Off-Nominal - 01 - You can’t go to space in pajamas

Episode Date: October 8, 2017

Anthony and Jake unpack the National Space Council’s inaugural meeting, SpaceX’s BFR update from IAC, and the future of Falcon Heavy. Beers Vital IPA - Victory Brewing Company - Untappd Pumpkineater (2017) - Howe Sound Brewing - Untappd Topics Making Life Multiplanetary - YouTube National Space Council calls for human return to the moon - SpaceNews.com We choose to go to the Moon and do the other things | The Planetary Society Picks SkySafari 5 | Professional Astronomy Telescope Control Software for iOS Astrospheric Astronaut Scott Kelly on the devastating effects of a year in space Amazon.com: Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery eBook: Scott Kelly: Kindle Store Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter

DLS and go for main engine, start. Welcome to space. Depending on where you want to cut it in, in case we have like some bullshit who we're saying or something, but... From the lovely Philadelphia. Vital IPA. Victory.

Okay. That's good. IPA. You're speaking to my heart. It's actually funny. I basically only drink IPAs and then the first time we do this, I don't buy an IPA.

I like them. I can't drink many of them in one night. I'm getting better at that. It takes like a lot of constitution. But so I have how sound pumpkin eater. Oh, you're a pumpkin, seasonal pumpkin kind of guy. Yes. I'm not.

I can't get into that. No? I can't get into it, no. This one's really good. It's got like, there's a lot of spices in it. I have a backup, which is a Pilsner as well over there. I can taste the cloves in this one. It's like, it's like pumpkin pie in a glass.

It's amazing. Hopefully not like thick, like milkshake. It's pretty thick, actually. It's like just a blended pumpkin pie with like some hops. It's almost like that. It's kind of like syrup. If you can make syrup beer. I'm out

I'm out for two reasons now not just one I'm going to have a headache later let me go it that way and that didn't look like just one that looked like a multi-ounce so yeah

so this is this is How Sound Brewery and they How Sound is like a little inlet by Vancouver and it goes up to kind of where Whistler is where we had the Olympics and stuff and so there's the

brewery up there and they only do these like these fatty bottles they're all one liter which is, I don't know. It's like three to four gallons. Three to four gallons. Close, yeah. And then, of course, I bought the strong alcohol one.

So we'll see how I am by the end of this show. So what are we doing here? What is the deal here? Off nominal. Okay, so the theme song. I thought about something hilarious about it. Oh. It says nominal at the end of it.

You didn't... You didn't... No, yeah, but it says nominal Miko, which is funny. Like, wait a minute. What happened here? It's like, yeah. Well, nobody has ever announced off nominal. No.

Because I usually just like shut it down and it's quiet. Yeah, yeah. Or if you're China, like, or Russia, you just are quiet for like an hour. And everyone's like, well, it clearly didn't work. You're going to let us know. No, what's going on at this point yet. You just stare at the little graph with the dipping line. Yeah, yeah, that was the India one.

There was like diverged heavily and they're like nothing, nothing, everything's fine, we're good. All clear here. We're good. How are you? Yeah. So I guess we're just, we're the podcast where the theme song is nominal and everything else isn't. This is where it went off nominal. Yes.

It was nominal until that point. The theme song had it under control and it quickly came off the real. rails after that. So this is our attempt at a loose format. I don't know what else, what other things we need to describe it as? Yeah, very loose. Loose format, monthly hang out. You do a great podcast that's super serious.

I do an okay podcast that's super serious. You're the one that talks about geology and stuff. I'm just rambling to myself. So Anthony and I run our own podcast and we, often have to have conversations off the air to sort things out and we've been good sounding boards for each other and we decided that maybe maybe there's at least two maybe three people out there that would care to listen to that too so and then we decided to make it a little spicier by having a beer every time we do it or some other or two or a liter or a

leader of pumpkin eater, which is about five real beers. So we'll see how it goes. So you have some topics for us? What are we going to talk about? We have some loose topics. I figure we're doing this monthly. So typically I feel like we would probably collect a couple of topics throughout the month. But given where we are at in the year and what has been happening, I feel like our topics are from the last week, which is the BFR announcement. And maybe. some National Space Council stuff. But it's it's been pretty heavy the news like yeah it was a dry August and like early September but and then it was like and it's probably going to stay that way because all of the

stuff coming out of Space Council is a 45 day deadline at which point there will be some policy things to look at yeah so it looks like it's going to be a busy fall do you think we'll have an administrator before that 45 day uh I don't even know how much It matters. This has been my whole thing. Like, I don't think we're in an era when that actually matters much. I don't think it matters from a policy perspective, but like, just the unifying vision of having the new administrator come out in front of that policy. Because then it's like always going to be in question if it's not. Like if Lightfoot has to go up there and be like, here's my new idea.

By the way, I got tickets to Bermuda next week. Well, so the rumors are he's staying around as like the second in. man. Has that been officially like announced or anything? Well, because they didn't they have a someone for deputy, but then it fell through or something? Who was it, the Arrowjet guy or something? Yeah, you're right, Arrowjack guy. Yeah. And he bailed. Oh, he bailed or they were like, nah, we're good.

They bailed him. I don't, yeah, I don't know which, I don't know which way, but they, I don't know if they have officially said that Lightfoot is up for it, but that's the thinking is that Lightfoot would be. which is the sleepiest thing of all time. Well, I mean, Bridenstein really isn't a party either, so we'll see. No,

but he's at least a little animated when he talks. Yeah. I've always thought this, this is going to be a mean thing to say, but I've always thought he looks like like a giant adult baby.

Bridenstein? I could see that. He is a little, because he's just got, this like, perfect, like, angelic face. Yeah, it is. Well, he's pretty young,

I guess, comparatively, of Congress. Yeah. But that's a whole other topic. Whole other topic. Where we're not going. Where do you want to, we haven't discussed BFR yet.

We've like, we've like vaguely texted about it. Yeah. And at this point probably have listened to each other talk about it. And we've been like not specifically not talking about it. Right. Yeah. Where are you out on that? You were, you were like kind of heated about it coming out of the announcement, but I don't

have you felt any. different like a week or so afterwards. Yes, I've settled down. I had a bit of a journey to take and I was pretty riled up about it at first. And I went at it really, really critical because I was like, I'm going to shoot holes in this and make sure that I don't succumb to like ultimate Elon fanboyism. And then when I had Chantelle Dubois in my show, we got to talk about it. And she was like smooth, like she was super cool about it.

And it just like help me, you know, come home. And so yeah, no, I think it's, I think it's good. It's a lot of work, though. Like that's the thing for me is that this is and like forget the point to point thing. That's whatever. And but the whole consolidating the fleet thing, like it's a tremendous change. It's going to have a lot of logistics. And we're going to have to have update three, four, five, and six before they really figure this out to me.

Because it's like there's so many. variables to it. Like with trying to fit drag in into that and ISS retirement and what the commercial contracts are and now are you going to have Deep Space Gateway playing into it. And then what do you do with Falcon Heavy?

And oh my goodness. There's so much you have to figure out. The good news is that that's like a 10 year period of time you're talking about. Right. So my reaction to your reaction, I was like kind of confused as to why you were like, like real fired up about it because it didn't feel like that much change to me.

Like I think there was from what was announced, I guess. Like there was downsizing and some architecture changes. But in a lot of ways, the renders that we saw, the details that we got impressed upon the audience that it was still a work in progress and there's still a lot of work to go, which I like, because last year felt like it was a final product that they were showing off. which I didn't like the message that sent that was like, this is a thing, it's done, we just need to build it. I felt that the unfinished nature of renders

and all that kind of stuff was like, we still have a lot of figuring out to do. Sometimes there's landing legs, sometimes there's not landing legs, we don't even know where those are going yet. So I was like, man, this is weird that Jake's fired up about this because it didn't feel like there were that many changes to get fired up about,

but there were, I guess, more realistic level implications to the things they were announcing. Like the timescale is about the same at this point. But because they showed things like it pulling up to the ISS or it deploying satellites, there were more things that made it feel connected to the space era that we are in today than the first thing of the next era, if that makes sense? So I kind of sense that's where you got the fired up from,

is that it was like all of a sudden you were grappling with the real implications of what that thing would be if it existed today. yeah so where did you get your degree in psychology oh my gosh yeah right no that's it because like you said last year it was it was pie in the sky it was there were like six people walking around Europa like yeah it was completely siloed but here it was like here's how I'm actually going to disrupt right which is yeah it's change management I need to go through some change management I was in the valley of despair. Now I'm coming back up the other side. But I mean, I guess there's, you have to figure out a lot of stuff, but like you said, there's a lot of time. I think the biggest thing I struggled

with was like, how do you get the manufacturing timed properly, right? Because like, how do you, how do you spin down Falcon and spin up BFR at the right pace so that you have a smooth transition and you don't hurt yourself that way, right? That's something I think will be one of the just logistical challenges, but I think it's totally possible. And it's the right move. I never thought it was the wrong move. It's just like trying to figure out how the heck they were going to do it. So the, there's two things that I think like struck me in the way that people look at things that were announced. One was that all the things that they showed, like the renders they show at ISS and stuff like that, people looked at them literally as in this is a thing that it would do.

versus showing off the flexibility of the system that it could fly to something that's in orbit already and docked to it. It could launch a big satellite, a big telescope, a big whatever. Like, it's showing off flexibility, not necessarily saying it will fly to the ISS someday. Because quite honestly, I don't think that would happen. Just politically and planning-wise, timeline-wise, it seems unlikely that that thing would fly to the ISS. but it's showing off that it's within the realm of possibility for something like this to fly to the ISS.

That was one thing that struck me, yeah. And you know what, it's a good point because we're not used to that with space stuff, right? We're not used to this corporate kind of like, you know, end state visions. Like here is what we want. We still haven't figured out how to get there, but we're going to do it because we have to and let's go.

Whereas like, you know, the NASA approach is more push, right? It's just like, okay, well, here's the next step. We're going to figure that out first. And then, of course, when you do it that way, the timelines are all a disaster. But, yeah. So much so that I found on, I don't even know how I got to this, but I was looking for some space review article from like a couple months back. And I think it was related to Deep Space Gateway.

Well, it definitely was because of what this ends up at. And I found an article on the Space Review from 2012 that showed, the deep space gateway and referred to it as a gateway. Really? I have to find that article again. But point being, like, when it was obvious that Orion could not get to low lunar orbit or anything else except some crazy elliptical lunar orbit, the gateway idea started to be percolating throughout.

And they started to, like, seed the, you know, like starting to write a little bit about it here, a little bit about there. and slowly get you thinking about it more and more. And we're even seeing that today with Deep Face Gateway, that it's not actually a program yet. It doesn't... What was that? Some crazy plane just flew over.

I don't know what happened, but... Like, the program isn't funded yet, but they're still trickling out, like, oh, here's a next step contract. Here's a graphic of what it could be. And it's this slow trickle rather than all at once. Like, boom, here, it could do a space station. It could do a space telescope.

It could do this thing. It can do all these things. And it's... It is that... difference of like positioning whether it's slow and steady until all the sudden it seems obvious that that's what's happening or all of a sudden you have to grapple with the implications of a crazy new system coming on to the scene yeah yeah and that's the wrong way to do it if you want to get partners right like if you want to have international people or or even even trying to get someone like just

SpaceX who is probably totally ready to roll with the punches because they want the contract you know but if you want to get those people on board you have to really get them in early and and get their input so that, you know, get their buy-in so that they're helping build it, and then they're more engaged with it, right? So the other thing, my other observation of the way people responded to it, and this happened last year as well, was that anything that was not mentioned in the talk was therefore not thought about hand-waved away, and SpaceX is horribly incompetent in those departments, that, like, well, he didn't talk about this pet,

concerned that I have about a trip to Mars. Or he didn't talk about this type of thing. Like, how is he going to dock the fueling connectors? And it's like, I think if somebody has done what SpaceX has done, they are competent enough to have thought about these things and are either, if they are painting themselves in the corner, they clearly have shown that they will go back and redesign. And maybe they haven't gotten around to that yet.

This year, he said two things. This is specifically why I thought of it. There were two moments on stage that I loved was when he showed Moonbase and he made an offhanded comment like, oh, and here's how you get cargo out of a high area to crane. It's not very complicated.

Like he said it in a way that was obviously pointed out the criticism last year. I was like, well, how would you get stuff down from that high? And he's like, it's just a crane. And the other one was the storm shelter. He showed off that it does have a storm shelter.

And those two moments felt like things that were kind of like the simplest answer there and the obvious answer. but last year everyone was like, he hasn't even thought about this. What is you going to throw cargo crates out from 400 feet up or whatever? So those, I felt like he handled that better this year. But yet, that reaction still happened.

Yeah, but Anthony, like, how are you going to get the oxygen into the space suit? I don't see any connectors on there. It just looks like pajamas. You can't go to space in pajamas. It just looks like a jacket that Elon would wear out the dinner. Yeah, it just looks like a motorcycle jacket. It's actually a Michelin Man. outfit and when you plug it in it just puffs out real quick it inflates it immediately it looked like

he's going to go to like a daft punk concert yeah absolutely the important part yeah no you're right i've noticed that too and it's just kind of like okay it says one more exactly what i went through right it's just another kind of change management we're not used to receiving space news this way we're used to i don't think it's just space news though like think about it on this is one that happened recently. We're taking a left turn out of space for a second, but Apple all of a sudden introduced facial recognition to unlock your phone. And the reaction is immediately, oh, well, it's going to unlock with a picture. It's going to unlock with this. It's going to unlock with that. Everyone assumes immediately that the thing they just were shown is the worst possible version of it,

rather than looking at history and seeing what has this company done in the past. Have they shipped a crappy thing. It's like, no, Apple, Apple has always nailed these kind of devices, so they probably won't ship the shittiest version possible of facial recognition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. SpaceX has shown a common,

the common thing that they do is scrap plans and reassess and redesign. So, yeah, if they do paint themselves in a corner with something that they haven't gotten to yet on their long list of things, they will redesign just as they did this year. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's the point, right?

So I think it's actually really good that he did like a did this update and not just because like we needed to know where they were at, but it, it starts to get us used to that fact that things change because, yeah, maybe it's the other way around. Maybe I'm more thinking it. But it's like if NASA, NASA does that a lot too, right? They scrap plans. They cancel. They delay. They change things around. But maybe our expectation was that.

oh, you know, everyone says that corporate, this, you know, this fixed contract thing is so much better. They should just nail it first try and then they don't. And then we're like, ah, throw stuff. Yeah. Well, so the, and the NASA case is interesting because sweet transition, bro, but they change things, but nothing ever changes. Yeah. Like they change plans, but then the hardware is the same.

same. So they went from Constellation to Journey to Mars, but the hardware didn't change. And now we're going from Journey to Mars to Constellation 2.0, but the hardware is still not changing. Yeah, but you know what? In that case, though, I almost, I want to give NASA credit on that one because, like, they've been burned so many times with trying to, like, start something and then having all their funding taken away, like, where they're, you know, they get a lot of slack for this capabilities approach. But you know what? this rocket's not going to get canceled. Right, yeah, that's true.

And is that, for NASA standards, that's kind of a victory, right? Because, like, I mean, you know, if we're talking about, if we're talking about Blue Origin, like, no, that's not the standard you expect from them. But, like, if NASA can survive a presidential transition without scrapping their entire program, good. Like, that's what we want, right? That's a fair point. We haven't had that in 20 years, yeah.

No, right? Like, when's the last time that happened? It hasn't. Like, as soon as, as soon as President Johnson or whatever, and as soon as, as soon as president Johnson or whatever in the 60s was out. It was like, ball's done. Like, there you go, right? It would just ride out the last of the funding and the hardware you had. You know, space shuttle, I guess, is one that

survives, but. But even then, we had programs that it was working on that, you know, Space Station Freedom eventually became ISS, but it was a long journey to there. So, yeah, you're right. It sucks that that that is a victory. Yeah. But you're right that that is a victory. Now, where it goes from here.

They specifically did that. They did that specifically to try and avoid this problem and it's working. Yeah, and even so much like the transition authorization act that was signed like right after, is it right after the election? I think it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was basically like, don't change anything yet because we still got to figure some things out. That kind of spoke to it, which was like, this is typically when there's a thing that happens

that changes everything and we lose all this momentum. Let's just punt that like a year and figure it out when we get there. So yeah, you're right that that, at least the last two times that has happened almost to a T. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I know it's an expensive rocket, but if SLS flies, that that's a checkmark in a box somewhere, right? So, and someone's going like, yes, my plan. Yes. I wish this was a video.

Your sweet reaction. Clenched fist to the sky. Are we done BFR? Did you have any other closing thoughts on it? I don't think so. No, I mean, I want to see more, I want to see more tank explosions before I want to, you know. I think I had one other thing. Hold on.

Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy is questionable. Yeah. Well, so you have, you have, like, questions on, is it a thing? Questions. Yeah, well, it is. It isn't, it isn't, right? I mean, if BFR doesn't fly till, I don't know, I don't think it's going to be launching cargo ships in 2022. I don't know what you think about that timeline. But, so let's say they miss one Mars launch window and it flies in 2024. That's seven years. So what's the, what's the lifespan of a rocket? What should it be? Like, what's the payoff? I don't know. How long does it have to fly before you pay off your R&D? Well, that's a good question.

It's even trickier with something like Falcon Heavy. Here's the things I think that are outstanding in my mind for Falcon Heavy's life span. Number one is we've heard some talk about reusable upper stage on Falcon 9. It's like on again, off again kind of thing where sometimes it's in the plan, sometimes it's not. Right now it seems to be both in the plans and not in the plans. Like they're talking about, we're trying to bring one back. Elon had that weird thing that he was like, we're bringing the Falcon Heavy Demo mission ones back.

So whatever happens there, if they do end up trying to implement something like that, if the system that it needs to be reusable is heavy enough that it puts a lot of their standard GTO missions out of Falcon 9 recoverable range, then I see where you're going. then I think they fly Falcon Heavy quite a bit more because they would rather fly fully reusable at that point.

You'd have Ferring reuse, Upper Stage Reuse, and Three Core Reuse. They would rather fly Falcon Heavy Recovery than Falcon 9 expendable at that point. Right, yeah. Or even... See, that's tricky, though, it's then, too. I think it basically would put recovering the upper stage out of reach for most GTO missions. If that happens, that's what I meant, is not the first stage. First stage is always coming back to the drone ship.

But if it puts the like 5 to 6,000 kilogram GTO satellite into upper stage expendable mode, then they would opt those for Falcon Heavy. And lately, those have been almost all their GTO missions, is like that heavier satellite mission. So that seems to be the biggest oddball there is if upper stage recovery impacts payload enough to make it much more attractive. So it's almost like you're almost describing the BFR, strategy light. It's like first Falcon Heavy cannibalizes Falcon and then BFR

cannibalizes Falcon Heavy. Even funnier because Falcon 9 cannibalized Falcon Heavy preemptively. Because they like a lot of the things that were slated for Falcon Heavy didn't end up needing it because Falcon 9 got so powerful, which is why we're in a weird spot now that they only have what two, three missions, three missions including the tourist one. Not including demo, including like three operations. missions are on their manifest right now. Yeah. So the reality is they don't actually need it right now.

And that's why I'm saying if the upper stage recovery makes it a thing that gets more stuff on its manifest, because right now that's the foreseeable thing. It's the only way to get Falcon Heavy's manifest up a bunch as if it's needed for something like that. So basically SpaceX just starts upgrading people to Falcon Heavy on their old contracts just so they can keep their second stage, right? Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

It's like 60, 70 million, whatever people paid for that long. is that more profitable when you're bringing everything back than just bringing back farings in first stage? Do you think the ability to bring back second stage, though? Oh, man. That's hard. It's hard. And the only reason that... So, a couple of things.

The fairings, let's touch on that first, because I was, the way that it was described was very poor. He said like Bounty Castle, which to everybody. thought steerable parachute that like aimed for a pre-deployed bouncy castle in the ocean. From what I've read recently, I think this was a NASA Spaceflight article that had it, it's actually a thing that deploys from the faring and encapsulates the faring, and that's what's, that's the inflatable part. Huh. The best info I have is from that NASA Spaceflight article, and it said that it,

the fairing deploys its own, like, encapsulation thing. Just a lifecraft. Now, I have no idea if that's actually right or not. But the way that that article was written, which was the most detail I've ever seen about faring recovery, is that. So if that's the case that they're doing there, recovery-wise,

I could see them doing that for upper stage is, like, landing it somewhere in the ocean softly with that kind of enclosure. The question then is, like, atmospheric entry. And that's kind of why I was saying, is that recovery system heavy enough to need Falcon Heavy,

because it has to be something like inflatable heat shield or like something weird like that because I don't know, their old render was like heat shielding on the top and one side of a second stage. But I don't know, man, that's a massive amount of changes to the upper stage. That I'm not sure that they want to devote resources to.

Could they... I haven't thought about this, but does, if they switched upper stage to Raptors, can you get enough energy to so that's the i guess that's the main question mark um i did see today that the air force released that rfp for the second phase of eelv2 or that's a redundant phrase but i haven't went through it yet to read all into it but that's the main question is like are they pushing for raptor upper stage in that and the interesting thing there is that the downspecked raptor that was shown off at IAC, looking at its thrust range, which is like 20% to 100% throttle,

and its new thrust rating, the low end of that thrust scale puts it into Merlin 1D vacuum levels. So, like, a lot of the worry was Raptor's so much more powerful, you would have to have like a crazy redesigned upper stage to handle the structural loads and all that, but they've got thrust down into the level of Merlin 1D. They've got size down into the level. of Merlin 1D. So size and thrust-wise, I think it fits into the stack better now. The question is, like, how much do tanks change and all that? But I also don't know if that even matters for, like, the overall problems with recovery,

which is atmospheric entry, mostly just atmospheric entry. Yeah. I guess it's like if you can get enough of an efficiency and power boost from Raptor, then you can extend the stage, I don't know, like a foot and put a whole bunch of extra hardware to help it get through entry, right? Whether it is an inflable heat shield or extra parachutes or whatever it is, right? You can add all that without impacting your payload capacity significantly, right? That's plausible.

If I knew I would probably be working at SpaceX, not doing this podcast. That's the ultimate problem of this whole thing we're doing. It totally is, yeah. we don't know what's going on so yeah that's we'll see we'll see that if the if they submit i think the response at rfp by the air force will be very telling for them are they going to go all in on the thing that doesn't make any sense to that though is that like why are they talking about bringing back these stages you know they wouldn't even be entertaining the idea of we're going to bring an upper stage back if it required whatever it is raptor requires unless they

out certain missions that have so much excess capacity to test it on first whatever the generic approaches well we're just gonna have to go with this as SpaceX and find out I guess yeah they'll let us in right I think I somebody might I don't know well they'll let you in I don't think that's true oh yeah Canadian that's right yeah I'm I'm a foreign yeah you're screwed you're screwed I'm gonna I'm gonna steal all of the technology and then the Canadian Space Agency is going to outmaneuver SpaceX. Yeah, they're going to go from robotic arms to full-on launch vehicles in no time. So we talk about NASA stuff again, National Space Council.

We touched on it briefly, but we didn't dive into it. Yeah, I was super sad about that whole thing. It was scary to me. It just felt like fire and brimstone. It was pretty heavy talk. Yeah. It's sad because it was like all of the All of the things about American politics that people don't like

Just like spilled into space that morning, you know? It was like space was normally about discovery and exploration Now is like we're losing to the Chinese like all of a sudden right Yeah, I was waiting for Bigelow to like pop out of nowhere and have his whole PowerPoint ready to go Like oh, I've heard about the Chinese Yeah, I told you I like your Bigelow voice. Yeah.

The Chinese and the aliens together. Yeah. Oh my God. Teaming up. Yeah, no, I was... So you didn't like the like militaristic side of it more than... Or you didn't like the we're behind or losing, whatever. Well, the we're behind losing was because the militaristic thing, right?

I mean, that's... If your vision of NASA is about anti-satellite technology and humans on the moon, then, yeah. But NASA's not doing so great. Sure. Okay. Space is not doing so great, right? America's not doing so great. And I get that the council's not about the other stuff.

Like, you know, all the, myself included, all the planetary people were like, what do you mean we're not losing? Like, Cassini, New Horizons, Curiosity, like all these awesome spacecraft that are out there like trailblazing. And I get that. And that's fine. This meeting's not about that. But they tried, you know, if you don't know. what space is and you were watching that and you're like oh this is what space is and we're losing like now you're trying to separate it because he wasn't clarifying that that this is human space

that there were other things military things you know we're behind in human space like that's that's that's where we're not doing so great sure that's I just wish the verbiage was better I don't know I fully agree but I'm also very glad that that side was not brought up because it's working well. Yes. And the less they touch it, the better. Yes. And that's the good side of the corner.

Yeah, it's the silver lining there. Yeah. And we've talked about the whole Decal survey process and all that and how well it works and stuff. So yeah, it's good that they're staying away. Sure. Yeah, I'll take that one. I'll take that one as a win.

The other things that were interesting, politically there was really nothing interesting, I'll be quite honest. Like, yeah, that talk, I guess, was probably the most interesting part, but there wasn't a lot of new policy directions that we heard there overall. Like all the things that we have heard previously, whether it was through op-eds written in space news or just leaked by people or even talked about already, like there was not a whole lot of new policy direction in general. So I don't know.

I was pretty not impressed by it. There was like two nuggets of information. One that Blue Origin was going to go after national security launches, which I thought it was very obvious. I thought they were just being nice to ULA, and I tweeted that at somebody. Somebody tweeted, like, I wonder how Tori Bruno feels today. And she, like, included at Tori Bruno.

And I tweeted back. I would be surprised if at Tori Bruno didn't see this coming, and he favored it. so I think that means he already already knew that that was going to happen well you don't get to be the CEO of a joint venture rocket company without knowing that stuff

oh that's an interesting topic as well ULA not there in any capacity other than their parents Boeing and Lockheed having a seat at the table apparently ULA is pretty miffed about that really I would be I mean, they're like, other than the NASA contracts, ULA's all the space pizzazz coming out of that company.

Yeah, that's true. And especially because their whole thing's been cis lunar 9,000 or whatever it's called. And, you know, so it's very moon-based, right? And they've got this whole idea for moon architecture. So, yeah, not be included. It's interesting. I mean, I guess I don't know enough about how they operate. separately from Lockheed and Boeing like how how siloed is it because if they're if you know if

the parents are there and they're at the kids table or whatever like is that fine is it going to flow down and and ULA is going to funnel their architecture up through the parent companies or or not I don't know no no no I mean none of the none of the contracts for NASA programs or really anything, are to ULA, right? They do launches, they do the launch vehicles. They handle marketing and operating the Delta and Atlas launch vehicles, and they're working

on Vulcan. They don't have a piece of SLS, they don't have, like, you know, them being the people that sit in Colorado and work on ULA or either coast and the launch sites, they don't have any connection to SLS, they don't have any connection to deep space gateway stuff. So that's the big

push and pull is that the big companies, both compete against each other, work with each other. You know, O'Ryan's Prime, or Lockheed's Prime on Orion, Boeing's Prime on SLS, Boeing's Prime on ISS. So there's this weird, like, they're in competition as prime contractors. They have this joint venture for launch vehicles,

and they keep ULA super siloed there. So I think the telling, here's my prediction. My main prediction is there's going to be a deep space gateway. They're going to put out a commercial cargo slash crew style competition for lunar landers. And ULA is going to throw their hat into the ring on that one. And that's going to be super interesting because there's going to be, SpaceX is going to submit for that, Blue Origin's going to submit for that,

and I bet ULA goes in with Mastin on their little centaur-der-derized lander, Zeus, they call it. That'll be a telling moment because they're going to all of a sudden be right up in the thick of things with all these other primes. And that'll be like either they spread their wings and fly on their own and eventually roll out to be their own little company, or I don't know, there's been so many theories lately. Are they going to sell it off?

Are they going to dissolve it? All this stuff that's up in the air. Like the future of ULA as an entity, not like is the Atlas going to fly until the 2020s? Is Vulcan going to work? Like the entity itself has been a big question mark for the past couple of years. Hmm.

I haven't thought about that. The whole joint venture thing really confuses me. Like I don't know that much about how that much business works to have an opinion about it. And yeah, freaks me out. It is tricky, though, because people think of them as as a big space company, not like capital B, capital S big space. But like a big space company, but they have been held siloed by the parent companies. and that's increasingly being a problem for ULA with the vision that they have. And that was, you know, about a year ago, there was all this rumor that they were going to rebrand,

that they were either going to get sold off or they were going to spin out on their own. Arrowjet tried to buy them unsuccessfully maybe two years ago for like $2 billion or something. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. My main theory is they're going to go in on this lander contract and I guess we'll find out from there. Yeah. So that's sort of the analogy of the whole, I mean, that whole Space Council meeting felt like old boys club, right? It was, it was very, very military, industrial complex.

It's the kind of thing that if you were a hippie, you'd probably protest. And all the excitement about like BFR point to point and somewhat blue origin? I mean, I kind of blew that off. And I don't know, like people seem to be pretty interested in that. But maybe if they follow through with the whole, they've talked about the, you know, completely re-looking at all the regulatory framework for space. And maybe if they follow through with that and clear some of those obstacles ahead of time, maybe it'll be less of an on issue that I think that is.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't even honestly think it's worth burning brain cells on. I had Chris Gebhardt, NASA Space Flight, on my podcast last week to talk about it. And he was, his main point was that was a way to show everyone why they should care about the stuff that they were talking about. Way to bring it down to people on Earth that are living and like, why the hell do we care about this killer whale looking spaceship? And that, I think that was shown in the National Space Council meeting that it was like all this excitement around point to point. That was the thing that they asked about. They didn't say, like, tell me about how BFR is going to do, you know, the EDL sequence at Mars.

So it was a very cool simulation you showed. They asked immediately about point to point. But that thing's not happening until they've landed the ship, I don't know, thousands of times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of work to get that to a level of, you know, that, that end state vision from that video was their most end state. It was their endest state.

It was so far in the future where you can put just, you know, regular passengers on there. and treat it like an airplane flight. And that's fine. It's cool that you want to do that. But, man, I just, that feels like, it's like the worst fight to have to have to, like, go up against the U.S. government. We're like, please invent an industry for me. Suborbital commercial passenger flight, like, what?

But I don't know, though, like, because I try to, we think of it from where we sit today and our relationship with commercial air travel. But, like, imagine you had an idea for trains. like before trains were a thing, right? And you're like, wouldn't it be cool if we had these big long things that were connected and they rode in these little metal tracks all the way across the country? And people were like, you gotta be frickin' nuts.

That's like gonna be a whole national program to create a train line all the way across the country and put this infrastructure in place. Or like looking at, you know, commercial aviation. It's like having the idea for Boeing 707 after like, you know, the first mail delivery was made or the first like, what was that, first tourist flight was across like St. Pete's Bay or something way back in and being like, what if there was airports everywhere? And it's like, well, what? Everyone's going to carve out a piece of land and there's going to be all these new regulations. We look at it because we have so much transportation today. But when you look at it

in comparison to where we're at in space travel itself, I feel like, you know, it is going to be a long time, but I don't think it's like an impassable thing to get there. No, I don't think it's impossible either. I just, it's not the, it's not the legislative battle. I would be really excited to engage in, right? Like, trying to move a, you know, especially nowadays where Congress can barely tie their shoes. So, I mean, it's like, who, like, I don't know. But I guess my point is that it has to just get a lot more normal first. Because even, like, two years ago, SpaceX trying to go to the FAA and say, you have to rethink how you're doing these, like, license is because we're going to be bringing back 30 of these things towards the Cape a year and them saying like you haven't even brought back one yet and now it's to the point when like people don't watch the live streams anymore because they're like they're going to nail it every time we're dead center yeah like that part has already gotten normal in two years so if they get that so normal that it's uneventful that's the best thing that can possibly happen to them so map that out what's the first thing they have to do then because like I'm thinking about they they got to have this is not I talked about this in this other podcast I was on. And like, because of this, the speed at which you can make travel with this,

it's going to, like, soak up a lot of traffic from surrounding areas. Like, let's say you open up L.A. to New York. That seems to me like probably the best, you know, domestic place to test it. Because you can stay within U.S. framework and have to deal with international people. and you know so what's that is that a four four five hour flight today yeah yeah it's like five and a half so they make that in whatever 14 minutes they can fly that so now it makes more sense ridiculous to think about though well i mean if it's if it's Shanghai and 31 or i don't know yeah no no you're right you're right whatever it is right it's going to be fast so now it makes sense like

If you live in Boston, it makes sense now to drive, you know, whatever is it, two hours to three hours to New York and get in that airport and get over there real quick. Or it makes sense to, you know, like you'll soak up that kind of hub traffic. And so if you have those two starting points where you can work out the regulatory kinks, build up a business case, like you think that's how it would work out? You think that's a, I don't know, how do you start that? Yeah, like saying you're putting the high priority routes in first that do a long haul, a common long haul. And then you land off the coast of LAX and then you ship in to LAX and you're taking a commuter jet to San Francisco or something like that. Yeah. And actually New York to San Francisco in two hours.

Yeah. And it makes less sense actually domestically than it does internationally. That's the one thing that. Right. Yeah, yeah. Because you get that travel time down to where all, you know, now like 80, percent of your travel time is just waiting in line at the airport right so and i wonder about that too like they show it as a purely suborbital thing right now but um everyone's always concerned about

suborbital stuff because it looks a lot like putting a missile on route to shanghai or something like that but there's no you know like you could go orbital for a little bit and do a standard I say standard, but standard, you know, flight to orbit and landing and do it in three hours. You know, do one or two orbits and plop down in Shanghai. And you've never done an overflight of another country. You've not done the suborbital, like, discrimination, whether it's a missile or an actual BFR. You know, you're following today as, like, you know, Orion's. EFT1, took off in Florida, did two orbits, and landed in L.A. And that was three hours or whatever.

And it was totally fine. And it was fine. Like we, obviously, totally different scenario there. But point being, they showed it as its ultimate goal, which was just suborbital hop or something. But you could, if regulatory stuff was really a big issue, say like, say the U.S. was working with Australia on it. Their new space agency or their new space agency was like, hey, we want to get in on that thing. and if you have a route L.A. to Sydney or something like that or New York's to Sydney and it's just like launched to whatever that inclination would be that puts you on you're up into orbit even though you might not even make one full orbit you just do a you know deorburn the right time to come down in Sydney yeah I don't know that leads me

to another thing though that was not brought up which was like what's the first flight of BFR he made it seem like it's sending one to Mars on 20th 22, but I think everybody knows that's quietly crap. They're going to do a bunch of tests here at Earth. Yeah. So what do you think that is? Like what do you think that's got to be, well I mean, that's a good question. I mean,

to me, I would, I would think it's going to be, they'll probably go straight to orbital. I don't know, I don't see, maybe some like grass hopper, I don't know, maybe just test fires. Does it make sense to go up and down? Like, I think they might just go for it. They'll do test fires. They'll do a static fire. Lots of full duration

test of the Raptor, tons of that, and then just go for it. Go to orbit. Do an LEO test, keep it on orbit for, I don't know, 10 days or something. Yeah, whatever it is and just, you know, shake it out and then come home. I think that makes sense to me. It's a lot of hardware to build for like a one kilometer hop, you know? Yeah, it certainly is. And like if you compare it to what grasshoppers doing, that,

that wasn't testing the grasshopper vehicle. It was testing engine control, right? And they know that now. And software and all that. Yeah. So, like, they've got their software pretty well honed now. So, like, you don't, it doesn't really serve a purpose. If you know the engine works, it's just about aerodynamics.

And you're not going to test that until you do the full thing. That's a good point. Maybe they can put strato launch as giant freaking airplane to use. I don't know what else that thing's going to do. actually that's funny you mention that so does point-to-point travel make virgin galactic completely irrelevant you know my feelings on this version galactic makes virgin galactic completely irrelevant like i think that it's just funny how their their original business case seemed like really interesting like oh yeah you can do this nice like safer suborbital space flight tourism thing we're going to get the price down to

you know a quarter million dollars a flight and now it's like nope now origin was already going to make that irrelevant now it's going to be like what what are you working on over there what are you doing I I'm honestly surprised that they're still around and kicking in anyway yeah and it's it's they took too long right that was it yeah that's your theory they took too long they did so yeah and unfortunately unfortunately they had that accident and And that did not help. And that's, you know, it's very sad. But that they picked, it's almost like they looked ahead to what the market was going to be,

but they didn't look ahead far enough, you know? Right. Yeah, they looked 10 years, not 20. And the market outpaced them so quickly. The other issue is that they picked the worst technology. Like they built, they built spaceship two based on what spaceship one was. but they didn't, like they're still having engine issues. So much so that like the flights are only going 50 miles, I think.

They're not like going to the full 100 kilometers. So, and that was the other thing. They like blew up a test stand back in 2007, killed three engineers. Like they've had massive problems with the engine for so long that they, and they committed to it too heavily. This is the thing that would never happen with SpaceX is that they are quick to kill plans when it's like even a degree off. of what they were aiming for.

Their plan's dead immediately. They're out. Red Dragon, Falcon 1, Falcon 5. Anytime the plan is looking like, no, this isn't going the way we want. They're out and they're on doing something else. Virgin Galactic is banging their heads against this wall. And it sounds like, based on what they're saying,

that their engine is finally pulling together for what they want to do. But, like, that has been their issue for 10 years or whatever at this point. Yeah. But I don't know. Like, was that ever going to be a business? this plan for them if they've ever dreamed of it i don't i don't know i don't think so but if it was it that sucks but and it's kind of a dead-end hardware too right like what else you do yeah yeah you can't really upgrade that to orbital no anyway it's too bad i'm okay with it rip if the best thing it was

came out of virgin galactic was that virgin orbit was born i think that's that's pretty good like the best thing that happened to virgin orbit was that they got out of virgin galactic as a as an architecture as a name everything right they're using liquid rocket engines they're using air drop which I'm like I generally have questions about that but I don't know there's some interesting things there so yeah I'm curious okay you want to do some picks yeah I do some space picks I have one pick okay do you want to explain what picks is oh yeah it's our it's our first segment actual segment it's our first actual segment Okay, the intro is over.

Welcome to the show. First segment is Picks. Picks is, I thought, self-explanatory. That's why I didn't explain it. But we're going to have some spacey recommendations, whether it's like something we read that you should read, either a book or a blog or an article or something we watched or something spacey in general.

You know, that's it. Okay, I just had a fear, though. What if, because I don't know your picture. and you don't know mine. What if we have the same pick? I highly doubt we have the same pick, because we have never discussed this topic that I have in my mind. Okay, you go first then. Okay. So I've been busting out the telescope lately because there's been some good views, Saturn, good views of the moon as it was coming in first quarter, a couple weeks back.

Granted, I live in the middle of Philadelphia, so the sky sucks, but planetary is pretty great still. So I've been doing a lot of that stuff. But I'm fixing my light pollution issue this weekend. We're going to drive up to Cherry Springs State Park, which is dead middle north of Pennsylvania, which is like the darkest skies east of the Mississippi in the U.S., like Bordle 2. So I've never seen Milky Way before or anything like that, so it's going to be pretty awesome. So I've been doing a lot of telescope and getting ready for that, and I've been using Sky Safari 5 Pro on Mac and iOS. And it's pretty freaking awesome. So the...

What's that? You look very confused about this. I think I've used that. I'm trying to remember. I think I tried that out. There's like several different versions. So there's like Sky Safari 5. This is for iOS, Android, and Mac.

And then there's Sky Safari 5 plus or Pro. And they each have like a couple of different options. The really cool thing that I like it for is that you can put in, I guess I should explain the basic premise. I'm sure people know about these apps by now. But it's like Sky charts that are interactive. You can zoom around. you can change dates, locations, all that kind of stuff.

But you can also, with Sky Safari 5, you can put your telescope details in and your eyepieces, and it will show you the viewports of each, like each combination, on your little viewfinder. So as you, like, zoom around to different targets, it'll show you like, oh, this will fill this much of your frame in, you know, with your 9.7 millimeter eyepiece or, you know, all the different kind of configurations. possibly have. So you can like plan up front. All right, I want to check out this nebula with these eyepieces and do all that planning up front and you can make observation lists and the cool thing with the mobile versions is that'll give you notifications for like this planet's rising or ISS is coming over, Tunggong is coming over, eridium flares are happening in three minutes.

So you can like run outside real quick and see a really cool iridium flare, which is pretty awesome. So that's it. You should check it out. It's like 20 bucks on iOS, Android, 30 bucks on Mac, but it's kind of expensive, but it's really, really good software. And the lower, like Sky Safari 5 is like $5 or whatever, and then Sky Safari plus is like 10 or something like that. I don't know. I've had it for a while, but I kind of broke it out recently again. And I've been loving it. I've got a link to that that I'll put in show notes as well. SkySafari astronomy.com. Man, I got to upgrade my telescope so bad because so. I saw it in the background of that.

You should plug that podcast you did yesterday, too. I saw it in the background. I peaked in there. Yeah. Well, okay. That was funny because, yeah, so I did the unseen podcast yesterday. And it was a lot of fun. It was guys are really great.

They're very, very theoretical. I'm, you know, way outside my comfort zone because I like talk about what's happening tomorrow. And they're like, well, what's the best colonization strategy? And I was like, ooh. So it was pretty challenging. challenging for me. But yeah, they, you know, I agreed to the podcast and then it was like two days before they're like, here's the YouTube link. I was like, hold on, is this live? And yeah, so it's streaming it live. I'm like, okay, so I had to like, you know, clean my house a little bit so that

people didn't get too creeped out. And so I was like staging in the background. Totally admit it. Put the telescope up there. But that's the only telescope I have. It's a little, uh, Orion Fun scope and I bought it like I want to say two three years ago and I was like because I wasn't sure if I'd be into astronomy and I was like well I'll try it out and then it's like if it turns out if I like it then it can just be like my portable one and I'll get a good one and if I don't like it I've only spent $80. It was like a perfect perfect thing but turns out I like it and I've like totally maxed this out like it's only basically good for the moon so I really have to get telescope and now I want to try this app and I want to get the eyepiece with the webcam so I can

like hook it into my map yeah yeah yeah take pictures that's what I want to do so yeah my brother and my best friend went in on a eight inch dobsonian for me for my wedding present last year that was like they're they were like hey we've got a large box to bring over and my wife was like oh god it's going to be like a life-sized stormtrooper or something she was real nervous but then opened it and that's that dobsonian so it's you know doesn't have a track of or anything like that. I got to build my own equatorial table, which will be fun. That'll be my summer project next year. Yeah, that's

my problem with the Dobbsonians. I looked at those ones because they're like pretty good price for the size of the lines you get and stuff. But yeah, I kind of want to get, I would love to be able to like film a time lapse or, you know, track a do a stacked image of you know, whatever Saturn.

I also though like I kind of feel like it's more fun to just go out and observe and let the pros. Like I'm really in photography as well, but sometimes I just like really going outside, chill in, put on some podcasts, and I just like hang out and look around for a bit. It's kind of relaxing to like not have to be fiddling with anything but switching eye pieces or filters or anything like that. So yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I have the same problem you do because I like to say that I'm in the worst place for astronomy like on Earth. Like I'm in the middle of a huge city and I'm at sea level. Yeah. And it rains like it rains like 300 days a year in Vancouver. and oh wait can I add a pick as well yeah based on that what you're talking about so there's an app app called astrophureic that gives you this is per your weather conversation it gives you like the full astronomy forecast for the night like it'll show like sky cover and weather and humidity and everything so that you know like oh it's going to be great night for it's going to be a shitty night for it

so i'll put that link in there as well so it'll help maybe that will help you in your quest maybe yeah basically I just go outside every night and then six out of seven times it's not good you have some mountains though so that gets you up a little bit yeah but yeah

I gotta like spend more time driving you need like another couple thousand feet yeah the mountains of Vancouver are gorgeous but they're actually not that high like as far as like on the scale of like all the earth mountains they're not really that big so I gotta spend more time like driving out of the city because you can drive like around the mountains and then you can use them

to like block the city's light so i got to do more of that but then it's like you got to plan it it's like an hour drive and i don't do well staying up late because i'm a big baby so it's that's how goes what do you got okay so i came up with this about 20 minutes before we started that's how good planning good planning yes and it's very very fortuitous because uh it just sort of popped up my twitter feed but it's a it's an article Oh, I think I know what this is. But I haven't read it yet, so sell me on it. Okay, so this has appeared in, I've never seen this publication.

It's called The Age. It's dot com.a.u, so I'm going to say it's Australian. And yeah, it's an article. It's an excerpt from Scott Kelly's new book. So he wrote a book about his one year in space. And this is sort of like, you know, a quick look at what he experienced. And talked a little bit about when he came back from space or the first 48 hours

and a little bit about, you know, his life on, on orbit. And it's pretty frank and it's pretty, uh, it's pretty scary. So like he went through some, he went through some shit when he came back. Like that was not easy on him. So, um, yeah, you know, you want to learn about the all the weird stuff that a year in space, like a zero of microgravity does to your body. This is definitely something you want. to take a look at. So now I'm going to have to get his book for sure. I was going to say,

is a book out? That might be your real pick. It says publishing on October 19. Yeah, this is like, he's doing the press junket before. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. I'm fine with that. Endurance, a year in space, a lifetime of discovery by Scott Kelly. So yeah, you know, he talks about losing his balance and tripping and he's got like all the all the fluids flowing into his legs and are all swelled up and rashes and, you know, he's like, wakes up and he's dizzy and he doesn't know where he is and if he's upside down and like, oh, man, like, we've got some stuff we've got to figure out because if this is what a year in space looks like, look out Mars travels. But Elon hasn't mentioned any of this in his presentation.

No, he probably hasn't thought of it. It's a callback. Callback. I have a surprise segment that I was just figuring this could be. the way we end it. We're still figuring this out, by the way. Anything that you've got coming up that's like things you're looking forward to or events we should know about launches that you're excited for. Didn't mean to spring this one on you for looking at your calendar or whatever, but.

Just opening up a spreadsheet here. Don't worry about it. Yeah, so there's some good planetary science conventions coming up. That's one thing. So DPS is actually, it's in about a week, which is the division of planetary science. It's more astronomy-based planetary science. That's pretty interesting. And then the week after that is as GSA, so it's the Geological Society of America. It's in Seattle, and I really want to just drive down there. It's two hours away, and I'm swamped with work that week.

I don't think I can pull it off. I'm, like, heartbroken that I can't just, like, a bunch of it. to people that I've even had on the show we're going to be down there. You know, like Fred Caleb is going to be doing a talk and Tanya Harrison is there. There's a whole bunch of stuff happening and I don't think I can make it happen. So, darn. You just made me sad. Yeah, sorry about this. This is a sad surprise. Well, here. Also, I've got one that I probably can't make, but would be fun if I could. I got my media pass to 08, the next Cygnus flight out of Wallop. but right now it's scheduled for a day that I will actually not be around and I have a pretty

crazy schedule for November December so don't think that that's going to work out in general but I applied because I don't think Cygnus has ever gotten off on the day that they originally scheduled so I'm banking on it pushing to exactly when I needed to to make it. Hoping for a scrub. Yeah, I know, but it's also like tough because it's like a four-hour drive to get down there. Yeah. And it's an awful drive no matter where you live or where you're coming from. because it's like...

Really? You go down and then you... Once you pass Dover, Delaware, there's no more highways. Like, all the way down through Maryland, through that part of Virginia. There's no highways, so it's just like... I mean, it's a highway, in air quotes,

but it's not like a highway highway, so it takes so long to get there. So the logistics will be interesting if I can pull it off, but that's coming up. Right now it's scheduled for November 10th. That'll be fun. That's a much-awaited launch because I think Antares is not going to be around too long. You're going to go one of the final launches of Antares?

I'll bring a sign. It's like, we'll miss you and it'll be crossed out. I'll be like, I hate you, Antares. Farewell tour. Preemptively. That's rude. Yeah, it is. Surprise I got the pass.

Okay, that's it. That's all I got. That's it. Next month we might have friends. We didn't mention that. We're going to try to convince some friends coming out with us. We're going to do whatever we want. That's a true point.

That's a true point. Yeah. So if you listen to our regular podcast, you know that we have, you know, typical things we talk about and typical topics we explore, typical people we have on here. Formats are very similar week to week, month to month, whatever it is. Off nominal is not that. Off nominal is whatever we want right now. And if you don't like that, don't listen. That'll be the ending every week.

I'm getting fighting. I'm getting fighty at the end of this. I'm already glass too and this stuff's hit me, man. I definitely want the closing line to be like, if you don't like it, we won't talk to you next week, but if you do, we'll see you back. Next month. You don't like it? Jump out the airlock if you don't like it. All right.

See you. See you.