're getting redundancy pressures and whoever suit is ready, like, we'll fly in it. That should be the message. But they get no pressure. And then you get this whole idea of we're going to extend the ISS and attach that module that certainly is shaped like the one that the company's building that isn't getting the pressure of the space seats. I don't like that. I don't like everything that involved

Axiom space here in this press conference or in this event. My spidey senses are tingling there, but maybe that was the key that unlocked all the political support they needed to do everything else here that we do like. So this is the troll toll. I guess that's what we're left with. All right. This was a long ranty one. But I've reached the end of my document. I'm sure I'll talk about this more. We've got Artemis 2 on the pad, like I said. If this goes this week, I'm going to be talking about it a lot.

And, yeah, that's what I've got for y'all. So I want to say thank you to everyone who supported Managing Cutoff over at Managing Cutoff.com slash support. There are 32 executive producers of this show. Thanks to Steve, Joel, Chris, Josh from Impulse, Will and Lars from Agile, Warren, Natasha Saccoas, Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut, Unis, Better Everyday Studios,

Russell, Fred, David, Donald, Frank, Miles O'Brien, if I could talk, Jan, Joe Kim, The Astrogators at SEE, Stealth Julian, Theo and Violet, Matt, Pat, Ryan, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support, as always. We want to join them, managecutoff.com slash support is where to go.

And until next time, I guess Godspeed Artemis too.