Main Engine Cut Off - T+95: September Q&A

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

This month, I take on questions about BE-4 and Vulcan, small launch, BFR, and human spaceflight. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, and eight anonymous—and 187 other supporters on Patreon. United Launch Alliance Building Rocket of the Future with Industry-Leading Strategic Partnerships EELV LSA Selection “Sometime in August” - Main Engine Cut Off U.K. selects Scottish spaceport site - SpaceNews.com Government Has Environmental Concerns About Nova Scotia Launch Site - Parabolic Arc Ursa Major Technologies OneWeb, treading water awaiting debt financing, now a source of industry concern - Space Intel Report BFR passing the Moon | Official SpaceX Photos | Flickr Gamma Radiation Protection and Radiation Shield | StemRad Commander Leads Japanese, Russian Spaceship Preps and BEAM Checks - Space Station Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

it's question time y'all it's time of the month where we go through some q a that you have sent in this is managing cutoff i am anthony colang Let's dive in. We got a ton of questions this month. You really stepped up to the plate out there. So much so that I don't actually think I'm going to be able to get to all of them on this show, but I've got them all saved so we will get back sending them in. We've got this one now for September. End of October will be another one of these. So if you think of follow-up questions to these or any questions throughout the month, send them in to me, anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com or tweet at wehavemiko and I will put it in the show doc to answer. So we're going to start off talking about BE4, the big news of the week. You might think that I would have a big show this week on BE4 and Vulcan. I thought I would too. I talked about it on headlines. If you're a headline subscriber, you heard some of my initial take on there. And I assumed that this weekend I would be

doing a big show on BE4, but I was thinking about it a lot more, and I don't know if there's a lot of ground to cover yet in the wake of the announcement before the next part of the story is really complete. We are a handful of weeks out from the second launch service agreement announcement from the U.S. Air Force for the EELV program. That is the big thing that we've been waiting for this part of the year. It was supposed to come in July, then August and September. The latest that I've heard is we're about two weeks away from hearing this announcement. And I think that will be the point at which I have a lot to analyze. I've talked a lot about BE-4, a lot about Vulcan in the past year or two. So I'll give some quick thoughts because I did get a lot of questions about BE-4 and Vulcan. But I think the meat of this is really

going to have to wait to see how that round of contracting shakes out from the US Air Force. I think we'll see a lot more of the strategy play out once we see what the lay of the land is when we get there, because that is a huge, huge component for the future of Vulcan. So my initial take, I am pleased that ULA chose BE4 for Vulcan. I think it was the best option, but it's the best option among bad options. ULA has really put themselves in a weird situation. And if you've listened to the show for a while, I was very optimistic two years ago, a year and a half ago. But I felt like ULA started to lose some momentum on the Vulcan ground. And I started to get less optimistic the longer it took them to announce the selection, the longer it took them to really formalize plans.

But they made some good moves in the past year, you know, upgrading Centaur to Centaur V that will fly on Vulcan, which pulls forward a lot of what Aces was going to do into a current revision of this launch vehicle. They finally did choose BE-4. The one misstep that I thought was that they chose RL-10 as opposed to one of the competitors. So a mixed bag over the last year with regards to Vulcan, but I really just think they're in a

tough spot. The more serious that we see Blue Origin getting, the closer to the launch pad that all these vehicles get, they are just increasingly in an awkward spot. It's a good sign that they say they're still on target for mid-2020. In the wake of the announcement, I was tweeting surprise that they still said mid-2020, which I got a lot of response like, hey, that's what Tory Bruno said the beginning of the year. Why are you surprised? I had assumed that his statements and ULA's statements in general were, this is the most recent thing that we told you, so we're going to keep saying that until we have an update sometime around the down select. To have the down select come out and still be on target for that is a good sign for Vulcan, because they need to be flying as soon as possible. It's

a great sign for Blue Origin, that means BE4 is going to be flight ready by mid-2020, which I would put a lot of stock in that saying that New Glenn is still on target for a 2020 launch. Now, strategically, as I said, we're going to wait for the LSA, the Launch Service Agreement announcement to really dissect strategy and how Vulcan can compete with SpaceX, with Blue Origin, with New Glenn. But I will say this, the next thing we need to see from ULA is any sort of launch contract, any sort of customer signing on to Vulcan. We need to see Vulcan start to land some of these deals. We've already seen, you know, as internal as they may have been, Ariane 6 has a couple of these deals. We've already seen, as internal as they may have been, Arianne 6 has a couple of launches booked. New Glenn obviously has seven or eight on contract at this point.

So these manifests are starting to fill up in the 2020s. And I need to see something from Vulcan if ULA wants to provide any services to the commercial market, because maybe they don't, maybe they want to double down on military launch. And I think I had a show, you know, maybe a month or two ago, my timeline's totally off. It was probably a couple of months ago at this point, but a show talking about the fact that there may be viability in a military focused, national security focused launcher. If that's what they want to do, then we'll see how that strategy plays out with the Air Force Awards. But if they want to do, then we'll see how that strategy plays out with the Air Force Awards. But if they want to provide services to the commercial market, we need to be

watching for that. We need to see some action there. They're obviously going to need to fly something on the demo mission. I think we're all expecting it to be Toro Bruno's car. But if it's another thing that's willing to put themselves on the first launch of a Vulcan, that's cool too, but we need to see those contracts starting to firm up if that's going to be something that ULA is serious about. So all in all, a really good day for Blue Origin, a really good day for Vulcan, for ULA, an even better day for New Glenn, and a great day for Rocket Nerds all around who are finally hearing the official announcement. And I think this is only the first part of the story. I'm very excited for, you know,

a week or two from now when we can talk about the LSA awards. I hope that's when it comes. I hope it's not delayed beyond that. On that topic, we got a question from Ken. Looking forward to the EELV2 announcement, who are your final bets for the three winners? This is a tricky one because I don't know exactly what the structure is going to be, if there's going to be three winners. I don't know that. I don't know if it's cut and dry that we know the makeup of the announcement, let alone the companies, which I'll get into in a second on my bets. But, you know, it's not unlikely that we will see some sort of mix of agreements where certain companies get funding for the launch vehicle, certain companies get funding for a component of a future launch vehicle,

and certain companies get funding for a component of a very, very future launch vehicle. In the past, SpaceX has gotten funding for vertical integration work. That has yet to happen. I don't know what the current target is there for vertical integration, but I don't expect to see them get more money for that. They already have money for that.

The other thing that SpaceX could get is some funding for bigger fairings, for space vehicles that can't fly on Falcon family because of those small fairings that currently have to fly on Delta 4 Heavy or even longer Atlas 5 variants. They could get money for longer fairings. That's something that's very possible in this announcement. So I would say as far as placing bets, I think Vulcan is a lock. I think New Glenn is a lock. I would not be shocked to see Omega land some sort of development deal. And I think SpaceX might get some piece of a contract, whether that's the fairings or a

follow-on Raptor contract to follow up with the previous Air Force contract they got for Raptor. I would bet we see that sort of makeup. Vulcan, New Glenn. I'm on the side, I'm probably like 70-30 that Omega will get something. And then I'm probably 100% certain that SpaceX will get something, but a much, much smaller contract than we've seen, than would be seen with like a New Glenn contract or a Vulcan contract or something like that. So timestamp this so you can come back and tell me that I got it right or wrong in a couple of weeks. I will happily be wrong if we do finally hear the announcement in a couple of weeks. I'll be more than happy to be wrong on this bet. All right, we got a couple of small launch questions that I thought would be

fun to tackle. Starting off with a question from Chris with a very succinct question. WTF is up with the British spaceport all the way up there. Surely that's not efficient. And you are right, Chris, that is not efficient if what you're going for is a low inclination launch. If you're trying to launch close to the equator, you want to be as low as possible to the equator. You want to be the lowest latitude that you could possibly be to get your launch off if you want maximum efficiency. But if you're trying to go to a polar orbit of some sort, whether that's pure polar or sun-synchronous orbit, anything that goes much higher inclination, even higher inclination orbits that we see with a lot of weather satellites that are

in the 60s or something like that, which cover most of the human population on Earth, higher inclination orbits, the higher up on the Earth is better because you are spinning less speedy around the Earth, right? The closer to the equator you get, the faster you're moving horizontally. The closer to the poles you get, the slower you're spinning. And that's helpful because you want as little horizontal velocity as possible

to launch to polar orbits. The other thing this British spaceport has going for it all the way up in the north of the British Isles is that they have a pretty large expanse of uninhabited area so that they can drop rocket stages and not land them in small towns like China likes to do. So there's a lot of room up there in the Arctic and so on where they can drop rocket stages no problem to get to those polar orbits. So what you would see is a trajectory that goes basically due north out of the British Isles and over the poles and into whichever orbit you're trying to get to. But for those kinds of orbits, which are very popular right now, especially for

a lot of these small satellite constellations like Planet and things like that, that is a popular place to be. So for a small launch vehicle launch site, it is not a bad spot to be. So that is why it is stuck all the way up that far. But a great question that I think is important to cover when you're considering these other spaceports. Sort of related to that, we got a question from Law who said, I'm really interested in some of the smaller space programs out there, public and private, and pulling hard for Rocket Lab and others in that emerging space to be successful. But I'm also curious about some of these less publicized efforts out there. For example, how is the Brazilian-German VLM project coming? Do you think we'll see a launch

from Israel, Iran, or North Korea anytime soon? Are there any countries that you might expect to gain initial indigenous orbital capability in the next couple of years and if not who in your opinion is closest uh vlm i'll say off the bat i have heard almost nothing out of that they were originally talking up a first launch test launch of some sort sub orbital or otherwise i'm not sure uh this year and i have heard zip on that um same goes for the whole uh i think it was called Cyclone. That was going to be a launch vehicle that would operate out of Canada. Have heard very little on that other than maybe it's off again. There was some, I'm Googling right now as you can probably hear, I think there was some political bickering of some sort about having that spaceport. So I think that's on hold for the time being.

Indigenous orbital capability. I would say, number one, what we just covered, British spaceport. That seems to be the closest to a new operating spaceport that doesn't exist today. The Nova Scotia spaceport that I talked about with Canada, same deal. That would be a very interesting one it's got a nice trajectory down south into the Atlantic which would make it very very useful beyond that there is not too much in the way of momentum in this regard you know it's very hard to know what's going on in North Korea obviously they are having some political

issues with rocket launches if you might have heard. The other thing that is possible and has been talked about is a launch site off the coast of Portugal, Spain, that area. There's a bunch of islands out there that would be a good spot to launch out of. And again, you would be servicing mostly, if not solely, polar orbits because you obviously can't launch east over all of Europe. So that's one thing. Italy has been talking up a lot of ideas on how to get some sort of launch vehicle location set up. I don't know what that means really. I think they're mostly thinking about something like an air launch. They've obviously talked about Virgin Galactic quite a bit, but that seems like they would be threading a real needle there.

So I think these are such long lead time projects that it's very hard to be surprised by any new spaceports. So I think your best bets are a British spaceport, a Canadian spaceport, and then the curveball would be some spaceport off the coast of Portugal. Finishing up our small launch segment of the show, Lars asks, Ursa Major, can they really make it as solely a rocket engine provider?

This is an interesting one. Ursa Major is kind of curious. I haven't talked about them much, but their thing is that they want to build rocket engines for small launch vehicles. Right now, Generation Orbit, and I think it's ABL. I don't know if that's ABL or Able Space Systems are signed up to use their engines. They're currently making an engine called Hadley, which would be the main engine on Generation Orbit's vehicle and then for ABL or Able however you pronounce it that would be the upper stage engine they would have these two Ripley engines as their first stage engines so the idea is to be essentially Aerojet Rocketdyne but for small launch and I think that is a telling statement because, yes, it could work for a little while. For new startups out there who want to get a jump and get a leg up early, not have to go

through all those years of engine development, it's an attractive option, and I think it can work for a while, and Ursa Major could make a bunch of money on it. The problem is that Ursa Major would make a bunch of money on it, and problem is, is that Ursa Major would make a bunch of money on it, and eventually that runs out, that catches up to you. Launch vehicles right now are so tightly integrated, they have to be so streamlined with such slim margins that the engine is always intrinsically very tightly coupled with the rest of the launch system.

You know, it's not that easy, as we've seen from ULA, to switch out an engine on a launch vehicle. In the past, we've seen engine upgrades happen on airplanes, for example. The B-52 has had a bunch of different engines right now. They're talking about putting some new ones inside of the airframes today. And that's a big project, but it's not a ground up redesign, like we're seeing with ULA. You know, even the AR-1 would have been a massive change. As much as Aerojet Rocketdyne says it's a drop in replacement, that would have been a big change. And that's why they didn't go with that. Because if it was a small change, they probably would

have went with it. And on the economic front, you know, the launch service provider, every single launch is paying a little cut to the engine provider because the engine provider is selling the engines for profit, which means that there is margin to be trimmed off there from the launch vehicle provider's side. And that's something that's always going to be one of the first targets when you need to cut costs. So it's an attractive option for an early jump start, and that's probably why Ursa Major is going to do okay, because there's so many upstarts in the small launch area that a couple of them will sign on to use their engines, but I don't think it's a very great long-term strategy,

just seeing the way that this market has went onto the larger rocket engine front in the past five, ten years. It worked great for a couple of decades, and it does run out eventually. So I think it's fine in the short term. I think it's sketchy in the medium term, and I think it's a bad strategy long term. So I think that's where it's at. On the topic of engines, though this isn't really small launch, so we're jumping a little here. We'll have a little engine interlude. We had what is probably the champion question of Miko Q&A so far. This came out of the off-nominal Discord from Chase. He said, I have a very childish question.

Do Methalox engines smell? And you and I both know what he's getting at here. What he wanted to ask was, do BE-4s and Raptor engine firings, do they smell like farts? Because that's what he was going for here. And it's a very curious question. The commercially available natural gas that you might buy, natural gas comes to your house or any other kind of fuel that you would buy, has that odorant in it so that you know if it's leaking. I don't know what the case is here. I don't know if they're buying... The difference is that SpaceX always calls it methane. Blue Origin always calls it

liquid natural gas. I don't know if they literally mean they're just going to buy regular commercial grade liquid natural gas, or if they're just using that term so people understand what it's going for and it's some sort of marketing situation here. But that'll be the key. So if you work at either SpaceX or Blue Origin and you have smelled a Raptor or BE-4, does it smell like a fart? Me and Chase need this answer. So please, please email me, anthonyatmanagingheadoff.com. This is a very important question. Moving on. We got a question from John about mega constellations. What's your read on the mega constellations right now? SpaceX, Starlink, and OneWeb. How are things going for

them? Which way is the wind blowing? This is a very questionable one. There has been a ton of rumors lately about both OneWeb and Starlink. There's been rumors swirling that Starlink satellites have failed in orbit. SpaceX has said very little about them. They obviously have never been very vocal about Starlink. They barely told anyone they were launching them before they actually did. So I don't know if I actually believe that. I think that might be a little bit linked to what's going on on the OneWeb side of the world

not to get too conspiratorial but OneWeb has been having major problems from the sounds of it there's been very little news in the last two years since they got all that investment they've had very little financing talk in the last year or two they've had four CEOs in the last four years.

Just recently at World Satellite Business Week, the CEO, the new CEO, I guess now the ex-CEO, was very dodgy about questions. There's a lot of rumors that their satellite cost has went up nearly double what they were planning, and that's putting into question a lot of their plans. There's a lot of talk that they're running into all sorts of other issues. We haven't heard much on them opening their factory down in Florida, haven't seen much in the way of their satellites rolling off the production line over in France, that initial run of 10 satellites that's supposed to go up later this year on a Soyuz, or at least a couple of them are. So there's a lot of smoke around OneWeb right now. And I'm trying to read the tea leaves. There's not a lot of confirmed info. It's starting to seem like something might be on fire there. And that's not super great. There was also, you know, a couple months back, we were talking about all

that weird Greg Weiler stuff where he had another company that was also trying to finagle in this market. And there was some really weird vibes coming out of that. So I'm not sure what to make of that aspect of this all. But OneWeb doesn't seem to be doing super great right now. So maybe this is all planted stories from somebody else. And later this year, we'll see them ship some satellites down to Kourou and they will get launched. It's looking tough right now, though, because you would expect to hear a lot more coming out of either of these. But it's been radio silence, which makes us fill in the gaps with our imagination. And that's not good. So overall, skeptical right now. It seems like both are in that phase where they are moving from concept to development, and maybe they're both having a little bit more trouble than they were expecting. But I don't know what to make of all of the smoke that I'm seeing in this regard. We got a bunch of BFR questions, BFR follow-up, Dear Moon follow-up. Starting out with one from Nekara.

I'd love to hear what you think about the decision to decrease development risk on BFR by using only sea-level Raptor engines on the entire vehicle for this initial iteration. This was one of the most interesting things coming out of the most recent announcement by SpaceX is that even this ship, the BFS as it is, has moved to sea level Raptors, and seven of them in this case. And this is a really interesting change, one that gives me a lot of confidence in this current design, because there was a lot of weirdness around the vacuum engines before on BFS. They had these four giant vacuum engines that would use, they wouldn't even gimbal, they would use differential thrust to control, which is fine.

But there was also the fact that the thrust to weight ratio was well under one if they were to launch the BFS by itself, fully fueled, which is not necessarily a problem, but definitely limits escape, recovery, all sorts of different options like that, landing with heavy loads. So shifting to sea level Raptors not only decreases development risk, as Nikara said, which they only have to develop the one sea level version for now they can test that one version they have a lot of data to go off of with a sea level raptor for both stages yada yada it's a lot of good benefits that come with that they also have options for something like lucas est is the bfs going to have a launch escape system now it is plausible that they could use those seven engines at any point during launch to boost away from a BFR if they were having problems. There's a lot of question marks still there because I don't know all the numbers and whatnot, but it's a lot more plausible now than it was with the vacuum engines in there. does bring up some interesting ideas about abort options or early recovery, early return,

landing with heavy payloads, significantly higher engine out capability on the ship portion, which is a pretty big deal both here at Earth but also at Mars. So across the board, it's better development tasks, better development timelines, more redundancy, safer operation in a lot of different scenarios, a lot of different off-nominal scenarios. So I think across the board, it's a good decision for SpaceX, and it puts a lot more hope in the BFS design at this point in time than I had last year when it was that four sea-level Raptor engines and two, or two sea-level and four vacuum Raptor engines. That always felt like an awkward fit to me. This looks a lot more accurate

and looks a lot more like the new Glenn engine configuration. So apparently the future is a cluster of seven methane-powered engines that may or may not smell like farts. Ryan had a question for us. I don't know who else is. It's just me. Recent data from, I believe it was an ExoMars transit. I forget exactly what that story was,

but I did hear this recently. It sounded like radiation data is not really not as bad as it sometimes gets sold to be, provided you have sufficient shielding. Love to know if you think there will be two versions or even three versions of BFS, one for the moon and Mars with radiation shielding, one for cargo and a tanker. Interesting questions there. There's two different questions there. On the radiation shielding front, I admit that I am nowhere close to an expert on

this, and there are always conflicting reports about how bad it is, how bad it is not, what kind of countermeasures you need to take. So it's very hard to understand exactly what's going on there, and I do have a person in mind to go talk to about that, which you may be hearing from soon. And in general, I've been more enthused about some of the developments on the personal shielding front. Like there's these STEM rad belts that are used by, you know, nuclear workers and things like that, that provide a level of personal protection, which I think is an interesting scenario. I think even some of those were flying on Orion or are going to be flying on Orion.

So I think I have more hope in that than a particular vehicle architecture that would provide whole of vehicle protection, especially when you start to consider fancier things like I'm a fan of, of artificial gravity, tethering a couple of BFSS together, spinning them up en route to Mars. When you get into architectures like that, shielding becomes even more of an issue, because then you really can't just load up a bunch of supplies at one part of the ship and use that to block radiation. You really have to start getting a little more fancy with the shielding. So if they can find some sort of personal shielding

that provides enough protection, I think that is a more promising route for the early days here. But as I said, it's a very hard topic to understand exactly how big of a problem it is, exactly how disastrous it is for long-term space flight and things like that. So more data needed,

but I'm encouraged by the developments on the STEM R spaceflight and things like that. So more data needed, but I'm encouraged by the developments on the STEMRAD front and things like that. As far as variants of BFS, I was kind of confused as to the lack of any new cargo variant visualizations. SpaceX did not show any of that. They didn't show any refueling in this version. In a way, last year's BFR update, they had an actual animation of refueling. They didn't show any of that this year. They didn't show any cargo variant. I'm really wondering if they're just trying to nail down exactly what they need out of the human variant first, since that's what they're going to focus on right off the bat? I don't know, man. That's a really good question, and I'm curious to see if they'll release some updated visualizations of cargo sometime in the future. All right,

we got some human spaceflight questions to round out this episode of Q&A. First up from iSpaceshipsFTW. I think it's an I. iSpaceshipsFTW. Space tourism has always been just around the corner for years. Are we there yet? I believe very firmly that Blue Origin will be flying tourists next year. They seem like they're raring to go. Slipping a little. I thought it would be this year, but it sounds a lot like it'll be next year. Virgin Galactic, I don't think we'll ever make it to space unless we redefine space as 80 kilometers. So not there on that front. But at least suborbital tourism is there.

And, you know, Dear Moon is a thing now. It's a project. And I think what's important to remember with Dear Moon is that it was treated in the wake of the announcement. It was treated as if this is the one and only lunar trip that they were going to take with BFS, rather than this is the first one that they've sold. And I think that's an important aspect here. This is not a thing that, if it happens, would be a one-off. Somebody else would buy a flight. Somebody else would charter a flight. SpaceX might even put together a flight and sell individual tickets.

That is a project in its own, but is also indicative of the fact that if it happened, it is going to be one of many flights. So I think suborbital tourism is here. It's happening next year. Orbital tourism, beyond what's already happened, is still around that corner. Question from Jason here. Haven't heard much in the way of news from Bigelow recently and their expandable habitats. Would be great to get an update on where they are, especially as it relates to Lunar Gateway and the aging out of ISS. I saw a news story the other day that Beam up on the ISS, the Bigelow expandable, I don't remember even the acronym at this point, Beam on the ISS, they're using it as storage right now on the ISS, and I saw that they were installing some more supports to allow it to carry a whole

bunch more storage. So they are significantly increasing the amount of storage that they are putting into Beam. And it's still operating great. So I think that alone is showing a lot of promise for its performance up there, that they are relying on it for that kind of storage. The one thing that I always couch any Bigelow comments in is that Bigelow, the company, is very hard to get a handle on. It is very weird sounding in there. And I don't exactly know what they're working on day to day. We had heard an announcement that they had a launch deal for 2020 with ULA, but there's been zero updates on that. Are they still flying it? Where are they flying

it? They talked about flying it to the moon or something like that to kind of, you know, capture that lunar gateway talk. I would love an update on that at some point on if those B330s are still going up, if they're going to start selling flights there, uh, what exactly is going on with that as it relates to lunar gatewayar Gateway, NASA has those next step projects out there for those next habitats that we would use. They have Lockheed and Boeing, Sierra Nevada, Bigelow, the NanoRacks SSL and ULA team, and I may have either miscounted or forgotten somebody, but those projects are trying to figure out habitation modules for the Gateway. And I think, you know, we should hear, if Gateway turns into be a real project, we should hear by, you know, next year,

2020, maybe 2019, 2020, about who is going to get those habitation contracts or how they're going to go about acquiring habitation for the Lunar Gateway. But knowing that BEAM is performing well on the ISS, knowing that there are significant advantages with expandable habitats, I would not be surprised to see some sort of expandable something on Gateway. Rob has a really interesting question here. He sent an email talking about Yasuko Maezawa's statement at the Dear Moon announcement of saying, I choose to go to the moon, playing off of JFK's, we choose to go to the moon. How do you see the dynamic between we and I playing out when it comes to the near future of space?

This is a really, really important question. And something that's sort of related. So let me bring in another question here from James. I'm interested in hearing more about the current state of the European lunar village. These two things may not sound linked, but I think, you know, we always try to get in these conversations about why do we go to space? Why do we go to the moon? Why are we going to Mars? Why, why, why? And we try to make it this collective thing. Like we all have to agree on a reason to do anything or to use any particular form of transportation. When in reality, I think the world is a lot more chaotic than that. And I think limiting it to this, all your eggs in one basket, everyone has

to go for the same reason or reasons, I think that's destructive and it holds us all back. Rather, I wish we would realize that everybody can go for their own reasons. Everybody can do their own things for whatever reason they want. But we can do things together. Those are not exclusive thoughts. I can go out to space and do whatever I want to do, but I can work with you to do it. And that's the European moon village idea, which is, I don't really care why you're going to the moon. And I should say, that's just a concept right now,

not a project. But the idea is, I don't really care why you go to the moon or how you go to the moon, but we should just go to a similar spot so that we can be of help together. And that's the way that we organize society here on earth. It's like, we don't all have to agree why I hop on the Broad Street Line subway, but I know most people are probably riding it down to go to the Eagles game. But there's some people that are just going home from work. The collective idea of the subway is good, but everyone has individual reasons for being on it at any given time, and I don't know why space has to be different. So I do see a lot of hope in that individualistic idea, because I think it unlocks a certain potential that isn't there when we all have to agree on every single detail, on every

single rivet of a space vehicle before we go anywhere. And we have to agree why we're getting in that vehicle before we go anywhere. A chaotic version of this of, you know, I'm going to go out and do this thing. You're going to go out and do that thing. Cool. We'll probably help each other at some point along the way. I see a lot of hope in that because people that want to go to the moon for scientific research are going to be very helpful in the same way that people that want to go to the moon to harvest water are going to be helpful to people doing the scientific research. It's going to work cyclically, and everybody can

contribute to expanding human presence into the solar system, but we don't all have to agree on exactly what and why and where we're doing this. And I think that's a natural extension of what we've done here on Earth, and I see that as a more exciting version of space exploration, space settlement, expanding the human presence out into the solar system. I see that as a more exciting version of space exploration, space settlement, expanding the human presence out into the solar system. I see that as a more viable route for the future, but I am kind of a chaos theory guy, so that might explain that side of things. With that, that is it for our questions this week. Before I get out of here, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash Miko. There are 223 of you supporting the show every single week, and I could not be more thankful for your support of this here podcast.

This episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 36 executive producers, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, and eight anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for making this episode possible. And thank you to everyone who sent in questions. If you want to send in some questions for next month's Q&A, email me, anthonyatmanagecutoff.com on Twitter at wehavemiko or head over to patreon.com slash miko. Join up there, support the show and send me a message on Patreon. We got a big week coming up this week. IAC is happening in Bremen. There's going to be a lot of interesting announcements coming out of there. So I'm sure I will be talking to you very,

very soon with maybe some updates on the European moon village idea. We will see exactly what comes out of ISE. But for now, that is it. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for all the questions again, and I will talk to you next week.