Main Engine Cut Off - T+340: Starliner’s Future and the Demand Signal

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

NASA and Boeing laid out Starliner’s return-to-flight plan as SpaceX prepares to leave Dragon behind. I talk through the weak demand signal for crewed flight in LEO, how NASA’s commitment to the ISS and commercial stations boxed themselves into this decision, and what to do between here and the Moon.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Theo and Violet, Miles O’Brien, Joakim, Steve, Warren, Joel, Frank, Joonas, Natasha Tsakos, Will and Lars from Agile, David, Matt, Jan, Matt from Built, Lee, Josh from Impulse, Russell, Heiko, Kris, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Ryan, The Astrogators at SEE, Donald, Fred, Pat, Stealth Julian, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsBoeing "incredibly excited" to serve as nation's only astronaut transportation - Ars TechnicaAfter being sidelined, Boeing's Starliner to get starring role in NASA's spaceflight plans - Ars TechnicaCongress extends ISS and tells NASA to get moving on private space stations - Ars TechnicaNASA chief concerned China may deny access to parts of Moon's south pole - Ars TechnicaSpaceX's Starship goes orbital, deploying first next-gen Starlinks - Ars TechnicaVast Establishes Lunar Programs Division, Applying Haven Flight Heritage to Power, Communications, and Habitats on the Moon — an update by VASTThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by Zhou QuanWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Mainwich Cotoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo. Back with you after a bit of a hiatus here on the main feed, huh? Been on the headlines feed a couple of times in the last month, but I've not had a lot I wanted to jump on and talk about on the main feed. Try to keep the signal to noise high. Enough signal has built up. Specifically with the guards to Starliner, it's returned to flight plans, its new lease on life, I guess some would say. And the way that that storyline came together with Dragon and the reporting around Dragon. and statements from SpaceX on Dragon and its life after 2030. An interesting flurry of things that is all very intertwined with the ISS, with commercial space stations, and I think in this shift from, you know, Leo to Sysluner space that we talk about all the time,

the Moonbase project, all of this is really tied up together. And I don't know if I have every single thought ironed out on what I'm about to unveil for you in terms of the way I've been thinking about this stuff. But it is an interesting web of interconnected things there. And I really can't separate the storyline that we're about to cover in September from the way that NASA handled the commercial space station side of this thing, you know, back at ignition in, what was that, February. And the preceding few months,

it feels very inner, it feels like we couldn't have been where we are right now today without the way that those decisions went earlier in the year. So I want to talk through all those different connections and the things I find compelling within NASA in terms of these storylines. So the news as of yesterday, this event that NASA had with Boeing, with astronaut Woody Hoburg, who was going to be commanding Starliner 2, made a series of announcements. Number one, Starliner 1, the uncrewed mission,

will be flying no earlier than December, so probably early 2027. And they had a crude flight target date for Starliner 2 of mid-2020-8 right now. So still these huge gaping holes in the schedule for Starliner, which I think are also a recipe for problems, right? The fact that they're leaving such a big gap means that there's a lot of things that they're flying on Starliner 1 that they still need to look into, which has the potential to push back Starliner 2. They're also doing this weird thing where they're flying some fixes on Starliner 1,

some corrective actions, but there's also additional pieces of the system that are going to be redesigned and re-implemented on Starliner 2. So all that has to go through certification, and that's going to be the first flight for some of those components, which is, you know, another area that could be problematic for Starliner when you look at their overall mission plan. But those are the schedule for the flights, and NASA and Boeing have agreed to a $350 million contract modification to cover part of the return to flight work for Starliner that is ongoing now. and also to cover the certification of Vulcan as a launch vehicle for Starliner, because there's only a few Atlas V's left, and that's what Starliner flies on right now.

It's what it's certified to fly on. NASA is exercising an option for the fifth and sixth flight of Starliner, and also certifying Vulcan. So that answers a big open question of, you know, is Boeing backing away from Starliner? Is NASA backing away from Starliner? Is their life beyond Atlas 5? We got yeses on, or no's and yeses.

So Starliner, at least in the current plans here, will fly into the future beyond Atlas 5 into the 2030s in some regard. Whether that's to the ISS or commercial space stations, out for debate, but NASA is covering these flights. They're covering the certification. They're covering return to flight costs. A lot is being made of that. About the $359 million contract modification on a fixed price contract. It's not great. It's not a good situation.

but I don't think NASA has any easy options at their disposal here. And that's part of what I want to talk about today is I'm not that hot and bothered about the $360 million contract. And not because I don't think that NASA, that's like a small amount of money. In context of what NASA has put in front of themselves, I'm more mad about everything else that they've done here and that they've handled, how they've handled the ISS and commercial station market. I'm more mad about all that, and I just kind of lump this $360 million with the other hundreds

of million dollars that I think they're wasting on this front. So to kind of roll back to that, right, I can't separate this storyline from the way that they handled commercial stations in ignition. I went back and listened to the ignition, the portion of ignition about the commercial market where they talk about the fact that in no uncertain terms that there's, has been no commercial market emerging for really anything, right? There's not been manufacturing in orbit that has shown a sufficient level of demand to really sustain a commercial market. There hasn't been tourism to sustain a market. There hasn't been, even when they talked about

the sovereign astronauts, other nations flying astronauts, that there's been interest there in flying these short duration flights, but there's been no interest in long duration flights for those astronaut missions. And, you know, in NASA's estimation, there was no market. And, you know, in NASA's estimation, there was no market to sustain what they were thinking about the commercial space station market into the 2030s as a replacement for the ISS. They were so outright about that in ignition and immediately got a huge response from the commercial space station companies being very mad at NASA for the way that they went and handled that. Now, publicly, they just, you know, kind of stated that they disagreed with NASA's assertion, and they pointed to the fact that they exist and they have

funding and they have some customers and there were other reporting at the time that they were furious with the way that NASA handled it because they thought that it compromised these companies' ability to go and raise funds to actually do the work that NASA needs them to do because of the commitments to the commercial space station market right now, which is, you know, some contracts for Axiom to have that module attached to the ISS. The free flyer program is still in its paperwork stages, I suppose. They haven't down-selected there, but, you know, there is a line in the budget for commercial space station development as the stated national policy is to move off the ISS onto commercial space stations. And here's NASA on the biggest stage of Jared Isaac Min's then very, you know,

infant administration at NASA, just kind of ripping holes in the commercial space station business model altogether. And clearly stating, whatever they want to walk back later is fine, but clearly stating that no one at NASA has done the, run the numbers in a way that comes back with a commercial market existing. So they were kind of pulling up stakes on, on that as a thing they would lean on, that, well, we'll just fly to a station that exists because all this other market will support the station existing, so we'll use it when we need to. That was the plan before, and then they went and said, well, nobody else wants to pay for this. So, you know, what are we to do? Now, like, you know, days, weeks later, I forget the exact time delay, but NASA backtracked on that entirely and said, yeah, you know what, let's do the plan we already had in place where we're going to have this RFP go out and we're going to downselect and we're going to do the program exactly as we stated before, even though we've just clearly went out and spent 25 minutes talking about how there's no market to support the things that we built that model on previously. That was horribly handled in my view. You know, why the walkback?

Was it just that at that point, the administration had picked so many fights on the budget and the infrastructure front, and they couldn't sustain that one, right? That Ted Cruz is already talking about extending the ISS to 2032, so clearly in Congress, there's huge support for that lane and the Houston companies involved there. A huge support for that lane existing. So was it just, you know, they were fine bailing on Gateway and the other pieces of the Artemis infrastructure that were canceled there, the SLS blockway. be, all that, but they were not fine giving up the ISS Starliner commercial space station markets.

Was that one too far? And so NASA backtracked and said, we'll just keep on keeping one. Probably. That probably is what happened. But that put NASA in a really terrible spot here. You have SpaceX responding to, I think, a couple of things, right? One is they want to move to Starship. That is what it is. Starship has now been to orbit. As a yesterday. They were most of the way before. Now they've orbited Earth with Starship. They've deployed operational satellites to orbit with Starship, 26 Starlink V-3s, 10 times more powerful than the Starlink's they're flying on Falcon 9. So they effectively, in one Starship flight, launched 10 times the payload of a Falcon 9. They launched 10 Falcon 9s of payload capability

to orbit yesterday that they do on a single Falcon 9. So that's, you know, an internal cost of if $15 million is still the number of the internal cost for a Falcon 9 flight, $150 million of Falcon 9 value they shipped to orbit yesterday. And that's internal value, right? So their priorities are shifting. Over to Starship, onto the new platform, also all the new business models that they want to go for. They've got Starlink up and running. They've got the data center stuff in their future. Their entire path is Starship.

So for them, let's move on. And that is the primary motivation for SpaceX. The other thing is, these commercial crew flights don't make money. Like, they might be a little bit profitable for SpaceX, but there's just not a lot of them. They're very high, high, they're very low margin. They're very high risk, especially for a company that has so much other stuff going on. Is this worth the value it provides to the company? There's certainly a prestige angle, but I think between 2020 and 2030, SpaceX would have that prestige.

And if they're optimistic about what they can do with Starship, then they might, if they're talking about crude spaceflight, maybe there's just a couple of years there where they're not flying people to space. Because they think they can on-ramp Starship, get it up to flying rate. They can do, you know, the human landing system contracts for NASA, which is easier to fly crew around space than from Earth to space. So we can do that for the prestige. That carries us a couple of years before we're launching humans on Starship. Maybe that's the thinking there. So it makes sense why SpaceX would want to move on, honestly. You know, everyone says, well, Dragon is the best.

It's winning all these contracts. It has plenty of business. It's just not a good business. You know, it's the same reason that Rocket Lab is not just a launch services company. Now they do a bunch of space systems. The same reason that SpaceX now operates a gigantic constellation of communication satellites because launch services also a pretty bad business. It's not where the money is made.

And in the case of the human space, space flight stuff, if they had to maintain that capability, they could not turn over all their infrastructure that they want to turn over to Starship if they had to maintain Falcon 9 flying humans and cargo to the ISS on the Falcon stack. So, I understand SpaceX responding to that, to that demand signal, to use a word from Jared Isopin. The other thing is, SpaceX has kind of been through this, right? They, if you remember, when SpaceX started flying cargo dragon back in the day, they were offering, they were advertising a thing called Dragon Lab, which was by Dragon Flight, not crude, uncrude, you could put your own payloads in there, you could put experiments, you could put manufacturing payloads, fly at the orbit, we'll return it for you, what a great idea this is, they did this whole marketing push, never, I don't even know if they ever got close to selling one of those, I would love, if somebody out there was working at Spasix at the time and has some insight into the Dragon Lab story, would love to talk to you about what, actually happened because it just seemed to get announced, never talked about again, and then,

you know, deleted from the SpaceX stack entirely. And then they moved on to the crude spaceflight side. And, you know, they got a couple of missions under their belt. They've got not only the private astronaut missions at the ISS, they've got, you know, Jared Eisenman bought a couple, Fram 2, one of the coolest missions that we all forget about. And that's it. That was the whole market. So I don't think they needed NASA to state that the commercial space station market wasn't, coming around because they've lived it. They tried to offer Dragon Lab.

They tried to offer these crude space flights. If there was a business there, I think SpaceX has shown in the last 10 to 15 years that if it's in space and there was a business there, they would own and operate it. They had the same thing with ride share services. They were one of the launch providers of the early spaceflight industry's ride share missions,

these other aggregators that would do rideshares, dedicated ride share missions. Then SpaceX started flying them themselves, and they're going to fly, you know, 20, and then stop flying them because they're moving on. There's bigger and better things that they want to do. And they saw the rise and the fall of that business model when it comes to their stack. So they are used to that, that churn, and I think responded to that earlier than NASA's statement of they're not being a marketeer.

So SpaceX moving on, understandable for their part of it. But now NASA being locked in on this idea of a commercial space station track, the ISS is getting extended to 2032. I mean, I would take betting odds that they try to extend it to 2040 at this point, honestly. And they're stuck with that. That's a national policy that's in place. Obviously has congressional support. NASA has backed it with their voice and their communications around this over the years.

They talk about maintaining a presence in Leo. So they're kind of stuck. They have to deal with that. And having to deal with that means they, they don't have, you know, billions of dollars extra to spend to make a new commercial spaceflight provider because Starliner had a terrible start to its career. The easiest way out for them is, I guess we'll sign $360 million because it's not $4 billion that we would have to spend to totally build a new capsule in the commercial spaceflight, commercial crew model that we've done before.

We can get this last one with our sunk costs over the hump with 360. $60 million. That keeps Boeing in the game. They're not going to walk away from it. Boeing also loves if the ISS were to extend beyond, because they make about $250 million a year. I don't know if they make, but their revenue is $250 million a year as the prime contractor for ISS operations alone, not even talking about the Starliner flights. So if that goes till 2040, right, there's another $2.5 billion from 2030 to 2040 for its Boeing. So they're in the game to extend it as long as possible. And if that means, we'll take $360 million for Starliner. We'll get the money that we still can get from NASA for flying those Starliner flights that we're on contract for.

Plus, we'll get the ISS Prime contractor. That's a great amount of money for Boeing to do that work. So they're incentivized in that way. And NASA has just left holding the bag of the decisions that they've made and that they've co-signed onto in the last couple of years around what they want to do in Lower Earth orbit. So I'm not saying that NASA had no choice and it's not their fault. It is their fault and they had no choice. Do you see what I'm saying? I think it was a bad decision to put themselves in this spot. But now they are and this is the only choice that is actually there for them. Because the choice was something that Jared Eisenman stated in this press conference yesterday. If we were going to walk away from Starliner, we would have done that in February. In my eye, they did do that in February. They backtracked it in late February or early March or whatever. But when they stated, we're not going on with this commercial space station market in this way, that was the out to not spend this amount of money on Starliner, to not spend this amount of money on space transportation to Leo in the 2030s, move on, move on to the moon base. That is your demand signal.

Jared Eisen wants to say, here's the demand signal, you know, because he was asked, hey, are you going to support a second provider because competition was so vital to having crude transportation in this era? Are you going to support a second provider? And they said, no, we've done that. You know, we, there are these two providers. That's how we got here. But we don't have the money to spend on a third. So the demand signal to anyone wants to go build or build space transportation, we would

love to buy it. Here's the demand signal. Two astronauts every six months, maybe every nine months, plus the international partners from 2030 to 2040. That's the demand signal. That is not a big demand signal. So I kind of felt like it was a little bit of a, of like a, you know, tongue-in-cheek comment from Jared Isamund.

here's a demand signal. Not a lot. You tell me, if you can make that a business, then great. So I don't think that people internally are necessarily happy about being in this position. But it does feel like the one thing in the Isaacman era that NASA has not been able to move on from cleanly. We were able to move on from Gateway, SLS1B, we were able to move on from, I mean, I guess they were able to move on from Mars sample return. I would love to hear some thoughts on what they think about that from the planetary perspective. There was all these big ticket items that they just moved on from. And they garner their political support to move on from. And this Leo idea is one of those that's sticky. Now, in my eye, the demand signal is not interesting. We're moving to the

moon from a crude perspective, from all these providers. The interest is there. I really seriously wonder in the astronaut office, as Artemis missions continue to happen, What is the demand signal for the astronaut's interest? Are there people that are jazzed about getting a space station assignment in 2034 when they know that, you know, at the Artemis schedule goes the way that everyone hopes it does, that there's an uptick of crude availability to the moon? So I think from the provider side, from the astronaut side, from the policy side, from the strategic side, that's the thing I want to crack in in the second half of the show here. From the strategic side, the demand signal is the moon, and Leo is weighing us down to the tune of the turn of

a couple of billion dollars a year, right? A billion dollars for operating the ISS, billion dollars for space transportation, that'll probably climb. So we're talking two to three billion dollars a year from now until the ISS de-orbites that is sunk into maintaining a presence in Leo when NASA has outwardly stated there is no market here, there is no motivating reason to be here. I would love to know from the human health perspective is that research, two to three billion a year when you're also going to have crude space flights going to the moon. Where is the interest? So more to talk about that. But first, I do need to say thank you to everyone who supports this show, even through times of basically just getting Miko headlines while I ruminate on the

news for a few weeks as it trickles in and then builds up to something like this. So thank you to the executive producers of Main Engine Cutoff. There are 33 of you, because you got a couple back on board here. Thank you to Theo and Violet, Miles O'Brien, Joe Kim, Steve. Warren, Joel, Frank, Eunice, Natasha Saccoe, Will and Lars from Agile, David, Yon, Matt, from Bill, Lee, Josh from Impulse, Russell, Heiko, Chris, Tim Dodd, David Ashinot, Ryan, the Astrogators at SEE, Donald, Fred, Pat, Stealth Julian, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support. As I said, if you head over to mainengine cutoff.com slash support and join up, you will get access to Miko Headlines. I've done a couple of shows

there between now and the last main feed that I've done, main feed show that I've done, run through all the stories that you need to pay attention to, filter out the ones that are just noise and keep you up on space news. You support the show. It's a win-win. I love it. I love all the people that support it. So do that if you want to jump in. Okay, so this strategic side is the thing I want to talk about. NASA struggles at putting a price on what they need to pay for a commercial space station, what they need to pay for crude spaceflight to Leo, what they need to pay for the ISS operations, because there's nothing to do math against. You know, if you compare the way that Leo human spaceflight is talked about by NASA, and the way that just in the last week,

they've talked about the lunar surface, vastly different perspectives. The only thing that really gets stated is maintaining a presence in Leo. That is the phrase that will appear, is we just need to maintain this presence. And on the lunar side, it is this strategic imperative about getting there and establishing a presence and the competition with China and like geopolitics. strategic geopolitics that NASA is positioning there. It is hugely important to the future of humanity. That is the strategic imperative that not only NASA, but people elsewhere in the government are talking about,

and people outside the government talk about that. That is such a more powerful message than maintaining a presence in Leo, especially. Especially, that's my fair part, especially when you talk about some of the comments that they've made yesterday, yesterday for sure is that, you know, they want some international component of a customer base for commercial space stations or for, you know, as Jared Isamund said, the demand signal of two astronauts every six months, maybe every nine months, that's a direct quote, plus the international

allotment there. And then you look back at ignition and they talk about there has been interest from other countries in flying their astronauts, but not for long duration. Now, you can assume that like Canada, Jaxa, ESA, that they would have, they would, they would, want to continue operating the ISS-like way of flying missions with six-month, eight-month duration. But elsewhere, we're not seeing that demand. And the reason I find that funny is that if you listen to the maintaining presence in Leo perspective, you'll get scaremontering about, well, if the ISS goes away, then the only place to fly in Leo is to Tyeongg, the Chinese space station. Well, you've just told me that the other, the foreign astronauts just want to fly, you know,

14-day missions, and they don't want to do long-duration spaceflight. So what what is the worry? You just told me no one wants to do that. No one's paying for that. There is no market. So do you think that's a huge, you know, in the same way that's talked about as like, if China establishes the moon base, then we've given up technological superiority and everyone in the world will just immediately partner with China because they obviously

are the future and we are not. You feel the same way if they fly a 14-day mission on Shenzhou up to the space station to Tyeongg? Like, maybe if you're doing nothing else in space, if you have no competing storyline, but if they're doing that, and you're out there pointing the $2 or $3 billion a year that you're spending an ISS, pointing that at a moon base, and you're saying, well, we're flying in the moon base all the time. Then how cool does that look from a geopolitics perspective? That, all right, you flew a 14-day mission to a thing that looked like mirror, not even an ISS, right? It's like very mirror-like in its construction. Cool, we're landing and walking around the moon and driving rovers and doing all this cool stuff. Like, there is a, a clear difference there in technological supremacy, if you're worried about that. And I think it's also, like, you don't get worried about someone that's doing a thing that you used to do when you're going out and doing something even better, even bigger and better and cooler. So the scaremongering

about, well, we've given up Leo, in my eyes, it's like, that's bad if you've given up Leo and you've given up all human spaceflight. You've just pulled up the stakes on everything, shut down in the way that people thought NASA did after the space shuttle, just shut down spaceflight and we're not doing it anymore, that's bad. But saying we've ceded Leo because we're going to do the lunar base, like that's defensible. That is a strategic decision that you're making and you're moving on, right? We're not still flying suborbital missions because now we do orbit.

Now, like, there's suborbital crew. That's a different thing. But I'm saying, like, we didn't keep doing, you know, Mercury Redstone flights once we had Mercury Atlas. and said, we ceded suborbital flight. I feel like that's the same thing we're talking about here. We've seeded Leo, yeah, because we're going to build a moon base. Do that thing. You've stated, this is the strategic imperative of the nation, not just NASA, the nation.

And the countervailing narrative for Leo is we need to maintain a presence. It's so uninspiring. But yet that commitment to the national policy and the decision to backtrack on what you stated in February, that there is no commercial market, we will not sustain this, we don't want to fund this, we want to move on, backtracking on that. has led you to a position where you're paying $360 million to finish off Starliner, you're going ahead with $90 million a seat costs on Starliner into the future, and you're burdening the commercial space station market, if there is one, with those prices of

Starliner, is a complete waste of money in my view. There is no reason to do this. It is muddying the narrative that you've got going, where we're putting all available effort into the viable, strategically important things of the future, and yet we're going to continue this program that has not changed. The structure of this program has not changed for 10 years. It has gotten worse, right? Dragon has come and gone. It has gotten worse in the last 10 years. The outlook has gotten worse in the last 10 years. We are not better off now with the position of the ISS than we were 10 years ago. I sound like I'm running for president or something, but I'm just, this is a dead end. And everyone else, other than NASA, as peers have adopted,

that mentality because guess what VAST announced this week. The lunar, uh, what did they, how do they name it? Uh, the lunar programs division. You know what? Vass didn't announce was, hey, guess what? We're going to develop our own crude spaceflight vehicle to get up to our space stations, which we're developing. No, they announced we're going to go build habitation for the lunar surface. Everyone's pivoting their demand signal to, okay, guess what? Leo, no business model, not interesting. The demand signal that NASA is putting out is the lunar surface. And yet NASA is still beholden to the national policy. of maintaining a presence in Leo. And that's the thing I think we need to get over that.

We have this weird fixation on not having a gap because we had a gap from shuttle to commercial crew. And I just think that's an unhealthy habit to have. Don't worry about the gap if you're moving in the right direction. If you're maintaining momentum, you're actually building a sensible program. And now I do feel like the changes in the last year have built a sensible lunar program in the future. There's still tons of problems that we all identify and we all want to fix, but it is way, way better now without a gateway, without a Block 1B. The things that have changed on that front in the last year are substantially better than they were prior, and that is the complete inverse where we're at with Leo now. And I feel greedy saying, hey, the Isaacman

administration at NASA has done such political work to shed all of these things that felt unmovable before. If I rolled the clock back two years and it's like two years from now, the gateway won't exist. Block 1B will be off the manifest. We'd be using the ICPS. We'd actually be flying an SLS flight without an ICPS, which shows that Orion could get the Leo and do stuff without SLS. We've shown the full path to kind of unleashing that stack on a lunar base. That was unthinkable because of the the things that we thought were so sticky in politics two years ago. So I feel greedy for saying this one I wish fell to, but it certainly feels like,

do the math, $10 to $20 billion spent on what has been stated by industry, by NASA, by crude spaceflight providers like SpaceX, as a dead end, not only technologically, but just, you know, economically.

The structure of flying crew to Leo in this way has a price floor that is so high that it does not facilitate a market showing up. And then the other thing you'll get is people saying, well, NASA isn't the one that can make a market appear because their requirements drive the price so high. It's like, okay, fine, then NASA should move on. If that's what they want, they should move on. Right. And the calls for, well, why don't you support the Blue Origin Human Space Flight Division that has reportedly been developing capabilities internally. It's like, no, that's exactly the thing that you just said, that if NASA did that, they would drive the price so high that it would be uninteresting to

other people. So just, if Blue Origin's working on that, just let them go. If Rocket Lab builds Neutron and then wants to get into human spaceflight game, just let them go. Because if a commercial market is going to exist, then it can and should exist without NASA. And if it does not exist without NASA, I don't think it would exist with NASA. I do very much feel like that would be a thing that develops totally separately. And if it's not, it's not healthy. It, But then that's also kind of my point about the strategic side of this, right? If NASA has a strategic reason to do a thing, then you can do that math separately then, and what does that mean to create a market out of it?

Because elsewhere, in other areas of government spending, that's not the kind of math you do. It's like, what is the value of this strategically? And is it worth us spending that amount of money to do a thing? That's why I think from a maintaining presence in Leo position, I think that's a strong. argument to make, take that over to the Pentagon and say, and I think I did this when I was down at the Pentagon last year and talked to General Saltzman and lobbied for 15 minutes about the Space Force having a human spaceflight division, I think that's a much stronger argument, is that if you think human spaceflight is going to be a thing in the next 10 to 20 years

that is worth being in the game on, then the space force should start now developing human spaceflight capabilities, and that math is going to be different than the commercial human spaceflight market. The economics on fighter jets and cargo planes is a lot different than passenger planes. Those are different markets. They are distinct markets. And that's okay. We get into this problem with launch services all the time. I think it's more defensible to say like, yeah, this, you know, ULA is a provider for national security market. That's a different market than, you know, the synthetic average radar satellites that want to get launched for some company who's doing environmental imaging. It's okay that they're different markets. And they respond to things

differently. But NASA's doing math as if they're trying to make a commercial market, but they're responding to national policy as if they have the strategic directive. And they're just a mix of these two things in a really unhealthy way that leads to decisions like this. Well, we've said that we're sticking to this national policy so hard that now we have to spend $10 to $20 billion over the next 10 years for a thing that is not only a dead end technologically, but in our manifest of what we find interesting for the future, which is the moon base. There's just no connection there. And you know, that's a very uncomfortable spot to be in. So do I think it's a bad idea to sign a $360 million contract modification with Boeing to finish out Starliner and certify Vulcan? Yeah,

but in the context of all the other bad decisions that have been made to make that seem like the best path, it's not the one I'm mad about. I'm really, really still bummed at the way that February was handled with the commercial space station market. And, you know, the commercial space station providers in the summer apparently had some bad times trying to talk to SpaceX about flying to their space stations and SpaceX saying we're not doing that. So go ahead and talk to Boeing and Boeing said they're not ready to give a price because they don't know what Falcon will cost. And then, you know, you've got Vass saying, well, we're doing a lunar programs division. That's the demand signal. So if Jared Eisenman meant the demand signal is two astronauts every six months, maybe every

nine months, and he meant that in a way to say there is no demand, then I hope that that that message comes through in the way that he handles this side of NASA policy in the next year as well. Because it, and the ISS may decide this for us, right? There may be structural issues about the ISIS that force their hand into retiring that earlier than 2040. But politics left unattended probably extends that program much farther than anyone's comfortable with. Um, yeah. Uh, that's it. I think that's, I think that's, I think. that's my list of things. I'm scrolling down all the notes that I scribbled, very disorganized. Yeah, that's it. I don't know. I'm curious. There was a lot in there, so I'm curious as you

want to tangle that. Let me know your thoughts. Anthonyatmanaging gotoff.com. Send me your thoughts there. That's probably the best spot, to be honest. Social media is too much these days. Just email me. Or if you're in the Discord, hop for the Discord. If you're on the substack, tell me in the substack. If you're on Patreon, do that. Those are the four lanes. Discord, email, Patreon. guns up stack. Not in that order. Whatever order you like best. But for now, thank you all so much for listening. Thanks for the support. Managingcutoff.com slash support. I appreciate you all very much and I'll talk to you soon.