Off-Nominal - 109 - Boil-off Truther

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

Jake and Anthony catch up on the news, including Blue Origin’s Lunar Lander award!TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeNASA Selects Blue Origin for Astronaut Mission to the Moon | Blue OriginNASA selects Blue Origin to develop second Artemis lunar lander - SpaceNewsTechnical strengths and lower cost led NASA to select Blue Origin lander - SpaceNewsBlue Origin picking up the pace at the Cape - NASASpaceFlight.comAstronaut DatabaseVirgin Galactic makes first suborbital spaceflight in nearly two years - SpaceNewsChris Bergin - NSF on Twitter: “Tally Ho on VMS Eve and Spaceship Unity prior to the drop and propulsive climb of the latter.”Kevin Limburg on Twitter: “I’ve spared no expense so Neutron could succeed.”Follow 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. Oh, Jake. Hey. How you doing? I'm great. I'm excited to you're back. I'm excited you're back. Oh, how was it?

Two weeks solo, Jake. Tell me. Let me just say that I love our listeners, and one of the reasons I love them is that they are very prompt about letting us know when we mess up the audio, which I apparently did. Oh, okay. Yes.

Update, orders of business. Orders of business. Anyway, so it was weird. I don't know what happened, honestly. So I mean, I've made podcasts before. Like, it's not like a new thing, obviously. And I mixed it the same way. I mixed all the other ones.

And it sounded fine to me in here. And then I literally, like, published it and downloaded it on my phone and played my phone. And it sounded fine to me. So my guess is that there is like a weird mix on it. I don't know, like just the levels, whether it's base or mids or treble or whatever, hits different speakers in different ways. And some people were like, I couldn't even hear you at all.

And it was weird. I'm sorry. So that, you know, Anthony's back. He'll do it his way this time and it won't be such a problem. And I'm trying something new. So you'll notice there isn't this big,

this is maybe like the, you know, this is how I did shows before, which is like the dumbest thing ever for YouTube. Yeah, for YouTube. So I'm just wearing a nice new lab mic that I bought. And Anthony,

you're telling me it's nice and warm. You can hear it good. We did some testing before and it was much louder than the other one. Okay. So we'll see. That's the closest this show is ever going to get to an apology for anything as well. Yeah, yeah.

Otherwise. I literally get annoyed that you called out my mistakes. Yeah. Otherwise, we have no regrets. No. So even for the worst takes. Some of which we may have today. We shall see how this goes.

Joey Barnard was asking for cancelable space takes today. And I reminded them about my Falcon Heavy is overrated take. I immediately got Twitter pushback. So it's still spicy. That one played a lot better before six were flying, though. Yeah, I know. I really did. That one played a lot better in 2020 when there were no flights.

And now that it just keeps working to get his shit together. Now that it keeps working and they keep winning contracts by other people moving off other rockets, it plays a lot worse. Yeah, yeah. Well, did you bring a drink? Are you still drinking on this show? Or did that? Yeah.

I could cancel them. Yeah. I'm going to simple today. There's always Anthony's Atlas 5 take. Yeah. That's totally true. What is this thing? Yeah.

I just go in simple today. This is one of the two kind of like localish, but also mainstream breweries here in Merida. So this is Patito and they're actually pretty close to me. So I grabbed their, this is like their, this is their standard. This is the lager. It's what they get. What you get if you get if you ask for a beer. there? If at a potato place, yeah. You know, they probably have like 10, you know, 10,

whatever, 10 styles of beer and this one's like 90% of their sales. Like it's that kind of thing, right? So anyway, but yeah, what you got? Uh, I have a yards bit viper, which I think I had in the show before, but I had them in my fridge and I just returned from a trip. So I did not really do a lot of shopping before this. So I'm drinking what's in my fridge. Cool. Pretty wild can though. Look at this thing. It's like a, you know, video game theme, just kind of the line that they have this year. I forget how to do the camera since I've been gone. Since I've been gone.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. What are we got? Where are we starting here? Well, dude, there was actually some news while you were got. Sometimes you go away and there's like nothing happens and it's like, great. No catching up to do.

I did feel a little bit trolled, I'll be honest. by getting on a plane, flying to New Mexico, and having Virgin Galactic announce that they were about to do a flight from New Mexico. A little trolled that they then flew one week after I returned. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe you should start with your National Park Review

because we have to keep this as a running theme on the show. Yes, the ranking, this is half National Park Review and half a ranking of America's deserts, as everyone knows, which desert is the worst, which desert is the best. I will keep it light on Carlsbad Caverns is amazing everyone needs to go in that cave it's unbelievable great time Guadalupe and mountains beautiful you would like it Jake as a geology nerd it's an old reef sticking out of the earth that's really cool

that's the most fun part about the middle of North America is that it used to be all the reefs yeah that's real mind-bender white sands amazing sledding disappointing which I knew would be the case because we saw people sledding in Death Valley on the sand dunes and that I looked at one person to go very slow down the hill and I was like that looks really boring but turns out if you're two and a half you are good at sledding on sand so Will had a great time going down the sand dunes but I did not have a great time going down the sand dunes it was more fun to play in uh I will say this it was kind of interesting because a trip started out we landed in El Paso and drove east

out towards Carlsbad and Guadalupe Mountains which are like 30 miles from Blue Origins launch site and later in the trip we spent a night in Las Crucese which is right next to where Virgin Galactic so I felt like it was interesting

having in one day driven from one launch site to the other effectively of the suborbital companies so I did find that kind of interesting that both are like because they both sound like in the middle of nowhere and certainly if you drive to Carlsbad, New Mexico you are in the middle of nowhere

but it's just interesting that it's all happening right there. Like that's a really bizarre thing. Like this is, oh, this is the desert where we do suborbital spaceflight, I guess. So that was kind of interesting. I did see a, so on Jake's beat, while I was driving about 45 miles an hour through Carl's Bed Caverns National Park, I did see a tarantula while drives. Nice. It's the scariest thing when you see them in highway speeds.

You should not be able to see spiders. highway speeds. No. It was pretty awful. Yeah, that was cool. Awesome. New Mexico desert, A plus, still better than California desert. It's lush. New Mexico's awesome. New Mexico is a uniquely American location. It's an interesting blend of cultural stuff. There's a lot more trees than Arizona. So it's kind of, like, rightly so based on geography. it is a cool blend of Colorado to Arizona region of the country.

So it's got a little bit of all that Colorado, Utah, Arizona vibe that I enjoy the mix of it. And the green chilies are just amazing. Yeah, I bet the food's fantastic. It's really good. Kind of like all those Mexican influences, indigenous influences, plus just good old fashion American fatty food is probably just like a great, great combo. So in this area of the country where I live, we have a supermarket chain called Wegmans, right? Which is the goat.

Yeah, I know Wegmans. I know Wegmans. I like Wegmans. You probably know it. Were they, did they make their way across the border into Canada? Because they started up in Rochester. But if we ever went to Buffalo, if I used to live in that, if we would go to Wegmans. That's the place we went.

Yeah, we had a membership. They gave us a membership. They gave us like, I was like, can we get a membership? We're Canadian. They're like, yeah, whatever, man, just make up an address. We just like, anyway, they really wanted us to have a card. like five years ago or something Wegmans in the area was running

I think it was set on the signs the first annual Hatch Green Chili Festival and like they were selling all this stuff made from green chilies Hatch is out that way right I don't know why Hatch claimed all the green chilies in this festival that Wegmans was running but I loved it. It was great everything was delicious and I was like first annual

this is going to be great like this is going to be a thing I look forward to every year and I've never seen it again and it's like Katie and I were talking about it the whole time. Like, this is a white whale of like, oh, remember that the first annual hatch green chili festival that we never got access to again? So we were pretty, pretty much loving it, the fact that we could go out and buy them in every meal. So we got some Wegman's fans in the chat. This is great. All right. Wagnman's. The go. Wageman is the best. It is. Shocker, this is the first time we've talked about it in 109 of these shows. It is. Maybe we haven't. Grocery was a big topic in the early Discord days. Yeah, early Discord days.

was definitely a thing. I know Wegman's appears in the Discord archives. All right. So now mostly we just debate pedantic arguments. That's pretty much what we revolved into. Let's do some of that. Big news, Jake. Big news.

I wasn't around. So give me the vibes on the announcement that Blue Origin is building the second lunar lander for Artemis. How did the real time drama go? Okay. So it kind of went like both exactly how you thought it would be and then also kind of like, oh, okay. Because like I think everyone was sort of like waiting to see if there was going to be like a, and out of nowhere with the steel chair.

Like dine it. Boom. I think we were all kind of like waiting for something like that to sneak up. But it was like very like, we are announcing the winner. The winner is exactly who you think is going to be. Thank you, Blue Origin for making a lander. And then the event was just kind of done. And so there was like a weird deflating sense of no drama.

And that was kind of dramatic in its sense, itself, I guess. I don't know. That's a weird way to put it, I guess. But that's like one of the first thing I think about is that it just sort of ended. And we all kind of went, well, back to work. Yeah. As someone reading this while on very limited connectivity on vacation, I very much appreciated it because I read the news and I went, cool.

Like, that's great. I know everything there is to know. Yeah. that is great. However, Jake, I'm in love with this lander, baby. It's pretty good. I am here for this lander. That's the headline that, you know, I mean, lots of space journalists commented on it,

but like the headline headline is that like Blue Origin cleaned up this proposal. It needed work and it got work. So that's like pretty good to see. Like it's bigger, it's better. All the weird stuff about the other one, like the triple stage curbel space program design of the other one's gone. It was like 800 feet long and it was made of too many parts. Yeah, it would definitely flex when you thrust it on it.

That would definitely be a thing that would happen with that. You need KJR to. Yeah, you need extra struts to make it not bend in half when you turn the engines on. So that's like I'm glad to see that disappear. But no, it looks awesome. It's good. I love it. Side hatch is weird.

Side docking port. How do you feel about a side docking port? It is weird, but like it's, I think it's, It's one of those things where you're like, it's weird because I feel like it should be weird, but I don't have a good reason as to why it actually is weird. Do you know what I mean? Let me give you a good thing that I feel is equivalent here, okay? To tie the whole first 13 minutes of the show together.

We landed in El Paso, and they said, hello, the SUV that you rented is available in 45 minutes. Would you like to wait 45 minutes or take a minivan right now? and I said, man, we got a couple extra people on this trip with us. Let's take the minivan because I don't want to wait around the airport for 45 minutes with a two-and-year-old who is running out of things to do. Minivans are funny because they're just so functionality over form in every way. And I love that. And there's like eight different parts of the car.

You're like, why can't all cars, like, I feel like we have room for this in other models of cars. Like, why aren't there shelves in regular SUVs as well? There's this little tiny phone shelf for my phone, and it goes exactly right there. There's no reason that can exist in other cars. So the functionality over form kind of situation is, now this is a good looking lander, but it's not like a sleek lander, I wouldn't say. Right? There's weird panels.

It doesn't have the like retro futuristic disco look of Starship, right? Right. But then you get down to that hab section and you're just like functionality, baby. Some windows, a docking port, stairs. Like this is, we need these things to live on the surface of the moon. And I'm here, like, if this showed up in a for All Mankind episode, there would be a threat about it in Discord about how cool that Lander was. Yeah, it would be.

You know what it kind of looks like. It looks like that, that hal that they have at Johnson Space Center for the analogs that they do, the blanking on the name. Let's see, let's see. They go and they do like the asteroid and the Marshaloids, Mars mission habitats. It came from the old Mars. Is it this one? Is it this thing?

Here it is, here it is. That's the one, yeah. So it kind of reminds me of this because it's got like that round thing and then the side hatches, right? Like you come in from the side. And I saw some reference that they're like, oh yeah, you could back a lunar rover up to this docking port and get in without going outside. side? Come on. That thing's going to be lifted. That's a lifted ass rover. I can see the little astronauts right there. That looks like that thing is like three meters up. It's a lifted truck on the surface. Yeah. Your tweets about our proposal were not super wrong. The F-150 lightning lifted is our LTV proposal. Actually, LTV is not the lunar terrain rover or whatever, lunar train vehicle. It is the lifted terrain vehicle. This is what we need for this Blue Origin

have. Jeez. Yeah. I do want to commend them on a couple things. Number one, they, with this design,

have effectively kicked everyone off of the mission critical path, except Blue Origin, because no one else is building this lander. Lockheed's got to get them there too, right?

You could build another one of those and dock it to the front of this ship, no problem. But guess what you couldn't have done with the last one? Build a new ascent vehicle. Yeah.

So I kind of I'm kind of here for that. Because, like, if you're Lockheed, how confident are you that you're always going to be building that transfer vehicle for this lunar lander? I'm not confident if I'm Lockheed Martin that I'm getting more than like four flights worth out of that transfer vehicle. Yeah, maybe. You know, that's the first thing to go. So, I think I dig that. Number two, boy, is the gateway going to have a hard time.

Because nobody needs it anymore. Except Europe and Japan to get their contributions through. Yeah, yeah. And not even Japan. Japan's doing surface. It's Europe. Who else is like doing Gateway, Canada? Sorry.

They all already have your flight in the books. Yeah. We'll throw an arm on the lander. We don't have to fulfill our end of the deal. That's just a wing wing for us. We just, you just got a free ride in that case, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I guess. Like, I don't know, I mean, Gateway's always been that sort of like, what's this for? But I don't know. I feel like it's one of those things where they're going to want to like it'll change and they'll find new ways

to make it part of something. But yes, it's always going to be make work for that, right? Watching this lander and starship dock to gateway is going to be just super really weird. It's going to be like when space shuttle ducked to mirror.

Yeah, like oh, which one's the main thing? The Russians are like, we've spent dozens of flight. and all these like complicated on our assembly. Look at our beautiful modular space station. Then the shuttle is just like, I'm the monolith. One flight I got here.

I fly over and over. Let me take control of attitude. Yeah. It's going to be funny. Yeah, man. I'm pumped about this. I'm into this. This is the kind of lander that I wanted to see.

I'm here for this 2020s. Let's go. Yeah, yeah. No, it looks good. Like it just, what I was really worried about was that Blue was going to really, you know, bank on just the fuss they made and the lobbying and all that to get them in. But I mean, they did all that. But also it looks like they took, they took care of it technically as well. Like at least if you're going to like, you know, buckle the weird demands that made this happen, you can at least deliver something nice. You know, it's kind of it's kind of the same thing. It's just like, well, if we have to have SLS, it would be great if it went somewhere, right? Like, you know, it's one of those kind of situations. So, yeah, I'm kind of glad that they really took care of it. It looks good. Now what?

Now we're just waiting, man. Yeah. Now what? Now fucking sucks. Gonna wait. Hardness, too. That's the next thing now. Yeah, well, you're pumped.

Again, you're going to get that free ride and then cancel the gateway. Yeah. Canada's going to go real hard lobbying cancellation of gayway right after Jeremy Hanson returns. He's going to wear a shirt coming out of Orion. He's going to wear like a canceled gateway shirt. I went to the moon. I didn't have to go there.

Why do we need this? Yeah. That's it. That's all we got on this lunar lander, huh? Yeah, I'm trying to. Pretty straight up. It was very not dramatic. Yeah.

We had some good discussions like, you know, trying to reverse engineer the picture, the render, like the one picture we got a bit, right? the tanks were interesting. So that one in the middle, the like pancake shape one, there was that bunch of debate as to whether it was teroidal, whether it was like a donut tank and you could go up to the middle. But I think, I mean, we talked about, I think you convinced me it's not.

It's just a weird pancake shape. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an interesting, interesting design. But I guess like what else do you do? Like you either make the tank more spherical, which means it gets narrower and taller, which you don't really want to do.

That kind of like ruins the flow. and so maybe it's fine. I don't know. Looks like it's okay. Well, I assume half the Discord was mad about non-common bulkheads. Yeah, maybe.

Common bulkheads is pretty big following in the discord. This is true. This is true. Yeah. What about the whole zero boil-off thing that Blue Origin's talking up? That this is like a key part of their situation here. I don't know what to think about zero boil off because like here's what I've heard about zero boil off like from equally reputable sources.

Yeah. It's like. radiation in space. Yeah. A, it's like the worst problem. And if we don't solve it, we will just die on Earth in five billion years. B, it's not a hard one way. That's longer than I think we've got.

But we'll go ahead. Yeah, like whatever it is, right? B, I've heard that it is the easiest problem to solve. We just haven't done it yet. And like, yeah, we just go up there to just that. That, no problem. No boil off. And then related to that, I hear like a bunch of companies bragging about how they've

solved it, but none of them have actually done anything with it. So I just like, is it solved? Is it easy to solve? Is it like, you tell me, I don't know. I have no idea what to think about zero boil off as an issue or a solved problem. It's a fair point, but the whole Arvus program now depends on it. And in two different landers, low or zero boil off is going to be a key element. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, they're sound confident. Somebody's done the math. Mass a bottom. Yeah. So. Somebody's done the math. Eric Berger's out here writing about depots. Yeah.

I mean, Tori Bruno has been saying that they've got it figured out for how long, right? He has been saying some stuff recently, I'll say. I'll say he's been saying some stuff. You think he's driving the market value up a little bit? I think he's saying some stuff. I forgot. I honestly forgot they were for sale. Just wanted to put it out there that there's a little bit of extra special IP under the

here. you ever have you ever seen it? We'll take a two or three X revenue plus whatever you value our zero boil off engine or tankage tech out. Yeah, yeah. So, hmm. So you're not, you're just like, you're like, okay, whatever about that. You're not like.

I need to see some real information about it. Like, I need to see, I need to see them try it. And then I need to see whether it works or not. That's the only thing I'm going to be able to like trust now. The funny thing is we're going to have, yeah, like, but, by what. you mean by see if it works is like see if the lander works because other than that we'll have no intrinsic way to evaluate if their system was good or bad about it yeah and just like how well it works like do they have a lot of margin or they like do they eat into their margin because the boil

off's worse than they think it is or blah with all that kind of stuff right so how are you going to be able to tell that you think they're going to tell you that knowing space i think NASA will say the astronauts were never in danger yeah knowing SpaceX will know because because the payload capacity will just start going up all of a sudden. We made some tweaks and we can take an extra three tons to the surface. Whatever you want, it's fine, we'll figure it out. You're like, where did you get that from? Ah, just shook the couch kitchens and found some extra margin there.

And that's because Boilov was nothing. We'll have something like that, right? I don't know. Blue will never tell us anything, but that's the... I love that you're a Boilov truther. That's my favorite. Yeah. All right.

Well, I'm pumped. 29. Is that when they said this is going to go to the surface with people on it? Oh, how about this? Let's talk about these other demonstrations, because I got some questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, me too. Did anyone figure it out?

24 and 25 is what the, I think the source selection document. I got it right here. So it's supposed to be like the blue moon pathfinders, right? Which I'm assuming is like that big robotic thing they had at IAC that we saw, right? It's like that thing is going to be the pathfinder. I guess. Presumably there was hardware in the work for that one if any other other timelines were not made up.

So that's what you're taking this as? This line there. And it's literally a bath liner. So it's probably going to be just like a lot of the key technologies bolted to the side of a pretty cheap frame. And just, you know, does the landing guidance work? Does the engine work? How's the boil off work?

The boil off. Big moment for the boil off. communication. There's all sorts of shit you can try before you build the real thing, right? So I'm guessing that's what it's supposed to be. But, man, 24 is early. That's next year. Yeah. Like at this point, have there been clips missions by the time that this mission's going to fly? In eight months, it will be 2024. Yeah, right. And they're all supposed to use New Glenn. So I have a conspiracy theory about this, Jake. You think Escapade flies on one of these?

Nope, no, well, that's an interesting idea. That has nothing to do with my theory is. There is Bradley and the chat is like, are these cheap clips missions? Well, he didn't say cheap, but I inserted cheap because they're going to say it's $1, Bob. We'll take you, we'll take you to the moon. I think it'll be like the intuitive machines like, hey, we're going to go on a third flight. If anybody's interested in NASA's like, yeah, well, Astrobotic just did this too. They bought a Falcon Heavy.

Hey, we're going on. No, so my conspiracy theory hinges on Astrobotic, also named as a team member on this proposal. Astrobotic contributing cargo accommodations on this is the line that I saw. They're just like, oh, both of those eclipse missions on astrobotic are the demos of our cargo accommodations. We've got a couple of lunar reps in us in the name of Peregrine and Griffin. I wonder if it's any more than that. So you think that it won't be the Blue Moon landers, they'll just like strap some landing sensors like they did to New Shepherd, but this time they'll put it on Paragon. and then go for it.

I kind of think so. Could be. Yeah. That's not an unreasonable theory. Yeah. I mean, honestly, though, all right, let's assume, let's do the thing that all space nerds like to do, Jake. Let's assume everyone's SpaceX for a minute.

All right. You have this giant lander contract. You were previously going to fly that other blue moon lander that's like a metal frame with some tankage. And you have a bunch of BE7 engines. Do you want to... Everyone has been crashing on the moon lately because they were using non-throdible engines and then they, you know, it's hard to do. Hard to do the math on that one.

So I guess if you want to inspire some confidence, like how cheap, how much hot rotting could you do? No payload. Just the metal frame, some tankage, your boil-off demo for Jake, the Robbins Boil-off demonstration, and a B-E-7. Like, what do you, how does it work out for you? you know how quickly can put that together I think putting the ladder together is I don't know it's pretty easy anyone could do it

is that what you're saying no but I mean I mean that for blue like I know we I know we know nothing basically but like there's been working on this for this is not a new lander I mean we saw the mock up

four years ago yeah but it's a mock up like right right but like it means that the work at least started four years ago So it's not unreasonable to think that they bought aluminum at some point and they put it together. It's not like they just won this contractor. I guess we'll spin up a pathfinder program. It's spun up already, right?

Like there's staff on it. There's people that know. So it's not like completely out of to lunch that they could look at that program and go, this can be our pathfinder and then make that connection. Right. And so then they can do exactly what they said, strap the engine to it, check out some boil off sensors. Take the landing sensors.

off of that new shepherd booster that they've been bragging about with NASA for the last two years and stick them on the side of that thing. And you got something. Yeah. What's the definition of a pathfinder? It would be huge. Honestly, that would be a better pathfinder than anyone could hope for.

Like, we took our engine of the moon and landed on the moon with it. I'm good. Like, that's good enough for me, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Now, the problem is what's launching it? And...

Well, that old one could fit in anything. So, once again, your favorite... Rocket the Falcon Heavy could probably just zip on over. And Twitter is going to be a flutter if Blue Moon flies on a falcon to the moon, like straight up. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it could be an escapade. It could be just like New Glenn demo missions, just fling it on out there.

Maybe, right? And then so then the New Glenn thing, it's a whole other thing. We're just like, wow, we don't really know where it's at. although I do have some feelings on New Glenn. You want to hear some? I do. Okay. So, I mean, generally...

Here we go. This is it. Generally, I am not holding my breath for New Glenn. Like, just straight up, I don't have that kind of, you know, fortitude of emotions to, like, get invested in that rocket. However, there have been a couple of things that I have been picking up that, like, feel like, at least better New Glenn vibes. Are you doing a vibe check right now?

Yeah. All right. Five check. Okay. So first of all, they booked Escapade. And it's a weird contract, I'll admit. But even the Escapade people are like, no, dude, like we're prepping for this launch date, like straight up. They're not couching it in any way. They're like we are ready to go for that time. So that's like one piece of evidence, right?

Second piece of evidence, there has been increased visibility in Florida to both the launch pad and pathfinders for New Glenn move it around. We haven't seen real flight hardware, but there's been more of that happening. Third piece of evidence, they delivered B4 for Vulcan. So that's like a good sign, right? So that's happening. That is a good sign.

And then the fourth thing now is this contract to me. So no one of those things makes me go like, oh, New Glenn is here. I'm not saying that. But the four together makes me kind of go, okay, I think I'm going to start looking around and keeping my eye out for this now. Because maybe we have reached some sort of a reflection point for New Glenn. Maybe. I don't know. It's got to happen at some point.

It does have to happen at some point. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. What do you think of that? It's a little inscrutable. I've heard not encouraging things about the, okay, what I'll say is all the launch vehicles, you name them

the companies that have launched their first launch vehicles in the last two years three years, four years the ones that will launch in the next three, four years. They all start out with no payload at all, no payload margin at all. And then they

either go out of business get sold off for parts or they figure it out. Now, New Glenn certainly has more of a margin to deal with but I haven't heard encouraging things about where they're at on the math for even a mission like Escapade. which is bizarre.

And it's so bizarre that it makes me go, I don't know if I trust this information, which is why I'm being cagey about it. You mean payload margin or price margin? No, payload margin. This is the weird thing that I can't figure out, Jake. I don't... Escapades like a cube set.

I know. All I'm saying is I am being cage about this because it doesn't make actual sense to me about what I've heard about where they're at on the math. And I don't know how it works behind the scenes. So I'm just letting it sit for a minute and figuring it out. All right. But at the same time, if the B-E4 engines work really well on Vulcan, then there we go.

Like, here they are. There's some engines. You could probably do something with them. So, like, it'll be fine. And I don't know. They got the whole reusable upper stage thing going on at the same time. The whole upper stage thing is like a big question mark, right? Because even like the before the reusable thing, they had like the just the,

to throwaway one. There was a three stage one and then the... Well, there was a three stage one and that made the most sense to me and then we stopped hearing about it. But the two stage one is like, it's like very much like that, you know, that Chinese rocket the Long March 5B where it's just like, it can just do like a big chunky thing to 400 kilometers and it's like after that is like useless after that. Like I can't like you're like, you want to go to the moon?

No, not happen. Payload to L.A. to Leo, 50 tons. Pailail to the moon. not quite escapade. Like that's like the difference that it was doing for that upper stage. And then they were like, well, I'll do this reusable thing. And I was like, okay, I'm taking that as a sign that that first stage idea was bad. Like that first, sorry, the original second stage idea was bad.

Yes, yes. And then that thing kind of like came off to critical paths. I'm like, okay, are they going back to what they had or is there some third new thing now? I don't know. That's the part that gives me strife. This is exactly what I'm saying. a lot of pivots to do for your upper stage, which is like a pretty important part of the rocket. It's like the first stage is the dumb part of the rock.

The upper stage does, you know, does a lot of the work in some cases. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. So that makes me nervous. Yeah. Now, the lander, they said, you know, seven meter wide, 16 meters long. Did anyone, anyone do the math on if that fits in a starship? I assume it does not.

Assume it's too tall. The lander? Yeah. I assume the shape of it. It's designed to fit in a new glen. Right? So wouldn't it fit in Starship? I don't know.

It looked like it was pretty long. Would it fit out the door of Starship? I don't know. Nobody knows. That's the other problem. Nobody knows what the door of Starship actually means yet. There's been a bunch of door drawings. Yeah.

Yeah. But anyway, the Pathfinder one, that could fly on whatever they got space on. But that's another question, though. So, okay. Right. No, you're probably right. It'll be. Falcon's the only option.

It's the only rocket you can buy right now. initial new Glenn ones, right? Your options are buy a falcon or make your own rocket. I go your shit together and fly this thing, yeah. Or wait till 2030. Like, that's basically your option. Like, so I don't know, man. That's, the critical path right now is, to me, this whole project is New Glenn.

And that's like never, we took Northroping off of it and put New Glenn on it. And it was like, oh, no. Like, was that the right NG to have on this? Did we trade for the good NG or the bad one? Swap in one NG for another. Which NG is the good one? I don't know. Big question, Mark.

That's a real situation to figure out there, Jake. Here's the other problem. Is there money? Is there money for this? The budget? What a bummer, dude. What a bummer that were what out of money? Is that the bummer?

Yeah. As a foreigner to the United States, as someone who was not a I have to ask a question. For the richest company in the world, country in the world, you guys always seem like you have money problems, and I don't get that. So do you actually have money problems or are you just making it up? I don't need to know.

We're usually making the money up, if that's what you're asking. That's usually what we're making up. Sorry, are you saying, please enlighten me about the state of the elections in the country? Is that what you mean? how please describe to me American fiscal policy political scene

between now and 2024 yeah well who the hell knows what's going to go on at that here's the one thing I will say I've seen some people talking about like how annoying it is that these programs

meaning HLS clips to some extent the modern programs even I guess you could probably levy this against the space suit contracts as well that they are effectively pay-to-play programs because you have to you have to bid a sufficiently low number

and contribute a sufficiently high number to both win the contract and finish the work, right? So in the case of SpaceX, it was $2.9 billion bid for Starship. I don't even know if they set a number on what they're contributing, but it was like obviously billions because they're building all that stuff for it,

so that's obviously billions. This one, it was 3.4 billion for for Blue Moon and well north of that or whatever the vague statement was. Yeah. And in the case of Dynetics, theirs was like way more expensive. And even like the Blue Moon, the original one, right? They bid, did we ever actually get a number? Was it? I assumed like $7 billion.

Did we get a number? Maybe it was $7 billion? I forget I knew that. I think I had six in my mind, but it was a high. It was very, yeah. Right. So we kind of had a general vibe that they didn't, that they asked for. too much and that was a key part.

And so you can say like, all right, this is kind of shitty that to win the contracts, you have to pay enough money to win the contract. But at the same time, NASA has literally no other option. Their option is cancel Artemis entirely or go this route

where they have to convince susceptible individuals in the world to pay enough money, to pay governmental amounts of money to operate these programs and let NASA kick in, you know, crowd fund a little bit of it. because with SLS Orion, with ISS, and I hate to say it, Jake, with planetary science, there's no room left for anything, right? Of any sufficient scale.

Commercial space stations, that's the other one that is this way, pay to play, landers. But that's like, you know, NASA effectively in these programs, by taking this route, has doubled the budget available to them because they're leaning on outside individuals to contribute half the budget. Yeah. And otherwise they would say, I don't know, we have a billion dollars. Can anyone do a lander for that? They would just do lander studies indefinitely. Yeah. So I can't really be mad about it.

I get why people don't like that situation, but I don't know what NASA is left to do other than cancel stuff, and that's politically and viable. That's the thing, right? We actually had this discussion in the Discord. It was like you can look at it from the positive angle. It was like, man, NASA's getting a steal. Man, all these companies are now, you know, self-funding,

half of the whole moon program. This is great. Like, imagine if Apollo didn't have to spend this, all these, like, great things about this, right? And then we get to see all American innovation and all these things, like, really jump into the freight. Great. And then I'm just like, are they picking it

because it's the best decision, or is this the only option they have on the table? Like, they're broke. Like, you know, I don't know. If you let NASA pick what they wanted to do, they would want to have enough money to pay all of it and boss everyone around. do it exactly the NASA way.

Which is what anyone would want to do. Guess what? If Elon Musk had enough money in the world, which, like, how, you know, that's a question, you would want to do everything his own way. But instead, he's like, I'll take this $2.9 billion off of NASA's hands and we'll figure it out from there. Yeah. So it's interesting. But it is like, I think we're going to see the other shoe drop in some way, right?

Like, we are going to get some great benefits of it. But we're still, you know, okay, so like Dragon is a perfect example of something that really worked out for for the whole setup, right? Like NASA got a deal. We got a great product out of it. It's built its own market. Like there's virtually no complaints about drag. Other than the shitty toilet, it's like the only like everything about Dragon is great. It's, you know, essentially where we were at with it.

Right. But everything, every other example of this is like still coming down the pipe. We don't know. if clips or commercial Leo destinations or Artemis Lander's or like we don't know if any of this stuff is going to be successful yet and I think law of averages lots of it isn't going to be and we don't know which one it's going to be yet so I don't know it's we're going to see some I wonder if the pendulum will swing back you know maybe by the end of this decade or something we'll see like we'll have a better idea to be like oh these are the things that we should just go

out and buy on the market and these are the things we need to bring in house like straight up, right? Yeah. Space suits? I mean, that's the space suits is the one that I'm like, oh, that's not, that's not the thing that should be doing. That's not what should be happening. Yeah, it's not a service.

It's an inventory item. Yeah. It's supposed to go in the closet for that. It's astronaut. Yeah, like, why isn't NASA buying polo shirts as a service? You know? Why isn't that how all of the people at NASA Ames are dressing in returnable polo shirts? All those shitty astronaut polos that they wear on the space station.

Yeah, they put them in a bag after. they send them back home and then they actually just return them to the company. Just like a little out. Yeah. It's like rent the runway for space. Unfortunately, Jake, every five shows, we stumble upon an idea that is definitely our exit. Oh, man. Sorry for everyone when we canceled the show because we've taken up one of these ideas.

But no, space use is the one. So here's my line, right? If anyone shows interest in doing the thing that you're trying to buy before you even and express interest in doing the thing, that's one that you should go commercial for. People have generally expressed interest in landing on the moon as a commercial entry. Great, let's do a commercial lunar lander thing.

People have generally expressed the intent to launch rockets. Let's do the commercial rockets thing. No one has been like, you know, I'm a young upstart individual. I'm going to go make a spacesuit company. No one does that yet. Will they eventually in 100 years? I hope so.

I hope there's enough of a market that a space suit upstart with like comfortable friends, Like Mac Weldon for space, I hope exists someday. They're getting advertised on podcasts. That'll be great when that happens. We are not in that world yet at all. So that one was like, ugh. But again, it's the only type of program where you can, because of precedent, say, like,

we're running this program. We expect you to pay for half of it. And that's where they're at. It's the same situation. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that might be the problem that we're expecting NASA's making these decisions based on, is the commercial market actually sustainable for that product when what they're making a decision on it?

Is this a program that we have the budget for or we only have half at best? And that's why they're going that route. Yeah. You know, like if they were starting today, would they do commercial resupply services, commercial crew, would they fund the development of those systems or would they say, we hope you pay for half of it? Yeah, that's what I mean, though, right? Like, are you buying it because it's the best, best option, or is it the only option, right? Yeah.

I don't know. What a quagmire. Yep. We'll see if this works. Notably, a market they're not interested in buying seats on is suborbital spaceflight, Jake. Yeah, weren't they buying something? Weren't they getting on that? I think they bailed on that.

There was like the astronauts thing, but I mean, they are funding payloads, I guess, but not so much. The suborbital crew thing hasn't really happened yet. So what did you make of this non-live streamed launch today? I seem to go well. I don't know. I know as much as you do. I watch the NSF feed like everybody else. Off in the distance.

Yeah. I looked okay. I don't know. I don't know. Let's come up with the most charitable reason for why Virgin Galactic did not stream this. The most charitable reason? Most charitable reason. I have literally one reason why they wouldn't stream this.

Okay, well, let's hear yours first then. And it doesn't hold true, but the only reason I can come up with is they were going full Mark Watney and taking everything out of the spaceship that they could see how high they could get. And that was not at all accurate based on what we saw after the flight. That was the only reason I had in my head before the flight, and none of it came true. This thing was like they didn't finish the interior of it. They ripped out the carpet. There were like no seat covers.

You know what I mean? One guy was holding on the handrail like a like when you run out of seats on the bus. Yeah. That was not true. I mean, so Bradley in the chat saying that they knew, you know, they were expecting a high chance of scrub. And that seems pretty charitable to me. Like, come on. Every space thing has a high chance of scrub.

No one would stream anything. Yeah. Oh, right, but... Okay, well, you told me to come up with a charitable one. This is where I got to, man. You want to hear the uncharitable takes? Uncharitable one. That they're broke.

They ran out of streaming budget. Okay. The people that can operate, the cameras got turfed. And they don't have any extra staff to sit in front of the thing like everyone else does. And they're like, NSF, we hope you pay for half of it. They got an asset to pay for all of it. They got them to pay for all of them. That's a great, you know.

All right. This is like when SpaceX outsourced Boca Chiba, Chica Live Developments too. Boka Chippa. Boca Chippa. Boca Chippa. Boca Chippa didn't want to buy their own, didn't want to buy their own Twitter. A real Boca Chippo down there. Yeah.

Couldn't have. Yeah. I mean, all right. So then the other thing is that they've never shown a full flight of Spaceship 2. There's only ever clips. Yeah. An end-to-end video does not exist. Yeah.

And to be fair, I don't think Blue Origin themselves have published a full end-to-end video. But our former friend of the show, Dylan Taylor, put a full end-to-end video up. So Blue Origin is clearly not opposed to that being out there. No, wasn't there one with the mannequin Skywalker or whatever? I'm talking with people because the reason I'm saying that is like, Even from the clips that we saw of the original flight, right? Was it Sarisha that was that like held on to the seat for a second? I was like totally what I would do if I dropped off an airplane.

I would hold on for a second. But is that a great look of like, oh, here we go? You think that the, it doesn't look good to see what happens inside the cabin? I kind of think so. I sort of think so. Because instead, the reason I'm saying that is the Dylan Taylor video, right? The end to end. I'll look if that's still up.

But, like, that was pure joy, the entire flight. Everyone was having the best time. They were hooting and hollering all the way up. No one looked freaked out. Like, some people, when you take off on an airplane, are freaked out these days, you know? Like, not these days as if things have changed, but just, like, still, in 2023,

there are people that are like, is this what the plane should be doing at this moment? But no one looked like that in the Blue Origin ones. Do you think so? You think in that theory, is it because, like, the experience is just straight up bad and like it's visible on all the passengers? Or does it just look worse than it is

and they want you to, you know, see the good parts because maybe what it looks like doesn't match the actual experience and they're just trying to avoid that misconception? I think I don't know anyone that would pay a quarter to half a million dollars for a spaceflight that would watch a video and go. I'm good. That was good enough.

I don't know if we've hit that market yet. Like watching GoPro videos of like going on a Zipald. line, people might be like, yeah, I don't really think that's for me, right? But you're out $60 or whatever for, but like people that have signed up for this thing, of which there are already a thousand, Jake. Like, Virgin Galactic has, should not at all in any part of their operations be concerned about future people that may buy tickets right now. They should be like, how do we fly these thousand people that have paid us money as quick as possible and deliver on that? So, I guess to that extent. That's 166 flights, by the way.

Yep. Yeah. What's the over-under right now? What's the over-under on how many people they'll fly? Before what? Before there's no more people to fly on that vehicle. Oh, my goodness. For any cause.

I'm doing any cause odds. Over-under. Give me your best. Hit us up on Twitter. At Off-Nom. What's your over-under number for, and we'll take over-under on whatever these ones are that come in. Yeah.

The pre-sale. thing on Virgin Galactic, like, okay, so when you run, when you run a business, you have something that's called like, you know, you have assets and you have liabilities. And like every one of those customers right now is a liability. It's something where they owe money, you know, in some form. This case, it's in the form of a service, but they owe them. Like, it's in their accounts payable department, right? And like, if you're the accounts payable account at Virgin Galactic, you got to be just like, oh, man, this is like 1,000. rich people that are waiting like 1,000 people who probably know other people.

And we owe them money. That's a great way to put it. That's a great way to put it. How many people have flown on New Shepherd so far? What's the current count? What are they in the 30s now? Yeah. I feel like we should keep a track of this somewhere.

Yeah. Is this the thing that the supercluster database would be good for? Does that exist? Can I do a vehicle? Welcome to Anthony and Jake, Peruse the Internet. Craft. Here we go. I'm doing it.

New Shepherd. Here. One, two, three, four, five. Six flights. I see 31 humans on these flights that have flown. Because a couple of them went twice, right? Only one, right? Only that one guy.

I thought there was two people that went, or did one guy go three times? No, Evan Dick went twice. I think everyone else went once. So, 31 people. Over under, Jake. I feel like that a question. Over under. Well, Virgin Galactic fly 31 people to space before they are no longer flying people to space.

That's a nice way to couch the ending there. Yeah, I don't care why you think they stop flying people to space. I have multiple theories on why they might stop flying people to space. Oh, man. That's a tough one. 31 people. Because, oh, how many have they flown? All right.

Let me switch it over from a New Shepherd over to... They've had two flights, right? Well, two, like... They've had multiple flights. Operational flights. And then they had a couple like test people, right? They've done three flights up to space. But yeah, one of them was just the two pilots.

Beth, they've done, let's see, in space. What's that like? 11, 13. Hold on a second. I think seven people right now. No, the other ones today aren't in six. So what are we at? Like 11, 13 people, 13 people?

There was a repeat, but yeah. Okay. So call it like 11, 12, 13. Will they get to 31 before they stop adding to it? 31 individuals, right? So if the two pilots keep flying, they're not counted again. So 20 more individuals. So four flights?

Five more flights. Five flights? Is there capacity two pilots and four passengers? Four other people? Yeah I mean at this point I have to assume Beth Moses is always flying on all the spaceship two flights

So maybe there's only three seats available I don't know what kind of deal She negotiated we should ever on the show to talk about this But maybe she's always flying As just like you're making sure everything it was fine It's in her contract It must be on every flight Yeah

I gotta think about that one That's a I can come up with compelling reasons to go over and under. Like under just because like this thing just doesn't seem to work great, but also over because they booked a thousand people that are motivated to move forward, but also like money's tight and they can't keep selling tickets for more money.

Here's the other, let me throw one more confounding factor in. Like the next flight that they have, right, this Italian Air Force flight, I think that's going to have, does that one have a mix of payloads too? or is that just people? I don't know.

Some of these might not have the full load out of people. Yeah, they might have two or three, right? So it could be like 10 flights before they hit that 20 individual count. Yeah. I'm just taking the under. I'm taking the under. Yeah? Because I don't think anyone else will, and I'm generally pessimistic.

Especially about Virgin Galactic. About Virgin companies generally, I am pessimistic, Jake. And please, please, you know, if you feel like this is the week that you should, you should yell at me for being pessimistic about the virgin companies. Please do so. Go ahead. I've always been a, not a hater, but a non-believer. The way that you are skeptical about Cyrilov,

I am skeptical about the Virgin Space Companies. All right, all right, all right, all right. Well, how about for fun, then I'll take the over? I'll do it. We can be the opposite on that one. Great. 30 some people. Let's just make it 30.

I'm taking the under, you're taking the over. 30 individuals. And we'll, this is a nice middle of the year off nominal prediction. Here we go. We're going to have to carry it year over year. If I'm right and it's over, it's not going to happen anytime soon. No. I'll be winning for a couple of years for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can talk about it at your son's sixth birthday or something. It's coming up quick, so. Yeah, yeah. When is the moon landing? That's when we can talk about it. Yeah. at the end of at the end of desantis's second term we can go over whether it's going to be that's a choose your own adventure right there that's a real choose your own adventure no it's probably not how it's going to go based on the twitter spaces so i didn't i didn't really check in on that not a great technical performance no i don't think so Elon hosted it shocker so that's how that goes we got nothing we got no content

on that. Yeah. I mean, what can be said that hasn't already been said. I agree. That's not our beat. No. Yeah. So that's catch up. That's what you miss, man. Pretty quiet. I didn't miss a lot. I mean, important news items. There's just no drama. No drama. Yeah. I was right. I was right. Once again, I was right that the Virgin orbit parts would be sold off to somebody interested in hypersonics. In fact, the parts were sold off to two people interested in hypersonics. Rocket Lab? Yeah. I was right for the wrong reason.

Yeah, yeah. So there you go. Oh, I should pull up that nice meme to just finish this off with that nice meme about the sale. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still sad that Boeing didn't buy it out. Yes.

I spared no expense so Neutron could succeed. Excellent work, everybody. Excellent work. Kevin nailed that one. What else we got cooking? Anything on the radar here, Jake? I don't know, man. I've been knee-deep in coding lately.

I've been like, I've been super, I've been pushing a lot of code. So, yeah. Do you want to tell everyone about the new setup on the Discord? Yeah, so we're overhauling Nostradam bot, which is our prediction application. So this is where you can have fun and you can predict whether it's going to be over or under on Virgin Galactic passengers by a certain date. So it's been, you know, it's a fan favorite in the Discord. So we're overhauling it and making it better.

So it's been a lot of stuff happening this week and that. So if you want to pop in there and be a part of that, you should. You should check it out. five bucks a month is the entry level price for the discord so go to opanam.com slash discord to check that out and if you you know if you think that if you're the kind of person that bought a virgin orbit rocket because you never because you never fly ride share and you want to spare no expense you should add never fly ride share you can do that as well 25 bucks a month and you can support this stream and make this happen make our terrible weird

takes just happen you know if you love this random show boy will you know just go on youtube and say that falcon heavy is overrated that's why you're really trying to get out of this right so um i do have a little accessory announcement jake do you remember when i made everyone fill out those family feud entries yes i do uh we are going to actually put the work in to come up with the family feud show so if you wrote to me last time it said you would like to help do this write to me again because I've totally forgot about it until now. So we're going to do this. We're going to, I need people to help me go through this Google sheet and actually like

clean it up and consistent size it and make it family feudable. And then we will load it into a family feud interface. And Brendan Byrd said he would come back on and actually help us host it. Nice, nice. Yeah. Brendan Burns got a new fancy job too. It does. You're getting top quality.

Yeah. He's like double, double executive vice president of news or something now. Yeah. It's serious. Whatever's going on about. Yeah. Yeah. That's it.

Hey, man. That's great. That's it. Hey, it's great to have you back. I'm excited. You're back. I'm pumped. It's going to be good summer.

I have no idea what we're going to do next week yet. But, boy, did we send some emails this week. We sure did. I finally reached out to people from the Space Symposium, and I'm only halfway through my stack of reaching out to people from space. space symposium. So a lot of people will be coming on the show soon. It'll be great. Trust us. And hey, actually, just throw this out there. Listeners, if you have people like you would love to see, like, we're happy to take those recommendations to me. So you can, you can drop those in our inbox, but like, we should talk to this person because they're cool. And it's got to

be a cool person. Don't give me a dumb person. Yeah. Come on. Come on. Yeah. Let's always end criticizing their judgment. Yes. Come on. All right, everybody. see you later. Bye.