Main Engine Cut Off - T+339: Starbase Louisiana, the Falcon Fade, and the Next Wave of Launch Vehicles

Starting point is 00:00:11 and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo, and I want to share some thoughts on Star Base, Louisiana, now that it's officially announced. Also, some thoughts on the upcoming kind of changeover of launchers. We are at this point in time where a lot of people, including some members of SpaceX, are talking about the Falcon 9 fadeout that we're going to experience over the next couple of years. You know, we finally hit that point where, as of this week, there are no more Falcon 9 launches of Starlink off the east coast of the U.S. They'll still be flying out of Vandenberg for a while. Obviously, we're in this changeover for Starlink, where they're moving to the bigger satellites that can only launch on Starship,

Starting point is 00:00:52 but that's going to mean a major downtrend in how many Falcon 9s launch per year. At the same time, we've got a whole new wave of launch vehicles that everyone's just been making a little bit of noise lately, and I thought it's worth reminding everybody the moment we find ourselves in, where there's a lot of new vehicles under development, getting actually close to, you know, close for varying definitions of close.

Starting point is 00:01:17 But it feels a lot like what we experienced a couple years back when the whole new crop of launchers came online then, New Glenn, Aryan, 6, Vulcan, etc. And it feels very similar to maybe 10 years ago when I was starting the show. And we were on the verge of seeing a major change in the industry as a whole new crop of launchers for coming online. So a couple things to talk about. I want to start with Star Base Louisiana. Now, I'm restricting this conversation to sort of the SpaceX logistics of it. Launch trajectories, what I think that means for landings, how that might play out

Starting point is 00:01:51 in their architecture of not only orbital propellant depots, but the AI satellites that they're launching, the data center satellites are launching. I want to have another conversation about the Louisiana of this. At some point in the future, I have someone from the area that I think it would be fun to talk with. So there's going to be a lot of storylines about the buildout of Star Base, Louisiana, just as there were the buildout of Star Base, Texas. And I feel like that deserves its own conversation. But I do want to bring you up to speed on some of my thinking around the location of this launch site. Because when this was started to be rumored a couple of months ago, I guess it was, you know, there was some talk of SpaceX, buying up land in Louisiana of coming to an agreement on some land.

Starting point is 00:02:38 I had some people telling me, hey, there's going to be something fun coming about a new launch site. And it was all sort of rumored, and I was at the same time as a lot of the importance of the data center satellites were coming to fruition.

Starting point is 00:02:50 I had a couple of thoughts around what that could mean in terms of what orbits are going to be important to SpaceX, how they might play out some of the architecture for the propellant depots and still being able to fly

Starting point is 00:03:02 to fulfill their obligations for the lunar base that NASA wants to build. So to start, let's just talk through where this is in Louisiana, right? This is on the coast of Louisiana. So you've got a south-facing coastline. This is west of New Orleans. It feels like approximately halfway between Houston and New Orleans, if you are thinking of a map in your head. They have a couple of trajectories they can hit very,

Starting point is 00:03:32 easily from this location that they do not have Starship infrastructure for right now. Starship flies out of Starbase, Texas. They've got two corridors they could fly, basically north and south of Cuba, if you draw a line from the tip of Texas, north of Cuba and south of Cuba. Those are the two trajectories that they can fly starships out of Starbase right now. Those are mid-inclination orbits that are very useful for a lot of different things that you might want to do, but not so useful for polar orbits, sun-synchronous orbits, orbits that would be good for imaging satellites, for Starlink coverage, like they're launching out of Van derbyrg, for, importantly,

Starting point is 00:04:11 the data center satellites that are going to be in a, what's called a dawn-dust terminator, sun-synchronous orbit, right? It's going to fly around that dawn-dust terminator so it can keep itself in the most sunlight possible per day throughout different times of the year. There's procession, there's a lot of other complicated things that go into that, but But that is, the sun synchronous trajectory is going to be the workhorse of those data center satellites, not only for SpaceX, but for the others that are out there that are talking this up as well, StarCloud and the like. You can't hit that from Starbase, Texas. There is no way to fly directly, it's not directly south. It's actually a little bit west of directly south.

Starting point is 00:04:48 So from Starbase, that's just like all of Mexico that you're flying through. Now from the east coast, from the Cape Canaveral pad that they're building out for Starship, they're building out some launch pads out in Florida. That has a broad range of trajectories that were used to, that were used to that from, you know, all of space history. You've got the corridor up the East Coast. That's typically where you're flying when you want to get to the space station, 51 degree inclination. So that climbs, you know, right along East Coast of the U.S. It comes by my house. I can see things flying out there, if it's the right lighting, has happened last week with a Starlink launch that was a beautiful view from the East Coast. And they can also fly, obviously,

Starting point is 00:05:26 directly east off the Cape, they can fly south. And even recently, Falcon 9 had brought back a trajectory we hadn't seen since the 60s, which is to fly south out of Cape Canaveral, fly down the coast of Florida, do a bit of a dog leg, a turn in your trajectory, and head to Sun-Synchronous orbit by overflying Cuba, but then you've got a nice run of sea over the Cayman Islands and down towards Panama that way. And they've used that to success a couple of times, a good amount of times. it was an awesome view if you were anywhere in Florida. And so that is a viable approach, but there is a major performance penalty

Starting point is 00:06:05 compared to just being able to fly directly to your trajectory without doing that dog-leg maneuver, right? That eats a little bit of your performance. And for the Falcon 9 flights they were doing, that was fine. For Starship flights, it's certainly going to be fine for many things, but it's more ideal to have this direct trajectory to a sun-synchronous orbit. Now, what's the important metrics here is that

Starting point is 00:06:25 they've got about a thousand kilometers downrange before they hit any land. They got even more than that, maybe 1,200, 1,200 kilometers downrange before they run into land. Amazingly, from this location in Louisiana, the sun-synchronous launch azimuth flies over the skinniest part of that area of Mexico very, very happily. There's the least land of Mexico you could overfly in that direction. So that's a really nice trajectory for them. Now, they probably are... also have some trajectories to the southeast as well. They've got an obvious one to me, if you fly between the Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba, you've got a real nice run of lands. I mean, you've got almost, I'm Google Mapsing this while I'm talking, you've got like almost,

Starting point is 00:07:12 yeah, you've got about 2,800 kilometers before you hit Columbia. So you've got a great stretch there. Obviously, there's shipping traffic, cruise traffic, there's things to be concerned about, just as there are in the Gulf, right? There was talk when Starbase, Texas was being built out of needing to dodge a lot of the important shipping traffic or oil rigs or the other constraints that you've got in the Gulf that made it a little bit limiting in terms of the launch trajectories. So I think from Star Base, Louisiana, they've got at least the sun synchronous. They've got a direct polar, although not many people use a direct polar orbit or even like a 88 degree orbit or something like that.

Starting point is 00:07:45 And then they've got that trajectory past Cuba that probably gives them like a, I don't know, 60-ish degree inclination. Now you could dog like that a bit when you're in flight to get down maybe in the 50s. It does look like they might have a trajectory that goes just south of Key West. If you are kind of drawing this line from that part of Louisiana, just past Key West. I mean, they can skirt between Key West and Cuba, and they've got 1,500 kilometers before there's a lot of land to worry about. So that seems like it could be a plausible one as well. That would give them a much lower inclination orbit than the other. That would end up. I'm not, I'm not, I'm kind of eyeball on this, but that looks, I don't know, that looks 45-ish. I don't know. I don't know

Starting point is 00:08:30 exactly what it is, but probably about that. So it is a shockingly good location as far as the launch azimuths that are available to them. It's so good that I'm annoyed that I failed the riddle I was given when this was first being rumored that it was going to be in a state that hasn't hosted an orbit to launch yet. I'm, I'm kicking myself that I didn't see how good of a spot that is from a, again, from a SpaceX logistics perspective here. I don't want to get too involved in the Louisiana of it, because I don't know a lot about that. There's a lot of people that are going to be concerned about the buildout of this. I should take a quick side note to mention in the announcement of this, right, there's big announcement from the state, big announcement from SpaceX themselves.

Starting point is 00:09:08 Gwen Shotwell did say, of the 125,000 acres in that area that they would have access to, they're only going to build out a small portion of that compared to what they could. And they are going to be partnering, it sounds like with feds, with state to focus on some of the wildlife and environmental issues that are happening in that, right? And they have this experience at Starbase. They obviously have worked around some of the stuff on Cape Canaveral and Vanderberg. Those two, a little easier because those have, they're hard to work with in some ways. But those sites have been around for so much longer than SpaceX that there's a lot more familiarity with. Um, there's, you know, the trailblazing had already been done before them. They had to work within the constraints that we know about, but it wasn't wholly new development like it was with Starbase. And we've heard, you know, on and off over the years of the things that, uh, SpaceX has done down in Cameron County, Texas, uh, coastal, you know, sea turtle work. A lot of things that were going on there.

Starting point is 00:10:05 Aescelots were the topic of conversation for a while. So they've got experience in that department. I haven't heard too many, um, reports of that recently. You know, there was a hot topic early on. And I think even SpaceX has showed off some time. They've had like wildlife viewing areas that they've built as part of that work. So, you know, as part of this announcement, Gwen Schottwell said that they're going to be also working on coastal protection. There's major erosion concerns on that stretch of coastline. Now, SpaceX, you know, they obviously had invested inches in that coastline, not wearing away to the point that it then eats their launch pads into the Gulf. So there are some matching preferences for how much coastal erosion you should allow.

Starting point is 00:10:48 But it's obviously a huge industrial buildout in an area that doesn't have a lot going on right now. So is going to have an environmental impact. There are going to be a lot of things we'll hear about in the coming years from different environmental organizations or agencies, wildlife, fishery, all that kind of stuff that happens in that area. They're going to have to contend with it as well. they've at least made that part of their initial announcement that they are committed to working and supporting those things. I mean, this is an enormous project. I think this project underscores a lot of what I was talking about in the SpaceX IPO days

Starting point is 00:11:20 that to achieve the scale that SpaceX is aiming for, they need to become the biggest company in the world in multiple sectors. To actually perform Starship launches to the extent that they are talking about, they need to be producing their own propellant. They're going to be one of the largest petroleum industry. companies in the world. They're going to be a huge natural gas producer. They are going to be an enormous shipping logistics, not only by sea, but by land. They've got so many aspects that they need to scale up to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in many industries in the world to pull off what they're doing. That's not to mention the satellite build out, the actual launch operations, the satellite operations, the data centers, the ground systems, everything that

Starting point is 00:12:05 is involved with the scale that they're trying to achieve is hard to get your head around. And I think that was one of the things that I saw, you know, when the wider public was contending with the SpaceX IPO, it's hard to explain the fact that they are such an outlier in the industry that we're talking about on this show. And to pull off what they want, they need to be that same outlier in so many other industries as well. And to me, you know, no stock tips, but to me, that's where the value lies is that we've seen how well they operate, how much of an outlier they are in this industry, they have shown the ability to go and do that in some other industries as well, right? Nobody, I mean, some people expected, but nobody really expected them to be as successful

Starting point is 00:12:49 out the gate with Starlink as they have proven. I think those of us in the space industry expected that, but I don't think, you know, there's a lot of comments of executives in other industries kind of hand-waving away. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no big deal. and then here comes SpaceX. We're seeing that in the mobile industry as well. Right here in the U.S. There's been comments from leadership of, I forget if it was T-Mobile or AT&T or Verizon or something, somebody kind of putting their head in the sand. It sounded to me a lot like a famous comment when the iPhone was coming out when it was like Nokia's CEO or somebody, I forget who was like,

Starting point is 00:13:25 the PC guys aren't just going to walk in and figure this out. And well, here we are, right? 20 years later, they figured it out and flipped the industry on his head. I feel like that's going to happen in many different areas that Starlink is involved in. It certainly feels like that's going that way with the data centers as well. But to put a point on it, right, all of those things are such massive scale that SpaceX needs to achieve such extraordinary scale that this complex is a perfect illustration of that. This thing is huge, right? They've got five launch complexes in their designs here, two launch pads each, propellant farm at each one. They talk about doing propellant production. One of the key aspects that made this site interesting is the access to some of the

Starting point is 00:14:05 natural gas pipelines that exist in this section of the country. It's some of the cheapest natural gas, if not the cheapest, that you can get straight out of a pipeline in this country. That's a huge aspect for what SpaceX is looking to do. That is huge downstream effects. If you look at how many trucks have to pull into Starbase, Texas to fill up a starship, it doesn't make sense. When you're looking at like 15,000 trucks, I forget the exact number, right? It's a huge. It's a huge downstream effects. It's some amount of trucks that is hard to wrap your head around what that many trucks would look like. You know what I mean? It's a crazy scale. So pipeline certainly helps. And that was one of the big reasons to look at this part of the country. So where am I in my rambling? I don't know exactly.

Starting point is 00:14:47 But I think what I was getting at is this campus, they say they're going to spend $100 billion on that over who knows what time scale. But it is going to be one of the largest industrial sites built out in modern history and everything that SpaceX is saying they're going to do requires that. So if you are a believer in SpaceX and you think that what we've seen in the last, you know, 20-some years of their company history is likely to continue, then I think you're buying that storyline. If you're a doubter of SpaceX, Relan Musk, certainly there are, you know, hundreds to hundreds of millions to billions of those out there. This all sounds like total fantasy.

Starting point is 00:15:29 Where you're out on that spectrum, I think you dial your own realism of what this site will look like. They say they're going to start construction in 2027, first launched sometime in 20209. I don't think they're starting by building out all five launch complexes right off the bat. This is going to be a progressive buildout over time, but you see what they've done in Starbase, Texas, from, you know, less than a decade ago until now. pretty wild. So let's start talking about some of the launch infrastructure aspect here,

Starting point is 00:15:58 because the reason I started thinking about this sun-synchronous orbit, data center idea was twofold. There was, I remember a, I poorly remembered a paper and a blog post by John Goff and Mike Lauchs and a couple others from years ago about staging for interplanetary trips from polar orbits. That was one. There was one about placing propellant depots in what areas would propellant depots be most useful to then actually go and carry out missions.

Starting point is 00:16:31 Could you do things like flights to Mars, flights to the moon from different orbits where you might aggregate assets and how could you do this by doing three burns instead of just a single burn? I sort of poorly remembered all these different details and coalesced in my mind around a comment that actually Michael Alex was the one that said this to me when at some point we were talking about how many flights of starship does it take to fill up a starship I talked to him one day and he was like you're thinking about this wrong I don't know if he wants me to attribute this to him but he got my head in the right spot so I appreciate that you're thinking about this wrong it's not

Starting point is 00:17:07 how many flights does take up to fill that individual starship but just always having a propellant depot filled you go over to it when that particular starship needs it and I that sat in my brain for months and months. As Louisiana conversation started, the data center topic was out there, and I poorly remembered the paper and the conference talks that Mike Laox and John Goff and others gave. I had them on Off Nominal a couple of months ago to talk, so there's a link in the show notes an Offenomenal episode where we unpack this. But what I resulted in is that the combination of how many flights they need to put up these data center satellites is a pretty good match for where they might want to co-locate propellant depots as well.

Starting point is 00:17:49 Because you could imagine flying up a starship full of data center satellites or starling satellites and having some amount of propellant leftover that you don't need for reentry and landing, but you don't want to just throw away. So could you co-locate, and not specifically in that same orbit, but at least in the same orbital plane as where you're going, different altitudes, right? You don't want to have your propellant depots up in your data center satellite orbits for safety reasons. But maybe you can be co-plainer with it so that you can actually, you know, get from one to the other and not have it look like the ridiculous scene in gravity where Sandra Bullock flies from the ISS to Chang Gong with a fire extinguisher or whatever that stupid scene was. Can you be close enough that you can drop off some data center satellites, some Starlink satellites, whatever you've got and still deliver some propellant to a propellant depot and then return for re-entry.

Starting point is 00:18:39 And what that requires is enough flights to the same types of orbits or the same orbits themselves. You might want to have a couple of planes of propellant depot access, but enough flights to the same type of orbit that that reserve propellant can actually make an impact. So you don't want to put a propellant depot in an orbit that is on its own that you only can get to by a dedicated flight. Maybe you do want to do that. But what also would be useful is this scale that you're flying at,

Starting point is 00:19:07 where you're flying tens to hundreds to thousands of starships in whatever given increment you believe, that scale accumulates. and that propellant can actually make a difference. So is it the fact that the most frequently accessed orbits for starship could become good locations to stage a propellant depot at? And then can you fly from that orbit to an orbit you care about where you might need refueling?

Starting point is 00:19:31 Can you fly there from there to the moon? Can you fly there to Mars? And that's where these papers came into my head is that I remember seeing graphics of this three-burn departure or of being able to be in an orbit that's actually higher inclination then the declination you need to get to an interplanetary destination. And it seems plausible to me. You know, you remember was it insight that flew to Mars from polar orbit out of

Starting point is 00:19:53 Vanderbord because Cape Canaveral was pretty busy and they wanted to fly an Atlas 5 out of Vanderberg to make sure they get the timeline. And what you realize is, we always think as sort of like beginners in the industry, well, you want to fly to the lowest inclination orbit possible so you have the most, you know, get the most help from Earth's spin to put you in an orbit, to save propellant, to have the most propellant available. Number one, when you're flying interplanetary or even to not an Earth orbit, you just need to be pointed the right way when you're coming off of Earth, right? When you do that, that burn to detach you from Earth orbit, you got to be pointed in the right direction.

Starting point is 00:20:29 If you're coming over the top of the Earth or coming off the side of the Earth, the destination doesn't really care which side of Earth you came from. So it's plausible, right? That's a simplistic explanation of this, but that's kind of the framework we're working in. And then the other aspect is, propellant refilling, some of those performance losses are kind of negligible. The performance loss to do something like this three-burn departure is negligible when you are topping up your tanks fully at a propellant depot, because you probably are pretty good on the margins there, unless you have an absolutely gargantuan payload, and we'll get to that someday. But for the kind of missions that were specking out for these initial lunar landings, for even the initial Mars flights,

Starting point is 00:21:13 probably fine to take a little bit of the performance hit from flying to a not particularly, you know, not the complete optimal trajectory from ground to orbit and being in a different orbit is not so bad. So now that all comes together with the Louisiana of this all, which has this great sun-synchronous orbit trajectory available. And the other aspect I find interesting is that if you launch to that sun-synchronous orbit, launching south, out of Louisiana, and you wait 12 hours for the Earth to spin under that orbit, you then have a really good landing trajectory. And 12, it'll change a little bit based on procession, what time of the year it is, whatever, whatever. Some hours later, you have a really good landing trajectory

Starting point is 00:21:56 coming up north over the Gulf. So if you think about launching a starship south out of Louisiana, it stays in orbit around the Earth. The Earth spins under it. Louisiana is then on the other side of Earth from when it launched a couple hours later, and the starship is coming back up towards Louisiana on a northward trajectory over the Gulf, and the entire reentry corridor could be over the Gulf, and you're not overflying populated areas, as you would be with a return to Texas, as you would be with a return to Florida. I even think if you're flying that the lowest inclination possible, in my estimation from this Louisiana site, flying north of Cuba between Key West and Cuba, it even looks like in that trajectory, coming in the other way, when you

Starting point is 00:22:37 come over Texas in that direction. You've got about 500 kilometers of water between the coastline of Texas and where this site is in Louisiana. So it seems like a really good trajectory for recovering starships as well. And they say they want to do these tower catches at Starbase, and I'm sure they do, but we've heard some funny things about the way that trajectory works, that they actually come back in, they overshoot Starbase, they fly back to Starbase, Texas, from over the water for that final descent, which seems workable. But when you're doing, you know, thousands of these a year,

Starting point is 00:23:14 as they intend, especially with these data center build out, the Propelling Depot stuff that we're talking about, seems a lot better to do that over water. And also, in a place that you will have more frequent landing opportunities because of the orbital mechanics that you're dealing with. When you launch to like a 40-degree inclination, 45-degree inclination, the amount that you overfly a particular site, and I don't know the exact cross-range that Starship has available,

Starting point is 00:23:39 but the amount that you would overfly that site for a landing opportunity is much less frequently, or less, I should say this, less regularly, than you would when you're in a Sun-Synchronous orbit that you've got full globe access, but for one, but you've got more frequent landing opportunities or more predictable landing opportunities for that particular starship. So it's a pretty good pairing of all these things. good trajectories out of the launch site, good trajectories for landing at that launch site,

Starting point is 00:24:06 to the useful orbit that the data center satellites are going, which you're flying enough of that the scale might make sense to co-locate orbital propellant depots at those inclinations, and you can use some of these trajectories that Laos and Goff and others have been talking about to get to the destinations that SpaceX cares about when they've refilled their propellant. So it sure seems to me, like this is the ideal spot for Starship operations of all the varieties that we are talking about. Because before every other launch site, we said, well, this is good for that, but not that. This site's good for development and testing, but not good for operations.

Starting point is 00:24:42 We'll do operations out at Kennedy Space Center, and we'll fly the Artemis flights out at Kennedy Space Center. But Star Base is really good when we're testing out new versions, and we're a little bit concerned about it, and NASA would be concerned about us flying something back to Kennedy Space Center that hasn't been tested yet. We always had these qualifiers, right? Vanneberg, really good for polar, but tough to get to, tough access, tough to work around, a lot of traffic. We always have these qualifiers, and the Louisiana one has got a lot of green check marks

Starting point is 00:25:08 and very few red Xs in terms of the Starship operations of it and the intended use of Starship over the next decade or two. So, again, this is a SpaceX and Starship limited conversation. I don't want to get too much into Louisiana of it. We will, but I do not have that mindset or the information to actually do that successfully for you. so I will hold that when I have someone that is from Louisiana to talk about that with.

Starting point is 00:25:32 So stay tuned for that. But it's kind of where I'm at on things. So before I talk about the general launchers, I don't know how much I have to say on that, but certainly I didn't know how much I had to say on Starbase Louisiana, and here we are 25 minutes later. Before we talk about all the launchers, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports main engine cutoff

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Starting point is 00:26:53 like I said, this inflection point where Falcon 9 is, we're on the early days of the Falcon 9 wind down, Falcon wind down generally. Now, that is going to linger for a bit for different users, right? There's certainly obligations they have to crude spaceflight, that that seems to be maybe something that's only for the 2020s. There's obligations they have the U.S. Space Force and other defense organizations for both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. And then the Starlink aspect. You know, like I said, they're moving on to bigger Starlink satellites. Those need to fly on Starship, so that's a forced transition. That is not a transition that is specific to Falcon. That is a transition that's specific to SpaceX and their decisions on Starlink.

Starting point is 00:27:32 Now, they are done populating those orbital shells that they can fly to from Florida. They're still flying the ones out of Vanderberg. I think a lot of the direct-to-sell satellites are going to be flying out of there as well. And then we'll have these bigger satellites that we started to see launch on Starship soon. But this does kind of belay certain confidence with where they're at with Starship right now right they ship 40 they've now towed back to Christmas Island uh in in an epic journey uh they they recovered that they put it on a gigantic ship right now and it's coming back uh to star base texas for and they're already cutting into the heat shield and learning a lot from getting that ship back for sure and they've got ship 41

Starting point is 00:28:11 uh fired up they're getting ready to fly that uh and it should be orbit orbit this time uh so if if they start, again, there's a lot of development aspects left to Starship, right? We've got to do orbital propellant refilling. They've got to do ship catches. But is this the moment where they go from every flight being a test of Starship to more what we saw with the early days of Falcon 9 where every flight is a flight of something and a test of Starship? Because that's how, that's a Falcon 9 landing process, right? They were flying payloads and then they were doing a test on the way down. Can we do that with Starship, where we're delivering Starlink's and then we're doing a test in orbit of Starship, of propellant refilling, of ship catches, all those tests that are downstream of

Starting point is 00:28:52 deploying payloads. That seems to be the moment that we're at with Starship here. Or at least that's the confidence that SpaceX seems to be indicating. And I think in some cases, maybe confidence, maybe they're being pushed to do that because Starlink demands it. And that's important for their future success. So that, you know, here we are, 2026, that moment is upon us. We've talked about it for years, we've theorized when that might be, that moment is upon us now. At the same time, there's been just a lot of noise lately by the people bringing on new launchers to the market, right? Stoke has been posting photos of mating Nova's payload section, the second stage, they've been doing fit checks for Andromeda engines. They've got the first of the flight

Starting point is 00:29:37 engines for their first flight doing hot fire acceptance testing. So they're integrating a lot of that bit. It sounds like their launch complex construction is getting close to completion, but they're still not activated on that. They don't have a firm date that they've set out loud in terms of when they're targeting the first launch, but Stoke is getting close with Nova. Rocket Lab Neutron is close-ish, but obviously we've seen, you know, we had some tank issues in the last year. There was this tank that they had out testing and it cracked. Where are they at with that. They're behind on the Archimedes testing that they were hoping to be by now. So Neutron is sluggish to the launch pad, but they still are talking about, can we deliver this

Starting point is 00:30:18 to the launch pad in Q4? Not necessarily fly it this year, but can we at least deliver that first flight unit to the launch pad in Q4? We've seen some photos and videos of the hungry hippo fairing for Neutron as well. So it's still a ways away, but again, getting closer. Relativity. I have not thought about or talked about relativity in quite a while, but they're installing acceptance tested engines on Terranar's first stage thrust structure. So again, like some of these things have been through all of their testing and acceptance. They're being integrated on a thing that matters. They are, they've been doing structural testing. They've been qualifying these different aspects. They've been doing cryogenic proof testing of second stages out at Stennis. So, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:04 we don't know again when this is going to land. They say no earlier than late this year. It's not even close to that. But again, like noise that this thing seems to be coming closer. I don't know why everyone's been talking so much and posting photos of like, here's where our hardware's at, here's where our hardware's at. Could it be the topic of conversation lately,

Starting point is 00:31:26 which is Falcon 9 doesn't have that much manifest left, right? Initially it was there's no more ride shares after 2028. and then it was, no, there's no more commercial launches of Falcon 9 after 2028. And that's been something that there's been articles written about, about this launcher crisis that's upon us. New Glenn obviously standing down because of their explosion. Vulcan having problems continue to fly. So even the new launchers that are flying are having problems.

Starting point is 00:31:51 So it's just a moment to be opportunistic for these companies that have launchers on the verge as signaling, like, we can be your hope for what you might fly on in three, four, five years from now, about a cycle or two away of your satellite and your mission planning, that's when you can rely on us. Is it just opportunistic? Or are all these companies feeling confident

Starting point is 00:32:15 about where the hardware is that they can go out and post these things? I don't have a lot of coverage for each one of those individual tasks, but sometimes I just like, I'll alert you of a trend that I'm seeing, which is everybody's talking. And we had these moments before,

Starting point is 00:32:31 like I said, 2016 felt like one of those moments where everybody was talking. 2020, felt like a moment where a lot of people were talking. 24, a lot of people were talking. 2026, a lot of people are talking. So I think what's real now is like, let's see who actually delivers on this stuff over the next year or two. And what does that put them in position for? Because coming online in the next year or two, at the same time that, you know,

Starting point is 00:32:54 the Falcon 9 manifest is drying up, we don't really know how Vulcan's going to shake out here. ULA seems to be in dodgy waters. New Glens got its launch manifest for the years that they returned to flight pretty well filled at this point and Starship doesn't have a payload door that will fit anything but Starlink's yet and you know that's not this

Starting point is 00:33:13 not even to mention the fact that for SpaceX they have so much of their own payload that they need to launch that flying payloads for anyone else seems like a negative right that's something I said in the IPO talk but I still believe it that the motivation for them to go and fly someone else's payload is a lot less interesting than it was when they were just the launch

Starting point is 00:33:36 services company. Now, the opportunity cost of flying someone else's payload is so great. SpaceX can do better flying their own payload than they can flying others. The only real reason I see for them to continue flying other people's payloads is to restrict opportunities for their competitors to fly their vehicles. That is cynical of me to say, but that's really got to be the biggest motivation, right? It's not a huge moneymaker compared to the kind of money that SpaceX is talking about elsewhere. There is an element of prestige to be the one flying certain things. But even that, they seem a little less interested in these days, right? They're saying, you know, we might not fly dragon past the 2020s. We might stop in 2030. And that's, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:34:14 a more prestigious thing than to fly the astronauts of the world on different missions. But clearly not a huge motivator, right? It's maybe more of a risk center for them than a motivator. So, a moment of change from 26 to, I don't know, 28-ish, when would we mark this window? Mid-26 to mid-28? Let's just say that. Let's check. I'm going to run this show back in August of 2008, and we're going to see who of the names I said here got their act together, right? The one I didn't mention was Firefly. They're trying to get Block 2 Alpha flying by the end of the year. There's this next vehicle coming online from Firefly and Northrop Grumman that, I don't know, I don't know exactly know where that one is either, but that could be a big force in the industry. So a lot

Starting point is 00:35:00 of change coming, and it's really interesting that so many are coming online at the same time that Falcon 9 and Starship are at the moment of transition, and that SpaceX itself is at a moment of transition. Huge opportunities for people out there, huge opportunities for companies to step up into a role that they haven't occupied before, and those are the kind of dynamic years that I think are really fun to follow in this industry. So that's what I've got. I, appreciate you listening, appreciate you being here for these kind of shows where I ramble through some thoughts, but I feel like we end up in interesting places. At least that's what I think. I don't know what you think, but you can let me know, Anthony at main engine cutoff.com

Starting point is 00:35:35 and as always, main engine cutoff.com slash support to join up over there. Until next time, I will talk to you soon.

Main Engine Cut Off - T+339: Starbase Louisiana, the Falcon Fade, and the Next Wave of Launch Vehicles

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