Off-Nominal - 104 - Ricky Bobby Goes to the Moon (Live from Space Symposium 2023)

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Anthony cracks open a beer and talks about the news from Space Symposium with Jacqueline Feldscher of Payload and Jeff Foust of SpaceNews.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 104 - Ricky Bobby Goes to the Moon (Live from Space Symposium 2023) - YouTubeLive at Space Symposium 2023! - Main Engine Cut OffOff-Nominal: What's Pitchin' at Space Symposium?​ - YouTubeLeidos, NASCAR Head to the Moon - PayloadRocket Lab to refly Electron engine - SpaceNewsFollow Jacqueline FeldscherJacqueline Feldscher (@jacqklimas) / TwitterJacqueline Feldscher, Author at PayloadFollow Jeff FoustJeff Foust (@jeff_foust) / TwitterJeff Foust, Author at SpaceNewsFollow 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

TLS and go for main engine, start. Everybody grab your drinks. It is time for the first ever off nominal live show. Got some stickers over there if you've not seen the show before. This is what it is. We all hang out. We have a nice drink, talk about stuff going on in space. Got two of our favorites here, Jacqueline Feldshire of payload.

You can see you with a hat. It's a good hat. Jeff Faust of Space News. Hey. How's it going? We got a lot to dig into. It's been a busy week. You two have been out here the whole time.

Is there a particular? story. Well, first of all, what are we drinking? We always start with that on the show, but I did not get the name of whatever this particular Colorado beer is. I have the IPA. Is your thing on? Your thing's off. Is that better? Is it on yet? Her mic is not working at all. On? There it is. We're doing great. This is all phenomenal, as the name implies. I've got an IPA. Mine is the Colch. It's the Prospector's Peak. It is like a Broadmoor brand. fear. Oh, I didn't realize that the situation is. Okay, great. What did you get? I got the Scottish Yale. This is the laughing lab. How can you say no to a laughing lab? So, all right. There it is.

Where should we start? What is your, you got a favorite story, Jacqueline? There's been some cool moon news. Yeah, you've been all about the moon stuff. I have. I mean, I'm all about the moon. How can you not be all about the moon? Rovers, satellites? What's your moon stick? Lido's unveiled their lunar rover. And cause a big splash because there's a giant NASCAR logo on the back, which people were very excited about. And why? Why is there a NASCAR logo? So I thought it was just like branding, but there's actually like a reason behind it. If like a wheel breaks on the lunar surface, they want suited up astronauts to be able to change it quickly. So they're trying to learn from NASCAR like a pit stop-esque wheel change.

That seems over the top. I'm going to be real. That seems like a little much. I don't think we're imagining this pit crew of astronauts. suddenly popping out of nowhere with a fresh tire. It seems like a little extra, I'll be honest. If they stuck purely on peppering the thing with logos, that would probably be a better use. That was another thing. They were like NASCAR as a branding master.

And I was like, so are we going to see this thing driving on the surface of the moon, covered in logos? And they're like, wouldn't go that far, but maybe. Procter & Gamble is like, let's go, baby. We got all the brands. What do you want? We got tied. We got bounce.

What do you want? I'm running out of my Procter and Gamble things. but yeah. It does, the rover does only turn left. I don't think that's the case. That's it. It also goes super slow. It's really slow and it only goes left.

If you catch a draft though, if you catch a draft on the moon, you can really get around somebody. They're doing like a second unveiling on Sunday at Talladega. So I'm very curious what the NASCAR Taladega, like audience viewership thinks of this lunar rover. Now, they're a rover in particular, because this has been a thing. Like, for the last year, people have been unveiling these, and they all look pretty sci-fi,

like unreasonably sci-fi. And this one looks like what I would expect it to look like. So what would have the other one? It's got, you know, some accents. It's got, you know, some LED lights and things like that. Those wheel wells are gone. They're not going to be there. It's no cup holders, I looked.

But, I mean, yeah, I mean, you have, these are a lot of concepts. to really get people excited about this. I think you find, like all concepts, the designs will evolve over time, whichever one NASA picks for what's called the lunar train vehicle, the LTV competition, it's going to evolve over time

as they dig into the technical details and they discover that, yeah, you know, we actually need more power or something, and the cool design elements sort of fall by the wayside in order to get something that's a little bit more functional. I'm unclear on the exact structure of what that program is going to be, though. Like, is that they're going to put out an RFP for the rover specifically,

and then they're going to pick one, two people. Like, what's the structure? Well, they want to do it as a services contract, like HLS and like most of the other elements now of Artemis, is a rover as a service, which is why you can do things like partner with NASCAR, potentially have a rover on the lunar surface that has, you know, sponsor logos on it, that potentially NASA astronauts will be driving at some point. I'm curious to see what sort of IP issues are going to show up or, you know, branding rights issues are going to come up about having, you know, a NASA astronaut, quote unquote, endorse a lunar rover by driving a Luna rover that's got a sponsor logo on it. So we'll have to see how that works. Like we see with people in uniform, it'll be like driving in this road or does not constitute endorsement of NASCAR.

The services thing, though, like, it's a weird bit, right? And this is getting increasingly weird with spacesuits. Like, who else is going to buy space suits? That's weird as is. But this one, actually, I was over at the Lido's booth earlier, and they were talking about there's like four sections of the payload deck where they can sell payload space. And that sounds more like what the service would be

versus like somebody else going to buy their rover. It's almost like an extension of clips. Instead of sending payloads to the surface of the moon, you have payloads riding around the surface of the moon. Or repositioning. If something came on a Clipslander. And the other thing about LTV. is that it's designed to be autonomously operated when the astronauts aren't present.

So 11 months out of the year, there's going to be no one there because the missions are only going to be a month at a time, but you can still use that rover to drive around, explore the things, use those payloads. And that's a potential, if that's on a commercial basis, that's a potential revenue stream beyond the services they're providing directly to NASA. So is this going to be a thing that we hear about soon? Do you remember the timeline on this? I don't remember when the RFP's... supposed to come out no later than late May. And the goal would be to have an award by late November.

Those schedules will probably slip like everything else. But I think the idea is that by the end of the year we know what company, and I don't know if they're going to leave it open to potentially multiple companies, especially since, you know, as we've heard here this week, that they are moving away from the single Artemis Base Camp concept to having like multiple smaller camps that you could visit. it at different times depending on when you go and what the lighting conditions are or so on, you may need multiple rovers to do that and that might be multiple opportunities.

Did you read that doc, like the Artemis plan? I did not. No, it's been pretty busy. I didn't really read it yet either, but sorry. There's people out here that worked on it. So, whoops, they're with a near shot. I'll read it when I get home. We're sorry. We didn't do our homework. It's also an interesting program because, like, they haven't talked about how those things get to the moon. And if Starship wasn't already selected as a lunar lander, this probably would

be more perplexing of a conversation about landing. Because it's, I guess it's a similar scale to Viper. It's a bigger, though. Yeah, I think that, I think this will be bigger than Viper. So this might be beyond what at least a lot of the existing Clips capabilities are. Keep in mind, there are companies like SpaceX and Blue that are on the Clips contract vehicle. True. And they've with very large landers, which have not been selected because NASA's flying much smaller missions. So there's still an opportunity, I think, to maybe use the eclipse vehicle to deliver those landers.

Or maybe they just stole it away in a corner of a starship because they've got the extra room. Well, that's the moon. Oh, how about the Astrolab thing? Did you walk by that Astro Lab rover? It's like around the corner here. I did not. I'll have to check it out after.

I talked about it earlier. I didn't know what to make of Astrolab. I was a little skeptical. I feel like I remember an article that one of you wrote a year ago when they announced. Now they've announced a Starship Flight in 2026. They just straight up tell you that they offer a 12 U-Cubset space for 25 kilograms for $10 million. And they can take like 1,500 kilograms to the surface. So it's interesting because, again, like, if they're just going to do one of these missions,

if that is actually true. And you can do your own Starship math, which we'll get into that at some. some point. Even if that if they pull that off by 2028 or 2030, that becomes like a serious thing that endangers the utility of Clips missions to some extent if that's actually achievable and flying because Clips is not doing the best right now. Everything's having a hard time getting the launch pad. I just find that I don't know. I went from like being pretty skeptical to going like, I think, okay, I could see what's going on here. Well, you know, it's almost parallel to what's going on in the and launch vehicle, the small launch vehicle sector

where all the customers now are flying ride share on transporter missions because it's so cheap and they can get close to the orbits they want to and if they really need an OTV, they can work with deorbit or momentous or somebody to get them that last mile rather than buy the dedicated launch. Well, it may turn out that the cheapest way

to get rovers and large cargo to the moon is this gonna be on dedicated starship ride share missions to the moon and all these small lunar landers going to be in big trouble because they're not going to provide the, be able to compete on price. That's true. It's literally the exact same conversation. This is great.

So happy that we're here. You're grumpy about Starship at the moment. I am. I mean, I'm excited about it. I think everyone's excited about it. But I can't believe people are leaving. You're sad that our friends are at Boguchika instead of here. Yeah.

I mean, I understand the draw of the beach, but there are mountains. There's great craft beer. That's true. I don't know. There's us. We're here. Exactly. More for us.

Yeah, that's true. I love Space Symposium. Like, I think it's so much fun. It's like Disney for Space people. Totally. So I love being here, and I think there's so much more news here. And, like, launches are cool, but I can also watch it on TV. That's going to be a terrible take.

People are going to hate that. But, like, I can watch the live stream. When it scrubs, I can, like, go about my day and be home. So I obviously, I obviously, I feel like with, not different in the way that you think I'm going to say. Oh, okay. Like, everyone was pumped to go to Artemis 1 because it was like the SLS launch that we've been talking about forever.

Right. And it was the SLS launch. And when the next one is, is TBD. If things go well, like, there's going to be a lot of Starship launches. So we'll catch one. It's true. That's how I feel about it. It's the first, right?

So it's historic. I'm not trying to chase this one around schedule-wise. Right. I get, I mean, journalists love being there for the first draft of history. That's kind of the benefit of the job. So I get it, but my travel plans were never in jeopardy. I was always coming to Colorado and always staying in Colorado. Yeah, I mean, if Starship had happened last week, I may have tried to go there.

If it ends up getting moved to next week, maybe I tried to go. But there was just so much I had going on here this week that couldn't justify going away even for a day, which would have been the absolute bare minimum to be able to do that because of all the other meetings and sessions that I had booked for this. So on Monday, half the people I ran into here are like, why aren't you in Boka-Chica? The other half are like, aren't you glad you're not in Boca Chica? Let's talk about the- You're my people there, group number two.

Let's talk about the flight for a second, though. I'm interested in what you think is going to happen, both with the flight, but also, let's just assume that, like, it launches. Reentry, you know, let's just set re-entry aside. Let's say it gets to, like, almost orbit, and then there's the whole gatekeeping about, like, how orbital was it, that whole thing. And just look at whatever Jonathan McDowell says, that's what we'll go with. Do you think that this is a moment that is, like, going to inject some chaos? Or is it going to be like, okay, Starship did its thing, and we'll wait to see how many times it flies in the near future?

Which variety of that is it? I think, you know, Elon has been doing a lot to try and set expectations low for this flight. It's like, please don't blow up on the pad. Anything and beyond that will be all right. You know, if they get through first stage, stage separation, get the upper stage going, And that's a big success because they have not flown anything like that before. So being able to do that, it's a big deal. If they were actually to get all the way to upper stage engine cut off

and get on that nearly orbital or marginally orbital or whatever the phrasing we're choosing to go around and splash down off Hawaii is almost like a bonus. But almost certainly something's going to go wrong. It's not going to be a perfect flight simply looking at the record of what happened on all the earlier starship test flights, what happened with Falcon 1, you know, what happened with the Falcon 9 landing attempts, all the failure. But the thing is, they have hardware. I mean, the next vehicles are sort of sitting there in Bocchika waiting for their turn on the launch pad. So they're able to iterate pretty quickly and move ahead. And I think Elon has talked about that

they have already made changes to the next booster and the next ship based on their experience with getting this booster and this ship ready to go so that they will be ready to go fairly quickly provided again that they don't blow up the launch tower in the process of testing this. Yeah, that's a big kicker. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any doubt that it's going to work eventually, right? Like I feel like everyone is pretty confident that Starship is going to be a thing. And we're a ways away from sort of the transformational flight cadence that they're talking about. So while this is a big moment, like, I think there's a ways to go before it's sort of the biggest moment.

And I don't know. I have like no intel suggest the launch isn't going to happen, but I just feel like they're going to be so careful. And, you know, like you said, Elon has that expectation so low that if there's anything even off, I think it scrubs again. Like I think this is something maybe I'll be proven wrong. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong for all the people who left and are in Texas. But this is something that I could see scrubbing repeatedly to make sure that everything really has the best chance to go right. I just find it really interesting that the, like, the flagship mission that Starship has on its manifest in Artemis 3 requires that they are flying so much and so frequently that it is astounding to consider. Like the fact that they have to fly, and I don't know what the actual number is of how many times they need to launch to fill up that depot, to fill the lander, to go to,

lunar orbit, but it's a lot. Massively complex, I think. Massively, immensely, immensely complex, yes. Yeah, what is it? Anyone, who remembers this? Something about high risk, immensely complex and high risk? Is that what it was? That's what it was. But it's true. Like that is, yeah, it is maybe not the high risk part, but what I find interesting to consider is roll your head out like right after Artemis 3, like the day after Artemis 3, right? Everything goes great. Whoever's walking on the surface is doing their thing and the next day there's this big gap between Artemis 3 and 4. And it's not like Starship just ceases to exist and then re-exists at Artemis 4.

And this is the moment I'm really curious about now. Now that we're beyond Artemis 1 and we can stop fighting about that and like what should be done on policy level, that gap between the two missions, if Starship needs to be flying at such a rate to pull off Artemis 3 that the years in between are like, they're not just going to wait around. There's going to be people flying on it all the time if that works out. And then what does the policy infrastructure do with that? If there is this frequent access, not even to the service, but just to lunar orbit, are we, is like, are the politicians cool with waiting around for the next SLS? SLS Block 2, which is going to be a whole other thing.

I don't know, that looks like such a chaotic three years to me. But do you think policy can react quick enough to jump on whatever the bandwagon is at the moment. I guess, you know, talking about looking at this gap is that after Artemis 3 sometime in the mid-2020-ish range, you've got, you know, you've got two or three-year gap potentially with Artemis 4. But, you know, SpaceX may be flying the Dear Moon mission. They may fly Dennis Tito's mission around the moon. Who knows what other customers are going to come out of the woodwork to fly this? do people after once they've demonstrated

with Artemis 3, do customers say, hey, can do a landing for us? Is the next Starship landing Artemis 4 or is it a customer? Right. Is it Jared Isaacman or whatever? Maybe that might be pushing it a little too much. I don't know if they

would go that far. Why not, though? But certainly, depending on how long the delay is, certainly, you know, they've said to NASA, hey, we've done our thing for you with Artemis 3, We're now going to demonstrate the services part of this and provide it to other customers. That's the point, right? NASA wants that. So if Jared Isaacan wants to go walk on the moon,

if Vegas would take a prop bet that he would walk on the moon before Artemis 4 does something, I would totally take that prop bet. Or the UAE or Saudi Arabia or some other country with a lot of money and interest of promoting a human spaceflight program. Yeah, or NASCAR. Generally, NASCAR generally. The pit crew. Ricky Bobby goes to the moon.

You can fit a whole pit crew on a starship. Notable. I think it's like about that many people. No, I think that's right. What else we got? Any non-luner stuff that you've been curious? There's a lot less launch here than I thought there would be. Rocket Labs make a lot of noise. Hypersonics, quite interesting. You were formerly at Defense 1, so you probably,

maybe you don't want to talk about hypersonics anymore. I don't know. That's why I left Defense 1. No, I mean, I think it's obviously really exciting news. It'll be a game changer if and when it happens. The Hypersonic thing? Yeah. It's like pretty soon.

Is it? I don't know the timeline. As far as I know, it's like pretty soon. Yeah. So I caught wind of this like before they announced it and it was pretty imminent. So I think it's a brilliant move. Like they can, they're working on first stage reusability. So they could launch one of these fished out of the ocean.

And other than whatever the mission specific kick stage is and the payload ferry, like most of the things reuse. There's no upper stage. They can charge a lot for this because it's a niche. And if you look at what hypersonic missions, would cost if it wasn't them. It's significantly more than electron costs, even at the high price that, whatever the highest price is, they sold electron looks great for a hypersonic budget. So I don't know. I feel like it's quite interesting. I'm into it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a number of the small launch vehicle companies have at least talked about looking at hypersonics because a small launch

vehicle in sort of the electron class looks a lot like a missile that you would use for hypersonics testing or as a target for missile defense or things like. like that. I think Rocket Lab is really the first to really get out there and say, we're going to make a minimal modification to electron and turn that into something that we can offer. Oh, and by the way, now we can amateurize our production line over a much larger number of vehicles between the orbital electrons and the hypersonic test electrons, which aren't that much different. So that's a big win potentially for them. You know, Virgin Orbit, for example, talked about doing hypersonic

testing and they never seem to get very far down that path. And I think some of the other small launch vehicle folks are looking at the same thing too. I thought that's what Virgin Orbit, that's what had happened in this bankruptcy situation with them, that somebody would have bought them that was interested in the hypersonic. Like Strata Launch did that, right? Where they got bought or after Paul Allen died and then sold it. All I heard about was hypersonic stuff. And that for, you know, the thing that they had, I guess that made sense at the time.

But Virgin Orbit felt like it was in that. territory, especially because I don't see a path for that being a really commercially successful launch vehicle. They got squeezed on the price side. They were as expensive as like the one-ton launchers, but they were as performant as the electrons in the world. And they were flying three times a year. So as much as they were going out selling responsive space, they just can't really sell that and fly three times a year and have a viable path there. So I don't know. I felt like I was never a big Virgin orbit believer. people were acting surprised and I don't know, I was like not surprised at all. Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's part of just a larger trend in the launch market.

Everyone moving to larger vehicles because they're looking at, they're seeing forecasting this demand, you know, supply shortfall in the larger launch vehicle area because at this conference a year ago, Amazon came in and bought up pretty much all the free world's heavy lift launch capacity for three years that wasn't named SpaceX. And so now if you're trying to launch something in the mid-2020s on a large vehicle, you've got SpaceX and very few other options right now because Arion 6 and Blue Origin and Vulcan are all bought up. So people are seeing that as sort of an opportunity. Tim Ellis has talked about that on the number of occasions, which was, I think, drove that,

you know, was one of the driving factors for them to say, let's accelerate the new version of Terranar. Accelerate? Is that the word we're going to use for it? Well, accelerate... You mean bail on Taryn 1, more than accelerate Ternar. Accelerating that if they were trying to do both Taryn R and Taryn 1 at the same time, they'd be going... That was never true.

That was never true. Well... That's what I feel about it. I remember talking to... I remember talking to Tim a couple of years ago, and I said, are you still going to do Taryn 1? It's like, oh, the demand for that's insatiable. So much so that we are announcing all of these launch contracts

other than just saying we've signed these customers. That, I was always, I don't know. I went on a rant about this recently. I don't need to rehash it. You heard me be cranked about this. I did. I talked with Tim about this today, and he just kind of stressed the need for the increasing demand for the medium and heavy lift launch and the fact that as he talks to customers here, no one wants a SpaceX monopoly. And Blue is behind, ULA is behind, and that not, you know, he acknowledges that Blue and ULA are ahead of where he is, right?

like relativity has kind of just turned on the switch in the Terranar but he he really sees an opening in the market because I don't think a launch monopoly is good for anyone we've been there no one liked it so he he definitely he was stressed that he sees kind of this opportunity and this hole that he's hoping TerranR will fill as demand goes up I'm right there like I buy that I think the vehicle makes sense I think they should have bailed on Terran 1 sooner like that was my take was this, the second that you started thinking about Terran R, you should have bailed on Terran 1. And especially the monopoly take, like, SpaceX has brought launch costs down, but not as much as was promised, because there's no pressure on them. There's no reason.

They could sell it for Atlas 5 minus a dollar and have won every launch contract that was up for bidding for the last five years. There's no pressure on them. And so, like, sitting here right now, what is the next vehicle to put pressure on Falcon 9's launch price? It's open for debate which one is the one that would actually put pressure on it? All the Atlas V's, mostly the most of the Vulcans, all the New Glens, all the Iron Sixes are already bought by Amazon who didn't really care. So they're not worried about marketing it for the next three years at a minimum. So is Terran R the next one? And in that vein, do you think they have enough, does relativity have enough runway to make it to Terranar without taking on additional

investment? And what's the outlook for that? I would almost have to guess that they would have to raise more money. It's been nearly two years since they raised, I think, $650 million, brought their total to well over $1 billion raised. But that's not going, I don't think that's going to get you, especially when you're making all these investments in, you know, a giant factory in Long Beach and 3D printing systems or other tooling, depending on the approaches that you're taking. That's a lot of investment, there's a lot of testing. And if it's not until 2026, which we all know is no earlier

than 2026 or a first launch, you know, I don't know if you have three years of runway in the bank to do that. I think you almost have to go out and raise more money. The question is in the market that exists right now, given both sort of what's specific to the space industry, but also the broader macroeconomic issues with interest rates and bank failures and so on, can you raise money at the amount that you want

at the valuation that you want? Right. Maybe with the Taryn One success in terms of demonstrating that 3D printing technology works. But they're cutting down on it for Taron-R though. Right. So that's challenging, right? But they're still using some 3D printing technology.

Yeah. Now they've been able to demonstrate. that that risk has been at least largely retired in that respect. So you can go to investors and say you're not taking a big bet on technology because we've already demonstrated that with Taryn 1. Whereas if they had retired Taryn 1 before that first launch, you still have those risk questions out there. And maybe that makes it harder to raise that money that you do need to get,

regardless to complete Taryn R. Yeah. I think that's a really interesting point. I don't really have anything to add. I just want to say that I think that's a really interesting point. I mean, obviously, you know, flight-proven stuff is better and easier to raise on. But I didn't even think about kind of if they had scrapped Terran 1 before it flew, where that would put them in a fundraising capability.

Now, maybe a couple years ago, that may not have mattered as much when there was a lot more capital available, and you could go out and raise a lot of money at high valuations. In today's market, that's a lot harder to do. So anything that you can do to retire the risk by demonstrating that, even if you're not planning to use that rocket at all anymore, that's true. It probably helps.

Whether it's sufficient is another story. But it certainly doesn't hurt. That's a good point. And one that I haven't given enough credit. Because my whole thesis, I had Tim Ellis on a show years ago, and I was like made a point to ask him, are you a launch services company or are you an additive manufacturing company who happens to do launch vehicles at the moment.

And he was adamant that they were launched services company. And yet every year, their factory comes a little higher on their main navigation of their website. But then, you know, like, even if half of their investment that they took on, if that investor was investing because they saw the additive manufacturing thing as a big value, it is challenged right now because they did have problems printing

these first couple of vehicles with Terran 1. I don't know how much of that is out there, but there was cracking issues in these tanks. They're doing a lot less of it on TerranR, right? They're printing the tank domes and the engines, but the engines they're printing with regular stuff like Rocket Lab prints engines with. They're not doing it with the Stargates.

So the value that is in their business of the printing side has taken a hit recently of this. So now they're going to need to attract investors that are purely interested in getting that second launch provider, and there's a good case to be made there that the market needs that second best option in terms of price and capability. So maybe they can go out and ignore

the additive manufacturing side when they go to raise this money and say we're doing it purely because look at all this value we can bring to the national security launch sector or whatever commercial launch sector. Their faring is pretty giant on TerranR.

If you look at the diagrams, now you have to trust all their diagrams. And I haven't really trusted any of relativity's diagrams because all of them have been not extremely accurate if I just look at the last five years of their history of the diagrams they put out there. That's my problem, and that's why I'm cranky, I'm getting back down the same rabbit, so we should pick a different time.

I know, I'm having flashbacks. I know. We did that. Jack and I did this last night, so. All right, we did moon, we did launch. What else is out here that? Hey, oh, I'm interested to pick your brains on this Lockheed Martin spin-off, Crescent Space,

that's doing this lunar communications infrastructure. It's kind of odd. I don't know. I feel a little bit odd that Lockheed Martin was the one that was like, we're going to do a communications network around the moon

and spin it off as his own company. Do you have any, do you dig into this at all? I mean, I feel like it didn't, it didn't comes a huge surprise to me. I feel like Lockheed wants its kind of fingers and everything when it comes to space and defense and aerospace and kind of everything.

But no, I mean, I think it's a cool, I think it's a cool thing. And I think, you know, Lockheed is really trying to be like the cool kid on the block, like despite, they're like, you know, the old man on the porch who's like, I listen to hip music. No, but I mean, I went, they hosted an event in D.C. last year, and it was like in this very cool warehouse, and like it was about the future of space and what, what is 2050 going to look like on the moon and we're going to build lunar habitats?

I'm like, I really think they're trying to embrace kind of the new space philosophy and kind of the forward looking, kind of trying to harness some of that excitement. And I see this as kind of an extension of that. I think the interesting issue here is what exactly is the market size and value for lunar communications when you think about the fact that a lot of the companies, the clips companies and so on, are developing their own solutions. for lunar communications. Intuitive machines has this, I think they call it the constellation, the con series of satellites that are going to provide lunar communications.

Draper's mission to the far side, they are going to have their own relay satellites. Fireflies mission to the far side is including the lunar pathfinder from Surrey that's part of the ESA initiative called Moonlight that wants to provide communication services. And ESA is looking to sort of barter those services

to NASA as part of Artemis, which creates all sorts of interesting competitions and potential conflicts for how that's all going to work. And again, how much demand is there going to be for that many satellites that are going to cost X millions of dollars to build and operate and will need to be refreshed every several years? And there's been some discussion of interoperability so that you could create sort of this virtual constellation of all of these satellites, but that requires getting everybody to work together. We know how we love in this industry to work together.

So I'm a little skeptical about just how much demand there is going to be and whether a business, a commercial business case can really close, especially if there are government actors involved like Europe, ESA working with NASA, that might take up a lot of the demand. that's interesting yeah I mean the clips missions alone were like a big part of all of the initial drawings of these kind of services to to provide to like look there's a customer base you know but like it's not going super great schedule wise so the problem with that is not that the missions are going to be bad but that if you're building a business backed on those businesses and the schedules are uncertain how do you make your schedule for a business on top of that That's a challenge. And the same thing that's going on right now at the commercial space stations, that the ISS deadline keeps getting bumped out.

So they're running all this business work on when does our business case close, and they don't know when the ISS is going to stop existing. So trying to figure that out, find the customer base, and market it appropriately is really tough in these moments of change. I don't know. I've been grumpy about commercial space stations lately, too.

I'm not generally grumpy person, Like, even though you might think that based on what we've been talking about lately. Kind of do. You know, one of the big challenges there, again, is a question of the markets. Who is going to use these stations? How much are they willing to pay? You know, how much demand is there for multiple space stations? And you talk to different companies.

You get different answers in terms of what they're pursuing. You know, Axiom this week rolled out this, basically this, what they call a space program in a box. You know, if you're a government, you want a commercial human spaceflight program, you can come to them, pay a certain amount, get a certain tier all the way up to getting to fly your astronauts to the Axiom Station or maybe even helping develop part of the station. You talk to Sierra Space, they're really focused on the research market. I talk with Tom Bice, the CEO, and he says, you know, we think biotech's the big initial market for this. people are still sort of looking for that killer app from microgravity research to be able to enable that. But the hope there is that someone goes out, goes out on a limb, does this, is successful, and then everybody says, oh, well, we got to do that too. But until that happens, you know, the demand is fairly limited,

and it's tough to build a business case and raise money for expensive infrastructure like a commercial space station. if you're uncertain exactly who's going to be using it and their willingness to pay. I am not personally super excited about the idea of like, you know, my like brother being able to fly to space and go to the space station. Like that doesn't like get, I mean, it's cool. If you can afford to do it, like go for it. Does he know that? I'm an only child. It's a theoretical brother.

It's a theoretical brother. Wow, what a kicker. I never had that. Never had that on the show. It's a wildcard. I was expecting your follow up. Yeah. But, you know, talking about the news out of Axiom this week, like the idea that countries

that don't have the budget, don't have the technology, can send, like, the first person into space. I mean, what, you think about the second and third order effects of that, and, like, the kids who watch that and think, you know, should I, should I study STEM? Like, I just, I get really, really excited about countries that, like, didn't have this capability, now having access to this really, really cool thing. and sort of what it would mean for like the citizens of the world to be able to do this. I think that's really exciting.

And the Axiom News this week is obviously like a huge step towards that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's a huge market for them. Like the, I think they realized pretty quickly the tourism market would be tapped fairly quickly. But the national astronaut off the side of the industry is there. My worry with that is though is that it's not very repeatable. Like you get one or two of those per country. But does it need to, I don't know.

I mean, that's a lot. Granted, that's a lot of people. That's a couple hundred people. If you do two per country, that doesn't done that's a couple hundred people. And like, does it inspire a generation to build a national space program that then makes it repeatable? That's obviously like a best case scenario. I love this long-term hopefulness. I'm on it.

Yeah, I mean, a couple of things there. One is that there are probably at least some countries that will want to continue to do it on a regular basis, that they either see the value in doing that from the R&D or the outreach or simply the prestige standpoint of regularly sending astronauts to a space station. The other thing is that it may serve as sort of a bridge market, and that by the time you've exhausted all the countries that have flown their first astronaut, now you have other markets stepping in, whether it's private astronauts, whether it's the research markets, something else to be able sort of step in, now take over that demand

because they weren't ready yet, but the governments were. So that's a possibility. But again, I don't know, you know, there are probably a lot of countries that are going to say thanks, but no thanks. We don't have the, you know, the tens of millions of dollars supplying an astronaut to the space station right now. So the market may be significantly smaller than the 200 or so countries that are out there. It has been interesting. So I'm going to forget his name entirely. Is it Sultan Al-Maieti that's on the station right now from the UAE?

I read the, like, ISS updates during the week of here's what's going on in the station. They've been putting them to work. Like, he's not just up there. He's like doing plumbing and like setting up experiments. Like he's just doing the work. He's doing a spacewalk next week. And he's got a spacewalk next week. So that's the thing that I've been somewhat surprised by is that not that like I didn't think he could do it.

But like I didn't know how much of that would be on his plate for, you know, what is a full rotation mission at this point. Because they've done the short duration one on, they've flown a Soyuz. Yeah, back in 2019. Right. Man, you know the date so well. That's unbelievable. Like that's even pre-COVID date. Nobody would remember that.

That's unreal. But during that, you know, like, there was no expectations around that of like, you better pull your weight for these two weeks. It's like, you know, we don't know what your schedule is. It's between soya's flights. This one, like, it's a legitimate thing. And I don't know, there's the whole aspect from the private astronaut mission of them wanting to have done a bunch of scientific experimentation on these flights, which I'm like, okay,

yeah, sure. Like, I guess that's, if you want to do that, go ahead. But I wouldn't have done that if I was buying a flight to the flight to the flights. the eyes as to be honest. Yeah and I think the UAE has talked about wanting to do a long duration flight like that once every several years. So the idea is that this is not a one-off that they want to do it again, but they're not going to fly again next year. Right. You know, and this particular seat was sort of a special circumstance, this really convoluted relationship with NASA and Roscosmos. This is the one that they bought because of the

Soyuz seat that the yeah, right, yeah, that whole thing. They did the three-way deal between NASA and Axiom and Rose Cosmos because NASA couldn't contract directly with Rose Cosmos. on a particular time frame to get the seat. So they had Axiom go by the seat, and then they exchanged the seat to, they, Axiom gave the Soyuz seat to NASA and exchange for a commercial fan in you. Yeah, this is, you love this.

Yeah, it's a baseball fan. It's a player to be named later. Yeah, you love that. All right, so you're not as cranky about commercial space stations. Well, you weren't excited by your brother going, but you were excited by national astronauts, but do you think that makes a commercial space station viable, or on the, on the,

timeline or policy directive that we have right now for commercial Leo? I don't know about, I feel like I am more skeptical of the timeline. Yeah. But I'm bullish on commercial space stations. I think it's really cool. And I think, I mean, we look at low Earth orbit where it was like all governments, and now that is very much not the case. I think it's a natural next step that space stations will be a thing that are no longer

all governments. I just don't know the timeline that happens. But I don't know. I definitely think there is a case. I think there's a business case for it. Like, you know, people have enough money. They're going to do whatever. I guess there aren't that many people with that much money.

But I am pro-commercial space station. All right. I'm not anti. I just, my problem is that, like, budget-wise, it's, they're kind of half in right now. And I'd rather them bail on it or go all in. And, yeah, I think. And that's shared with a lot of people in industry that they would like to see NASA move faster, spend more money, down select from the four companies that are currently involved to one or two earlier

so that they can free up those resources to do that. But the issue always is that these always take long these these always take longer than you expect. Any space program takes longer than you than you expect. And so you've got a 2030 deadline. The question is how how hard is that deadline? Is that going to get pushed out further if the commercial space stations aren't ready? and there's a good chance. Stations won't quite be ready by 2030. What happens there? What happens?

How does that affect the urgency of developing some of the business plans for these? But, yeah, if it's important as NASA says it is, you would expect the agency to be at least requesting more money. Yeah. And, of course, obviously early on, the problem was that they were requesting money and Congress wasn't giving them anything.

Now Congress is giving them what they're asking for. They probably just need to start asking for more money. Not only that. There's like two or three things that are making this the right time to push for money in this area, one of which is the Russian space program and the relationship that we have with Russia. Number two is the Russian orbital segment on the station has got a bunch of leaks, and I feel like that's one that would unravel pretty quickly. So there's, if you are playing politics, which is what you're doing when you're writing a budget for a national space agency, there are things here to be used to make sure that's a budget priority.

That's separate from the whole budgetary situation right now anyway, that will this budget make its way through Congress at all anyway? Probably not. There's a bigger issue there. Maybe it doesn't matter. I think it's important to point out that while we've talked a lot about the news here in the news in Texas, it was a big week in Washington for the NASA budget. Administrator Nelson was on the hill twice defending the budget.

I did not watch the hearings because I was here, but, you know, it's, we're starting to see that process work out. There's always been huge bipartisan support for the space program, but we'll, we'll see where they come down on some things like the Venus missions and, you know, some of other things you're talking about. But I just sort of point out that other side of the country, there's been some, like, big space news over there too. It's stuff going on, yeah. It was interesting in the Senate hearing yesterday that the focus really was on the science side. There's very little discussion about SLS and Orion, other than one senator making sure that Michoud gets its new roof. You know, very little talk about space station

or commercial space stations, but a real big concern about Mars sample return, eating the science budget, and affecting other missions, and Administrator Nelson happy to say, oh yeah, we're going to need $250 million more this year or next year year for Mars sample return, which was new. And as he put it, you know, we've got a record science budget, but we can't put 10 pounds of potatoes in a five pound bag. I mean, I suppose if you've squished the potatoes really tight.

Chop them up. Mashed potatoes. Make them yucky. They could fit a bunch. That's probably not, you're probably not loving this. You're a planetary guy at heart, right? That's my degree, yeah. Yeah.

So let's give me the tea on Veritas. What do you think about this situation? We are with a near shot of APL, so feel free to go off. It's a tough situation for several missions. You know, Veritas suffered the brunt of the effect of the Psyche delay and the independent review of JPL in response to that. But then you also have Janus, the SmallSat mission, that was going to ride with Psyche. And now that Psyche's launch is delayed, it can't do its mission.

And so NASA says, we're going to, well, we'll go spend the rest of the money that you have and see if you can find an alternative mission. maybe we'll go do it. So you have that effect on it. You have Mars sample return now eating into Heliophysics. There's this whole Heliophysics mission that is now getting delayed. And it's also starting to eat into the technology development for the next big space telescope, the Habable Worlds Observatory, which won't launch for 20 years, but you need

to start the technology work now to enable those technologies to observe those habitable worlds. and that again gets back to this whole, you know, trying to squeeze, you know, nine or ten billion dollars worth of projects into an $8.2 billion of science budget. If I can talk about Mars Sample return for a minute, I wrote an article when the first mission launched that was basically like, science has done its part, will Congress do its part, to kind of fund this mission and get it back because little tubes of marsh and soil, just sitting on the Martian surface is like the status thing I can think of.

There's an atmospheric sample. But it's very sad if these things don't come home, right? Like, that's the purpose. And I think, I mean, this is exactly what we're seeing. The fact that Nelson is saying it's going to cost more money. Senators are asking why. There's a lot of other priorities. Like, we're seeing exactly what I wrote about.

You know, that it's going to come down to not a technical issue, but a political issue as to if these samples are actually able to be brought back to Earth. Yeah. It's funny, you know, the more sample return architecture had been very much in flux, even up through the launch of Perseverance in 2020. And more recently than the helicopters are in now. Right. And the joke was before Perseverance launch is that it's going to go cash the samples that get returned by the Chinese Mars missions.

Or the NASCAR pit crew on Starship. Or the Elon Starship Mars mission. Yeah, the timeline is pretty unbelievable on this whole situation. On the international front, you mentioned the European side of that, they're contributing to this. I'd be curious to pick your brains on if you've been following that the European spaceflight strategy discussions that have been going on recently. There was this advisory group that was like, we should do everything, we should do all the things. What do you make of that? Yeah, I mean the key point is, is, and when I talked with

Joseph Ashbacher, the director general visa earlier this week, you know, he emphasized this was an independent report, you know, most of the people on this advisory panel did not have space flight experience, and that was a deliberate. They wanted this broad area of expertise, There was a former Secretary General of NATO. There was an artist. There was an explorer who had gone to the North and South Pole on the top of Mount Everest and wanted to provide sort of a holistic, high-level view.

And he says he was very pleasantly surprised by the fact that they very strongly endorse a human spaceflight program. Is that the human space flight program that Issa is going to be able to pursue with landing humans on the moon in 10 years? Probably not. But it allows them now to go work on scenarios

that they can take to European governments and say, if you spend X billion euros, we can do a crew-rated spacecraft that we can launch on R-N-6 and be able to send our astronauts to, well, the International Space Station might not be there. It might be going to a commercial space station, which is a whole other story.

But, you know, the idea is that, you know, they want to emphasize strategic autonomy, and they're feeling that really hard right now because the problem's where they are in launch. and that they have to turn to the U.S. to launch some ESA science missions and potentially now Galileo navigation spacecraft. Galileo was all part of that strategic autonomy did not rely on GPS. Now they may end up flying on a falcon.

Yeah, your old stomping ground politico had that story. It was like the intent to send a letter to the committee that might consider the letter that would then also approve the letter. But it was still, like that's a big move. I think it's less big than we're going to make a lot of drama out of it, but I feel like they should just do it. And like, I don't know. I just feel like this storyline gets pretty overwrought.

I do think it's interesting that, like, Falcon 9 is ready to go for people that need it. And all the others, all the other launch capacity has been bought up. There's one area in five left. All the Atlas Vs are gone. H3 is struggling to get going in its own vein. So there is, yeah, back to the way we started this conversation. There is like that undersupply right now. It's a really curious situation.

I guess it probably is a bigger deal internally to Europe than like your point being that the Al-Alao was started to be this like independent thing. And having to fly them on Falcon 9s is like a point of pride. And at the same time, they're making a multi-billion dollar investment in their own satellite constellation because they were afraid of being reliant on Starlink or, or even one web, which is not European. They were, you know, so they're spending billions of dollars on that. And now they're looking at having to turn to the US for launches

because of the problems with their own European launch system. Which is one of the other things Oshbacher mentioned is that they're doing another one of these space summits where they bring together representative of all the ESA and all the EU member states. So there's some overlap, but not complete overlap between the two to bring them together. And one of the things they're going to talk about is human space flight. But another thing is a launcher strategy for the long term, so they don't find themselves in this bind in 2030

and find themselves potentially behind the technology curve because everyone is now flying reusable rockets, and here's Arian 6, you know, still flying in the old-fashioned expendable way. I do feel like there was starting to be some momentum behind their large cargo lander for the lunar surface. Like that was a program I'd heard talked up a lot. Argonaut, I forget, I think that's the name, right?

Yeah, and that, Issa funded that, in late last year and their ministerial meeting. That three-year cycle, right? So they've got funding to start work on that. And one of the reasons they funded that is so that they could go to NASA and say, we will barter these Argonaut landers so you can deliver large cargo to your lunar bases

if you give us seats on Artemis landing missions. And they really want a European astronaut on the moon, but the most likely way a European astronaut ends up on the moon is that they're flying on a starship or other American lander as part of an Ardumman. And what they don't know is that the European that will fly is an F1 pit crew member to change the tires on the Lido's rover. You just keep coming back to that. I'm stuck on it.

I'm stuck on it. I don't know. It's a completely bizarre. Are they going to allow an F1 pit crew member work on a NASCAR car? Isn't there some sort of union issue there or something? The Artemis Accords, you know? That's the inner operability clause of the ArdenoS Accords, right? We got to talk to him about that.

All right. Well, I think we're running out of time here. So I want to thank you both for hanging. out. Is there anything you want to leave us with, anything you're looking forward to in the near future that other than Starship and not being at Boca Chica as we know about you? What am I looking forward to? I don't know. Can I do a plug? Yeah, oh, plug. Yes, do some plugs. I don't see my people telling me know. So, uh, do a plug. Payload was launching a policy, a space policy newsletter, which is really, really exciting. I'm going to be writing it.

I'm pumped about it. Uh, so everyone should look for that early next month in early May. And like work wise, I'm really excited about that. There's a ton going on in space policy. So we're going to be right in the roundup of that. You got to, where do they go? You got to tell them the link. Payloadspace.com. There it is. Jeff, anything to plug?

Oh, is this terribly boring? There's nothing going on. Oh, wait. Hold on. Did you write the juices loose subject line in that email? That was my editor that wrote the juices loose subject line. I got to be whoever that was. I was going to try that. The subject line in the next morning was juices loose.

And I just loved that. That was so good. It was ripe for puns. It was ripe for puns. We had like one of our headlines. about the end of the mission was like good to the last drop. Yeah. Gotta do all the juice pun.

Yeah. Anyway, sorry, what else? No, no, I said, no, we're obviously there, this is a really exciting time for the industry in general right now, because there is just so much activity going on. You have to take it with a note of caution that a lot of these companies aren't going to survive, but that's sort of part of the process of covering this is figuring out who survives and why they survived, whether the technology, the business case, the execution,

you know, all those factors play in. But, you know, there's a tremendous amount of activity going on, and there is not a dull moment, which is unfortunate for those us who do like to sleep occasionally. Yeah, yes, that's absolutely true, which is what I need to do tonight. So we'll wrap it up here. Thank you both for hanging out with me. Thanks to Redwire for hosting us here.

This has been amazing. So thank you all for hanging out. And if you don't follow the podcast, offnom. Offnom.com, one of the most fun domains in space. There's some stickers and stuff over there. So check it out, and we'll talk to you next week. 5 4 321 end the death