Off-Nominal - 124 - Accidental Cadence

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

Jake and Anthony check in on human spaceflight with a bit of a roundup—Axiom-3, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, SpaceX, and more.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 124 - Accidental Cadence - YouTubeSara Mauskopf on X: “Companies that raised money in 2021 trying to raise again today”Sara Mauskopf on X: “When you’re in the arena trying stuff and then some of it doesn’t work”Sara Mauskopf on X: “Aaron Rodgers after the opening drive”‘Galactic 04’ Mission Marks Virgin Galactic’s Fifth Spaceflight in Five Months | Virgin GalacticVirgin Galactic’s president explains how VSS Unity is now flying frequently | Ars TechnicaA year after New Shepard’s accident, Blue Origin may return to flight next month | Ars TechnicaAxiom Space names crew for third private astronaut mission to ISS - SpaceNewsVladimir Putin meets North Korea's Kim Jong-un at Russia's Vostochny Cosmodrome spaceport for 5-hour summit | SpaceFollow 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. Hey, buddy. Hey, how are you? I'm good. How's your trade wins? They're working out. You know, they seem to have gone right by me. There was like this very scary cloud, like, looming over the house,

and they always come from that same sort of Caribbean direction, and the loudest thunder you have ever heard in your life. I think it struck, like, the neighbor's house, maybe, because the house shook. I love those ones, though. Like, not when it's my neighbor's house. when it's really low. Yeah, I was really loud.

I have a great memory of my time in Florida. I lived on the third floor of an apartment building, but it kind of was like you had to walk. There was an interior archway thing that would have had the staircase that you would walk up, and then there was four units on each floor, right? So you would like get to this middle floor,

and then there was all the doors there. It was pretty large, like, internal thing. But the top was this arch. And I remember I was leaving my apartment one afternoon to go to school. And it was one of those like four o'clock storms that come through. And it just, you know, hit maybe the building and just this unbelievable thunder clap. And it echoed through that archway in the way that I've never been scared of my life. And I jumped so much, I threw my phone, like, across the apartment.

And it almost fell three stories down. It was very traumatic. Yeah. Everything was fine. These were the old phones that had a little more gumption. to them other than their glassbacks. Yeah. I guess no, that was probably like a plastic one at that time, right?

Okay, all right. Yeah. So it was fine, I think. I don't know. Anyway, so, Anthony, I have to ask you, I want to ask you how you are feeling now that we live in a world where aliens are real. How are you feeling about that?

Yeah, I mean, your government has unveiled true believing. Oh, God, the memes on that. The memes have been really good. The memes have been so good. The memes have been good. Yeah. Yeah. What the?

My wife was like, I walk in the living room and she was in there and she's like, have you seen this thing from the Mexican legislature? And I was like, unfortunately. And she's like, this is my afternoon. Because it was just so wild. I think my wife was scrolling through Twitter one night and then just pointed her phone at me and went, what the hell's going on with this? Yeah, yeah.

It's good. It's great memes. Send us your favorite memes. Send us your favorite, Mexican alien memes. Yeah. Yeah. But what is points if it's in Spanish?

That's like you mean. We'll retweet the best ones or repost or re-skeet them. I don't know. Yeah, there's some of my favorite ones has been, there's a personality Sarah Mouskopf, who is like a Silicon Valley, founder of this company, yada yada, she's cool. She's also from Philly originally, so she's an Eagles fan.

But she has had some fantastic memes such as this. Companies are raised money in 2021 trying to raise again today. It's the little alien in the display case. I don't even know what to call this thing. She went on a tear of really good memes around this thing. Oh, man. Yeah. This one was dunking on Chimath.

believe when you're in the arena trying stuff and some of it doesn't work. So Chimot Dunking has been a topic on the show recently, so I forget I'd show that one. It's been great. For the football fans out there, Aaron Rogers after the opening drive, this is relevant. It's just all the memes are good. This is a good, this is Rich Vane. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good one.

This will live forever, this one. This meme format is perfect. Some say they already have lived forever, Jake. Yeah, it's true. It's true. What are you drinking today? What do you got? I got a zero gravity cone head. A friend of mine brought this over when we were watching the Eagles on Sunday. Sunday.

Yeah, Sunday. And left a couple beers here. I think I've had a zero gravity on the show before. Vermont. Isn't it always Sunday? God, no. Oh, I don't know. They're playing tonight, Jake.

Okay, all right. Yeah, there's Thursday, Sunday, Monday, and then when you get into the special part of the season, there's Saturday games. And there's just, as a guy who likes football, but it's not my number one sport by any means. It's just an increasing encroach onto the rest of the time that the other sports get,

and that does make me grumpy occasionally, for sure. I thought it was like, there was like, you know, because the seasons are pretty short, aren't they? Aren't they like 16? Yeah, September, January. February? Yeah, I thought it was just like 16 Sundays in a row and that was and the, like the business pitch for NFL was like, we own Sundays.

I thought that was the pitch. Well, that is. But unfortunately for you, all of your information is out of date. Teams play 17 games, which over the course of 18 weeks and they play on three different days of the week, it's sometimes four. And then the playoffs go all the way until February. So, yeah, welcome. I'll just trust you on that.

I don't know. Welcome to the new future. Yeah. Wait until you hear about baseball. Oh, I know that's a lot of games, but that's all the games all the time. Yeah. Yeah. It's just concept playing. Anyway.

I got a gin tonic, nothing special today. Oh. Clearing out some fever tree in my fridge. Less lime this time. This is a more traditional one than I had. I love lime. That one was too much lime, but the usually, how much lime do you put in it? like half an ounce maybe i don't do that just like how much of a line cut up a lime and tell me how much

you're putting in there like half a lime probably maybe three quarters of the lime yeah yeah great i have i just have a bottle because i hate squeezing them i hate top oh really yeah i hate it i go to costco and i get the giant bottle that's a weird thing to hate i hate squeezing limes in particular just your hands just get all sticky you're just covered in lime and then you got this like lime husk you got to deal with and it sprays everywhere. It's a nightmare. It's the worst thing. It's the worst thing ever. Or you got to buy a tool. You got to get one of those silly

No, nobody needs to do that. The limes. Limes are so tiny. They're the easiest citrus to deal with. You have those crazy things down there though, like the prehistoric things. Yeah, the dinosaur lions. Yeah. So you got a whole different situation. What the hell are we doing here, Jake? I don't know. I don't know. We're filling time. No, we're not filling time. Okay, so we have a potpourri roundup of human spaceflight stuff. Because there's been some news. We were being complaining all summer, there's been no news.

Now there's kind of some news. So I thought, yeah, I just thought we would maybe kind of tackle some of us. So we got Virgin Galactic, we got Blue Origin. We've got Axiom news. We've got maybe a little bit of Polaris Dawn. There's like some ESA stuff that we can talk about. There's quite a few. Apparently North Korea is on the menu.

Not sure if you've checked in on that storyline. I've heard briefly, but it hasn't made it much. It hasn't made it much farther than the alien story in my headspace. So I'll have to see what's there. All other news stories. Yeah, yeah. You know where my private is. That's going to be the, you know, I changed the Miko artwork monthly.

That's going to be the one. for October. That's terrible. So funny. To put him in an astronaut helmet and it's okay. Someone will tweet that too. All right. Where do you want to start, Jake?

Okay, well, let's start with. I want to ask you about Virgin Galactic. We kind of like we're going to talk about this, you and I and then we never got to it. And, you know, there was a good burger article that came out about them getting their groove back a little bit and some stuff. So, yeah, I kind of wanted to check in with you to see how you were feeling because they're, they seem to have stumbled into a cadence all of a sudden. And it's, it's kind of nice. I kind of wanted to see what you thought about.

All opened up that way. I was, yeah, they literally today just announced that they're going again on October 5th. So, like, they are. Whatever. I don't need to look at the calendar close enough to declare them monthly at this point. They're monthly. Yeah. Which... Yeah.

Yeah. Like, so it's an interesting moment in time where they are more monthly than Blue Origin's ever been. Blue Origin's been not flying for over a year now. Yeah. Over a year of any flight that, longer than that, if you look at when their last crewed flight was. Of course, Blue Origin's done more flights. And we're going to set aside the entire conversation about... for at the moment, we'll talk about at some point,

the technical architecture of these two vehicles and the differences. But yeah, they do feel like it's hit another inflection point between the two companies. And it felt like that in July 2021, when everyone wanted to fly at the same time, and

Branson, like, jumped the schedule on Bezos after Bezos announced he's going to find the moon anniversary. And then Branson jumped in front and then, you know, all the fall that we had heard from that, was yeah, we kind of rushed that flight and there was a bunch of stuff wrong and then we did the one flight and then we stopped flying for all these years and only now have they begun flying again but they turned it on right away and I was shocked. I did not believe that and at all. It's weird, right?

Yeah. I had no hope that that was a good case. They were just like weren't doing anything and then they just started like it just it wasn't a ramp up at all. They just started going every month and now we're on. This is the fourth one coming up in October right? So that's, July, August, September, October. Is that what it was? The fourth of the named galactic missions. Correct. There was one right before it that was named Unity, whatever else, right?

Is that true? Unity 25. Is that what it was? Unity 25? That sounds right. That feels like it's a thing that I read it somewhere. I think that was right. Yeah.

Because of course, any time that you want to, as a, you know, the history of spaceships has changed your naming a lot, so nobody really knows what number you're flying. and given moment. Looking at you space shuttle. Yeah. So it's funny too, the Wikipedia page. The always reliable list of blank Wikipedia page has so many different tables on this spaceship two pages that I need to figure out which table I actually care about.

Yeah. Yeah, Unity 25 was May, May, June, August, September, October. Okay. So, yeah. Yeah, like the June 29th to August 10th gap is the one that people be like, well, they're not exactly monthly. It's like whatever, they're monthly enough for me to declare monthly. But I hadn't, like, it feels there's a storyline in there somewhere because it feels night and day that they, you know, the last previously on Virgin Galactic was like they were leaving stuff taped to the wings and the wings were coming apart on a couple of the test flights. and then they went down for that two-year maintenance period

and got their shit together? I guess. We're shocked. This is our shocked face. We're totally shocked. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it came into nowhere. So I think that's that sort of remarkable thing in and in and of itself.

So, yeah, and there was all that drama with the pilot that left, right? What was the guy's name? I want to say, like, was it this duckie guy? Yeah. Forger. Forger. we're doing great this is a great show it's a great show we're doing here

virgin pilot Mark Forger Stucky Mark forger's like okay we're both right Forger is the part in quotes which is not what I have would I would have guessed Some reason I guess I don't know like I want to know the story of What check he passed off to somebody You know

Yeah So yeah so I mean that happened and he was and that's where we got a lot of information right you know like what was it the bag of bolts that was taped to the inside of the airframe or something that nobody knew about and all that kind and the wings like delaminating from each other and I mean even one of the best jokes we've ever made on this show of when Richard Branson's flight went out of the actual zone that they were allowed to fly in and then we had the meme of the job safety or flight safety button but even that was like you know that was I think that was a good example to bring

up here because it was not only like technical issues that were happening and, you know, legitimate security and safety concerns from hardware level, but it was also operations that seemed a little bit like, ooh, how about that? You rushed this flight and you flew out the flight corridor, but everything's fine, and you didn't talk about it until later, not to mention the stock price. Yeah. I don't know. So my question for you then is, would you fly on it now?

No. I would not. Not yet. No. I wouldn't. Still not there yet. No. I'm not going to fly on this vehicle.

100% not, right? Like money aside or whatever, I'm not, I'm not doing it. All right. Okay. I don't feel comfortable with it. I don't like the architecture. I mean, like, we're always just how dark, how close to dark can we get with this topic, right? But Blue Origin, like the New Shepherd, right?

Flying reliably, it's got an escape system. It's been doing fine. and then boom all of a sudden hot streaks in the nozzle the whole thing blows up and the escape system works so like i mean the space shuttle everyone gets you get lulled in the same sense of stability that you do for every vehicle ever yeah until something goes wrong that you never could have seen coming and there's just that's my not a lot of options if that happens with this vehicle honestly my biggest worry about version because it's like it has to be with this with this with sudden cadence it's just like right right right Okay, so does that mean you change something or you're just barreling through right now?

And like, what does that mean, right? Yeah, it's wild. I mean, I will say the, was it Eric Berger that had that big interview with the Virgin Galactic? Yeah. Yeah, this. With the former NASA guy, right? Yeah, this was from August 29th, so a couple weeks ago. Yeah.

Pretty good, long interview about, and it's Mike Moses who he's talking to, about the kinds like how did they get monthly basically? What kinds of things are they doing now? What is their actual turnaround like? And there are, there is talking here about, you know, what kind of inspections they need to do between flights and how, you know, what is the actual time that that takes and the vehicles that they're building for the future don't have those same requirements.

But I just, it's never like, we're not there yet with space. We're just straight up not there yet with space where where this is not going to raise eyebrows from people. I don't know. It's a weird topic because you're just projecting the future. But I feel like New Shepherd was, we were literally, when that new shepherd abort happened, do you remember we were on a, our once a week business planning call?

And we were like, oh, there's a new Shepherd flight. And we turned it on. And I was like, why are we even watching? And then explode. That is barely exaggerated. Yeah, yeah. So. Yeah.

No, I guess what I'm really curious about is that like you go from just not flying for a long time and then you're suddenly every month. And so that means like one of two things. Like either you were sort of practicing and getting back into the rhythm of things before that. And it's a kind of a slow ramp up or even a fast ramp up, but like a linear change, you know, a gradient change. or like you just start doing it and you haven't actually figured it out but you're going anyway, right? Just to get the flight rate up. And so that's kind of where I haven't quite figured out what's going on there. And it's interesting.

So I don't know. I'm glad that they're finally doing it though. Like because like you know, they finally flew. They're finally working on the backlog instead of just sending kind of like employees up. They had like the first ticket guy finally flew now. So that's good to see that they're going to make that. accounts payable and that go down a little bit because they collected a lot of money and then they didn't really do much with it. So that's good to see. But yeah, I know it's interesting.

I'm really curious to see what happens there. I want to ask you to say if you would fly on it. No. No, I don't think so. It's too weird. I don't know. It's more fun to watch from the outside. It's a pretty ship. Wait, in this, It's fun to watch on the outside for sure. I think it's this interview where they, somebody talks about, or maybe it was in one of their recent live streams where they were explaining that like,

you know, when we released the vehicle, the carrier, mothership, right, Bons Eve, actually, like, because now it's light, it flies up above us and we actually continue to fly level. And I'm like, please explain why in the first flight with employees,

at least two people grabbed their seat. at the moment of release. You know, I don't, I didn't understand that, but it is fun to watch it happen, but it also, I don't like, I don't like watching it. What's going on with the secret customers thing? What do you, what's your idea? I wanted to bring that up. I wanted to bring that up, yeah.

I'm kind of assuming that they're trying to set a news, like, the first people to fly on these are obviously going to be news stories, but like eventually, if we all want to achieve like the sort of going of space is just like going in any other vacation, like, we don't need to all know who's flying where and when, right? And I feel like they're maybe trying to get that precedent established early and just sort of like going after it. That's the best I can figure out. But it was weird, though, right? It was, I don't know if they're there yet. I feel like you're still at the point where they can talk about it. It hit me weird for one minute. And then I was like, nah, I'd rather than be

like that. Like, I actually, I honestly would rather than be like that. Because, Yeah, I mean, this is a little bit of dressing for the job you want or whatever, right? Like, if I've had these vibes about SpaceX. I'm like, are they, they're still live streaming Starlink launches? Why are they live streaming Starlink launches? Don't they kind of do like unhosted ones now or they just show the camera feed? But there's someone in there working on the thing. Yeah.

I'm shocked that those live streams have survived as long as they had. considering the men charge. They're dead now. That's true. I love your Twitter blue subscriber or something. Now the only reason they're not dead is because they need live streams for X. Yeah, yeah. But we had the same conversation with Inspiration 4 and even some of the axiom flights, right?

They're like, oh, we're not getting, you know, astronaut live streams from the entire segment of Instration 4. It's like, well, you didn't pay for that. You did. And that's a case that you didn't buy that option for this flight. Yeah, yeah. No, it's true. It's true. I don't know.

Like, there was, not to keep bringing up the same guy, but like there was a lot of drama around Twitter accounts that would track a particular private jet. And yet we're like, I need unending live streams of private spacecrafts. Yes. How's that different? It's not. It's not different.

other than it is a remarkable journey still. So that was the only thing that like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, people that go on submarines still sometimes get coverage, right? So I feel like we're going to get, we're going to get some space coverage for a while. How many does it take to not be remarkable? I guess that depends on if you're the sales guy or not, right? I mean, if you're trying to sell Virgin Galactic flights, maybe you want the live stream, right? That's the other thing I can think about.

Yeah, right. You want to have a little bit of marketing, right? Yeah. Maybe you don't. Maybe you don't. They didn't, for a long time, they wouldn't show a full length of a flight. Yeah. They would just show a two-second snippet of acceleration and then a little bit of apache and not much else.

Mm-hmm. It is a delicate balance, but I kind of feel like, I don't know, I, let's flip it around. Let's say you're on one of these flights. Do you feel like having people watch you the whole time? I can't pick your nose halfway off. I'm not a good example, though, because I'm going to be live streaming on Offnon episode from the Blue Orgy. We are going to do this for content, for sure.

Yeah, we're going to have a bar set up on the abort motor, right? But like, we're going to have one of those zero-g beer drinking things with the weird poofs and stuff. But yeah, right. We're strange in that regard, but I don't know, like, I guess I'm banking on the weirdness of people, like, go on an airplane flight and just watch everyone else for the two hours that you're on a plane, and you're like, I don't really need to watch, I don't need to watch that. I don't need to have that streamed 700 times. So, I don't know, I'm going to stand for

these companies don't need to be doing live streams for this stuff. Make it a regular operation. I mean, let these people like buy a ticket and go do their thing and we can report on it or whatever. We could talk about it. Like they should share information about it because it is of public interest. And certainly there are, you know, like public resources being spent on it from like the FAA to airspace closures or whatever. So don't make it like you're doing a, you know, super secretive operation in the middle of the night. But at the same time, if I'm buying a flight for a couple hundred thousand or a couple million, I'm like, yeah, I don't really, I don't need your YouTube stream up in my face the whole time.

Yeah. Well, I spent for Orbital, like, definitely, like, yeah. I was saying the exact same thing for inspiration for us. It's like, you don't need to let them go to the bathroom for God's sake. They can have some privacy, but yeah. But I don't know, these little flash flights, though, are kind of interesting. I think they're an interesting sort of stressed on that idea because I think fundamentally your theory is like sound like I agree with that but also it's like for a four minute flight or

whatever it is in zero G it's just like I don't know maybe that's fine you know we'll see they have to become less less regular or sorry more regular than roller coaster rides and then and then we won't care more regular yeah it is funny too because you're right that it is a good advertisement many times. Like, I remember when Dylan Taylor posted the full-length video of the flight, he took a New Shepherd, there hadn't been really many videos. Because at the time, they weren't really getting video coverage on the live stream. So we'd see a clip or two afterwards, but he posed the whole thing. And I was watching it very interested to see, like, would people freak out? You know, I think that was one, he was on there. I forget who else was on the flight, but there

There's an interesting mix of characters, some that knew what was coming, some that I don't necessarily know how much they knew was coming. And Michael Strayhan was on the flight? I think his flight at Strayhand, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think. Pretty sure. Tim and Taylor Michael Strayhan. How many times is that at Google?

He just saw him? What do you mean? No, in a TV show, an old show. I'm rewatching Chuck. You ever watched that show Chuck? No. It's a goofy show, but he was in it for that. Well, he was on the same flight with Dylan Teller.

Okay. So, but the whole way up, everyone's just having the best time of their life. They're under this like 3G rocket thrust. Yeah. And they're just hooting and hollering the whole way up. They're yelling to each other. Like, did you see that thing? This is the best.

And I thought that right there was the greatest advertisement for like, oh, this is really fun. Yeah. Because if you do six people on average basis and like put six people on a roller coaster and put a GoPro in front of them. them, at least three of them will be losing their shit the whole time. Yeah, yeah. Hyperventilating, freaking out about what's coming. I love that video for that because there's a lot of people that dismiss suborbital spaceflight,

like it's not real or it's not good enough. Like there's a lot of gatekeeping for orbital versus suborbital. Like, oh, you're only a real man if you go to orbit. And I'm just like, shut up. Like, I'm just like, this looks like a blast. Like, you know, like you can talk about how great orbital flight is all you want, but this is still fun. Like, this is like a Google Riot. It's over quick. You don't have to commit to anything.

In and out in a weekend. That's great, man. What an awesome service. I love it. In out on a weekend. Should we watch a little bit of it to remind ourselves what this is like? In and out of the weekend is the funniest ad for this of all time. That like this is an engagement that you can have over the course of a couple of days. Honestly, that's like not a bad. It's not a bad. There's a lot of yelling. What's going on? Whoa.

It's not a bad advertisement for it, though, right? Because one of the problems with, like, face flight being so inaccessible is like, yeah, you've got to be a professional atheron and train for this many years. And then you can, and you have to be in a, you have to have three engineering degrees. And like, you know, like there's a lot of. I decided 30 years ago to do this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you missed your window.

How old are you? If it starts with more than one your age, then, you know, like, like you're too late. So, like, being able to just pop in in on a weekend, that's a great sales pitch. That's like spaceflight that I can afford to fit into my schedule. Let's do it. They do need a bar set up on this middle thing, though. Totally.

Personally, I think they need that our consulting gig. Totally, totally, totally need a bar. But everyone just looks so chill. It looks like so much fun. Yeah. Yeah, I'm enjoying it. Let's go. I forget what her name was.

Let's go. Laura? Laura? I don't know. Laura? Laura? Laura. Sounds right.

Yeah. Sounds right. Straight hand. Look at him. Just chilling. Just chilling. It barely fits in that seat. He does.

My feet would barely reach the iPad in front of me. Wow. So are you feeling good about them coming back? Sounds like they're coming back to flight, right? Yeah. We'll see. Why do you think it took so long? So over a year, right?

Over year. It's like 13 months or something. something if they make it next month. Are they just waiting for that new booster as all it was? Because there was only two, right? There was like a cargo one and a crew one. A cargo one blew up. So they had one.

I thought they had it in the pipeline already. And maybe it just took another year to finish. And that's going to be the new cargo one. Or maybe they're like moving them down the line and the crew gets the new one. I don't know if they do a swapout or something. Does that feel right? I don't know. I can't figure it.

Yeah. My vibe was that they had more than one. in the pipeline, that they were getting close to, oh, look, we have a fleet of vehicles now and we're going to fly like, you know, two or three different tracks, basically have like a payload track and then two human tracks so we can fly monthly or more than monthly or whatever. And so if that's true, then I think this resulted in, you know, rework across many vehicles and probably double-checking. I don't know.

I actually kind of have a vibe that they're going to end up doing. the Virgin Galactic situation here where it's like nothing, nothing, and then boom, yeah, like, what if they come back and they are flying monthly and they have two boosters ready to roll? The one thing I read was that they were going to do like an uncrewd, they're going to redo this flight. Yep.

You know, whatever, not go right? And then the first crew one wasn't going to be to like February. Like, they were still going to have a bit of a gap there. Right. So maybe then it'll be. I kind of, I would bet more money on that being the case than then they limp back to starting and they fly every three months. at best.

That would be where my money goes. Man, if 2024 works out to be like monthly cadence from both companies, that's going to be a great, great year for a day's life. That's going to be pretty weird, yeah. Yeah, let's see. That would be what, almost 40 people on Virgin Galactic that fly up almost. 70? Yeah, almost, yeah, you have more than 100 people added on to the list.

Yeah, that's big. deal. It's pretty wild, if that's true. Yeah. Plus a couple Axiom flights, Polaris program flight. But what happens if you let the commercial spaceflight regulations lapse? What happens? I still don't really know what happens. I've been wondering for years. There was like a big off-ed from Michael Lopez-Alegria, right? About like, you've got to, you've got to extend the moratorium week. We can't have regulation down. It's like, well, okay, like, maybe. Like, I know it's still like an industry and it's infancy and maybe there's some shortcuts they get to take. Like, what are they? What are the shortcuts? I kind of want to know what the shortcuts are for all these

spaceships that we're putting people on. What's going on here that's so hard that this regulation would sink you? What is it? I'm curious. It is a funny situation because it's written about and I'm seriously undecided on this. Like, I don't, I don't fully buy the line on either end because we can unpack why. I don't believe both parties in this case, but the op-eds that you're talking about, they always write about it in a way that, like, the day this thing expires,

somebody has a long list of stuff that they would outlaw on these vehicles, and it would immediately become illegal to have private space flights. That's what's written about. There's a bicameral crew at the legislation at the freaking Congress, and they've got them drafted,

And they're just waiting. They're standing there waiting at the desk. This is the one thing they can agree on. 1158, 1159. Bam, shut it down. Like, yeah, the wishful thinking that like, number one, they would agree on a thing. Number two, that this would be a thing that bubbles to the surface in an election season is also hilarious. There's so much other stuff that.

And then the other part is that it's not necessarily just Congress, right? It would allow agencies to then put regulations in place from basically the executive branch, too. So it's not just the legislation aspect. I want to shout that out. Yeah. Yeah, but at the same time, I don't know, it is a little bit of like, I don't know, nobody gives me good examples of what this would be. Like, are they going to write down that you need to wear a seatbelt or are they going to write down that like you can't fly on a rocket engine? So usually those kind of regulations would like, I mean, they're not often that like progressive.

They're usually very responsive, right? They're reactive. And so like, you know, what I kind of think like what bad things have happened in commercial human spaceflight that they would want to go and try and prevent from happening again, right? That's kind of where I would start when I think about it. But I don't know. I can't think of like, you know, there's the virgin crash, I guess, is like the scariest thing. one that we've had in that kind of department, but what do you, I don't know, what do you regulate?

Think about it from that level, though. That's why I find this interesting is because if you think about it from that level, you know, this might be showing too much from my bias, but typically when you're going to write a regulation, it's going to be like the two biggest players that write the regulations so that they remain, we talk about this at SpaceX all the time.

Like, now they're the incumbent. They want the launch market to operate the way they do, so they retain incumbency. the new startups will be, you know, sent off to the yonderland. So in that vein, we have two biggest players that are sending the most people to space on this kind of basis that would be covered by this. SpaceX is going to do a couple dozen a year, but if they are flying monthly on these other providers, they're going to send more people per year up.

They do things so differently that this might result in them just arguing about what things should be regulation. We want to regulate that there should be pilot. Yeah, you got to have an abort system. No, you got to have crew aboard. Yeah. Like there may just straight up be some things that that become strange battleground and all the sudden because Virgin Galactic can't fit four customers on their plane, they can only fit three because they have to have their customer representative on board that they're going to try to push

so that Blue Origin can only fly five paying customers per flight instead of six. That's like petty crap like that, right? But I don't think that, like that's the negative version of it. I don't think that's how this will end up. You know? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's more technical than I know, and that's my problem with this. I don't know, like, what those things are that people would find even useful to write down. Has there been anyone, like, sort of telegraphing, like, gunning for it? Like, I can't think of any senators or congresspeople or even regulators who have been, like, oh, yeah, we've got some other thoughts and we're just waiting for this thing. Like, you know, no one's, like, telegraphed what they want, right?

Like, I feel like usually in, like, a political space, you got to sort of drum up some support ahead. of time right before you drop the big law or whatever. So I don't know. It seems interesting. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what's going on there. I'm going to guess if anyone, it's going to be Bernie Sanders just because he likes to go out and be like, yeah, go out the billion. I think we should have moon landers. And then it'll be just like the same thing. Or, you know, there's also been, there's been some like weird political stuff that's like, we're going to implement, you know, whatever commercial space tax in our flight or in our state so that if you're flying a commercial space flight from our state, you're taxed on it, like,

commercial airline. That's not going to happen, though. Like, that's, that's, that is, that's way down the list, right? Well, but I'm just saying that there are some people making noise that would, would be prone to saying, oh, now that this thing is, now that we're allowed to put these regulations in place, then, you know, this is a lane for me to go in on, you know, the, the billionaires and their space toys. Yeah, yeah. Because like, because like, if you think about the two actual players, like, in New Mexico, I mean, they're, they're practically begging them to use that spaceport. So, like, there's no, way they're going to as long as Virgin says, yeah, we're going to make

Spaceport America a place to be that they're, they could do whatever they want in New Mexico. And then like, does Texas even know they have blue origin flying? They're like, I thought that was New Mexico. Like, do they write anything down? Is there even a government that maintains any records there? I don't know. I can't be sure with Texas. So all the way out there. Not that. Not that far west in the state. I feel like that. Yeah, that's like that's like the Mexico part of Texas. We don't really know much about that. So I don't I don't think there's anything of that. come like at a state level but it is interesting though i'm yeah it's really interesting because

that you know because michael lopez ala writes this op-ed in space news like you do and uh they run some opads man boy do they run some op-eds oh boy uh and they're and you know he's axiom right so he's got a vested interest in it so you got to take that with uh for what it's worth but it was uh it was funny i don't know i kind of laughed reading it did you read the thing though i was going to say like i kind of scrolled a little bit and i was like yeah this is the same one I've read this before. Michael opens out of here. Okay, I know.

This is coming. Read the first article. Yeah, I don't need to finish this one else. There's more news to read. Well, that's a weird aspect though, too, is that the span of what would be covered is so weird, right? You got everything from a few minutes suborbitally to free-flying orbital missions to like going to the world's most advanced laboratory. Yeah, to flying around the moon.

and where NASA doesn't really have rules for what they should do when they're flying around the moon. Yeah, yeah. I'm not even sure. I don't know. No one has described to me why if this moratorium is allowed to lapse. I mean, it's going to lapse at this point, right?

That seems unlikely. They probably have bigger fish to fry when it comes to agreeing on things. There's always bigger fish to fry in Congress. No one has described to me that like, I don't know, it's just, it seems like a theoretical thing right now that people are worried about, just the possibility that something could screw with what they've got going on right now. And at the same time, it's not a place where there's, the barrier to entry is so high on this

that to get to the point where you are a new competitor in this industry, you've had to advance to a sufficient level where I'm like, is this shit even useful? You know, is this just, this sounds like a waste of time to write this stuff. down because, you know, right now, if I were to start a commercial airline, I need like a couple billion dollars, which up until recently was very easy to raise, and buy some planes and hire some pilots and get some gates, some airports, there's a path there. To start a new commercial space line, I have to, like, first I need a couple billion dollars, and then I got to do everything right for the next 20 years to have a shot at flying someone to space. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just such a high, like to get to that point, you've had to do all these other things right. Yeah. So I don't understand how this would be useful to defend the Mike L.A. is out there. Because we'll have to ask him. We'll have to see if he does anything super sketchy on his flight. Maybe they're up to shenanigans up there. We don't know. We don't know what's going on.

They turned the cameras off. We talked about this. Great conspiracy theory. Yeah. There we go. Figured it out. He's going to be like the first stipulation is Peggy Whitson is too much of a national treasure to let fly to space once again. We need to ground Peggy Witson so I get all the space flights.

She belongs, an area of space history that she's here for all the kids to talk to and get inspired about space. And I will do risky things to fly. Weird stuff. Like he doesn't want the regulation against like bringing his gun to the space station or something like weird. That would be amazing. Yeah, it's like, every time I've been up, I've been... I am an American and I have a right to bring my firearm to the space station. That would be something.

Now, this sounds, that sounds more like a Richard Garriott motivation. Like, what if they outlawed doing hijinks in space? Like, that would be concerned. Like, I can't pull a prank, you know? One time I sank the mayor of Austin in my lake or whatever he did in that story that he told. I can't do that. Yeah, that's wild. Speaking of the Axiom flight, this one's very interesting to me.

Okay, please explain how, because I'm struggling to find it. Okay, well, so we've talked about this concept for a while of like, well, back when Virgin orbit was flying, we were saying, like, this is great because it's like space agency as a service, right? You could just buy a rocket and they come to your country and launch wherever you want. And now we have the private astronaut equivalent of that, right? And so we're seeing now on this flight, we have not only do we have the first Turkish astronaut, which is cool. So the Turkey's, you know, getting to space thanks to this Axiom flight.

So that's pretty neat. But we also have this, the ESA thing is really interesting to me. What is going on with this? Like what? So ESA buys a commercial flight. And then they promote some astronaut out of the reserve to go on. that was really kind of, I'm like, what is, what is the strategy here? Like, what is, like, they have astronauts on hand and they have lots of, you know,

they have this loss they deserve from the ISS given their contributions and stuff. So, like, it's, it's interesting. It's like, there's some, I don't know, some different stuff going on here. I kind of wanted to get your take on it. And then the Italian guy, you now double spaceflight here for him, right? Yeah, I mean, they were like, well, he needs to train on the other. The timing is also funny, too. it's like, oh yeah, he finally flew on the Virgin Galactic flight, and this one happened.

It would have been really like, you know, what if this flew first? Would they have kept their agreement? Maybe flown someone else on the Virgin Galactic one or what? I don't know. It must have a backup group. But I don't know. It's like a, the selection of different international astronauts here has been a something I've been begging about because it's kind of weird and different.

And I kind of, I don't know. What do you think? The ESA one that you're talking about is interesting because the theory that we had of like well ESA getting more access to the space station is for them a good thing right for anyone it's good thing unless you hate ESA I guess but like they do have limited seats to the ISS they don't get to fly

that often you know one two a year up until recently and now there's probably more possibility for it but that's complicated by international politics, starliner, yada, yada. So the bandwidth of European astronauts to the space station has always been a bit tight. So can we, I want to expand on that. Can we read into that because,

usually with the space agencies, there's no exchange of funds, right? And so, you know, ESA buys the service module for the Artemis 2 flight. And in exchange for that, they also get to send two astronauts to the space station for two missions, right? And that's how the agreements usually work. So theoretically, if ESA wanted to have more time on the station,

they would just contribute more, right? And maybe the argument before- Right? Yeah, yeah, come on. You're like, get your numbers up. Contribute your 2% or whatever it is. So the argument before it would just be like, well, no, they're spending as much money as they want to spend,

and that's what they get, right? But this kind of tells me, no, they were ready to spend more. Yeah. Because now they're buying privately. So does that maybe tell us there's just like not really any opportunities to buy anything else on the space station? Like they're like, we got money. What do you want us to contribute? Like, no, space station's over.

There's no more things to buy. There's no more things to maintain. We can't fly any more LSS. So you're just, this is what you get. We're done. It's project's over. Yeah. And then you factor in how many astronauts they have.

They just selected a new class. There hasn't been a lot of retiring lately. Yeah. It's, you know, there's. they're in a tricky spot and then you factor in the commercial space station aspect of this all for the future where

there's been a couple different officials off and on again that would talk about what might they do in that scenario when the ISS doesn't exist anymore are they going to help fund one of the competitors nanorax has been their typical gritty smartness to then go partner with Airbus

instead of Lockheed basically as the prime and they've got a little inside edge in the European side of things, and maybe Europe wants to kick some funding their way and Airbus's way to develop some bigger version of the Nanaract proposal that would allow them spots on the space station.

At the same time, they're talking about, now, when I say they, I mean, astronauts in Europe, not really yet, like officials in Europe are talking about, what if we did human spaceflight? Now, everyone points to that and says, oh, that'll be so over budget, so many years down the line that they shouldn't even consider it. It's way outside their bandwidth.

And I'm like, why shouldn't they? If they want to, go for it. You know, if you want to develop that capability, go for it. Like, sometime between now and a billion years from now, probably everybody should have spaceships if we're heading in that direction. So, like, if not now, when would they develop one? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know.

It's interesting. And I almost wonder if they're also sort of like trial running. Because this flight is not going to be NASA free. It's still going to the space station. So there's still a lot of work that has to be done with NASA, but it's NASA light. And so, you know, up until now, ESA's flights to the space station have all been basically under NASA

or under Ross Cosmos, right? Like either you get on one of their ships and you go with NASA, or you get on their ships, you go with Roscosmos, you go to their joint place. Like, you're in that structure of that sort of operation, right? And so this will be the first time where they can just go to SpaceX and Axiom and do things that way. way and they're maybe like trying things out.

Like this is how Europeans would operate a spaceflight if we had total control over it. These are some of the things we tried differently, right? I almost wonder if they're kind of doing that. Like that's these commercial ones or like practice runs for whether to actually get ready for their own space vehicle or at least to inform the decision making process on whether to get their own space vehicle or not. That's kind of interesting. But why did they pick a reserve astronaut? I don't know. I don't get.

It's so weird. They hired this, the whole new class, and then some of them were reserve, and some of them were career astronauts. And I read back and read the press leads, because I was trying to figure it out. And it was like,

reserve astronauts are people who did well, but aren't ready to be hired yet. I was like, okay, that's not any information. But, uh, and then they just sort of like, that was not that long ago. And now they're just like, yeah,

we're going to promote one of them. Like, what are the people that got into the career one rate of way, think about that? It makes you wonder what Sweden's up to, you know? Like, they throw in a little extra in the donation bin or what? Maybe. I mean, maybe that's not worse.

I don't know. I can't quite figure it out. There's lots of politics at the ESA level, right? More politics, maybe even than you guys have. So it could be something like that, but I don't know. It's kind of weird. That one, to me, I don't know. I mean, that's like, I would say it's conspiratorial,

but it's kind of like how ESA and Aryan space generally work. Like the word that they have of geo return is like kickback. Like another word for that is kickbacks. At the same time, maybe was it some weird, you know, we're just conjecturing at this point, but like are there weird politics internally where none of the astronaut astronauts wanted to be relegated to the Uber flight version of this? And this reserve astronauts were like, I'll go. I'll go on an action plan.

I'll go with the Turkish guy. I don't know, no problem. Or what, here, okay, we've got to have at least one conspiracy theory per episode. It's like our new rule now. What if it's all connected Sweden to Issa to the EU to NATO and the NATO membership and all that flows together? How about that? Zelensky is going to be the next one. Yeah, Ukrainian astronaut

to the space station He'd wear the same suits that the one crew wore up the one time Yeah, I don't even need to bring extra clothes They're already up there. It's good to go Oh, Jesus I don't think a lot on that topic On that topic, I'm trying to scroll to this article about this situation where

at the Vostochny Krosmadrome. Did you follow the storyline at all, Jake? I don't think I did. Okay. Well, let's have fun with this one for a second. All right. We've got a few minutes left. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

So Kim Jong-on went to the Vostoknikovodrome with Putin, and they were chatting and chatting about what things they could collaborate on. And one of the things noted was, like, could we potentially do a human spaceflight? There was, here you go, Anatoly Zach, which reminds me I need to follow up on email once again, but why didn't that go to the thing? Whatever. He says, Russian social media sources discuss a possibility of a joint

Russo-North Korean orbital crew mission, assuming it would avoid the ISS, I guess a two-to-three-day autonomous mission is theoretically feasible with some safety margins. So they're going to do a free-fly-in, like, Inspiration 4-style Soyuz mission with North Korean astronauts, and then 10 minutes later, a NASA astronaut's going to fly in and fly out to the ISS from the same launch pad. Like, what? It's going on here, Jake.

Yeah, it's weird. It's weird. How long can the cognitive dissonance maintain? Yeah, yeah, that's all, I mean, that's on you guys. I don't know what to do with that. You're a partner in this. Don't bring, don't put it on us alone. Yeah, I'm partnering with you.

though, not with any of the other guys. You made this, you made this marriage, okay? I'm fascinated by just, this is not really space related, but I'm just fascinated by the politics of Russia being like, oh, I got to assert myself, I guess, let's invite Kim Jong-un over here. That'll show him. I'm trying to figure out what that looks.

Is it a threat? Is it like he just literally needs friends? or like, what's going on with this? I can't figure it out. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, when I heard that this was like, that he was going to visit Russia, I was like, oh, interesting. I wonder, you know, I wonder if they're going to go to a space place.

Like, I, North Korea's had a rough time putting stuff in orbit recently. I really struggled at this. So why not go to the other people that have a reliable track record of launch vehicles? Russia will go there and try to figure out why our rockets are crashing. They at least have a lot of experience figuring out what went wrong with the rockets. Aren't the North Korean missiles basically derivative from old Soviet stuff? They're going back to check another warranty. They're like, we actually would like the extend warranty on this.

They've got to dig out some old R7 engineers in their 90s at the backwoods of the Soviet Union to come and look at the rockets and figure out what the hell is going wrong with them. But that's this is what I want to like. All right. So up until now, you know, we've, we've had this like split brain thing where, you know, we're going to go to war with Russia effectively, everything but calling at that on the ground, and we're going to maintain this partnership with them in orbit. We're going to continue to fly astronauts there.

We're going to fly their astronauts to the U.S. We're going to send them up on our vehicles. And we're going to forget about all the other stuff. And then it's like, all right, that's, I guess like we've done that before. So let's try it again. And then they rabble rouse and rabble rouse and rabble. ralows and rabble riles and say that NASA astronauts drilled holes in the spacecraft and they're sabotaging us and then that guy gets sent off to the war and then there's it's all these

little things right and now North Korea is going to pay them money to fly an astronaut to space funding the vehicles that fly the astronauts to the ISS and people start drawing lines between this and you're like a portion of the ISS budget is North Korea derived to some extent it's like is that part survivable all right all right that one's survival all right let's move on what's the next thing that could possibly happen. Yeah, what's the next thing? How many of these can there be before there's, you know, some major incident?

That's all I'm wondering here. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know, Matt. I don't know how it ends. That's... I know how this show ends, Jake. We should not forget to plug some things that we did last time,

is how this show ends. Correct. We should, yes. Offnom.com slash donate is where you should go as a little primer here. a podcast network called Relay FM who does all I don't know if you listen to any of their shows Jake but some of it feels relevant to your life so you probably I could recommend some shows yeah yeah I've darted in and out here and there yeah all right well uh they do a bunch of great shows they also every September do a fundraiser for St. Jude which uh is you know relevant to people

that are in the space world because it's also who inspiration before partnered with and They're a research hospital in Memphis, focused on childhood cancer. Hate that cause, everybody out there. Come on. So Relay does a fundraiser for them every September. They're raising a bunch of money right now. They're actually almost at their goal of $293,000. Yeah, they're pretty close.

Which they're going to blow through anyway. But we set up a little sub-campaign. They allow this thing this year where there's these sub-campaigns, and you can go down and see that we're doing pretty good on the leaderboard. We're sitting at number three. I don't know what's going on with this guy that raised 9.4. It's only 1,000. I thought that was another comma.

It was like $9.4 million. We're trying a little bit here, but we're in the number three position. You can go. We got an off-nominal fundraiser. And since the last time we talked, Jake, we've hit our goal. A very low-balled goal, thanks to some fantastic donations. Shout out Adam. I don't know which Adam it is.

We have a couple of Adams in the Discord. I assume it's one of them, but if it's not, us know. Or if you want to be anonymous, I guess you could have checked off anonymous. So shout out, Adam. Shout out to... Tell them about our goal, Jake. What are we going to do?

Well, so now that we've hit this, that's great. We're going to do a super fun episode. We're going to be reviewing very bad space movies. We have a couple of suggestions from some people in the Discord and otherwise for terrible, terrible space movies. And we're going to watch them with... with these guys to do a little review on it. Stephen Hackett, the man of the left here,

if you're looking at these pictures. He used to, still does occasionally host the liftoff podcast, if anyone out there is a liftoff listener. And he's going to come on October 19th. I think I got the date correct. And we're going to pick a series of bad space movies. We'll probably pick, what, two movies? How about this?

What if we, if we double our goal, we'll do three. So there we go. There we go. So we got to get the 5860. and we're at 3590. So off nomad.com slash donate. And then we're going to nominate some movies. What are we going to watch?

What are some options? Okay, well, the ones that had originally started this idea was the Brad Pitt one. What's it called now? I can't even remember. The dad one? Ad Astra. Ad Astra. That's the one.

I've heard it's just awful. So I'm kind of think that's probably going to. to make the list. Yep. And then there was one that came out. Now I'm not going to remember the name of it either, but there was like one that came up from like the 80s. There was like some weird like direct to VHS thing and all sorts of wacky stuff going on

in there. There's some space plane like a supersonic plane that gets like stuck in the atmosphere and then a space shuttle has to go get it. There's something wild here. I shot that. I shot on that one. That one sounds awesome. So we got to go and we got to watch that thing.

I don't know. If you have any suggestions, you can let us know. But, uh, you know, if you're doing it. We're looking for really atrociously bad, like laughably bad movies. So, yeah. Yeah. So that's the plan. It's going to come up.

There's some, there's some ad astras. Oh, no. Not, it's not fun awful. It's boring awful. So. Boring awful. So it's boring. I guess fun awful would be like, what, Geostorm?

Or the core. Yeah. Geostorm is. great. The core, which is not really a space movie, but I kind of count it as one because it's like a spaceship for Earth. Yeah. Okay. All right, Epcot. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Geostorm is amazing. I like gravity. That is like a bad movie that's good to me. Yeah. I hate gravity. I hate gravity. It's so pretty, though.

It is pretty. I hate gravity. God, I hate gravity. Gravity does. I should watch it again because I feel like I've probably softened on it. Probably. You're no longer an idealistic young kid. It would never come back around like that. Yeah.

You could just chill out of that space station with a fire extinguisher. You can just walk the one space station to another one. No, no, no. Choose a fire extinguisher, I think. Which, why do you have one of those, you know? Yeah. Just in case. Anyway.

Safety. Safety first. What are we doing next week, Jake? I think we're going to try and get into some Osiris rec stuff because there is some space rocks coming home. Coming in hot. And coming in real hot. Real hot.

So, yeah, stay tuned for that. We're going to. Syrus Rex. We're lining up interesting, interesting individuals. So it should be fun. Yeah. All right. That's all we got, I think.

Well, did we solve it? We solved it, I think. I don't know. I don't know what we did. I think we solved it. I'm going to go. I'm going to give us the big green check mark. And your internet survived the storm.

It did. So that's great. Starlink had a global outage a couple days ago, and so maybe it was just a big patch, and now it's a lot better. Let's hope. I just had to update the firmware on the satellite, all at the same time.

One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.