Main Engine Cut Off - T+48: Rand Simberg

Episode Date: May 27, 2017

Rand Simberg joins me to talk about his recent trip to the Space Tech Expo, the dawning of the age of in-space manufacturing, the future of SLS and Orion, the National Space Council, and a lot more. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 12 executive producers—Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Laszlo, Jamison, Guinevere, and four anonymous—and 50 other supporters on Patreon. Rand Simberg Transterrestrial Musings Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space Safe Is Not An Option on Amazon Space Tech Expo USA Loser of  ULA’s Vulcan engine downselect will likely lose Air Force funding - SpaceNews.com NASA inspector questions why agency built rocket test stands in Alabama | Ars Technica Virgin Orbit on Twitter The Long Space Age, by Alexander MacDonald DARPA selects Boeing for spaceplane project - SpaceNews.com Thoughts on XS-1 - Main Engine Cut Off Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Play, Stitcher, or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

I heard from a lot of you after the episode I did a few weeks back with Eric Berger that you really liked that format where I bring on a special guest and talk with them about the topics of the day, whatever else is on their radar. So we've got another special guest here with us today. We've got Rand Simberg, a recovering aerospace engineer, as he likes to say, and a consultant covering all things space, be it technology or policy or strategy. You name it. He's got some opinions that you're going to want to hear. He's also the author of a book called Safe is Not an Option, Overcoming the Futile Obsession with Getting Everyone Back Alive That is Killing Our Expansion into Space. It's a great read. I recommend checking it out specifically in light of some of the things that we'll be talking about today, some of the

things that are going on in the industry lately. But before we get talking to Rand, I want to real quick say thank you to all of the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. There's 62 people over on Patreon supporting this show week in and week out. And this particular episode is brought to you by 12 executive producers, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Laszlo, Jameson, Guinevere, and four anonymous executive producers, along with 50 other supporters. They make this show possible week in and week out, and I'm hugely thankful for their support. So if you want to help support the show, head over to patreon.com slash Miko and donate as little as $1 a month. You'll get access to some extra content from time to time, and you'll get to hear about upcoming

interviews like this one with Ran today and be able to chip in some ideas or topics for that show. Real quick reminder up front too, if you head over to mainenginecutoff.com, you can get the show notes for this show. I've got links to all of Rand's stuff over there, his website, his Twitter accounts, and a link to his book as well. So head over there and check out some of those links while you listen to the conversation with Rand. So with that said, let's get into it with Mr. Rand Simberg. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm excited to have you here today to talk about this list of things in front of us. Glad to be here. We'll start with the Space Tech Expo, since that's where you spent the majority of the week.

What was what, three days or so out in the, where was it at? I don't even know where it was. It was in Pasadena at the Convention Center. That was most of the week, so you spent a lot of time there. I was following your Twitter feed as you went, but were there anything going on there that you thought was really interesting? Any trends you noticed? Any specific announcements or topics that they covered that you found really interesting? Well, I found the Wednesday sessions very interesting. It's actually almost like two separate events,

but they're conjoined, and one of them is an actual... The Space Tech Expo itself is a trade show, basically, and there were a lot of vendors. In the past, the shows had people have shown up, like Orbital ATK a few years ago. They were actually pushing the Liberty rocket at the show. They had a big booth, and ULA has been there, I think, in the past.

The very first one, XCOR, was kind of the star of the show, and they actually had a mock-up of the Lynx. But this year, I've noticed it's both grown in terms of the number of exhibitors, but it's not the major primes anymore. Now it's second- and third-tier people who are looking for customers, people with 3D printing and guidance and control and electronics and flexible electronics and a lot of the stuff that a lot of these coming space companies are going to need. It's not clear to me how many of them. I talked to a few of these coming space companies are going to need. It's not clear to me how many of them. I talked to a few of them.

Obviously, they want to sell to anybody, but I don't know if they're figuring out how do they market to the new space people who don't have the kind of budgets that traditionally the big irons had or not. So anyway, there was the trade show aspect, and I wandered around there for a while. But in conjunction with it is what they call the Space Tech Conference. And that was a single track event, which was mostly

a few speakers, but a lot of panels. And on Wednesday, Dave Barnhart, former DARPA, now a professor at USC, also an entrepreneur, he has a company that's called Arcusys that's actually selling some of the technology

that was developed when he was at DARPA. He basically was the chair for the whole day, and so he put together some very interesting sessions. And the overall theme was in-space servicing. And that encompasses a lot more than you might think. It's not just going out servicing satellites. It includes refueling. It includes assembly.

Almost anything you can imagine. All the kinds of things that we've been thinking about for decades that we would do in space if we could afford to get there. you can imagine, all the kinds of things that we've been thinking about for decades that we would do in space if we could afford to get there. And so we're on the verge of being able to afford to get there thanks to the new competition to drive down the cost of launch between Elon and Jeff Bezos and maybe ULA as well, though they're operating under more financial constraints, financial and political. But basically, it seems to be that the launch problem is getting solved.

So now people are thinking about, okay, now that we can afford to get there, what kind of things can we do? And Made in Space had a presentation. They're doing like an all-out blitz lately. One of their people appeared on Capitol Hill at some hearing, and I've heard them on, I don't know, a few other podcasts they've sent people out to. They seem to be doing a lot in the last month or two alone. I don't know.

Was that tied to anything specifically, or is that just them maturing their technology and now wanting to talk about it more than they have been in the past? Well, I think it's a combination of that and the fact that things are going on. They've got some interesting things happening. In both cases, both in Pasadena and on the Hill, that was Andrew Rush, the ETO. But I guess I was kind of surprised at how much is going on. That's why it was so interesting to me, because it wasn't just Maiden Space. And Firmamentum, who I always think of those two as the Space Assembly people, is Maiden Space and Firmamentum, which is a division of Tethers Unlimited.

Rob Hoyt didn't even show up. So Firmamentum wasn't represented on this panel, and yet there were several presentations on what's going on. And it's not just kind of the startups. It's people like McDonnell Detweiler and SSL, which is the same thing because MDA bought SSL, Space Systems L'Oreal, a few years ago. They're proposing to do in-space assembly. And Orbital ATK is proposing to do in-space assembly. And interestingly, something I discovered yesterday,

which is the Arcanaut robotic space assembler that Made in Space is proposing is actually being contracted to Northup Grumman. So everybody's kind of getting into this. But the prevailing theme was, and even Airbus, Airbus is proposing space assembly. Airbus is proposing space assembly. So the theme is, the age of launching a single mission on a single rocket is coming to an end. And that's the age we've been in since 1957, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And also, if you notice the difference in the trends that you were talking about in the early days of Space Tech Expo, which was all, how do we make launch cheaper? That stuff's faded away, and now we're faced with cheaper launch coming online. Now we're getting this interesting stuff. Here's what we can do now that we can get to space, and we don't have to figure out some way to gather up

this many millions of dollars in the past. Now they can do it on these smaller budgets and actually operate in space. Right, and that was a point that I think Andrew made, Andrew Rush made from Made in Space, is that we're getting to a point, we've always said this is going to happen, but it was always theoretical that when the cost of launch comes down, the cost of satellites come down as well, for a number of reasons that we can go into if we need to. But the thing is that the thing that's been driving the high cost of satellites is the high cost of launch. Because when launch is so high, the satellite has to be very lightweight.

When you try to get weight out of the satellite, you increase the cost. When you try to get weight out of the satellite, you lose some margin. So now you have to spend even more money to try to figure out ways to get the reliability back into it. Yeah, you can only pay for one launch. and so now you have to spend even more money to try to figure out ways to get the reliability back into it. Yeah, you can only pay for one launch, so you've got to make sure that that thing works rather than peppering an elliptical orbit like Planet does to image the Earth. You spend a bunch of money on four satellites maybe, but now they're just sending up 100 at a time to image the entire Earth. Yeah, and I guess another point that Andrew made was that,

which again we've known for years but most people don't understand, was that every, in the days of CubeSats, it's not true anymore, but in general, traditionally, every satellite launch was way over-designed for its orbital needs, its orbital functional requirements, because it has to go through the launch environment. It has to handle high Gs. It has to take all the vibration. So there's a lot of over-design in the structure of a satellite just so it can survive the launch. And once you start assembling things in space, that all goes away. Now you can build much more efficient structures up there that don't need to handle multiple Gs. They live in free fall. So the general message, and this was not just from Made in Space,

but it was from Airbus and it was from SSL and it was from Orbital ATK. Everybody's saying and it was from Orbital ATK. Everybody is saying, look, the age of assembly is upon us and it's going to completely change the world. Now it's basically going to be, we're going to launch stuff, materials into space and then we're going to build stuff in space. That's the future and it's not our future, it's the near future.

And the elephant in the room that was not discussed, and there was no reason for them to discuss it, because there was no reason to want to piss NASA off, was that this completely obviates the need for SLS. There's really no, you know, this is how you defeat, I don't remember, somewhere, some recent conference, somebody was talking about the tyranny of the fairing. You know, and people say, well, we need 10-meter fairings or whatever.

You know, if you're actually assembling things in orbit, no, you don't. But the one question that I asked from the audience in the context of all this, because it wasn't really discussed, was, okay, guys, so we see we can build trusses, we can build panels, we can do all kinds of structure, but can we do pressure vessels? Have you thought about how you do large pressure vessels? Because that's the thing. Yeah, that's the limiting factor right now.

Yeah, that's... In fact, even for optics, we don't have the tyranny of the fairing anymore because now they're coming out with these concepts for actually constructing and design and tweaking large

collectors on orbit. So even that doesn't require it. And I suspect that Webb, hopefully it will succeed given how much money we're spending on it, but I think that was the first and probably last

origami satellite. I think in the future they're not going to try how do we unfold stuff? Because they've been doing that for decades. How do we make something big that fits in the fairing?

It's always been, as with Galileo, we had the failure of the high-gain antenna because it got shipped back and forth across the country because they didn't know which launch it was going to go up, so many times it lost the graphite lubricant on it, so

when it deployed at Jupiter, it didn't fully deploy, and then a nice side effect of that was they came up with all kinds of new data compression algorithms. So they ended up getting almost as much back as they expected, even though they didn't have that much lower bandwidth. But things like that, we're not going to figure out clever ways of getting things to fold up inside the fairing and then unfurl it when we get into space. We're just going to get up into space. And in this case, the future would be, you know,

instead of sending it all the way out to L2, Earth-Sun L2, not Earth-Moon, you know, millions of miles away, and then hoping that it opens correctly, which is basically the plan for Webb. It's going to be, we send stuff into space, we build stuff in space, we check it out in low Earth orbit, and then we send it on its way, maybe with a low-thrust system. So was there any interesting answer to the pressure vessel question?

No, none of them had been thinking about it except maybe Andrew. Interesting. And that's one reason I was kind of disappointed that firmamentum hadn't shown up, because I think they have been thinking about that. So I guess that's one reason I was kind of disappointed that firmamentum hadn't shown up, because I think they have been thinking about that. So I guess that's a coming attraction. How are they going to do pressure vessels, both for things like propellant tanks, for liquids, and for something like an old 14.7 psi of atmosphere so people can breathe? the other interesting thing that kind of goes along with what you're saying where you know the the commercial push that we're seeing in space is one by one picking off the rationales that you can come up with for sls and the fairing is probably one of the last big ones and that was fine and

dandy until you know a couple months ago when new glenn was announced and that's got a seven meter fairing and that's the first time in i don't even know how, and that's got a seven meter fairing. And that's the first time in I don't even know how many years that somebody announced a fairing bigger than five meters that they're working on today. And you're starting to see that where, you know, there's companies that are doing it for their own right. They want that big fairing for whatever they have in mind that, you know, that's obviously a rocket built for Blue Origin's own needs, because it's technically oversized for a lot of the needs that the commercial market has today. So it's clearly in the same way that SpaceX has always been building things, that they're building it for

their own needs that they can also serve to someone else. So isn't that kind of, how do you think, how do you square that up with the Blue Origins of the world pushing towards bigger rockets and SpaceX, obviously with some ITS plans world pushing towards bigger rockets and spacex obviously with some its plans pushing towards these monstrosities yeah and in fact i mean new new armstrong presumably would be even bigger right right so yeah there's really going to be no and of course that's at the same time all this is happening sl SLS continues to slip, and the cost continues to increase because slips increase cost because you keep paying people while you're not flying the rocket. So I think it's really important for Falcon Heavy to fly this year.

That's going to be another nail in the coffin of the program. It would be nice to see New Glenn fly as soon as, it'd be nice to see everything happen as soon as everybody says they want to make it happen, right? Yeah, absolutely. 2020 seems to be the year. 2020 seems to be, yeah, when everything's, we're going to have, you know, modules attached at ISS and we're going to have a new rocket flying. ULA is kind of behind that curve,

I assume mostly because they're funding constrained. So it could be that New Glenn is flying with BE-4 before Vulcan is. And of course, I saw actually, I just saw an interesting, there was a piece of space news today that to me was kind of misleading, at least in the headline, that said, you know, loser of the engine competition will lose Air Force funds. Okay, well, I don't think Blue is getting any Air Force funds. Right. They're a roundabout way of getting them from ULA, who put in a little money, but, you know,

that's a pretty strenuous line to draw. Yeah. Because they're comparing direct funding of Aerojet rocket to Aero 1. And that's also an unfair comparison, because if Air Force does pull funding from Aero 1, or even if Air Force pulls funding from the BE-4, the BE-4 is going to continue development. Blue Origin is building that engine,

regardless of what happens outside of itself. Right, and I pointed that out. building that engine regardless of what happens outside of itself. Right. And I pointed that out and said, no, it doesn't matter what... If ULA picks BE-4, AJR is not going to build AR-1. Right. Because it has no rocket. It has no...

Nobody wants AR-1. The only two things I speculated in the past, and one of these is now invalidated by OrbitalATK pushing the stick once again, was that, you know, in the past, they were looking at RD-180 for Antares. And I just guess both of these are now invalidated because the other thing that was on the horizon is potential liquid boosters for SLS, which would have used some sort of engine in that class. And, you know, that doesn't seem to be on the horizon. And if it is, that's 15 years away. So yeah, without that selection of Vulcan, AR-1 has nothing to do.

Yeah, and which always raises the issue, of course, that the SLS is also welfare for orbital ATK because it's not like they're going into mass production on these five-segment boosters when you're only flying whoever knows how few times per decade. So if SLS dies, then there is no market, which I guess is why they're kind of desperately just thinking, well, okay, let's go back to Liberty or whatever to see if we can make use of these five-segment solids. But I think ultimately we're not going to be, well, Atlas aside, or maybe even Vulcan. I forget if Vulcan's going to have solid strap-ons or not.

Yeah, they are. But certainly, Falcon Heavy's not, and I can't imagine anything that Blue Origin is. Yeah, definitely not. So I think also the days of solid rockets, at least for human spaceflight, are probably coming to an end. Something interesting, Adam, as we're talking through this, kind of comes to mind.

I was asking about the different sizes that Blue Origin's pushing the sizes of their fairings up. SpaceX is pushing the size of comes to mind. I was asking about the different sizes that Blue Origin's pushing the sizes of their fairings up. SpaceX is pushing the size of their spacecraft up. The difference really comes down to those two companies in particular. There's others out there as well that say, we're building this thing for our needs. It can also be used for these other things if you want them. Even extend that to the BE-4. We're building this engine for our rocket. It can also be used on that one if you want it. Versus the inverse of that is the space shuttle model or even the SLS model that says, this thing can do everything. Don't you guys want to use it? And kind of that

open-ended look at how many things it could do versus it's built for this task, but you can certainly do these other things if you want. That seems to be the breakdown between these two sides. Yeah, well, the other breakdown between these two sides is that both SLS and Shuttle. Shuttle was, it did have, obviously had some legitimate uses, but I mean, they've pretty much given up on that. Their whole purpose of SLS, despite, you know, when you can see because they're in desperate search

for a mission for it. It was just to preserve the shuttle workforce. In fact, it says that right in the legislation. Yeah. So, it seems to me that at some point it's going to be so obviously

ridiculous to continue that program that it just can't survive. What do you think is that moment, though? It's some combination of, well, obviously, you know, if they're still working on SLS

and they haven't flown it yet, or they haven't flown it with crew on it, and they say, well, the next mission is we're going to send somebody to go visit the Lunar Hilton. You know, at that point, it becomes pretty obviously ridiculous. And, you know, there have been many critiques of the program, and I don't know if just one more would make a difference, but I was just thinking about this the other week, that when you think about it, it just makes your head hurt because it's not just crazy.

It's like fractally nuts. There is no scale at which you can look at that program that it's not completely insane. I mean, you look at taking the reusable engines and throwing them away, You look at taking the reusable engines and throwing them away. Or you look at these, in terms of the production rate and these five-segment solids, they're going to build how many per year? If they want to double the flight rate, they'd have to double the production facilities at Michoud. And how much would that cost? Yeah, you can see how much a dropped LOXstone is causing them panic right now in the program.

Right. Yeah, and their welding issues. And, you know, all of that is fine as long as there is no viable competition, you know, and as long as the jobs stay in place and they keep funneling the money. Oh, and the test stands in Huntsville. Yeah, that was a really rough look for them lately. Yeah, we just saw the IG report that came out that said, we don't see any kind of trade

study here, guys. Why did you do them in Huntsville? And everybody knows why they did them in Huntsville. But, you know, they're not allowed to say that. but, you know, they're not allowed to say that. That was maybe the best, most obvious example of the thing that, you know, a lot of us in the community complain about. But there's always a rationale that you can say, well, nobody's building this thing,

so it's still a unique capability, or nobody's doing this particular, you know, slap as many adjectives on this as you want. But that was such an example, you know, with some of the language used in that report was that when we asked for this documentation, there was no documentation. And it was such a glaring example of the, you know, the Alabama-based, I don't even know what word you want to use there. I use mafia, but yeah, it wasn't like, well, we kind of looked through this and they didn't make a very good case. It was like there was no case. They didn't even try to make a case. If there was any documentation anybody wrote down to say why did we do this, it was because Senator Shelby wanted it. And Mo Brooks, you know, and Russ Edelholt and everybody else. But that's basically why it's in Huntsville,

because the Alabama delegation wanted it in Huntsville. One thing I'm curious about, I'm curious if commercial crew was flying today, if it hadn't been experiencing these year-over-year delays like it has been for the past two, I wonder how much of that would change the score. Because right now you can say, well, yeah, SLS is delayed, but so is commercial crew. So is this program that that person's working on. And you can do that, yeah, but that's delayed too sort of thing, which everybody loves to do from wherever they stand to the other side. But if commercial crew was up and operational and we were flying every few weeks or months

to the space station with astronauts from U.S. soil, do you think that would change the balance at all? Probably some, but not enough. I don't think that by itself would be a tipping point. I think the tipping point, ultimately, if it doesn't happen sooner, I don't see how SLS survives survives maybe even New Glen. Yeah, that's a big old rocket, too. Yeah.

If somebody's operating a big rocket, except it's affordable and it flies often, and it's got a sufficiently large fairing, they'll always say, well, the fairing's not big enough. It has to be 10 meters instead of 7. But I think that's going... And then if Falcon Heavy is flying as well, and maybe if SpaceX figures out how to hammerhead it, and I don't know if they're working on that or if there are aerodynamic issues with that.

And I haven't talked to them about it. But it's just going to become abundantly obvious that there is no purpose to this program. So let's switch topics to the National Space Council, which we keep hearing about all the time, that it's going to happen, it's heading towards the president's desk, we're just waiting on him to sign it. What do we know about it so far?

Who does it look like? Scott Pace seems to be the name coming up as the head of that. That's what we keep hearing. I don't know how solid that is. Yeah. I don't want to make you too sad here, but I was born in the years

in which the previous National Space Council was operating, for how short that was. So as somebody who's never lived in a world with that even happening, and there's a lot of stories about how that fell apart, what would be the ultimate, if this went right, what would be the purpose of it? What would its operation be? And what do you think the outcomes, the best outcomes from that would be?

I'll say that on the proviso that I don't think those are likely outcomes. But I mean, what I'll do is describe the ideal. Yeah, exactly. Why we're doing it. But with the expectation that the ideal didn't happen with the old Space Council and it's unlikely it happened with the new one. didn't happen with the old Space Council and it's unlikely it happened with the new one. But ideally, it was to kind of replace what was the old interagency group for space, which was the idea was you regularly meet with all of the government entities that are associated

with both civil and military. At the time, there wasn't really any, but now it would be also commercial space flight. But even then, the Department of Commerce had an Office of Space. So the Space Council, I think, was put in place to make something more of a...because the Space IAG was sort of an ad hoc kind of a thing, and they wanted to formalize it a little bit more and actually give it a...r rather than just getting people together for a meeting, actually have somebody sort of in charge and sort of trying to, you know, maybe take some strategic administration direction from the vice president himself. that and coordinating the Pentagon. Back then it was the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which reported the Secretary, which the old may be new again if Bridenstine gets his way and will pull it out of the FAA, which I've been advocating for

ever since they put it in there. I never thought it, so I should never have gone into the FAA. So you've got that, and you've got the FCC for the spectrum issues, and you've got the FCC for the spectrum issues and you've got the Department of Commerce and that Department of Commerce could become more of a player I guess if somebody, I doubt if Wilbur Ross is thinking about things like that, but if it wanted to it could play more of a role, particularly in terms of defining new, having – I forget what they call it these days, but it used to be the National Bureau of Standards, but no.

Whatever became of the National Bureau of Standards, maybe it's actually a staff trying to establish some standards for the industry, though industry is starting to do that on their own, which is something else that sort of came out of the Space Tech Expo discussions. What are we doing about standards? Well, we've got a lot we're inheriting from shuttle and station and they're useful, but maybe industry will be coordinating. We're going to not try to

reinvent the wheel. There are all these agencies that have a dog in the space fight from a federal standpoint. The idea is that if we have an actual space council and each agency has a representative on it and they meet regularly and there's some sort of top-down coordination

that maybe we can kind of get the whole federal policy establishment moving in the right direction, in the same direction, whether it's right or not is a separate issue. The State Department would be involved, of course, too, in terms of the treaties and international relations and so on. So that's the idea. We have a top-down space policy that says these are our goals in space. It comes from the White House. In this case, probably from Pence, if anybody. And then the federal government is, in theory, coordinated below it to make sure that that happens.

Okay, so that's the theory. In practice, the government is so large and so dysfunctional, and there are so many, and Congress is going to stick its oar in, as it always does, and the Space Council will say, well, we should do a, what do they call it, the base closure, BRAC. We should do a BRAC for NASA. We need to rationalize the centers. We need to decide which centers we need to keep, which centers we don't need to keep. We need to stop, we need to be more strict about how we decide where engine test stands should be put.

So you can see immediately where the pushbacks are going to come from for stuff like that. Same old battle lines, really. It's tricky to me to envision because even, just take NASA as an example, there is such factions within NASA, the ones that really like commercial cargo and crew, the ones that really like commercial cargo and crew, the ones that really like SLS Orion. NASA can't even get itself together. Not that everyone in any agency should all think of the same thing. That's obviously a horrible idea. But even in NASA policy, there's such battles that adding four or five other agencies into the mix just

seems like total gridlock. And I'm not sure how that really shakes out in any way that's productive. Well, it doesn't make it worse. I'm just saying it's probably not likely to work. I mean, ideally, you always want to try to coordinate federal space policy. And so the idea is, well, maybe it'll be easier if we have some, at least if we're getting together and talking about it and thrashing out the issues. But ultimately, you know, Congress is going to decide where the money goes. And a lot of people have their own parochial interests, and the agency do.

And as you say, even within an agency, even within the five-sided building, even forget about the fact that, you know that dealing with internationals, it's easier to get France and Germany to get along than it is Huntsville and Houston. So you've got the inter-center rivalries. You've got intra-center rivalries. I mean, if I were the astronaut office, I would just be outraged at what's going on. You know, I would have said, why are we wasting so much money on this Orion capsule? We could be flying on Dragon today.

You know, and the only reason is because they think we're too precious to risk lives on because they don't think what we're doing is important. You know, I'm sure there are probably astronauts who think that, you know, but they can't say it out loud because, you know, they have to toe the line as well. But then there's, you know, that is so compromised by certain decisions made within, you know, for political reasons, within the SLS stack, being solid rocket boosters, an escape tower rather than a pusher. Nobody else is working on an escape tower design right now,

especially one that encapsulates the entire capsule. Yeah, but if it wasn't a tractor, it wouldn't look like Apollo. Remember, we're doing Apollo again. Right, right, exactly. That's such an obvious example. Again, between the people that are working on human spacecraft right now, you've got just even between Dragon, Starliner, and New Shepard even, all of them have pushers. None of them have escape towers.

And safety is a top priority, yet let's consider flying crew on the first flight of a rocket that has solids and an escape tower, not these other ones that are flying on launch vehicles that have flown plenty of times before that don't have a single point of failure like an escape tower. There's such obvious politicized decisions going on that sometimes it gets hard to even worry about because the things that I find interesting are the other half of the industry that, like I said with Blue Origin, is going to do these things regardless of what happens.

They have a mission, they're on a mission, and they're working towards that. No matter what, any extra help, that would be great. But, you know, without it, no big deal. We'll keep on our way. Right. And that gets back to what I said about the SLS being an Orion too really practically insane I mean you can't look at it it's hard to find any aspect of any of those programs

that makes any sense it's not like well it's kind of an okay thing but this part doesn't make sense no there's no part there's nothing about it that makes sense that's pretty evident in the deep space gateway whatever you want to call it roadmap plan you know idea that's out there right where they they talk about even gerstenmaier when he was talking about that plan initially said you know when he talked about the deep stage transport which is the ultimate 2030s heading to mars vehicle

he starts talking up how we're doing this big vehicle in one launch because that's what we can do with SLS, disregarding the fact that he spent 20 minutes talking about what they're going to do with secondary payloads on SLS, rather than devoting SLS to a big massive payload. If you want to devote yourself to a big massive payload, do that now. Don't wait 10 years and do these other things with Deep Space Gateway before you get to that. And that's the kind of cognitive dissonance that gets really hard to see through after a while. Yeah. And I don't envy him his job. Definitely not. Yeah, he does such a great job, you know, all the times, but it's so obvious that he has to go out there and put the spin on it as best he can.

It's always interesting, people like that. John Grunsfeld has been making the rounds the last year or so after he retired, and he's finally letting his opinions come out a little bit. And I can't wait to get that from Gerstenmaier, if we ever do get that from Gerstenmaier, because I would just love to sit down and hear what he thinks about these things. I would just love to sit down and hear what he thinks about these things. Do you have any interest in talking about Rocket Lab, Vector, all that, the small launch stuff? Yeah, we should some, but that's an area that I'm not paying a lot of attention to,

so I'm not sure I have much intelligence to say about it. Congratulations to them for getting into space, but not quite into orbit. For a first launch, it looked pretty good from what I could see. I was up at the conference and not paying a lot of attention. Yeah, they were pretty quiet about it otherwise. I guess what I would say is that, yes, we need low-cost launch so people don't have to hitchhike. There's going to be a huge, huge shakeout. Not all of these companies can possibly succeed. So Rocket Lab is sort of in the lead.

But, you know, Virgin Orbit, they're talking about flying this year, which surprised me. Yeah, they tweeted a picture recently of nearly a full vessel, and I was very surprised that they had that much hardware together, you know, because that has been swallowed up under the Virgin Galactic brand for so long. But we didn't hear a lot about it. They broke it out into its own brand. They're using regular rocket engines, which is probably why they're talking about flying this year rather than the other stuff.

Right. In fact, I just talked to Monica Jan yesterday, like one of the last things I did before I left the conference. And she said, hey, come down, check us out in Long Beach. I haven't been there. I've never been to their facility, so I should do that, go see what's going on. But

that's, yeah, I just think that's another segment of the market that certainly these smaller satellites need because they don't want to have to wait for somebody else to go along. But so far, that's been the only way they could afford to get into orbit. So that's going to come along, too. And I hope we get more than one succeed so we have some competition in that market as well.

But other than that, I don't have a lot to... I don't look at these individual companies very carefully and say, well, I think this one has a better chance than that one or whatever. I find it very interesting because of how different, just between Rocket Lab, Vector, and Virgin Orbit, how different their approaches are. They each have something very unique.

They're all about the same size. Virgin Orbit is a little bit bigger payload-wise. But Vector's doing this whole approach where they don't actually have in-the-ground launch infrastructure. They can move it around, so they can go from East Coast to West Coast to Alaska. They even talk about sea launch at one point. You've got Rocket Lab flying with electric turbopumps, which is pretty unique. which is pretty unique, and then Virgin Orbit doing air launch, which, you know, there's been some history of it,

but most of it being Pegasus, which is drastically overpriced. Yeah. Well, the other interesting thing about it is when you're speaking of Alaska is that Alaska is helping Rocket Lab even for their New Zealand launches. You're meaning like they're tracking? Yeah. I did not know that. Yeah, they've been actually, Alaska's been working with them. Alaska's trying to kind of unify, I don't know if that's the right word,

but coordinate a lot of what's going on in the Pacific, including out of Barking Sands and maybe in talking to Japan and so on, because they obviously want to get more customers for Kodiak, because they have some unique capabilities up there, particularly for these small-sat launches. If they want to go sun-sink, Kodiak is the best place to go from in the U.S. You get significant benefit if you have to go retrograde, being at higher latitude. And you don't have to deal with things like SpaceX dealt with at Vandenberg in the early days when they had, what was it, a Titan IV out on the launch pad for two whole months that SpaceX couldn't even get access to their pad while it was out there? Right.

So there's benefits from that as well. Yeah, because Kodiak will let you just lease your own area and facility, and you're not going to have those kinds of conflicts where the Pentagon can shove you aside. I'm curious about how that Georgia spaceport is going to work out.

I don't really get the rationale behind it. I haven't spent too much time looking into it, but hearing what Alaska's trying to do and having, they're up and operating, but they're having problems even getting the interest for something that is probably a more useful orbit than whatever Georgia would be, 30 degrees. It's curious to me.

Yeah, well, I'm not plugged into that, but, uh, I guess, you know, you should talk to Laura Forsyth. Yeah. I've actually talked to her about coming on and talking about it, but they're, they're finalizing the last bits of the environmental reports, which I guess is a, one of the last big milestones hit for them before they can actually say that it's going to happen. Even though Vector seems to be planning to launch out of there, I don't know. Everything's weird in the spaceport world.

Yeah. Not helped by the waffling of Spaceport America. Right. And there are more spaceports. Again, there's going to be a shakeout there, too. And then right now, they can support or are needed to support the existing traffic. And I don't know. It's going to have to grow.

The industry is going to have to grow a whole lot before they can start using all these spaceports. Yeah, and because even, you know, you've got like wallops, which sends something to ISS every once in a while, but it's not very useful otherwise. Yeah, and again, that's partly congressional. You know, I think it always got a lot of support from Mikulski. Yeah. And we'll see if that continues or not

even though it's in Virginia but a lot of people work there probably or Maryland people one other topic you might find interesting because I just read Alex McDonald's

book, new book I don't know if you're familiar with it or not I am not it's called The Long Space Age book, new book. I don't know if you're familiar with it or not. I am not. It's called The Long Space Age. And it's, he went back, I don't know if you know who Alex is, but he's a historian and economist at NASA.

He's based out of JPL and Ames. But he went back and looked at the history of space science in the United States going back to the founding. And all through the late 18th and 19th centuries, the vast majority of observatories were privately funded. And if you look at some of them, they were, and this is all the way up through 1948 when Palomar first saw starlight. That was funded by the Carnegie and the Rockefeller Foundations. But his point, and a point I've been making as well,

is that the war and the Cold War created this anomalous situation where the government was funding this big space science. In addition, all the other stuff was doing the missiles and nuclear and Apollo and all that stuff. So people kind of come to think of, oh, well, if we want to send a mission to Enceladus, well, obviously NASA's going to have to do that. And Alex doesn't make this point,

but the point he does make is that this is all about signaling. Apollo was signaling that we had better space technology than the Russians, the Soviets. In fact, there was a space race between the U.S. and Russia in the early 19th century. They had a huge telescope, and John Quincy Adams wanted to get Congress to fund one that would be bigger than theirs, and they refused to do it because they didn't think it was a federal responsibility. But some of these telescopes and equivalent dollars, he went back and did an analysis that there was the equivalent of a billion dollars

put in by philanthropy for some of these observatories at Yerkes and Mount Wilson, and later in Palomar and Lick, you know, these are all privately funded. So his point is that now that we're kind of getting launch costs down and the Cold War has been over for 30 years, almost 30 years, and we're kind of been running on inertia from Apollo for all these years. Well, we're getting back to a time when we're going to see private philanthropy doing space science again. And in fact, Yuri Milner wants to build a starship, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so my thesis, and in fact, I just wrote a review of the book for Reason, which will be in the next issue, print issue of Reason. And I'm working on a much longer essay for the New Atlantis on the same topic, that the future of space science is not NASA, it's not government, it's probably people like Red Dragon is a perfect example. That's what's going to happen. If you agree NASA is doing space science, it might be hitching rides with other people.

if that's what's going to happen. If you agree NASA's doing space science, it might be hitching rides with other people. Because I think NASA's going to put some instruments on Elon's 2022 Dragon mission in exchange for helping him figure out all the details of how to get there. Because NASA obviously has some useful knowledge that SpaceX can draw on.

But this is Elon's Mars mission. And vice versa with NASA partnering on supersonic retropulsion. I think that alone, the research that they're getting out of Falcon 9 entries save NASA, I don't even want to guess at how many years collectively, not having to go through the whole process of getting a project funded to do that research, actually carrying it out. That alone is going to pay for, you know, if you want to look at it that way, it kind of pays down some of that technical knowledge that NASA has to build up to do some sort of mission at Mars if they're going to do that in the future.

Right. And Bezos wants to have his blue moon. Right. Yeah, he's been weird about that, though, saying that we'll do this with government money. That's felt a little weird to me because it's so counter to what they have said most times, which was, we're going to do this. Who wants to come along for the ride? This has been a lot like, we would like to do this program in partnership with NASA. I don't know if that's just a lobbying ploy or if they're earnest about it. I kind of feel like it's a lobbying ploy, though. Well, no, I think everybody would like to do things with other people's money as long as there aren't too many strings attached. That's true. I don't know why

you would choose that if you have the net worth that Bezos does, that he's willing to sell a billion dollars of Amazon stock a year and invest it into Blue Origin. Well, basically, I just think he's saying, hey, NASA, you want to buy services from us? We'll sell them to you. Right. That's how I view it. And just don't give us any of those strings that you usually attach. Right, right.

So that was how I interpreted that. But my point is that, you know, like John Morris, I'm not familiar with the Boley-Gole Institute, but John Morris is setting up a new institute specifically to find philanthropists to fund space science. It's a very interesting new era because in every way you feel this tide coming on, that there's private landers heading out to different bodies. I'm curious when we'll hear the first private space telescope that will go up,

because you assume that has to happen at some point, right? That's obviously a much more expensive proposition than others, but in this same vein, that's a project that has to be somewhere on the horizon. Right. And that might be one of the things that Bold Eagle would fund. Well, in fact, they tried to fund that. They had a failed Kickstarter last fall. I don't know if you remember, but there was a Kickstarter for, I think they called it Blue Planet.

That was the one that was going to directly image an exoplanet? Yes. They wanted to build something to look at Alpha Centauri. And they had a million-dollar goal, and they only raised half a million. Well, to me, that says, okay, do it again, but make half a million the goal. Right. If everybody kicked in the first time, why don't you kick in again, and maybe you'll get more. And it was kind of an experiment to see

how much can we raise for something like that. And of course, you're not going to build a telescope for that amount of money. It was more for, you know, how do we do a preliminary design? Here it was, Project Blue is what it was. Project Blue, yeah, that was it. And BOLIGO was affiliated with that. They didn't necessarily encourage it because they and boldly go was was affiliated that with that they

didn't necessarily encourage it because they didn't think it was going to work but they said hey it was just some people up in silicon valley apparently wanted to try it i said you know i guess nothing to lose so try it so it was a it was a you know an experiment and then and they learned from it because they learned okay we can raise half a million but we can't raise a million you know now maybe a year from now they could raise a million. But the fact that they could raise half a million I thought was pretty interesting. And that was something that Planetary Resources even tried to do a few years ago. I think they lost a piece of hardware on one of the

CRS missions, I think it was. Or not CRS missions. Was it one of the Antares flight or something? They lost a missions. Was it one of the Antares flight? Or something. They lost a piece of hardware in one of those two explosions. But they did some sort of crowdfunding to get an initial version of their telescope up that would search for asteroids for them to go out and prospect. Right.

So all this stuff is happening. I think the real point is that since the Cold War, as I said, it was all about signaling. You know, we were signaling that we were better than the Soviets. And we continue to signal that, you know, we're the leaders in space. And we can kind of pretend that as long as, even if we're not flying anything, as long as we have a giant rocket under construction. But at some point, it's going to look kind of pathetic when we're seeing hundreds of private commercial flights a year, and there's commercial space stations, and there's probably the commercial lunar base.

And that's all going to happen long before they get any kind of cadence up on SLS. And again, the point McDonnell made was that they were signaling in the 19th century, too, with all the private philanthropists. You know, Yerkes funded Yerkes Observatory because he was trying to rehabilitate his reputation from having monopolized the streetcars in Chicago.

Sounds very Bill Gates-esque. Yeah. And so we're going to see that kind of, and we're seeing it now with, you know, not necessarily with Elon and Bezos. They're just kind of true believers in what they're doing. But Paul Allen, you know, is an example. You know, I just don't understand straddle launch. Yeah, I agree with you on that. I just don't understand straddle launch. Yeah, I agree with you on that.

Oh, by the way, one thing we didn't talk about with Virgin Orbit, they have one advantage that the others don't have, and it's the same one that straddle launch has. It's not clear how important it is, but because they're air-launched, they can do single orbit rendezvous. And I don't know how many of the CubeSats care about that, but it's a useful capability. Yeah, I haven't really considered that. Because I think that's the reason for straddle launch. I think they want a system that can

do single orbit rendezvous. What I don't get about straddle launch is why they chose Pegasus. I guess because everyone else had bailed out over the years you know they were going to work with spacex they were going to work with that right they couldn't find anything else yeah that's that's uh between the the new plane build and pegasus i'm not sure how that's going to compete with let's use an old 747 that we got from other other company and uh it's curious. Yeah, I don't know. Well, you're familiar with,

Gary Hudson has a theory that the straddle launch is the Glomar Explorer of space. The good thing with all of this, though, is that you can sense that it's starting to propel itself forward and that it doesn't have to, you know, these things are happening because people want to, because people care enough to put their own effort and resources into.

And they're not waiting to be prompted by a big government program or some other effort that springs up different companies like this. And that's, you know, even I want to get too far off into the weeds with XS1, but I'm disappointed in that decision because it doesn't do anything to widen the industry at all. It doesn't bring in new players to develop something. It kind of just repositions things that we currently have rather than saying like, hey, Mastin and XCore, you seem like interesting companies doing interesting things. You know, because Boeing was awarded $146 million for XS1. That's not much to Boeing, but to Mastin and XCOR, that's a huge amount of money. So I'm encouraged by seeing the companies we've talked about on this that are doing these things in the industry today. And hopefully in the next couple of years, we see everyone that you talk to at Space Tech Expo actually get hardware up and flying and operating on a commercial level, not just some sort of subsidized space on the ISS

like Made in Space has today. Not that there's something wrong with that. Take that opportunity that you have there. But once we see that break out of that model of national laboratory-type stuff, that is another tipping point, I think, that we should be excitedly looking forward to. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess my view of X-S1, and I haven't been paying a lot of attention to it, but I agree with him. It would have been nice to see Amaston get that. It's almost like a consolation prize for Boeing for the X-33 decision. It's a long time coming, though. Yeah.

Yeah, only 20 years or so. And everybody who worked that proposal, I'm sure is retired, uh, you know, back when it was Rockwell. But, but I mean, cause it looks, looks very money. I think they just kind of, you know, dusted off the old proposal and said, here it is. That seems to be working everywhere else in the industry to be fair. Yeah. And, uh, so I don't, I don't hold out. Uh, I, you know. I haven't talked to Jess about it in terms of what the rationale was for that. But I don't see the industry as succeeding or failing based on XS1. Yeah, exactly. that Jess has been wanting to see happen for 30 years is finally happening. And DARPA may not be directing it, but it's happening.

So he's getting the technologies he wants ultimately anyway. That's good stuff. All right, Rand, you can find his book over at Amazon. Safe is not an option. Do you want to talk about that for a minute to let everyone know who may not have read it yet? Sure. It's basically the theme of the book is we're not killing enough people in space. That's how I always pitch it. And I just want to mention, as somebody who's read the book,

I went over it last week again, there's a reaction that people out there are going to have to that, that I know you love, and that's part of the thing. But if that put you off, you need to give the book a chance because reading it, I think, reading it in light of the EM1 crew or uncrew decision was pretty entertaining for me because I think that is such a pertinent example of the things that you talk about early on in the book, which was, you know, risk can be taken, but it needs to be balanced with reward. And if there's no reward, why are you taking that risk? Or conversely, if there's a ton of reward, take the risk. Right. And I should expand on that because that was, you know, I've heard people say, when I criticized putting crew on EM1, they say, well, USA National should be taking more risk.

And I say, no, it's not about whether we should be taking risk or whether we shouldn't be taking risk. There is no not taking risk. The question is, is the risk balanced by the reward? You know, flying commercial crew today on Dragon 2 would be worth the risk because it would be ending our dependence on the Russians. It would be allowing us to double the amount of work being done on space station by adding a crew member. You know, because most people on ISS are just keeping ISS running. We're getting about one, you know, person year per year of actual research out of the six crew that are on station.

So if you added one person, you would essentially double the productivity of the station. That's something that's worth doing. So it's worth taking the risk to end our dependence on the Russians and stop shipping money to Putin and get more productivity out of the space station. It's not worth the risk to put...and it's even more risk, it's kind of crazy to me, to put somebody up on the very first flight of a rocket that's never flown. This is even crazier than Apollo 8, because at least on Apollo 8, Saturn had flown and had a rough ride, but it had flown.

And now they're proposing the very, very first flight, put crew on it for no purpose, except to recreate Apollo 8 half a century later. That just seems, that's a stunt. That's a political stunt in order to preserve the program. Yeah, so I think in light of that, though, if any of you out there have not read Rand's book, head over. Amazon is the best place to buy it. Where would you like them to go for that? Amazon's fine, but if you want, and it's available on Kindle as well. It's also available at Google Play. It's available at Barnes & Noble if you want, and it's available on Kindle as well. It's also available at Google Play.

It's available at Barnes & Noble if you have a Nook. But to expand on what I said, the reason I say we're not killing enough people's space is because if I told you nobody died on the highways last year, what would you think? I would think you're lying to me, number one. Either that or I would think they outlawed driving. They outlawed cars.

My point is I want to be doing so much stuff in space that it's inevitable that some people are going to die. And the reason people aren't dying in space is because we aren't doing anything. I don't think I can go out any better way than that. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been a pleasure talking with you.

Okay. So that's it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you've got any thoughts on anything we talked about today, feel free to send them in to me. Anthony at MainEngineCutoff.com is the email address where you can send your thoughts. Thank you again to all the supporters over on Patreon at Patreon.com is the email address where you can send your thoughts thank you again to all the supporters over on patreon at patreon.com slash miko including the 12 executive producers once

again pat matt george brad ryan laszlo jameson guinevere and four others you made this show possible thank you so much for your support week in and week out and as always head over to twitter at we have miko to follow along with what i'm doing throughout the week what i'm writing what i'm thinking about and keep up with me between shows thank you for listening and i will talk to you next week