Main Engine Cut Off - T+327: Artemis II, the Lunar Flyby Edition (with Paul Fjeld)

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

Artemis II completed their lunar flyby yesterday, and it was epic on all levels. Paul Fjeld and I discuss that and many other topics related to Artemis, Apollo, and human spaceflight. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Ryan, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Will and Lars from Agile, David, Better Every Day Studios, Kris, Stealth Julian, Joonas, Russell, Warren, Jan, Natasha Tsakos, Steve, Pat, The Astrogators at SEE, Fred, Donald, Miles O’Brien, Matt, Josh from Impulse, Frank, Lee, Joakim, Joel, Theo and Violet, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics Space Art by Paul Fjeld NASA’s Artemis II Crew Flies Around the Moon (Official Broadcast) - YouTube Artemis II Multimedia: Crew Photos, Videos and Mission Highlights NASA's Moon ship and rocket seem to be working well, so what about the landers? - Ars Technica T+58: Totality - Main Engine Cut Off 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/Bill Ingalls Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo, and I've got a friend with me today, Mr. Paul Fyield, joining me to talk about Artemis 2 and its lunar flyby and how the mission's been going since we talked last on the first day of the flight. So they are, I'm sure you've seen around the moon at this point, an amazing encounter with the moon. Awesome to watch the live stream and hear from the astronauts. Wanted to talk about it. Especially with somebody, if you have not met Paul before. He's been on Off Nominal before. has not been on Miko, but he was around during the Apollo program. He was a NASA artist during the Apollo program. He's done mission patches and all sorts of different art about the program, has had some experience with the lunar module at the Smithsonian

and a lot of great historical context. Somebody that was there the last time that all these Apollo missions were happening. And there's been a lot of equivalences and comparisons that have been made between Artemis 2 and some of the Apollo missions, certainly in the state of the world. But also, I wanted to talk about some of the program. stuff, right? That a lot of people can't separate the programmatic complaints and feedback and thoughts and all of the criticisms and things that they liked about the program. They can't really separate that from the mission itself and how those are entangled. I wanted to talk about how

that also felt during the Apollo era. Were there these similarly kind of conflicted thoughts or different ways that you were thinking about the mission compared to what was actually happening on the mission and feedback that you had about the architecture overall? But also, I just wanted somebody that kind of could ruminate with me on the mission overall and how things have been going and what it was like to see astronauts in this state. So without further ado, let's talk to Paul. Paul fieled never been on Miko,

been on off-nominal a couple of times, but never on Miko, and we're finally fixing that. How should I credit you to these people listening right now? Space artist, love spaceflight, can't wait to produce a final book of what the coolest thing happened in space. That's a poor... That's not a very good way of it. They got it.

Yeah. I've already lost the publishing rights. Okay. Why are you the one I've brought on here to talk about Artemis II and be, we have no topics specifically outlined. We just have a long time on the calendar. This may be one of the longest MECOs there ever were. We'll be great. But specifically, please enlighten us as to your experience during the Apollo era because

there are some things I would like to pick your brain about differences between then and now or similarities between then and now. So I grew up during the Apollo program. I was 14 on Apollo 11, followed it like crazy. I became, I just fell in love with it. I'm an artist. And so I have a particular interest in what the astronauts say. So that whole idea of having a vicarious adventure through humans that you can identify with is right up my alley. That's the thing that I absolutely glom onto. And I needed to see this entire adventure for myself personally. So I managed to get down to the launch site on Apollo 15. and became addicted and sneets sort of snuck into the NASA art program where I got to see an inside view working my way all the way up to mission control. So I have a lot of experience on both sides as a fan and as somebody on the inside. And then when I worked for the Canadian Space Agency, I worked for the agency, kind of as a public affairs officer.

We call them a communications person. But so a lot of the things that I talk about I had to do on both sides of the both sides. So maybe that might be the reason. Also, I'm freaking out about going back to the moon. So maybe that might be the best thing. Well, and you specifically emailed me and said, paraphrasing, I've been really cranky about the program. Please enlighten me further as to where you were at going into the mission and then how it felt once the mission was underway. Well, I've been caught up in how long things have taken and how things have sort of gotten away from the point of spaceflight.

which is to have this adventure and became more like a jobs program or people sort of protecting themselves and just sort of sort of staying in the business but not committing to doing the thing. And Artemis kind of got caught up in all of that stuff. I guess maybe when Gateway died, it should have broke some ice or something. And so that kind of got me a little bit jaded about the whole thing. I thought, okay, I'll follow along. But as soon as they launched that sucker and I knew where the hell they were going, it changed completely. And then of course you realize this this actually is hard. I know everyone went to

do it's hard, but this is a hard mission to do really, really well. This is the first time this spacecraft has, you know, flown with an environmental control system. There's enough scuttlebut about, you know, who are all the systems working properly? Did they really test them properly on Artemis 1? So there's that kind of interest to it. And so I became dedicated. Look, I got to send them good wishes in my head or this thing ain't going to fly all the way. So I wanted to succeed. And of course, just when I saw what they were going to do flying around the moon, how they were going to, the types of things they were going to see, were exactly the kinds of things that I want to see. And so here we are. We saw them. Holy crap. It was amazing.

Yeah. I mean, you heard the last show I did, right? I was prepared for this to be a very cool mission and to feel different when it was underway. But even I was not prepared for how cool this does feel to be and certainly the access to just having this stream on all day. I've had it on,

the TV's in the house 24-7. My wife has gotten at the point of like, are we doing this? And I was like, I've been waiting all these years for this.

We are doing this. We're going to have this on in this way. But there's, you know, not that you're seeing every single second in the cabin,

but the fact that you can feel like you're riding along with this vehicle. And that's something that is different about the last time this happened, right? Even the access

that you had to, those later missions, it wasn't the same temporal access as we have now. And I'm curious how that feels differently now as it did then. Well, covering the missions during Apollo, we had access to all the air to ground continuously. You get a little, you could sort of sign up for a little squack box when you were down at the Cape and, you know, all the reporters and the people, the families and that of the astronauts, they would have this squack box in their room and you'd hear it continuously. The thing that is really different as the nature of the crew and their interaction that we get to see. I think maybe people are different today for some reason. This crew are delightful. They're really a neat group of people

and they kind of let you in and they sort of, you know, I mean, the right stuff guys were kind of right stuffy and, you know, and there's a certain quality, you know, unless they were listening to Frank Sinatra smoking a cigarette and drinking alcohol, you wouldn't really get into, you know, what they were feeling or what they were saying. And so this business of getting to know them, like I got to know a lot of the crew that flew from the Canadian Space Agency, and that changed my perspective very much from, you know, what I could sort of see through their eyes in a way that was different.

This crew, for some reason, I get the same feeling, even though I've never met them. For example, I'm going to call them all by their first names. I don't care if I don't know them. There was a sequence that happened yesterday before they did their fly around when they said, look, we'd like to name two craters. And one of them was for integrity, like, okay, that's kind of obvious.

And then they brought out the fact that Reed's wife had died five years ago and someone that they loved. And I started bubbling like an idiot, you know. Oh, my God. Okay, you're not going to get that on a bottle of spacecraft. I'll tell you that much for sure. So, you know, I think just liking his crew, even that stupid little zero-g indicator and the cute factor, it kind of crosses a boundary for a sort of ick, you know, into, oh, my God, I'm fully doubted.

So some of the extremely earnest, let's put it that way, you know, you can either find that revolting like British people or, you know, it was an unnecessary cheap shot. I apologize to all British people, but you know what I'm talking. It's a 250th. We're taking shots at Brits all year here. Okay. I forgot. But some of us have left the Commonwealth.

Yes. some of us have. Thank you very much from pointing that out. But I was originally part of a different Commonwealth, the Viking one. That's a good point. Anyway, so I like, you know, this fact that you can connect with the crew is very different from the Apollo days. Now, we weren't doing it for the first time, this time. You know, so there was a thrill and also being a young person and getting caught up in the whole 60s and 70s of the adventure.

You know, and the world. was crazy at that time, you know, just as it is today. I don't know what's worse. Vietnam War, this war, you know, everything is sort of going nuts. And then you have this one really beautiful thing happening at the same time. So I'm hanging on to it for a dear life. Yeah, that's something that, you know, a lot of people like to paint the equivalence, right? Foreign wars, domestic upheaval, moon. Yeah. I get it. I think my other defense of that or my maybe attack of that storyline is that maybe it's that there are terrible storylines all the time

and only occasionally do we get really beautiful ones and I think so and I'm a I'm a congenital optimist right like I it's hard to break that from me that I do I do think

on net the world is getting better all the time and like I would rather live now than most times in history exactly I say that all the time yeah but I do think there's like If you look back through history, most human history is kind of dark and bleak and terrible. And there are these shining bright moments. And I think we should be thankful that we have one.

That's maybe too dark of a take to say that it's optimistic. But I do kind of feel like we might always find the bad storylines to pair with a really good one. But only occasionally do we have the really good one. And I think what's interesting is that this crew is making an effort, a very deliberate effort, to blast past the obvious stuff by mentioning that. You know, they bring it all the time that's sort of like, it's almost like, all right, already. It's kumbaya, we're here, you know, all that kind of stuff.

No, but it really is. And when they see the earth that way, especially from a great distance, I think just a few moments ago, Christina, she said, Chris, as I like to call her. No, sorry, I don't do that. Anyway, Christina, Cook, said the thing that surprised her in terms of looking at the Earth after she'd been looking at it for about a year on the International Space Station was how striking it was against all that black around you.

I think that's one of the shocking things, certainly that I've heard from Apollo crew and the rest, is the blackness of space. It is spooky. It scares a hell out of you when you look at it. T.K. Mattingly, when he flew on Apollo 16, did a spacewalk on the way back to retrieve some canisters of film, and he said it was so black. He started to feel kind of prickly. scared on the back of his neck the whole thing when he was out doing a spacewalk. It was just so

crazy. Part of it is because they know what's there. They've seen it in a dark spot when their eyes get dark adapted and they see this cosmos screaming at them. And then they go in the bright light in the sun and suddenly your pupils are the size of a pinpoint. And it's black and it's velvet. And it's all there, but you can't see it. And it's just this whole combination of where we are in the universe is made so vivid, so present that it freaks them out and sometimes they lose it. And that's what I like the best is to, you know, tell me when you lost your, uh, your composure. I'll use that word. Usually it's best to get a drunk first and then ask them, but, uh, no, so when did you lose it, you know, and by realizing that you were in space, where you were, you know, that whole thing

of being in space. And, you know, Christina brought it up. She said as well, when they were flying around the moon, she was staring at one part of the moon. And she, she, she, she, she, she, she, just kind of lost it since I was there. I thought it was cool as hell. Yeah, and I think if you're somebody who drags telescope out to the backyard occasionally, there are those nights where you get the view of the moon at certain lighting angles where you do feel like you're right there. I mean, even a couple months ago, I had the big eight-inch dobsonian out in the backyard, and my older son is now old enough to reliably look through an eyepiece. And there was something about this particular night that he caught him and he was like, I feel like I'm at the moon right now. And I was like,

yes, you're getting it. Like, this is the point, right? But, but you amplify that with all of the resolution that they have. They're looking through a single pane of window. And hearing them describe it, right? Because, you know, a lot's been made of the disappointment of the video bandwidth that we have coming back on the moon. And I get that. That's maybe something we should talk about is what infrastructure we may be rolling out soon. But the descriptions, it's almost, kind of a good balance where you have video that you can get the sense of where they are and what they're looking at, but you don't get all the details. So you have to get the detail by Victor Glover's amazing descriptions of what he's seeing. And these long, I don't know,

and the way they did the operations where two people are doing the observations and the recording on their devices, but then one is relaying back to ground control that we can hear of what's happening in the spacecraft, like audiobook style taking us through that. It was just a beautiful way to spend a couple of hours and you can really tell how unbelievable the view was when astronauts are beside themselves. You're right because they're so centerline. And Victor Glover might be like the astronaut's astronaut. He's like handsome dudes flies every plane as a huge family. Like takes a shirt off all the time on the spacecraft. Like he is such an astronaut. And then he's there saying like I literally can't describe this to you. I don't have words to tell you what's in front of me right

now. That's sci-fi. Yeah. It's sci-fi. Yeah. Awesome. Well, when he talked about walking along the crater walls in a way visually, but what you're talking about is us using our imagination to fill in the blanks. All they need to do is give us a rough notion. This is where we are. Here's where the moon is. And now I'm going to tell you that what I can see is something that we can't see, even with the best cameras. That was the part that I love the best being an artist. It's like, ooh, good, my job is safe.

In the face of AI, you're still fighting off cameras. Oh, Christ. Yeah, that's never going to stop. No, but I mean, the fact is that the astronaut, and they tell me that all the time, too, the one that I've talked to is when they see something that they love that just blows their mind. They don't take a picture of it because it might ruin the memory,

the visual memory of it. And so when, I mean, Victor said it a couple of times. I think Christina said it. What I saw with my eyes was better than what I got with this 400 amazing, you know, NikonD camera, 400 millimeter camera, you know, and it's neat to see it when they're kind of gushing and gushing, and gushing about looking through the lens.

But the fact is that the lens was sending photons to their eyeballs directly. And when they tried to capture it with the CCD, it couldn't capture it all, you know, because it would overcompensate. And also, the human eye can pick up subtle colors. And that's the thing also. I'm kind of jumping around here a little bit. Let's jump. Let's jump.

Let's jump. Let's jump around. The extent to which the scientists get information from the astronauts that their machines can't. They've got two, you know, one amazing satellite probe flying overhead LRO. Jaxa had a cool satellite flying around taking videos, all that kind of stuff. You figure, what more can you want? As a scientist, how can you get any better information than when you've got from these two instruments?

The human eye can pick up these crazy subtleties. Now, I couldn't with the green and the brown because I'm a little colorblind, so immediately. I can forget about the fact I panic at the first option. My color vision would wreck me. So Lisa got that. to lean on them. That's not because I'm a coward that I wouldn't be an astronaut because my eyes are bad. But when they described the subtleties of these kind of greens and these browns that were sort of interleaving and that around some of the craters, I guess Oriontale they were talking about specifically,

I thought that was really, really interesting, that the scientists would be going bananas for the personal discussions. And just to jump, loop back a little bit to what you were saying about the crew being together as a team, sharing this adventure at the same time, you could hear it in their voices, how excited they were. And when Jeremy, the Canadian, the Canaanis, that's the name I forgot. When Jeremy and Christina were at the window, was it they they were talking together or was it, they were just, no, or was it Victor and. I think Victor and Christina were a pair.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. He was saying how helpful that was when they were discussing the same thing they were seeing together. Like they were bonded in this moment of discovery and it sort of, they're pinging off each other, you know, having, you know, sort of making it easier for them to describe what they saw and maybe to pick up certain things. And then they could, you know, kind of add to it. I thought all that stuff sounded amazing.

And that's how I would love to have been that, you know, have that experience myself, you know, with somebody that I obviously trusted. You know, I mean, these people have been bonded for three years. It's not like the Apollo crews that had six months and then they could get, you know, they were talking to them each other again. Yeah. Yeah, right. Some of them. I mean, I think a lot of them became friends, but... Yeah, it was...

I mean, it was a different astronaut corps then, right? Like, it was... There were more missions, but there were smaller astronaut corps. So, you know, the... I think people have talked a lot about, you know, will one of these astronauts not read, but will one of the others go on to command an Artemis mission in the future?

I'm like, I don't think it's like that anymore. I don't think that's... That's what we're used to in the Apolladies, but the astronaut core is huge now. The last few classes have been enormous, and they've had people... that are very specific to, like, things that they would do on the surface. You know, there's been people that have, have geology backgrounds and have mining backgrounds.

Yeah, so, like, the, which is why, one thing going into this was like, are they disappointed that they got selected for this mission versus a landing mission? That's a common thing people would ask, right? Like I say, yeah. And I'm like, you got it, number one, the pace this program was moving and is moving. I say was because the desired intent has been stated, but it is still moving at a pace at which you've got to take the mission that's in front of you, because you don't know what's going to happen to yourself or the astronaut core or the program overall.

But then you hear the experience they have on it. You're like, God, I want to go on that mission. Like, screw landing. They saw an epic eclipse. Those photos are unbelievable. And having seen the eclipse, I kind of get what they're saying, but that's an even more epic version of that than you can see from Earth. Well, the visual experience of that is even way more epic than that.

I mean, as much as that blew me away, to be there and see that, the three-dimensionality will freak you out. You can actually look at the pictures kind of through like a keyhole of your hand. You can sort of make a little hole and sort of just using that small little kind of telescope, if you will, through your hand. You can see the details and they pop out almost three-dimensionally, but you multiply that many, many times, and there you are. But what you're bringing up is a very interesting question, and that is in the future when they fly the missions,

they're only from getting two folk down on the surface and then two people sitting up in the command module, in the Orion. How will that work? Because now you do have a chance to go on the surface and you missed it. Not only that, you don't get to be by yourself, you know, having this sort of strange. You know, I mean, I'm contradicting myself a little bit, you know, with the story I just told about the two of them sharing something. But that's one thing that the Apollo astronauts love, the command module pilots, is that they just took down to center seat, and they had this cathedral, basically, that's what Mike Collins described on Apollo 11. And they went around the moon, and the fact of them being away from the earth by themselves, just them and the rest of the universe had a special moment. It was very, very exciting.

And I don't know if you want to share that with anybody in that sense. Not while your toilet doesn't work. I mean, no, exactly. Just because that was one of the comments of the things I wanted to jack about just briefly was, how is it possible that you've got a spacecraft that's so sophisticated and can fly by itself? We've proved it on Artemis I that you need to have two people up in orbit just floating around there, their weight taking out what rocks could be maybe on the way back. So, I mean, I don't understand why they don't have four people going down to the surface,

especially if you got a great big ship like H.A., you know, the Starship Moonlander. Yeah, I think that's something that will change. What is, so one thing that has appeared to have changed. I want to talk more about the programmatic changes and how we should kind of put this mission in context with that. But just on this mission specifically, I think the experience of the of the altitudes that we got to ride along for. Yes. show how truly depressing near rectilinear

or halo orbit would have been if someone, if some poor soul was stuck in that for six months or whatever, three months or whatever even if it's three weeks like that 70,000 kilometers on the high end and then I think probably a little higher than they got to

on closest approach. So like the view when you're at close the approach, not bad but often over an unilluminated pole because the missions that you would be staged at Gateway would be South Pole landings, and you would be flying, I think the idea was to fly where your Periloon would be at the North Pole.

And you obviously want to be flying when the South Pole is illuminated. So your closest approach every time is an unilluminated North Pole, and then you're 70,000 kilometers off the surface for most of the orbit. What a shit orbit for humans. Great for communications relay, but terrible for humans. I'm glad that has been into the dust bin. You can dunk on Gateway all you like. I'm worth you there, brother.

Just a, yeah. I don't know why that was just like a meager, pathetic sort of, you know, this is the best we can do. And it's kind of sort of going to the moon and it's sort of going somewhere. And the final experience that you have is sort of interesting. But after a while, you just want to go, let's just go home. I'm done. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a really, really depressing, particularly if you had two folks on the surfers, bopping around doing fun, exciting adventures. And you can't even see them at that time because they're 70,000 kilometers away. And they're in an emergency. saying you're like, well, I'll see you in seven days. Yeah, right. I'll see you. Yeah, so good riddance to that orbit specifically. Okay, so we got that out of our system. That's great. I do want to dig into that, though, because the, from the kind of our community, right, our space nerd

community, I am glad, I should mention on the record that I am glad that the closest approach day seems to have broken out into the mainstream more than I feared that it would. Seems to have been more of a cultural moment than I would have thought. I mean, I was getting hit up from people that do not care about space all day. And I was enthused by that. A week ago, nobody knew about this mission, right? Like, I'm asking the teachers at my kids' school, is anyone talking about this? No one.

I'm going in tomorrow to talk about this mission and show the kids some photos and videos because no one at this school knew what's going on. And my son's going in every morning of like, the astronauts are launching today. And no one knows what he's talking about. That was depressing. But I, but the, and I think that's an indictment of the vehicle not being sticky enough that NASA feels like they can't make noise about the launch day because they can't be confident that's going to happen. Once it launches though, thankfully they have four days of a run-up.

They can make some more noise. They can get some more coverage. And it seems like the awareness of the mission peaked higher than launch, even based on the numbers I'm looking at that actually would be on that, which would be amazing if that's true. And I, it's never going to be, well, here's my historical context question for you. How much of the way that we remember Apollo, and I say, remember, I wasn't even around for it, right? It's, I hear stories from people like you. And how much of that is revisionist history about how interested the country was in it and how much of a cultural moment was. Or was that really so dominant because of the media environment at the time? It was dominant because of the media at the time. You only had the

TV networks. All the newspapers followed it. I remember following the Apollo program, you know, from Apollo 7 on. That was always front page news. Apollo 7 was just a test flight Apollo 9 the same thing Lower Earth test flight When they went off to the moon That was being covered all the time And the lead up to

Apollo 11 went Months before that They would have advertising all the time You know Apollo 11 And that's all you get to see You know there's nothing else on television So people you know Remember I was telling you about how

There's no technical information You know at the level that I want well, they had to fill a lot of time. And so they just basically, you know, ripped open the operations handbook and read from it. You know, like, if you want to do switch 25, 75 and an off nominal condition, oh, bravo, that's really fascinating. They just go on and on and on. I mean.

But did people care, right? Because there's a difference, too, between that. Like, they care. But then there's also this whole thing about that, you know, after the first couple landings, the public support for it by polling did not, was not there at all. It wasn't quite there from what I remember. See, I didn't have access to all the detailed stuff at that point, but I could pick it up pretty well from just general media. I could pick up like batty match, the French newspapers.

Europeans and the rest of the world was more interested, really, probably than America. I just heard the curator, the one that I worked for at the Smithsonian, Dieselmere Harmony. She was describing how the rest of the world was kind of more interested in the Apollo program than America was. after Apollo 11 and 12, kind of. 13, it was dead until the crew could almost die, and then everybody packed in. And they were interested in Apollo 14. And then on 15, 16, 17, it was like,

this is pretty cool. We're going to show you a couple of, you know, some hours we're going to take out of your day, but it's not the end of the world. And even within NASA, they were pushing away, pulling away from the Apollo program because they wanted to stay in the business and fly shuttle. And they wanted shuttle to be something

that was like a normal airliner. Nobody's going to be interested in. and we can sit here and do our cool stuff, fly astronauts, kind of like an astronaut yacht club. You sort of get to go up in space underneath ship and come back down again. It's almost like we lost the whole adventure of, why are we exploring and the Kennedy goal? So, I mean, to answer your question, I would say,

at the time, Apollo had tremendous interest in an excitement, and Artemis picked up some of that once it launched. I think once we saw some of these pictures come back, And I'd be curious, you know, too, how the crew, you know, who they were and how they behaved sort of increased that interest. Excuse me. But it feels, you know, not quite at the level of Apollo, but certainly a hell of a lot higher than, you know, for any other space. Yeah. It's also the thing like...

We do it, you know. Well, it's also just, it's not just space that operates like that right now. Like, nobody on a general scale cares about college basketball outside of these three or four weeks a year, right? Like, I know friends that watch college basketball a year, but I know, like, I can count them on one hand. And that's, no one's like mad, like, oh, the heyday of college basketball coverage is like a mass media. Nobody's really, like that, we just have more stuff. There is an abundance of things to care about. So if you ever capture that interest, that's a good thing.

But I just feel like as space fans, we are like perennially afflicted with this disease that we have to compare it to the space race and say, like, are we doing the same metrics as the space race? And I'm like, that's a stupid rubric. That's not how we should measure these things. Society is different. We've sort of siloed ourselves into little tiny communities, and we can stay in that little tiny community and be perfectly happy and get all the information that we need. and it's not like everybody has to, you know, they've only got three chances to look at stuff on TV and they get to dictate what's interesting

and tell you, you know, what you need to see. So, you know, choice is a big driver, I think, of what you're talking about. And also we've been in space, we've landed on a moon, we got all those stories. And I think the fact that we're doing it, you know, in our way, and in a sense, having our own race with the Chinese, I don't think, I don't want to, you know, sort of minimize that fact.

I don't think we fully appreciate, you know, how important China is as a competitor, but they're not, they don't seem like the Soviets who were a deadly enemy, you know, who could kill us at any minute. And so, you know, that heightened sense of, you know, the importance of that added to the importance of watching Apollo beat Russia where we don't have the same kind of thing exactly against China, especially because we've already been there. We can do, well, we already landed. But we've set it up such that we kind of have to beat them now, or it's a failure.

So that's the language, and maybe that's something that's useful for within the program. I prefer if they just want to go there for its own sake and that it's exciting and interesting. And, you know, because you'd rather go than not go. You know, you'd rather fly tomorrow than fly a week from now. You'd rather all those things that we don't understand why things are going so slowly. What's kind of wrong within the organization that doesn't want to push them naturally to go higher? That's the point of the space program, right? It's doing something really extraordinary with ordinary people,

and you get caught up in this challenge, and the challenge itself because it is hard, and the result is so dramatic, you know, wow, we're fleeing the end and leaving the planet. That's incredible. That's supposed to drive young people and the, you know, engineers and all the rest of them to do things that they've never been done before to solve these hard problems.

And, you know, economically, that can trickle. down for a spinoff type what you call whatever that is. But the fact is you go somewhere, you do something, and that's being hampered over the last bunch of years because it became, you know, kind of a jobs program. As long as all the money is flowing to Alabama, is it Alabama? Not anymore. It was Alabama. It was Alabama. It was Alabama's on the outs now, right? Okay. Yeah, I know. My thinking was give all the money to Alabama. Just make them, you know, have some fun, you know, design something cool just because it, you know, doesn't look like a shuttle, doesn't mean they can't turn a wrench on it.

You know, these are smart people. Well, that's the other aspect here, right? That we want to, I mean, there's a whole section of people that I have, like, randomly decided to tweet a little bit again and get in little Twitter spats with people that can't separate the program from enjoying this particular mission in a way that apparently I can separate art and artist. But then again, I think I might be. I would feel much differently if this went off in January, when they rolled it out the first time.

If this left them and we were pre-ignition, I think my excitement would be hampered by still feeling like we're on that dead-end path where Block 1B's coming up and the gateway and ML2 is still a thing. And we kind of just were keeping on a track. Not that this, the pure announcement of ignition means that all of that is going to happen because certainly that is not the case. but the fact that this doesn't feel like only a dead end architecturally is making me more excited about the mission itself while at the same time I think complicating some of what I'm trying to explain to the non-space nerds about what is this mission for right because I'm like test the systems of the thing that we're going to definitely not fly that many more times That's right.

You know, the roadmap as sketched out in ignition painted a very specific case of not using Orion and SLS in the pretty near future. Like, beyond Artemis 5, we're probably launching on something else. And if this reporting that Lauren Grushet Bloomberg's got that the Starship plan is to meet up in low Earth orbit and then carry the crew out to low lunar orbit, well, you don't need Orion anymore for that.

And the replacements are all slated there. So it's like, all right, we tested the Orion toilet and the eclipse. it still has never flown with the docking system, and it might one or two times, and then that's it. Right. You know, so I'm still conflicted in this way of like, is this the dead end and is this mission meaningful, but also at the same time, kickstarting this program in this way from a human perspective, I think is really important and does give them a little leverage

to go out and show these photos and say, like, this was the start, we want to do more interesting things like this, and here is the plan to do that, and here's why it's achievable. there's something in there that I think is a good mix. I just don't know if the balances are right at the moment. Well, I think you're right. I agree with you. You know, it has changed very much. First of all, I like to think of the pre-ignition Artemis program as kind of a version of Xenos paradox,

where you're never getting to the thing you don't want to do anyway. You know, so no matter how you go through these steps and they seem like you're moving there, not going there because it's, you know, really quite strange. The other thing, though, is just once you fly, you talked about this a while ago, you know, fly it out, fly out your hardware. I was about to go back to an Apollo reference, but I won't do that. Apollo 1. They wanted to fly, I will, I'm going to do it. They had two versions of the command service module.

They had block one and block two, and block one was the one that they flew, that they, you know, they were going to test it. But they already knew they weren't going to fly that. So why fly it? And Owen Maynard, who was the chief of systems engineering, said, look, what matters is that we get in the process of flying Apollo. We need to get the organization in a flight moment. I just lost you there, I think. There you go. We get in a sort of flight regime where the mindset of the organization is active and that it matters because we're working in the spacecraft, and sure, the next spacecraft is going to be different. We're going to learn different lessons.

But as an organization, flying spacecraft, we're keeping the muscle memory right, and we're going to plow through and do the Block 1 mission, even if it's the only one we do and we don't, you know, whatever we learn from it, we're not going to really put that forward to the next one. Of course, they died in the spacecraft. That was horrible. They did fly another Block 1 on top of Saturn 5. But it did the right thing.

And, of course, on the Apollo program, it changed their entire perspective. It's probably the way isn't that they landed before the end of 1970. It was because it shook them up in such a spectacular way. I think that the program without gateway really focuses the mind and the organization in a way that they weren't focused before. So I think they should just fly. Whatever they've got, fly it, fly into the moon. Each mission should go somewhere better than the last one did. So you're drawing down risk, buying down risk, I think they call it.

and, you know, however they end up, you know, doing the lander mission, I mean, that's really a big question. I don't know if you saw Eric Berger's piece where he talked to Lori Glaze about, you know, what's the real status of the two landers? And she's kind of whistling past a graveyard a little bit at the end. He wished her good luck and she sort of said, yeah, I kind of need it. Yeah. It was a great quote. But, you know, they have to do this to make the whole program work, whether they can do within the timeline. I think Lori Greig, you know, gave her Lori. Lori Glaze,

getting your lorries all. No, I met, I met earlier. Voltron of Garver. Voltroning your lorries. All right. I met her, I met her when she was at NSS way back in 99 in Washington before she became. At any rate, yeah, no, you know, what she said about

back in the day. I mean, the whole space program after Apollo has been a series of disappointments in a sense of great promises and you never quite reached them. Space Station was supposed to have, you know, a hab and a lab module with a centrifuge and that was going to be everything. And then they said we can't quite do that. And even Fletcher, the administrator, he said, look, if we're not doing the whole program, it's not really worth doing because part of the reason why you have the astronauts up in zero G is to have a centrifuge where you can test different levels of gravity.

You know, what's the minimum gravity that a human body can need? And that's a very good, you know, very important piece of information if you're going to fly off to Mars. You know, I only need one-eighth gravity, then I'm fine. Oh, good. That's going to save a lot of money and time. But anyway, you know, so we ended up with kind of like a pathetic version of it. And it became kind of lesser and lesser and lesser to the ultimate version, which is gateway, near rectilinear, whatever. I've ejected that name.

from my head, but near retinalinear halo orbit, there we go. So now we have to depend on these contractors, and that's the problem, in a sense, because the contractors, you can say, you know, get it to us by this date, and they say, good, give us these progress payments, and you get the progress payments, and you get the last 10% at the end of the day, say, sorry, we don't have a launch vehicle, we're going out of business. We ate, you know, 90% of your budget and we're out of business. it was a fun right thanks see you later you know where if it was in-house in some way you're not

you're not i mean you still got to build it and the people can't do it for some reason okay get new people fire the other people whatever you want to call it um so that's sort of um you know a thing that i think um Jared i'm going to call him Jared too i like it first names everyone yeah yeah we're our first name basis with everybody except for the lawyer we got to specify yeah i know i'll call Lori A and Lori B. I'll do it that way. Sorry, I like them both. No, and the thing that Jared has brought to the table, and I think this is maybe the most important thing, in a sense,

other than canceling gateway, is he wants to bring NASA folks out to, you know, sort of more embed them with the contractors, bring contractor people within NASA, have the muscle memory and capability that NASA needs so that they can monitor these things, so you're not stuck, you know, with a company that has all the smarts and won't give you what you need when it finally comes up

because you don't know how they're doing. So this, you know, more, I mean, I know it's kind of contrary to the way the contractor has wanted it. They said, let's leave us alone. We don't have all this oversight, NASA oversight. Well, if you have oversight that's smart and helpful and useful, like I think Jared is proposing, that's good. On Apollo, you had engineers at NASA who knew how to build the vehicle because as part of the contract letting, they had actually built in-house designs of the vehicles, get to think through all the different engineering problems, so that when they came up to it and, you know, the contractor tried to sell them a bill of goods, they'd say, that's a bill of goods. You can't sell us that. That's crap. We know that already because we did

our own version of it. Tom Kelly, who was ahead of the lunar module program at Grumman, kept going up to Owen Maynard again. He was ahead of sort of verifying the things had done. Well, Owen had already done a bunch of designs for a lunar module. And when they showed up with the latest, you know, when Grumman showed up at NASA with the latest version of it, he'd say, you know, how are we doing? And, you know, Owen would say, you're getting closer. And he said, he thought that Owen had a design of a limb in his desk, and he would just pull it out and look at it and say, okay, they're getting closer. So, I mean, he thought they were both fathers of the lunar module because it was that important. So I think what Jared has done within the organization might help us, you know,

actually get a lander, maybe not in two years, but, you know, before. much longer. So you won't have to have this too, but Zeno's paradox of never quite getting to an actual final mission. Yeah, the concept of reestablishing the muscle memory of flying too is, I think, important for a couple of reasons. One, I mean, there's some operational stuff on this mission that they haven't exercised in a long time, just straight up, like communications with the spacecraft and crew preferences

and finding the weak spots in the infrastructure. This whole forward link loss of signal thing is driving me nuts. That every, we're okay with every few hours not being able to talk to the spacecraft for an hour. While we can still downlink, we just can't transmit up. I'm like, all right, well, that's a glaring hole that we definitely need to fix because that seems unbelievable that we're still doing that. They also want to obviously get better bandwidth, and that's where the whole idea of this

communications network at the moon relaying from the bar side, right? We can clearly see the weak points by flying this mission. The other is purely reestablishing the design. desire to go fly. Like, I sort of equate this to when you're not working out, it's a huge Herculean task to like get yourself back to working out. But then once you're working out and you're in kind of a good flow, your body starts to want it and you don't feel as good unless you're working out. And you've established that that's a regulating element to your life. And flying these missions does put you in a different stance than always being in a state where you're not. And

it changes the way that you look at what missions are sensible to take on and what risks are sensible because this whole, you remember the whole, maybe we should put crew on at the time EM1, the first flight of SLS. Oh yeah. That whole branch, right? That was a, that was one that was a fun 10 minutes for us to all get hot and bothered about, but it was also so evidently not worth it at that time. There was no payoff and all risk.

And that was clarifying because you had to contend with, is this actually worth it? if we're flying so frequently that you're constantly contending with is this worth it? You are then constantly going to be upgrading what you're working on to make it worth it so that you can fly because you're really used to fly in now and all these astronauts have flight assignments

and they want to be getting experience. There is a clarifying... Hardware to keep up with the cadence. Yeah, it's a clarifying moment for the whole program from people to hardware. And I guess, you know, to your point about budgets of all

these things leaning in the jobs program direction for so long. Yeah, if we are, if this money is being spent, I'd rather it being spent with the flights than without the flights, if those are the two times we're given. Yeah, you're still spending the same amount of money. Why don't we get something for it? The other part of it too is, I'll be delicate. No, I won't. Cover your ass. They cover your ass mentality, you know, that sort of seems to have taken over a little bit. When you have a program that doesn't really matter, then it's, you know, I got to make sure that I don't get caught up in making a mistake or whatever. And then you have whole organizations that work around that. I saw some of that in the work when I was doing it. It was the thing that bothered me the most.

But you don't do that when you're invested in the program. You know, if you have a program that's so exciting and compelling and you get buy into, you know, the people buy into it, then managers are really there just to sort of make sure that, you know, people are working at their best potential and can deliver whatever they want to deliver because they take it personally. The success or failure is on me. I'm not going to let this program fail. That's one of the classic things. You heard from Apollo because of a mistake that I made. And so you ended up with a situation where as George Scurlow, who was head of LM work at the Kennedy's Bay Center, he thought the Apollo program was got for about 70% of its true cost. The other 30% was unpaid over-dive.

time because the people who were responsible for different systems, they wouldn't go home. You know, they would stay and make sure that the next guy understood what was happening and whatever we're here. You know, they're not just punching a clock every so often. So it's a different mindset. And I think when you have something as successful as Artemis I and how well that's done, I think that's going to add a real push to the next crew, the next group. You know, they want to make sure that they don't do worse than Artemis I. They want to move the ball. Two, baby.

RMS, too. I'm sorry. RM3. That's going to be an interesting flight. We should talk about that, too. I was just going to go somewhere else with this. Oh, I want to ask this one more time, too, on the, you know, the fact that we haven't been flying for so long and that this has been such a hotly debated program, and we've all

had a million opinions on what they should do and how they should be structured. Was any of that prevalent back in the day? Were there major critics of, hey, we should have used, you know, Earth orbit rendezvous, or we should have done this other thing, or we should have had a land. that could take all three to the surface. Like, were those as hotly debated, or was there just absolutely no time to really be concerned about it?

Well, the last thing you said is the pinpoint. They didn't have any time. Second thing is very hotly debated for the first year and a half. That's a great story deciding on the mode, finally with the lunar orbit rendezvous. Once that decision was made... I don't even mean within NASA,

because we know the debate within NASA, but, like, you on the outside, right? Did 10 and 11-year-old Paul have like, oh, this is a crock of shit. We should have done the other thing. Was that something that was prevalent outside of NASA? I said that and I was seven years old and nobody listened to me. So that was a problem.

I don't know. And it's a very interesting question. I do know that the PSAC, the presidential science advisor, I can't remember his name, for Kennedy, was really against what NASA had come up with. He didn't think that made any sense. But he wasn't as embedded as, you know,

these guys were, and, you know, it became pretty obvious that, you know, some of the reason for some of the arguments was to have a follow-on program. You know, like von Braun and the folks at Marshall wanted to have two Saturn Fives launch in Earth orbit, do Earth orbit right over then go directly to the moon because you needed a big spacecraft to do that direct landing where you land, everything, including your heat shield, on the lunar surface, and come back. He thought, well, that would be good for us because we have to build twice as many Saturn Fives. It became pretty obvious that if you're going to hit the deadline that you got to get on the program, you know, you got to get with the program and not to do whatever is best for you and whatever

the most efficient way to do it was. And it was pretty damn obvious that lunar orbit rendezvous was once you realize that rendezvous was not a big deal. I mean, it was a big deal, but it wasn't, you know, a showstopper. Like landing. These guys in the corner drawing pictures. He's telling me that rendezvous is not a big deal around the moon. All right. All right. That's right. That's right. You were occupying what is now the independent podcaster section of the media room. That was your territory back then. I had to take back then.

I haven't had a tape back then. They had done stuff with studies for Rondi Wu, like MIT classes. Dick Patton and him and his astrodynamics folks had solved that problem really a long time ago. Even today, I find it funny, just to go back to Artemis 2. And the difference between this mission and Apollo 8, it just came to my mind. I might if I interject this. Part of the reason why Apollo 8 was so useful, besides having just one spacecraft orbiting the moon

so that mission control could kind of get their feet wet at the long distances, if they were doing it for the first time with two spacecraft, it would have been higher pucker factor, that's for sure. But one of the reasons was because they needed to characterize what the mass concentrations on the lunar surface were like. This gravitational geopetential of the moon would torque your spacecraft off in weird asteroids,

directions. And so you were careful. You couldn't figure out where your orbit was exactly. It had been a couple of times for later flights. But anyway, now we have it characterized so well, especially with those two Grail satellites that went around the moon and sort of did a really nice map of the gravity. I believe with LRO, they actually use the Mascons to help them do their navigating. We're playing, you know, Newtonian mechanics like a violin. I mean, the stuff we were doing way the hell out. of Jupiter, Saturn, using, you know, gravity gradient stuff from the different satellites to fling us off to do a precision pass of a different satellite of Jupiter or something. I think that stuff, we get it, you know, we really understand this stuff to a high degree. And that's why, you know, a lot of the stuff that people go, oh, Apollo White, we should do

something like it. Now, we know a lot of what we had, you know, learned since then, too. We've got a much better base of understanding. And so you can fling a spacecraft from a T-A-Sah. you know, at 100 miles above the earth and loop around the moon and come back and reenter and that's your target. You know, that's what you were you were targeting was that moon. Good grief.

To think you, you know, with minor corrections, I think that's really impressive. Yeah, it's a, it's a cool mission profile. Like, I think it gets black from people say, well, you know, why not enter lunar orbit? And there's obvious technical reasons because the service model sucks. but but I do also think like this is a this is a pretty defensible profile for the goals of the mission that it's exercising all the right parts I mean the first day on orbit was I don't we didn't get to look at like the first day or two of the the axiom private missions that we've heard was like a total chaos you know

fest on board and that's maybe true but I haven't seen a harder working crew that first day than what they were doing they seemed so busy getting everything configured the way that they needed it to get ready to go for TLI. Like, maybe, I'm actually curious to ask on one of these upcoming calls if, like, would they have planned the mission differently knowing how it went now? Did they need more time in that initial orbit? Was there ways they would have changed the schedule? But it definitely seemed like the right mix of balancing the risk of inherent in the vehicles themselves,

but still achieving the things that they needed to. Seeing mission control kind of get sorted in terms of the flow between the different, you know, centers again. We got the new science desk. That was really cool to see that, that sort of work out. She was great, too. Kelsie Young. I'm such a fan. I'm going to try to get her on one or both shows because she was a delightful influence on the broadcast for the last couple of days. Yeah. Very neat. No, I think, I think that's very true. I don't know that they would want to waste another high orbit like that. You know, I mean, once they figured all that sort of stuff out, once they got to play around with the proxops,

I was following that very carefully because I wanted to know. Yeah, we can talk about that in a second. First of all, I love that high orbit, you know, the Gemini 11 high orbit. You know, you go way up to hell. This is way higher. Well, in fact, just before we got on here, the crews were talking to each other between Space Station and Artemis 2, and Reed was saying that Jeremy was freaking out when they were screaming in,

you know, like 600 miles away, and they said, are we sure we're not going to hit that thing? You know, to come from that close to 100 miles, I was a little nervous when I watched the burn from the saw camera looking aft. You can't see the plume because it's a, you know, the hypergals don't really glow unless you've got it at night or the sun is right. But anyway, it was just going and there was a nice steady push, do, do, do, do, do. And then suddenly it started moving. And I went, wait, why is it pitching and rolling and yawing here? This doesn't, you know, are we in trouble. Actually, Scott Manley pointed that on in one of his little things. He says, Wyatt, what's going on there? And I just realized they're probably taking out the residuals

that are off. In other words, back in the old days, you would have a burn and you had a burn target, and you just drive to that burn target, and then you would calculate what my orbit resultant was almost immediately. And it would say you're off by two feet per second, you know, up and half a foot per second right, and you just burn it up with the RCS. Now they're probably, incorporate that at the end of the burn and just, you know, pitch into it and take out the residuals. But I don't know that. Yeah. But it looked cool as hell.

You know, I mean, I wish they would tell me. Same thing with the proxoffs, you know, what kind of dead man was there? Why is it driving over a gravel road? I looked up through NTRS, you know, some technical papers, managed to, you know, wade through about 20 of them to find maybe the result of, you know, these tiny thrusters they have. They're only 50 pounds thrusters. We got 24 of them. and they fire like, you know, like five hertz, like, ba-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b.

And so you've got these going back and forth, and it would sound like, you know, just like you're driving on a gravel road, you know. And so every time he pulses, he's asking for like 0.1 per second left. So I want to go half a foot, so I'll go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, stops. Does it stop? It stopped. Bang, bang, bang, bang, the other way, and I'll go back where I was. And that's how they fly the spacecraft. in these discrete, easy to remember if you got a good brain, like Victor had.

And then I thought, I wish we could have had a little bit more of an, you know, an understanding of, you know, where is a spacecraft working? How come they're, you know, testing it against a different spacecraft, the ICPS? Well, how good is its stability? You know, when it's in its, you know, stable position, if you're measuring your stability against something that's wobbling around itself, how do you know how stable you are? I mean, there's all kinds of questions like that. I guess that's something that we'll find out later,

or I'll be in the back of the press room the next time and ask a question to one of the NASA folks. And I'll go, who is this guy? We don't know. I bet we can find the person to ask that question, too. I wonder. They might be listening. Um, what was the other thing?

I had to kick this one. I had another thing on my list for you specifically. Okay. But I can't remember it right now. One thing I wanted to talk about that's exciting is my notion of spaceflight is kind of a fake adventure. It's a fake adventure in the sense of true adventures are like, you know, you're going on a journey and you don't know what you're going to find. Don't know where you're going to see. On spaceflight, if you don't know exactly where the hell you're going to be 10 days from now landing on the earth, exactly.

I mean, that's how we sort of, we can predict and even simulate what the flight. flight will be. Ernie Wright at Goddard Space Flight had a whole simulation of what they were going to see on the moon and they prepare for it. Well, just because we know exactly where we're going to be at every time, doesn't mean that the experience is not going to be an adventure. And that's the part, I think, which is exciting. It's an engineering adventure in the sense of us being able to do that to figure out the astrodynamics to get out there, to have a spacecraft that when they say nominal, that's a success, you know, as designed. But then when they get there, and you have a bunch of humans in there,

the meat freaking out, you know, because it's looking at stuff. It's never seen before, and they just can't get it in their heads. That's where, that, to me, that is like a poetic adventure. It's a cultural thing.

And I thought this mission really showed that. And you had that moment where Victor Glover called down, you know, I don't think this is scientifically helpful, but I'm really glad we launched in April 1st because that was one of the only, I think the only flight of this window that had the eclipse period in the flight,

path. And that picture of the eclipse, fucking freak me out. Real. Yeah. With those planets, you know, now this is, this is the point, right? I mean, why are we here? How are we here? How is it to humans, you know, from all that, this solar system, this engine of our being or whatever you want to call it. I'm trying to use words that aren't too crazy, but, you know, we're sort of, yeah, we're just sort of wading in the shoreline of the infinite. You know, that kind of thing it puts you in mind of all that stuff. And when you saw the planets just laid out across the side with that huge, beautiful, did you get my two little painting sketches?

I sure did. Okay. I don't know. I mean, if you're allowing me to release them, I'll put them on the show notes. No, no, no, no. I just wanted to, I just wanted to show you what I've been working on before we got the picture. So I at least had one person in the world that knew that I did it before they did it.

I've verified. I can verify for you. Okay. You were on it. Yeah. It was pretty close. I was very happy. Oh, nailed it.

Absolutely nailed it. Yeah, it was fun. But, you know, so I'm, that's that's the one person, an artist, yearning to be there, to have that experience. And I can't go there because I'm not built for it. But, you know, I can in my imagination make it concrete somehow as an artist, you know, to try and do paintings and listen to what the astronauts have to say about it and recreate what they do. But the key part of that is how they react to it. And if they're dead, if they're kind of like a lot of astronauts, I said, well, beauty factors. off-scale live, you know.

It's kind of, okay. What you want them to do is to yeah, Sierra Hotel. You know, you want them to lose their minds. That's, you know, to me, I just want to, you know, the beauty at burns. Scott Parrizzinsky is one of the astronauts I work with

did a pass for a couple of them, actually. And I asked him, he was going to go on and doing an EVA where they're going to be way up above the Z trust. It doesn't matter. It's part of the space station. And he said, it should be really a cool view. And I said, oh, yeah, I bet you're going to be, you know, ah, the beauty, it burns.

And he wrote back, we got anointment for that ball. And I'm like, well, thanks. But he did promise he'd take some special video for him even then I lost him as a crew member. So he's a guy that repaired the space station, the big solar array. I remember the solar way that had a rip that in. And he was like way the hell out. So he got to do that anyway, which was really cool. But he didn't take any video for me.

Come on. I know. What are you doing? I do just want to linger on this for a second, though, because the launch itself was unbelievably clean. The spacecraft with the exception to toilet has been doing fantastic. The toilet, and I think the environmental control in terms of the temperature is a storyline. I mean, Reed Wiseman's fist pumping in the spacecraft the other day when they're allowing him to keep the fan speed where he likes it. Like, that was another moment after, I don't know if you stayed up too late. to watch when President Trump called the vehicle.

But afterwards, you know, they had the fan speed at a particular setting for that event, I guess so that it wasn't too audible. And afterwards, they said, hey, Reed, did you guys want that as the new fan speed or do you just want it for these events? And they were all like, we can keep it this way? That's awesome.

And they said, yeah, we'll let you keep it that way. And he was literally like, fist pumping in this scene, which was hilarious. But overall, like, all of that went so well. They launched the first time they boarded the vehicle. And it's the launch attempt that gets the solar eclipse, and they specifically note that when they're in the eclipse period of like, I am so thankful all of this came together that way. That's like a, that's a, that's a,

that's a combo of things that I don't think many of us as SLS critics were prepared for to say, thank you for slipping one launch window, but not another day. Like there, there it was. That was the reason that we waited all these years. I think we deserved it. After waiting all this time, we needed to have a real success. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, deserved. and I'm grateful that we had it and I'm not thinking oh thank God we were lucky I think finally we had something decent

something I wanted to bring up you mentioned the solar eclipse I remember you describing was it on Miko or with Jake when you saw the eclipse and you have a sense of that I thought your description was dramatic like you saw things I've never seen a solar eclipse which is stupid

but I know but you know what happens as you get close to totality and all you have as a light source is that skinny little sliver. And so all the shadows have lost their penumbra and they're sharp. And it's like you're on the earth. You're looking at shadows and they're not shadows anymore, the way you're used to them. You brought that up.

I thought that was really amazing. When Victor Glover was explaining what they were seeing in the eclipse and the out-of-body experience he was having, it was, I'll go back and listen to that show that I did. It was after the 2017 eclipse on Miko. Go back and listen to it. I had a total, like, off-earth experience because it did. the way the planets were arrayed at that time too you got the sense that you were not

you were looking at the solar system you weren't just on one of the rocks in the solar system and they explained it almost similar so I feel like a very small portion of what they saw I understand that sense now theirs is on a scale where they also have the earth in view right like that was another layer on top of that and they're in a

spaceship like it's magnitude's magnitude's cooler than than that but but I do think truly if you're somebody that has not been in totality and you get a beautiful view at one, you will have a solid portion of what Victor Glover was expressing yesterday. Well, that's what I think is so interesting

about your experience and how you described it, even just the shadow racing towards you, it's like you actually feel the heavenly body moving. The motion of the planets, in a sense, is visceral. And it's that, you know, even though you've got sort of just a taste of it, and they get maybe the full meal in the face. Yeah, right.

Although we get more of the corona from the earth because the moon's a lot smaller. So that's true. But I mean, yes. And even just watching the stream, right, and seeing the face of the moon change so rapidly, but still be moon proportioned, right? On the Apollo missions, you get right up on that thing. And you kind of lose the larger moon context. And there's something about always seeing the whole disc.

and really witnessing parts of the moon that you're not familiar with unless you're somebody who explores moon atlases, which I'm also one of those people. But, like, you know, it's a thing that you don't often see, but then you get that sweep of the Terminator across. And then I think also people are saying, it's a bummer, not more of the backside would be lit for them. And I'm like, that's actually kind of great,

because if you've ever explored the moon via telescope, you don't want a fully lit. It's super boring. The moon looks very boring when it's fully lit. Well, as they pointed out, It's the Terminator that's exciting. Yeah. The craginess of it, the surprise of it.

I mean, the fact that you want to land when the sun is behind you, so you pick up all the things. Because when it's noon, everything is washed out. You can just trip over all kinds of horrible stuff. And, you know, looking at how dangerous, you know, that Terminator was. I think Victor was really in love with the Terminator for a long time. I'm not going to understand that, too. It's that transition. That's really thrilling.

Yeah. I don't know how they're going to land down in the South Pole, though, I tell you. Well, they maybe won't. It seems like the South Pole constraint is being relieved of duty. So, yeah, let's spend like five, ten minutes talking about future stuff, right? Obviously, we got a lot of mission left. There's a huge heat shield moment coming up. I don't want to dwell on that right now until we know.

What's up? They'll be fine. I think they'll be fine. I'm confident in NASA's call. I get people's point that are concerned about it, but I think they're going to be okay. They wouldn't have stepped on that vehicle if they also did not feel that very strong. I agree. But yeah, let's dig into like just come, what now, right?

Now what comes next from where we are now? There's this huge re-architecting of what they want to do at the program, which is a flight next year to Leo, test out one or both moon landers, maybe a spacesuit, and then landings beyond that. What's your overall sense? Fantasyland, not fantasy land. Where are we at? Timing-wise, fantasy land.

Yeah. ability to use the SLS with the Centaur upper stage, I think is their only chance to get this spacecraft out in the orbit that they needed. And then to rendezvous with whatever, however, you know, whether B.O. is going to launch their blue. Excuse me. They're going to be mad. You're going to get some. I'm sure. They don't call it B.O. do they? Nobody does, except the people that don't like them. Sorry.

Sorry. Blue. So blue, it's got a great upper stage. enough, you know, energy, I think probably to get the thing, well, they're going to show that. They're going to demonstrate it on this next, the first version of it. So, I mean, I think for some reason, I feel kind of confident in that spacecraft. The problem that I'm worried about is a boil-off problem. That hasn't been really properly solved. You've got that spacecraft out there for a hell of a long time.

And, I mean, I think, Limp, what's his name? Doug Lint. What's his first name? Dave Limp. Got it. Dave. Go, Dave. You only do first names.

Yeah. Lori. is the other one. So he mentioned that they've got a new technology. They're very excited about that's going to actively cool the thing and it'll keep it nice. Well, that's great. Well, you really want to test that out. You don't want their first mission to depend on some technology you've never had before.

So, you know, I feel fairly confident in that. I'm really concerned about Starship, just in general. They're coming up with, you know, I guess my worry is that the IPO for, SpaceX is now the most important thing for the future of SpaceX now that it's been gobbled, it's gobbled up X-A-I and it's called, you know, caught up. His chance for the most amount of money

is to not have a failure of the next Starship. So in some respects, he may be a Zeno's paradox right up until they do an IPO. I think that is likely to be the case. I mean, there's people talking early May for the Starship launch. I wouldn't be shocked if it's past

IPO. No. I mean, it's basically a brand new vehicle almost entirely, I mean, in some respects. But anyway, so, you know, and the amount of refueling that they have to do, I don't think you want to launch Starship, and then I guess you have to dock with the Orion, and then you're flying that whole thing through the docking market. Minded, they did that on Apollo. So, you know, and it's a pretty robust docking system that they've got now compared to what they had on the Apollo days. but that would scare me a little bit then you're wasting the upper stage it's really that's a complicated thing

you know the starship version of it I'm sure it'll be a lot cheaper once they get it grooved but I don't know how long it's going to take to be grued so for timing that would be the one that I'd be most concerned about the other thing too is I really don't know how they're going to land that sucker

on the lunar surface other than if they land at a pre-positioned spot that they can, of course, you know, drive to directly because we've got, you know, great maps, all the LRO stuff. The digital terrain maps are really excellent and they've got slopes and all kinds of stuff like that. I could see them flying in with some kind of LIDAR where they can pick out the target almost, you know, within a few hundred, you know, a few feet. Yeah.

And then know what the terrain will be at that point and pre-positioned the legs, you know, when they come down so that when they've touched down, they're going to be pretty much level. But, I mean, that whole system just scares a hell out of it. me because, you know, has it, I mean, I trust them. I think they're the best engineers on the planet. I really do. I think you brought that up a couple of times. Is there another company that is as, you know, proficient? But they really kind of get over their skis a lot of times. They get maybe a little overconfident. So I'm worried about that part of it. Yeah. I don't think you're going to get a useful Artemis 3. This is just a guess, you know, in a year. You're not going to have a, you know,

Are you going to be drawing down a lot of risk flying a kind of starship-looking lunar lander or a blue-origin-looking lunar lander just to do a docking? You may as well just throw up a big thing with a docking mechanism and just, you know, practice flying Orion on top of it. Because, you know, how much risk are you drawing down with those vehicles? You know, are you flying a real lander, you know, up in Earth orbit to sort of dock with the Orion and, you know, go in and check stuff out, maybe get into suit? That would draw down a fair amount of risk, but it doesn't seem to me to be useful,

you know, quite the same way as this mission, for example, relatively speaking, is useful. Yeah. How do you think? Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, I think that's kind of our point earlier, right? Do you fly, do you fly when you were ready to fly, or do you fly when it's time to fly? And what is the balance there? And that's something that, you know, a lot of this stuff that Isaacman rolled out before, it's felt very orchestrated the last couple of months, that the first event was,

this reclassification of Starliner and sort of an establishment of the Isaacman doctrine of like, go to that podium and say it like it is and stand behind it and talk about the NASA side of it. Don't take credit for other people's things. Just talk about NASA side. That established his methodology as the administrator and then rolled that into the Artem's rollouts that have happened. And strategically so, right, we had when they rolled the vehicle back, they unveiled a little bit of that vision. And then they had this big ignition event between that and the next Artemis attempt. And they, I don't know that they could have planned that way because if SLS got off the first time around, great, but it did work in their favor. And I would not be

shocked that we are a month or two away from a big event of here's the Artemis 3 crew and here is more of the roadmap on what exactly, like, they haven't talked about the ideas of what these new lander systems are or what's the accelerator program. I think the next event coming is, here's the proposals from Blue Origin and SpaceX on what the rollout plan is, and here is the plan for Artemis 3, and here are the astronauts that are flying it. That is the next event that I think is coming. Wouldn't be shocked if that's... We're probably going to take a little bit of the old confetti draped parades and whatnot

that when the Artemis 2 crew gets back. June? I don't know. Like summer probably feels like the right time period to start rolling that out, and how that interacts with the Starship launch, I think, is somewhat irrelevant in this case. certainly the blue moon launch is nearing as well, right? That's a different lander than would be involved in this program. But that does feel like, I don't even think it's really worth overthinking it

because I do think that event is so close to us in time. Okay, so you're not thinking, you're not worried about like the unmanned demonstration of the two landers on the moon or... I think that's largely the shape of what it will be, but I don't think we have really any of the details about what and why and how much of a thing needs to be. to exist for that to be classified a lander. Like, I think that's the part is still coming. Right.

No, no. Well, and so part of the question is timing. Part of the timing problem is that you're going to be driven to a sequence that makes really no sense in the general smart architecture of the landing system that you want to continue, just to make the 28. And if you don't make the 28 thing, what is the likelihood that you've got support? Yeah. to my mind, especially as it's this politicized as we've got now and it's kind of, you know,

ultra-polarized at the moment. No, I know. And so I think that's a huge hurdle. And I think this crew, the group Jared, everybody else, is driving everybody to get on the right path, even though they may be, I'm guessing now, I don't know this for sure. But even though in their, you know, the back of their heads are going like, is this a worthwhile place for the, to put NASA if we don't make the lunar landing by 28? In other words, we want to make sure that we're not to cover your ass all the time, which is, you know, what your point? No, I think the strategy is expose your ass. I think the strategy is.

Yes, yes. Like, I don't, to some extent, I don't think it's, I don't think Jared Eisenman's legacy is this ignition schedule sticking as is. I think it is because he has rightly maybe realized that, you know, he has to play policy. Actually, he put this letter out the other day that said, leave the politics for the politicians. and I think he includes himself in that. I think that there's a lot between the lines of that letter. And I had people send it to me from Trump World and I had people send it to me from not Trump World.

And it was a Roershock test, which I think it means it was a well-written letter. But between the lines was, I think Jared's saying, yes, I'm going on TV and I'm doing these hits. And obviously, this is my version of the Roershack, right? What do I see in it? I see that, you know, which one is the real Isaacman here? Is it the guy that does go on Fox News?

and do Donald Trump's the only reason that Artemis II is happening? Or is it the guy that realizes he is a politician, he is injected into the administration and needs to play those games to achieve these other goals? And I think it is more of that, and what he realizes is,

the extent that he has to leverage his reputation as not a Trump guy, it does put the mission at risk in the future because that draws it into the polarized political world, but if he can use his influence to make some future decisions either more obvious or already decided, then that puts the whole program in a better position,

no matter who's in charge next time. I agree with that. I would say another thing, too. It just came to me, I don't know that if he's an engineer. He thinks like an engineer, you know, to a large extent, an operational person.

He's a fly guy. He knows how to do all that sort of stuff. He may be approaching the political element the way that he would approach an engineering problem, you know, very concise, very carefully, but smartly. I think, you know, his ability to talk about this, you know, the program just extemporaneously is remarkable. You know, the clarity of his

understanding of the situation and where he wants to go. I've never heard anybody speak as well as he about that stuff. It's funny, too, just as a quick aside, this, if you listen to him when he was talking to the crew from reading remarks, he doesn't do that well. No. He was stumbling all over the place. I said, where's it? Not into that. No, just make a couple of notes, man, and just wing it, because you do so much better if your brain is completely engaged. But I want that cat's brain engaged. I don't think he has, I don't want to say, you know, I'm not going to be a boot liquor here, but, you know, he has a pure intent because he doesn't need anything else.

Yeah. He doesn't need to go anywhere. No. You know, he's already proved so much in his own life. He can take off and, you know, literally take off and, you know, fly his jets and have fun and do whatever he wants to do. I know he wants to do more than that. And he did so, you know, sort of helping Starship, you know, maybe the first flight of Starship or whatever. The few first crew, I think that's what he had. I think he had signed up for, yeah. He'd sort of had the one in the Polaris, Don 2 or whatever it's called, was going to go up and boost Hubble Space Telescope.

I thought it was funny when somebody said, should we boost Hubble Space Telescope? One of the press conferences with the scientists and there's Jared right there going, duh, I can do that. You don't even to worry about it, man. You know, but it was funny because that's who he is. He's like superstar astronaut administrator. He'll have five titles instead of, you know, you'll beat Nelson by a mile on his patch. That's hilarious. So I'm, I think bringing him in canceling Gateway, we're kind of golden compared to where we were.

Yeah, I keep telling Jake that on Offnominal. Like, we've already won, man. You won't believe you. Yeah. when you said that in front of Lori Garver Yeah, I'll tell her She's listening right now, I bet

So I'll tell her again. We've already won. She had a sign up. She kept going 100%. Well, she was that gateway? Everything. She was 100% on most things on that show. She just had to write it.

She was tired of writing more than 100%. So she was fantastic. I'm optimistic that they could work something out. I shouldn't be surprised by anything that SpaceX can come up with because they've surprised you every time. But that next mission, I think that's going to be the key. When they fly the first Starship 3,

and if it doesn't go right the first time, how quickly they can recover, because they've got all new engines and everything like that, that's to me, if that doesn't go off by the middle part of this year, I don't think there's any chance of doing the landing by 28. Well, we'll have you back again when we get the next event. you know maybe we should

I don't know my bet is we got like two months till the event that unveils more Artemis 3 stuff oh sure no that's exciting let's do that when it comes time but Paul what should you point you want to point people anywhere if they're uh trying to check show art out yeah it's a PF in space

Paul Fial in space so it's PFNSpace dot com my art some of the stuff I did there it's just a waiting page until I can finish my book on Apollo 11 an illustrated book maybe I can show that one day I'm about a year away all right y'all

thanks Paul great talking to you yeah this is epic this is exactly what I needed I needed to just ruminate on this for a while because it's been a great week a couple days left in the mission but I'm pumped

I'm thrilled like my son's been super into it I've just been enjoying partaking in it and trying to set aside a lot of this programmatic stuff for just like let's just be enjoying human spaceflight because, God damn it, we've all been waiting too long for this. We're not just going around the Earth again. No, that's great. I got, I will say, I did get, I expected to not have major feels when they passed the Apollo 13 record.

I totally cried. I did not expect that to be an emotional moment, but it was. And I think it just hit me that my whole life, we have done less than what I knew existed before I was alive. And finally, we were going beyond that. And it felt very different than I expected. well I felt a little sad about it just because Apollo 13 got out there because their mission almost crapped out you know so they weren't that much higher than the other Apollo missions they just happened to be the highest they were the they were the highest I think because of the

orbital they were but I'm saying like relative to where all those two flew they were much closer to all the Apollo missions than they were closer to artists too absolutely no so we beat them at one thing and there are four people nice and a woman and a black guy yeah one of one was an Eagles fan. Oh, sure. Oh, and one of them was, one of them, yeah, Christina is an Eagles fan. I think her husband is from, like, near where I live,

and I don't know. She watched the Eagles on the ISS one time. I posted a photo about it, and I love that. And I'll fill you in more on that later. Also, I do want to, I should have shouted this out. This was the other thing I wrote down that I forgot. And I said, I have something else to tell you. I want to just shout out Jeremy Hansen for an incredible foreign relations moment

on the phone with President Trump last night. when all it's going on between the countries, Jake won't even visit me because he's got this embargo in place. He will not come here while all the tensions are rising. And Jeremy Hanson's statement of, I want to thank you for this mission. Great nations bring others along with them. I was like,

this is such an artfully, perfectly written line, let alone the whole rollout of naming craters after Reed's late wife. He's been an amazing, amazing man on this mission. No, if I was still at the CSA, I would say he's absolutely a top gun. We're super proud of him. I thought it was funny that Trump kind of gave him, you know, as a Canadian kudos and also

mentioned the prime minister with kudos, not to get to political. And then there was a silence. And I thought, hmm, praising Canadians, he didn't have a stroke, did he? I was worried. It's going to be a true line situation. Yeah, that's right. and then it came back in, I guess. I didn't get the whole thing.

But no, it's been a great mission. It's been really exciting. I've definitely connected to my Apollo kid's side to a level degree. And being out here, you know, yaking about it with you is a lot fun. Thanks, Paul. Sure, man. Anytime. Thanks again to Paul for joining me on the show.

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And if you got any questions, hit me up email an Anthony at main engine cutoff.com. I am talked out, obviously. I don't often do hour and a half long Miko recordings, but there you have it. hope you enjoyed that one and I'll talk to you next time.