Off-Nominal - 101 - Tastes Like Fish

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Anthony is joined by Chris Carberry and Dr. Tanya Harrison to discuss Chris’ upcoming documentary version of his Alcohol in Space book, the upcoming Humans to Mars summit, and the state of humans to Mars in the Artemis era.Announcement: Off-Nominal and MECO Live Shows at Space Symposium 2023!More details coming soon, but Anthony will be at Space Symposium 2023 and will be hosting MECO and Off-Nominal live at the Redwire booth on April 18 and 19. We’ll have wonderful guests such as Lori Garver, Peter Beck, Masami Onoda, Karina Drees, and more to be named soon! Come hang out, watch some live shows, and say hello to Anthony in real life.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 101 - Tastes Like Fish (with Chris Carberry and Dr. Tanya Harrison) - YouTubeRedwire Announces Live Event with Main Engine Cut Off Podcast, Previews Full Schedule of Activities at Space Symposium 2023 | Redwire SpaceCulture in SpaceAlcohol in Space - TeaserSpace for Scotland - Vignette from the FilmAlcohol in Space – McFarlandAlcohol in Space: Past, Present and Future: Chris Carberry, Foreword by Andy Weir — AmazonSummit | Explore MarsNew Program Office Leads NASA’s Path Forward for Moon, Mars | NASAFollow ChrisChris Carberry (@Carberry2033) | TwitterExploreMars (@ExploreMars) | TwitterExplore MarsFollow TanyaTanya of MarsDr. Tanya Harrison (@tanyaofmars) / TwitterFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, friends. Welcome to Off Nominal with just one of your regulars here. But don't worry. I forgot some old friends of the show. Tanya Harrison has been a long time since you've been on an off-nominal production. How's it going? Great. How are you?

I'm good. I'm running a little single-handed. Jake's away for like a month. He's basically taking a sabbatical, so, you know, I figured that's the perfect time to have a completely Mars-focused show. which is great. We've got Chris Carberry here, Humans DeMar's Summit, Alcohol and Space, the book we talked about last time. We'll talk about documentary this time.

How's it going, Chris? Doing well. Very busy, but very well. Yeah, you got a couple of projects going on at the same time, which is good. More than a couple. So that's the perfect time to join me on the internet for a drink probably too early. And I know you're debating drinking straight out of a bottle before the stream started. You know, it has been those sort of.

couple of weeks, you know, I might just go right to the bottle, but I decided to go with a glass instead. That's classy. What you got? What do you got over there? I'm drinking Ardbeg. Oh, look at that. Yeah, Artbeg whiskey, you know, they were the first first whiskey to age in space, you know, up on ISS from 2011 till 2014. Scottish whiskey from Ila. Was that a particularly set length of time, or was that just when they could get rides? It was kind of a strange story because they only had two weeks to prepare, so they had to get together this really quickly designed and not very well designed probably. It went up.

Then it was only supposed to stay up, I think, for until like 20. It was only supposed to be up for like a year or two. Then it was there until 2014 because it wasn't able to return at the right time. But then the final results was that it tasted a lot different than the ground sample. It had this kind of fishy, rubbery taste to it, which is not exactly what you like in your whiskey. Is that what you've got right now? Does it taste like fish? It does not taste like fish. It's smoking. Okay, nice.

Yeah, I have to admit. I don't. If I probably would not want to drink the space flowing version, I'm not really into fishy, rubbery whiskey. Did they figure out why? That's a weird. I think it was probably, it wasn't really a byproduct of aging in space. I think it was probably a byproduct. productive handling. It was up there longer and they didn't really, it was so quickly designed and didn't really take into account all the extreme handling, the, you know, the return and everything else. So I think other things happened that were separate from just the aging process. Huh. Well, we're going to have to sort that one out in the future. Yeah, well, there are companies. There's another company that's had an experiment up there.

Actually, since 2014, and they brought one back, Suntory. You know, the Japanese whiskey company, but they've been very closed lips about their experiments. So I don't know how much impact there's been, but other companies have tried aging, not just whiskey, but there were bottles of Bordeaux that went up in 2019. And that seemed like a better experiment. And apparently there were. There were differences in the taste. So, you know, so a lot of companies, it didn't out. I didn't taste much. As far as I know, it did not taste like fish. I love my bordeaux to taste like fish as well. Tana, do you have any fish tasting alcohol with you today? I don't, but I have a drink in honor of Jake, actually. So I'm sure he's not paying attention because he's on sabbatical. But this is a non-alcoholic cocktail called the Saskatoon.

So he's from Saskatchewan, but it's like Canadian themed. It's close enough. Yeah. It's close enough. Yeah. It's close enough. Yeah. Tartberry black pepper. It's at least not Ontario, so it's probably fine. Like, it's close enough. Yeah. It's tart berry, black pepper, Douglas fir tannins, and fellowship. So I think it's supposed to taste sort of like Saskatoon berries, because I don't really think of Douglas firs when I think of Saskatchewan. But it's quite lovely if you're looking for a non-alcoholic cocktail. What about? Fancy. I got some crazy-looking beer from yards called Bit Viper. This thing's like pretty well. I feel like it's a reference I'm missing.

It's like kind of game themed. But I don't know. It says it's got citrus with a lot of s's. So I enjoyed the comedy on the box. And I haven't had it before. So cracking it open. We'll be curious to hear. Well, here as well.

But hear from you what it tastes like. Probably fish or snakes is my bet based on the label. It tastes like snakes. Okay. Before we get into the topics of the day, which NASA also landed one on us pretty timely with the opening of the moon to Mars office that I'm interested to dig into a little. Are either of you going to space symposium by any chance? I am. So big news on the off nominal front, I'll be out there.

We just started announcing this stuff this week. I will be out there at posting up at the Redwire booth and we'll be doing a bunch of live shows on the floor. So there's going to be a lot of Anthony because there will be five episodes of MECO and then an episode of Off Nominal over the course of April 18th and 19th. So we've got, we're still booking some people out. We've got some good people confirmed already. We've got Lori Garver, Peter Beck, Karina Dries of the Commercial Space Flight Federation.

we'll be posting some more names throughout the next couple weeks as we get confirmations people's schedules are in flux so we're like nailing that all down but if you will be out there we're going to be having our first live show so it's a bummer that Jake

decided that this is the time to take sabbatical but here we are I'll be flying solo without them but I want to throw that out up front I'll definitely draw it by your booth yeah so the good news is the off nominal one is timed with the happy hour at Redwire's booth So if you come by, that'll be Wednesday afternoon, happy hour timed.

We will be doing some regular old off-nominal shenanigans. I got a bunch of, I print a bunch of stickers. I've got these little cool, I've printed like little mini-cards. So I got swagged up. So it's going to be fun. You have to find some brewery to partner with to make special off-nominal beer that you can have for events like this. Okay, first of all, there was once a plan that Jake was going to home brew beer, and then he moved to Mexico, so I feel like that part fell apart.

Second of all, yes. I mean, he could, but I feel like he's, I don't know if he's got the same kind of set up. He just spends too much time outside now, you know, before it was a lot of inside time. So, you know, I don't know. He's just eating and hanging out with iguanas and stuff all the time. It looks beautiful. Like, I won't move to Mexico now. I got to at least go there.

but yeah we totally do need to get some beer you know one of our like I think it was like our fourth or fifth episode a company sent us beer we had our like our one and only sponsorship it was uh I think it was Ninkazi brewing or something they flew they per our first part of the conversation they flew um what did they fly on they flew some suborbital hops or something they flew in a suborbital suborbital fly I think it was up aerospace yeah that's right and you're into suborbid and flew yeast up into suborbid. And then, well, after the second, the first experiment, basically they lost it for some period of time in like 100 whatever degree

Fahrenheit heat. And so that first experiment was pretty much ruined. The second one succeeded. They got back efficiently. And then they used that yeast or the descendants of that yeast to create their their beer, ground control beer. Yes, that's the one. So we drank that.

It didn't taste like fish. It was delicious. But all I'm saying is that was like literally our fourth or fifth episode and no one sent us beer since. So we must have done a terrible job at plugging it or something. Because no one took us up on this. But, Tanya, you are now in charge of the off-nominal beer brand. So if you can do some outreach, you're well located in the Pacific Northwest to find the right partners. So congrats.

I'm on it. Chris, last time we were here, you had a book. and now you're taking it up a notch. Please tell us about the current state of your culture and space and related properties. What's going on? Yeah, well, alcohol in space is being turned into our mostly, you know, all right, mostly interviews have already been done, but turned into a documentary film, which will be out later this year.

But we'll be having a screening event at the upcoming Humus de Mars Summit in May. And so it's largely giving the story of all these companies that we might have been mentioning and if you're going to play it, we can listen to it. And would you rather do that right now or I can talk about an upcoming show? Yeah, it's fired up here. Chris is a pioneer. He brings the humanity into this human story.

Alcohol has been a part of human culture from the very beginning. You want to break some rules, so people do. You want to rebel a little. We've made that it's possible to be a bit of a peasant-earned. We have the solution, we made only two prototypes very much alike, and the two prototypes failed. It completely.

Let's send yeast to space and brew with it. It worked, but what didn't work is not finding the rocket for 28 days. So that's how it all came about, Sam. It was bonkers mad. It was such a short period of time I had to work with. To be called Single Walt Scott, you have to be matured for at least three years in Scotland. So we would have had to have tried to claim space for Scotland.

Ha ha ha ha. Tye, we have an experience that is fabulous, which is absolutely not... Uh-oh. I got buffering. I got buffering. What's going on here? Oh, here we go.

It's back. It's back. Sorry for the eruption. Reproductive on Earth. But the most incredible for me, it was to diguste, you have the gravity zero, you have, you have, you have, you have, you have,

So you had the vase, tapise all your palais. And in plus, we have a sensation that I've never known, it's the crockon of bules, because it had to perce the burses, clacket, the bules, because physically, it had to explode the bules, and it's an experience really unique. Jules Verde actually hypothesized,

bringing grape vines with them, and growing vines on the moon, thinking that the art sunshine on the moon would create really wonderful wine. Vintages. Why don't I get so much buffering? It was the first time they were contemplating agriculture on another planet. This dream of Jules Byrne would come true, at least having wine on the moon,

104 years later in 1969, when Apollo 11 landed and Buzz Aldrin actually consumed wine on the surface of the moon. This isn't a bonus. This isn't a nice to have. This is what it means to be human. It's space bootleg. Alcohol's been on every ship. Captain Cook stopped in Alaska. to make beer. We are bringing human culture up to space. People say, oh, we can't risk it. We can't risk not to have these things in space. If we can allow astronauts to be not only machines,

but to be people, not only surviving entities, but people to create, even for a few minutes, a society of humans outside of Earth, then this is precious. That is legit. That is real, like, this seems an extensive amount of work. And I'm curious to hear about the timeline of this project in comparison to the book.

And it looks like you've got footage from all the missions that we heard about the last time we were talking about the book. Yeah, and there'll probably be more also because there have been other missions as well since then. But Sam Burbank, the documentary filmmaker who I've known for over 20 years, who's got a lot of documentaries for National Geographic Discovery Channel and on and on and on is, you know, directing it.

And we've been working on it probably now, probably about two years now. And so we're just finally getting to the point. We're about ready to do screenings. The screening, as I mentioned, at the Humus DeMars Summit, will be an early screening. There'll still be additional interviews after that. And hopefully it will be ready for the official premiere by the end of the summer, summer, early fall. And one of the things we're hoping to do, because one of the primary,

funders of the film was the champagne company, Maison Mum, who you saw quite a bit in that video, they have their special space champagne bottle going up on an Auxium mission in the fall. And so, you know, hoping to do things related to that with screenings, you know, here in the U.S. and in Paris and other places. But to mention, yeah, we're trying to cover all these different companies that are trying to use space environment to improve their product for here on Earth, but also see if we can consume it in space. With Maison Mum, they're doing it because they want to pretty much advanced conviviality in space, which is basically what they do for a living.

They say they try to advance conviviality, and they want to do it when there are space hotels and other human settlements. If people are going to drink, you know, toast to their good fortune in space, they want them to be drinking Maison Mum. However, I still haven't heard how they're going to deal with the whole carbonation issue, because carbonation and microgravity is not pleasant in most cases. It seems like the astronauts had some not-so-great things to say early on. And I don't think they really enjoyed the taste of like the modified,

was it modified Pepsi that they sent in the 80s in the Suey Shuttle? They sent both Coke and Pepsi, actually. Oh, okay. Because originally Coke was originally going to be sent, and then Pepsi heard. And, you know, they complained and demanded to have Pepsi sent as well. So both Coke and Pepsi went up. But this also interestingly stimulated the first wine in space

because the French heard that Coke and Pepsi were going up. And so they demanded a bottle of French wine go up first. So French wine did go up before Coke and Pepsi. Oh, wow. Okay. So what was the one with the Apollo 11 wine? Like, do we know where that made its way from? You know, I don't know. Because this was something, it was communion wine.

I don't know what the brand was. He had probably said it actually arranged with this church, the Webster Presbyterian Church in Houston, to, you know, with the communion wine, a goblet, a goblet, which is still at that church, and they have an annual ceremony honoring kind of the moon, the moon service up back in 1969. But I have to admit,

I don't know what kind of line beyond communion wine. I've heard the Webster, what was it called Webster? Presbyterian Church. Their communion wine tastes like fish, is what I've heard. This is a weird. You know, Jesus was a fisherman. This is how Lent works. I was a carpenter, but he was a fisher of men.

Sorry, I didn't think I'd be referencing. It's almost Easter. We're in the spirit here. Wait, what? I don't think I know this fact, Tanya, that it tasted weird or was modified. What did they change? I thought they just made a non-carbonated version. Do you know, Chris?

Oh. Of what? Of the Coke and Pepsi? No, I don't think. I think when they did it originally, they didn't even do non-carbonated. I think that was part of the issue, which didn't go over well, because I don't think they had consumed a lot of carbonated beverages prior to that. I think they had, but this was part of the reason why it wasn't a very good success, if I'm

recalling correctly. Yeah, if the non-carbonated version is like the stuff that you buy for soda, stream before you do the whole process. It's just that like whatever that thing is. Tap water. Yeah, no, I mean, that's the, you know, non-carbonated Coke or Pepsi. It's just absolutely disgusting, you know, so nobody wants that. The zero-g flights that are in that are really fun because that's like already a compressed

time scale to do experiments that don't involve trying to hold drinks in a glass. And I'm really curious, like, what that whole experiment was like? What was the idea? Try to figure out what the surface tension is or what? Yeah, well, that one was Maison Mum. And that one was actually not ZeroG. It was the European version. I believe it's Nova Space.

It has an aircraft that does the same thing, the interparabolic flights. And they've gone up several times already, including one time, because they loved doing the PR. They had the famous sprinter, Uzane Bolt, come up and do a microgravity. any sprint on the airplane and then drink the champagne. This one, they were testing out not only opening the model, but these glasses, because in addition to, you know, the champagne itself, they don't want their champagne consumed out of a sip bottle or even just put out little balls in space. They want to, you know, want it to be authentic.

And once again, how do you enhance conviviality in space? Well, you have a champagne glass. So they did have enough time to see how. well the glass would hold on to the liquid. So that's kind of, you know, one of the things they were doing, but also how the bottle was designed, opening the bottle in an efficient way. And they went through many, many iterations of this bottle. I was at the IAC and Paris spec in whenever it was September at the Paris Observatory where they Maison-Mom announced their, announced their collaboration with axiom. And they were showing all the different iterations of this bottle that were actually came

originally from an idea from Octave de Gaulle, who you saw in the video, who was part of, you know, he was thinking during a graduate paper about sending wine up and it slowly transformed and then he partnered with Maison Mum and they really grabbed onto it. Okay, I don't know if this, I didn't see this in the footage, but have they, Has anyone done the champagne spray in zero G to see what kind of propulsion we can get out of spraying champagne like you just won the World Series? Not that I know of. I'm signing up for it. Now that we have more commercial space, now that we have more commercial space, I think that certainly is going to, that's going to happen and it would be interesting to see.

I mean, it's essentially that scene from gravity where she uses the fire, the, what's called, fire extinguisher. I don't know why my short circuit on fire extinguisher. The worst scene in gravity where she fire extinguatures her way over to the other space station, that's basically doing the champagne thing. That's true. So maybe it should be advertised. It's not just a drink, but it's a different form of propulsion. Yeah, if you're on a spacewalk and you get caught out there, just celebrate, you know.

I wonder. I wonder how fast we could get going with that. It's a question. What is the ISP? What's the cost ratio there? Yeah, what's the ISP? SP of champagne. I can see a future experiment in development here.

So anybody watching who wants to fund this experiment? I'm sure everybody here would love to do that. Oh, yeah. We are, well, you're going to need at least three or four of us. So I think, you know, have you ever seen anyone win a championship? You need a couple of people. So I'm thinking it's a good experiment. Are there, were there any things that made its way into the documentary that you didn't have in the book

or that a storyline that you were hoping to get in the book and it's coming out in the documentary, anything like that? There are a number of people interviewed that we're not in the book. And we're hoping to get, for instance, I mentioned earlier, like the, and it's not in the documentary yet. I'm hoping it will be in it. I mentioned the Bordeaux that went into space. That flew in November of 2019.

The book came out in October of 2019. So I obviously didn't get that experiment. But there are a number of new new. experiments coming out right now. There's a number of American whiskey and other producers are hoping to send the first American bourbon into space, and we might want to try to cover that. This group that want to do the first moonshine on the moon. And so it's interesting, all the different projects in development right now. There seems to be a lot of interest within the alcohol industry. They're just trying to figure out how they can get in,

and how can really advance their brand, but it is interest. To some extent, it makes sense because figuring out the functionality and the things that you need to change is like a long lead item. So if you do want your products in like early, you know, actual missions that are happening or actual hotel stays that are happening, you got to start figuring out now. You can't really wait for the hotel to be built and then figure it out. So granted, it's a lot cheaper to do these experiments than build a hotel. So there might be a little cart before the horse as we're experiencing right now.

In the meantime, you get some novelty marketing aspect to it, right? You're always going to have people that want to try the weirdest wine, the most unique whiskey. They'll want to taste the rubber and fish flavor, even if it sounds disgusting because they get to say that they tried it. Yeah, and honestly, number of the company and new companies are looking for that high-end market, you know, that people will pay it. Huge amount. For example, one of the ball, this wasn't the primary reason for it, but one of those bottles of Bordeaux was sold for a million dollars through Christie's auction house. Wow. What's the highest wine has ever gone for ever? No idea. I should. I do follow those things, but I don't recall. But that's pretty high. That's one of them. Someone Google it and put it in the live

chat so we should see. I just love thinking about someone's just looking at that. Like, yeah, that's the million dollar bottle of wine that I bought. And it's just like, I don't know, is it really nice wine or is it just kind of regular wine that happened to go to space? Yeah, you know, I kind of wonder like, you know, those bottles, you know, Jefferson's wine that were, you know, raised, you know, they were supposed to go to Jefferson, but, you know, sunk.

And I don't know if those were sold off and those probably went for a large amount. there are a lot of these historical bottles to be curious to see how much they've gone for. Well, maybe the Webster's fish wine has an opportunity if they still know where that bottle was that they poured Neil and Buzz's wine out of that that one probably would go pretty good. People love that kind of stuff.

Yeah, I don't know what the bottle is, but I know where the goblet is. Let's talk about the summit. So I want to talk about the summit, but also just generally like humans to Mars because we're in the, now in the full swing of the Artemis era, we're no longer debating like Artemis existing. We're definitely firmly in the Artemis era. So I'm curious to hear, is there generally like a theme or a vibe going into this time around with the summit?

You know, what's the layout? Well, I think it, I mean, theme is we're going, you know, Artemis 1 is flown. You know, Starship looks like it's about to fly also. Of course, today they announced the end of you know, the first head of the Moon Mars Project Office, program office. And this is an office that we've been advocating that would be created for probably since the mid-teens. This has been a constant theme, you know, in our op-eds, in our meetings with Congress, meetings with NASA, we've been pushing and pushing this. So we were quite happy when it finally was announced through Congress.

And then today, of course, with the announcement of the first head of the office. So that's a major step. All these things make a difference because trying to focus it, because I think even with all the extraordinary progress we've made with hardware and all the commercial activities and progress with the Artemis program, it sometimes still seems not to be as focused as we'd like it to be, you know, and it's still unclear, all right, when are we going to land on the moon? When are we going to actually going to land on Mars? You know, the current NASA plan is no later than 2040. Well, we'd like a little sooner than that. And when they say, no later the 2040, I can't help but think that means probably in the 2040s. So we need to have more ambitious

timelines. But having somebody whose job it is to really focus the program like that can help so that, you know, we get things more efficiently and you build more interaction between integration, rather, between the mission directors at NASA, which, you know, work together. But they often have a history of being siloed and don't always work together, but as well as working with all the partners, whether it be the commercial industrial partners or international partners as well. So I think it's a great step, you know, and hopefully this will just continue all these milestones. As the representative of all the professional Martians, Tanya, I'm curious to hear where you're at

right now with not only the human side, but, you know, there's this budget request out there that's got the Mars sample return. Like, we need this amount of money, but it's probably going to get more expensive. Ingenuity's been kicking ass. So, like, I feel like there's some good and some bad in the current Mars storyline. So what are the things that you're keying on right now with both robotic and human? I mean, I think the sample return community is certainly extremely excited. Like, this is the first time we're going to get samples back from Mars that we actually know where they came from compared to Martian meteorites.

where we know they came from Mars, but we have no context to put them in. So it's kind of like handing somebody a random rock and saying, tell me the whole history of the Earth from this rock that I didn't even tell you where it came from. But at the same time, we're seeing kind of a halt in the rest of Mars exploration because we don't have any future missions on the slate after perseverance and ingenuity. There's been talk of this Mars ice map mission for quite a while. We talked about it at a panel at Humus to Mars last year, but NASA pulled out of their part of the participation and the mission can't really move forward

as it currently stands with the other international partners. The main science instrument would be provided by Canada, a radar instrument to map out ice, which we obviously need for humans. So there's a lot of hope that maybe NASA will come back in on ice mapper because it's really going to help fill in the gaps and knowledge that we need to pick the best human landing sites. We've got data on this from things like Mars Express and Mars reconnaissance orbiter, but it's still very coarse resolution data. And it would be really great to get just a little bit more information to get a better idea of,

yes, this is where we're going to send humans. This is a great place to actually start developing, like, hopefully permanent infrastructure. Because if you're going to all the expense and time and effort to send humans, like, let's start outright. Let's put the stuff in the right place to begin with. So I'm, I can agree more. Go ahead. Oh, yeah, I'm hopeful.

I think that there's, it feels like there's positive momentum in the direction of maybe ice mapper will become a thing again. So I think we're all just kind of waiting on the science side, like, okay, what's the next mission going to be separate from the whole Mars, Sanford, Return Architecture? Yeah, Explorer Mars is really a big fan of Ice Mapper, so we're certainly going to be advocating and have advocated for it because it makes so much sense. And this is one of these programs, not really that expensive. NASA is one of the rare cases where it's a true partnership and NASA isn't paying for the majority of it. Majority of the money is coming from the partners, but NASA obviously is a key partner. So it just makes sense to figure out where the resources are, where the best places, as Tanya mentioned, the land humans when we send them. So this is one of our top priority, our policy priority is making sure, you know, ICEMAP or gets Mac, you know, back in the list of NASA projects.

And hopefully we get back to that, really, really important mission. There's the other angle, the Rosalind Franklin, that it's kind of become like a geopolitical thing now, right? That for a little while it seemed like it might just go away when the war broke out. And then it seems like at some point, everyone was like, yeah, we should just make a point and put this thing on the surface and like both have the thing on the surface and make a point of it. But, and I know early on when we were talking about the delays that Jake was saying, well, by the time it gets there, is it, still going to be able to function? Is it still going to provide the science return that it was hoped for? I haven't seen like a latest timeline on that, but that's, again, it's another thing that NASA's chipping into, and they put it in the budget this year, the contribution, but it is a little bit

longer of a timeline. So it's just kind of weird how this stuff is laying out. And I guess the, you know, I know for a while there was thought that the communications infrastructure at Mars was going to be a real choke point that we were going to run out of orbiters to relay things through. And I feel like the only reason that's not more of a hot topic today is like you said, Tanya,

there's not another big thing on the horizon other than sample return. But it still feels like a huge risk or am I outdated on the current operations out there? I mean, the newest satellites that we have, at least on like the NASA side, at this point are almost a decade old. And a lot of the satellites

that were using for like the, the main workhorse of comms. You're talking like Mars reconnaissance orbiter and Mars Odyssey. Odyssey is really old at this point. I mean, it's still trucking along, but you know, you could lose these satellites at any time when they're this old. And so you lose one of those. That's a huge blow to the amount of data that you can send back. There was actually a workshop, gosh, I forget when it was now, late last year, where NASA basically invited a bunch of folks, or at JPL, I should say, the Mars exploration program so NASA and JPL called industry out to Pasadena and they're like here are the things that we need help with because we're investing so much money in Mars sample return we need the industry to

you know can we can you can you can you can you can you guys to chip in on these other things and part of it was high resolution imaging so what's the follow on to high rise communications infrastructure weather monitoring and uh I think the fourth thing was or I thought I was like propulsion technology. And it was interesting in that there was not a lot of enthusiasm from the industry side of things other than the folks that were already bought into Mars exploration like SpaceX. But NASA also wasn't offering up any money. They didn't say we're going to launch something like the Martian version of the commercial lunar payload services program. So I told some of them that afterward, I said, I don't think you're going to get excitement from companies until you

you tell them that you're going to put some money behind it. Right now you're just saying it'd be great if maybe you kind of wanted to work on these things. And it's hard enough to sell the commercial aspect of lunar exploration just for the moon. But Mars is like a whole other magnitude away, like in every sense of the word. So it'll be interesting to see if maybe from that meeting, they actually do decide to launch a commercial payload services program for Mars and see what kind of innovations we get on that side. Yeah, that's interesting. because we're also like getting into the, into the ballpark now of being able to at least learn some lessons

with how eclipse has gone. And even, I was, I was, my hopes, I've been pretty negative about it recently in that it felt like they onboarded so many companies that it was a race to the bottom for pricing and then the companies were just going out of business. The most recent award that went to Firefly that included this like transfer stage

that would drop something off in orbit was north of $100 million for the contract, which was significantly more than the past couple task orders have been. So I don't know what's going on there. Maybe people are getting more realistic finally. But I do feel like if that continues to struggle, it does make the case harder for can commercial companies, is there a viable way for the business model to work out to provide payloads to Mars, let alone the moon? I kind of wonder if part of the motivation on the communication side was like, all right, like down the street,

everyone's making thousands of communications satellites. Can we have one? We just need one of them out of the four. thousand that these companies are making. So, I don't know. It's such a weird spot because it's hard to predict demand because the timelines are so long that you have to predict the future and future demand. And it's not something I think that any of the companies that really have a beat on yet

that they'll take it up on their own. I mean, there's no incentive right now, right? There's no commercial benefit sending a communication satellite to Mars on your own volition or even like sending an orbiter to Mars. the environment there is so completely different. You can't just take a satellite that you've designed for Earth orbit and then put the exact same thing in orbit of Mars. It's not going to work.

You have to understand the different atmosphere and orbital dynamics and all of that stuff. I see in the chat, Bradley says that there was an announcement about maybe eclipse-like program for Mars starting in the 2040s. I feel like this is where the government needs to jive a little bit better with how quick the industry works. Like, that seems like such a lot of, so much time to waste when you could be getting help from industry now by just doing a little bit of investment. Yeah, that's 2040s. That's useless. You know, and one of the topics we have at Humans to Mars Summit is looking if there's a market for Mars. And, well, communication satellites might be a bit of a push right now.

And I agree with all you. And that is one of the essential things because we do not have sufficient communication. will present humans since most of what we learn on Mars stays on Mars because of the trickle of data that comes back from the rovers. But we're looking at other aspects, you know, about five or six years ago, I'm missing what, COVID time right now, I guess, 2017, 2018, we had panels on, is there a market for Mars? Is there, you know, will people make money in the near term? At a time they were saying pretty much, no, maybe the moon certainly.

low earth orbit. But since then, we've seen a lot of change. It's not like investing major investments that, you know, it's hard to see what the benefits to companies are, you know, because it might be a hard sell to say you should pay for this communication satellite around Mars, but other things, because we, everybody now sees that we have the transportation. I mean, it's not all done yet, but we're well underway. People believe we're going to Mars. now they're realizing, oh, we need a lot of other stuff to be able to go to Mars or anywhere well, sustainably. How are we going to eat?

How are we going to drink? How are we going to breathe? You know, medicine, artificial intelligence, resource utilization. And so a lot of companies are looking at all these challenges, you know, these innovations required for sustainability on Mars that could also benefit Earth. That could be a market here on Earth. And not all these things are going to cost billions or hundreds of millions of dollars. some of these things cost in the lower order of millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So there are even in the last few years some venture capitalists who have been investing in Mars-related technology. I don't know what the failure of the Silicon Bank is going to do with that. But nonetheless, it was a major change from the previous time when people really didn't quite get it and didn't see how you're going to make a profit from Mars. But then they realized, oh, you don't have to pay for the entire. mission to Mars, then it's not going to be a profit on that any time soon, but all these different elements required, there's thousands and thousands of technologies that when you look at a problem to the Mars lens, you know, what sort of large leaps can you make in the technology that you wouldn't

be motivated to do here on Earth, like in agriculture, other forms of food production or environmental mental systems, things like that that you might realize, oh, look at what we did for Mars. Now we can use it as a major improvement here on Earth and make a lot of money. It's similar. You know, the space version of that is like, can we learn lessons here and make money here while then figuring something out from Mars? The topic that's age-old debate of like how much can we learn at the moon before we go to Mars is always an academic debate more than like a realistic debate because we haven't really

had a viable moon program either for a long time. I'm curious though, now heading into the meat of the Artemis architecture, the way that it's shaped out, are there areas that feel ripe for that? Because before, there was, you remember, if you can put your mind back to when it was the deep space gateway. And then there was this thing, the deep space transport that was going to be a longer-lived, what were they going to do, fly a mission for a year or two to, to, like, simulate a Mars transit effectively. That has not been talked about ever since. It's totally gone. So I'm curious if there's pieces of the architecture that you look at as like, oh, that's the Mars foothold here, or is it really the moon to Mars program is kind of just hand-wavy? Like, well, it just means because

we'll do the moon first and Mars later. I know. That's been a big, big topic of discussion. It was in Explore Mars. It will be at the Humans to Mars Summit in May, but it's been one of the primary topics ever achieving Mars workshop. We just released the most recent ninth report two weeks ago. Just go to explore mars.org if you want to see that. But one of our, you know, one of our primary tasks for the last several years has been working with the lunar community to figure out the best ways to utilize the moon, to feed forward to Mars. So we're not, so we're not just having a moon program and then, okay, we're at the moon and maybe one day let's start planning about how we're going to go to Mars and have a completely separate architecture. They're not perfect analogs to each other,

but there's enough where as long as we keep both in mind, we're planning for Mars and the moon at the same time, this is what we've been pushing. And so there are a number of places where this can work with, you know, with life support, you know, dust mitigation, although there are different types of dust, of course. It's a lot sharper on the moon. But, you know, even some aspects of land, you know, entry descent landing is different because there's no atmosphere on the moon, but, you know, on the terminal phase, you know, last phase of landing, there's a lot of similarity. So they are looking at a lot of these systems on how we can effectively use the moon to get to Mars, you know, because we generally, with our group, we're realistic. You know, we don't think we need to go to the moon, but we're happy to get back to the moon as soon as we can. And if we're going there, let's find the best way of using it to advance getting to Mars and not becoming an obstacle to going to Mars, which you could very well turn into if we don't plan it correctly.

But thankfully, you know, in our talks with NASA, Congress and everybody else, everybody seems to be on board with that approach. But once again, we'll see if that continues as more hardware is being built and as budgets, you know, start getting bigger. because the easiest thing to do for mission planners, and that's what happened back in the earlier plan, you know, when George W. Bush announced plans, you know, for the moon and Mars, it quickly became a moon-only project. Not that we got to the moon, but it became more focused on the moon because of budgetary and some other issues. So we want to avoid that. I think this is where having this new program office is really going to come in handy, since it'll mean it's not just this nebulous idea anymore of, and we're eventually going to go to Mars, but right now we're focusing on the moon.

I think without that, it could be really easy for it to turn into, the moon is basically an anecdote. And it's like, well, we have to do so many things here before we feel confident enough to go to Mars. So now we have somebody that can actually set that strategic vision and say, okay, you know, we're not going to get stuck on the moon, which stuff we want to do here, but we can't let that keep us from making that next step. It kind of felt like it was, that was even going to happen with the moon if a program

office did not form, right? Like, there's not been an art. It's not like there was a moon office. There was none of those either. So that, that aspect is really interesting. The only thing that I would, like, I don't know, I'm not going to argue for the moon over the Martians to the Martians here, but the only thing that I would be concerned about is the way that human spaceflight programs become sticky in the budget. And, you know, for all in its purposes, the Artemis program would be farther ahead if there wasn't an ISS, eating, of the budget? Like, that's a pretty substantial amount of budget that they have to contend against, and that's, you know, witness also the way that Artemis and the commercial

space stations programs are fighting for budget, and Artemis is winning by a lot. So, eventually, the Artemis wedge nudged out what was the future ISS wedge. But once we have infrastructure on the moon, and there's momentum to keep paying for that and keep building onto it and maintaining it, that's the next battle. It's like, all right, well, now the Mars budget needs to to wedge in here and that's problematic. Well, yeah, and some of it has to happen sooner than later. And there have been some, they are spending money on some of this. Like there was, what was the name?

I'm blanking right now in the program where they tested the arrow shell for landing on, you know, large arrow shell for landing on Mars. And so, and that was important because in one of our previous workshops that was always named as the number one long pole technology for landing on. Mars since the biggest thing we've ever landed on Mars is both the curiosity and the perseverance rovers at one metric ton and you're talking about lofted yeah yeah left it sorry yeah left it's all right yeah I just blank on the low earth orbit flight test of an inflatable decelerator that's just so easy to roll us off the town we will be having a talk on that at

the humans to Mars summit as well but it is we've only landed one metric ton with perseverance and curiosity, and those were lowered with the sky crane. We're not going to be doing that with humans. We're going to need to land with, you know, the mission, kind of the mission parameters that NASA industry have put out is generally going to be like 20 to 40 metric tons, or SpaceX considerably more. So, you know, it's not a small problem, and we can't wait until we're just about ready to send humans to Mars and figure out how are we going to land. And then once they land, how are we going to get off the surface as well. So, yeah, you can't just wait until we're on the moon and then for a while and then start

thinking, oh, now we're going to be planning for Mars. We have to really look at some of these technologies right now. And they are. But we need to do more of that. Like we got a skycraning and the humans does sound pretty cool. And I won't be using airbag. We won't be using airbag. That's true.

If I depict airbag or skycrate, I'm going skycrate 10 times out of ten. I think how big that would be. Yeah. I feel like that's going to become like the Martian equivalent of skydiving, just like riding on these sky grains. This is what I'm talking about right here. That's a off-nominal adventure. We've got to have an offshoot brand.

That's, uh, yeah, that's going to be sweet. Um, you mentioned Starship a second ago, and that both feels like the cheat code for the moon to Mars program office and also still a little bit hand-waving at the same time of like, only because like when's the last time you've seen a lot of talk from SpaceX directly

about Starship outside of that cool render of everyone descending from the elevator, right? They're pumped on the Artemis contract as they should be because it's a lot of money and it's a high profile thing and it would be completely epic if they land that insane elevator on

but like the cheat code there is their whole program depends on doing the same kind of atmospheric entry back at Earth with Star ship as they would need to do at Mars. So it totally is the cheat code. And that's good because NASA needed to find a cheat code to, like, offset some of the cost, right? Because effectively, they've found a way to make use of what private capital there is going

into developing this system that's going to help them both at the moon and Mars. It's also a risk that if we lean on that too much and there's only a single company interested in building that kind of thing. Like, I don't know, for instance, Locky Martin used to put out a lot of renders of Mars Base Camp, and I'm pretty sure they just launched a new company called Crescent that's like a lunar infrastructure. And I think Joe Landon's running that,

who I remember talking about Mars Base Camp in the past. Oh, they're still very much into Mars Base Camp. I just, you know, I was thinking the May I said yesterday. Okay, see, but that's not out there. Like, no, but they're not really talking that up. And I'm kind of interested in the fact that that has gone completely silent. I think there's a lot of realism as well. I mean, I think Lockheed, particularly, and a lot of companies, I mean, I deal with all of them.

And I think in many ways they are still more excited about Mars, but they all have to be realistic from a business perspective. The moon's coming first. So it's not, you know, SpaceX has an advantage the way they're operated, the way Elon, you know, operates that can pretty much, you know, brand anything and talk about Mars all they want. And they operate differently than anybody else. But, you know, companies like Lockheed, Arrowjet, North of Grumman, Boeing, you know, they don't operate the same way. And so they have to look at this in the way, what is NASA doing? What is the most likely path forward? You know, and how are they going to be able to get the contract to do it?

So, yeah, I'm not surprised there's a little more focus on the moon lately. But I can guarantee since we, a lot of the key people of these companies participate, heavily in our programs, you know, they are very excited and are just committed to making sure this isn't a moon-only program that this truly moves us onwards to Mars. Because that's, you know, Lockheed, as you mentioned, I mean, has this tradition, you know, of going to Mars robotically, but nonetheless, it's a long-standing tradition. And so they certainly want to go as well as all the others get humans on the surface of Mars. The other aspect that came out recently about Artemis, is that they appointed mission scientists to some of the missions themselves,

which I found kind of interesting, knowing Jake scrumbles in the past of, like, what about the science? But another area maybe, like, clips, Tanya, where we can, are there lessons to learn now about, like, managing these programs? I don't know if you've talked to anyone recently about, like, you know, science is in a quagmire with Mars, as you know, with, like, the sample return budget and all that, but, are there things that we can actually sort out with the Artemis program to get that right

before going to attempt organizing a Mars mission and trying to put science somewhere in the prioritization stack? Or is that like, I don't know, figure that out once it's actually happening? I think the fact that they're even talking about it is a huge step because there were never any science goals for human exploration when you talk about things like the space station. It was sort of an afterthought. We're going to use it to do stuff. Oh, crap. What is that stuff going to be?

Well, there's probably money in pharmaceuticals. Like, we could do things like that. Let's do some biology. But there have never really been, like, what are the science goals behind human exploration? Whereas the science goal is, like, the number one thing that you define when you're proposing, like, an actual robotic mission. Like, the goal of perseverance is to look for signs of ancient life. So now we're actually going to have that for the moon. not like an overarching Artemis, like, we're going to do this,

but actually thinking about what science we want to do with humans, beyond just the idea of we're going to send humans there to stay. Right, and then we'll be there. Yeah. What are they going to do when they're there? What questions do we want to answer that we couldn't do with rovers or that, you know, we scratched the surface with Apollo, and now we're going to have people back there studying step in situ.

What do we want to do with it? So I think even just the fact that they're doing this is a great first step for figuring out what we're going to do for Mars later. We talked about the summit a bit. We got a couple minutes left, so I thought it would be cool maybe to hear like, what's the deal? How do people, can they still buy tickets? What's the deal? Oh, they can.

We want as big an audience as possible to get the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C. You haven't been there, beautiful building. It's worth going to the building even without a conference, but with a conference, that's even better. But we have a great program. It's May 16th through 18th, 2023, and a lot of great topics. If you go to the website, you know, we're adding speakers every day. But, you know, some fascinating conversations, including some new ones. One of the ones I'm most excited about is a session called tradespeople in space.

Basically looking at so many years at conferences forever we've had, of course, as we should have. The engineers, the scientists, and everything else. But from so many years, we had PowerPoint programs. Now stuff is being built, not just by government programs, but huge number of commercial programs as well. And of course, it's not the engineers that are generally bending the metal, but you have welders, machinists, you know, pipe fitters, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we're starting a program, starting it with this panel, but it's gonna be an ongoing program to look at the people who are actually building the space programs, commercial and government, as well as what the challenges and opportunities are over the next few decades. Do we have the right pipeline for these high-skilled workers? And as I mentioned to a number of people, I suspect that 99.9 plus plus percentage people considering trades have no idea they probably they might be able to work in the space industry. So we're just trying to start to kick this off and start talking about all the different elements and making sure that we can start connecting the dots

within industry and within the groups of the companies or at least the organizations that train people in these areas. So I think that's going to be a really interesting one. But, you know, we're going to be having updates on Artemis, you know, as well as Artemis 3, you know, when we actually land on the moon, but how that actually helps us get to get some Mars. But many, many, many, many talk about. I don't want to go down to litany of topics because it gets a little bit tired some, but, you know, I think people, take a look at the website. It's really coming together well and would love to see you in person. We'll have great, we'll have, as I mentioned, also a screening of the alcohol and space film preceded by a reception sponsored by Art Beg at a Scottish Whiskey

company. So that should be fun. We have some other things about to be announced as well. So people definitely need to be there in person. I did see. There's a session with your name on it, Tanya. Yes. Is that a thing? Oh, it's got my old affiliation. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Not updated for current status, but it looks pretty sweet.

Lori Glaze is going to be hanging out with you. You got the whole, you're around the globe on this one. Yeah, talking to everybody that's got an interest in Mars science from a space agency standpoint. Do you have anything you want to plug or mention or should we move on? I can't think of anything. All right, great. Hope to see you all in DC. Yeah, I mean, May and D.C. is like a, that's just a great time to hang out. So I'll have to,

I think I might be traveling that time, but I got to figure out if I can drive down there. Oh, yeah, you've got to be there. And bring the show there. I know. Well, the problem is that I am already on the road. But let me look into it because I do need to be there. And I do love D.C. and it's been a while since I've been to D.C. for conference. Last one was IAC, I guess, right before COVID kicked. So that was notably a great time. So I will mention next week, and this is somewhat Mars-related, next week on the show, we've got, you might remember Rocket Labs doing a Venus mission.

There's another company called Impulse doing a Mars mission. So we'll have Barry Matsumori, who is the C-O-O-of-Impulse on, and Eric Berger will be here with me chatting about what Impulse is up to. They'll be at H-2M as well. well there you go he's on the he's on the junket we're we're officially part of the junket i guess so uh yeah that'll be cool impulse i kind of glancingly know from when they did this uh kind of media push when they announced that uh partnership with relativity a couple months ago or something like that it was probably in the fall or something so that'd be cool to talk to um and of course uh you got to uh come out

the space symposium should be a good time uh space symposium has always been one of my list to go to that I've never gotten out to, so I'm glad that it's happening this year. And I'm sure there will be... The Bromere Hotel is really wonderful. It looks pretty swanky. Old classic. But the nice modern facilities also,

but the old classic hotel is wonderful. It looks fairly swanky. I'm pretty pumped to see the chaos. And it sounds like it's... I mean, it's always felt like the conference I should be at because it's got such a bent on like business strategy and commercial stuff, but I'm sure...

Is there stuff that you're looking forward to in particular, Chris? Mostly just talking to people. There are a lot of good sessions always, but, you know, one of the main reason people go there is because of all the people who are there. So looking forward to that, all the different side events. So it should be a lot of fun.

Sweet. Well, thank you both for hanging out. I will mention, too, the Offnom Discord. If you've not checked that out, Offnob.com.com slash Discord. You can join up, and there's always something good going down in there. And Jake's doing his sabbatical thing. So he'll be back in a while.

So tweet at him and, I don't know, give him some crap while he's out there and has time to spare. But thanks again, Chris. Thanks again, Tanya, for hanging out. And we will see you all later. Thank you. Bye, man.