Off-Nominal - 141 - TRL Valley of Death

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Elizabeth Frank to talk about the future of the CLPS program, JPL’s Mars-focused Commercial Services Studies, and a whole bunch more, including Elizabeth’s epic travel photos.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 141 - TRL Valley of Death (with Elizabeth Frank) - YouTubeAstrobotic to begin formal investigation into failed Peregrine mission - SpaceNewsMoon Manifest | Astrobotic TechnologyFirst Intuitive Machines lunar lander mission set for Feb. 14 launch - SpaceNewsExploring Mars Together: Commercial Services StudiesFor the first time NASA has asked industry about private missions to Mars | Ars TechnicaFollow ElizabethElizabeth A. FrankFollow 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, Jake. Hey, man. I got to say, I'm so glad to have real you back. Real me. Real you. Yeah, not some Palo Alto concocted material whatever that was that we just had in the pre-show. I got to say, oh, man, I don't know.

I don't think, I don't know if I'm there yet. I don't know if I'm there on the Apple Vision Pro yet. All right. Well, Elizabeth, you missed the demo. but I think, you know, based on what Jake's saying, you would be happy to have missed the 3D demo, but... Sounds like it, yeah. Yeah.

You got to get to know actually before you realize how good the 3D people are in that environment. That looks like me. I haven't met the real 3DU. Yeah, so now you'll know. The real 3DU. You know how there was always like, in the early days of the internet,

we always had the, like, we had the need to differentiate between our real friends and our internet friends. Yeah, like IRL friends, right? And then we kind of realize like, no, our internet friends are real too. They're real people. Now those lines are blurred again, thanks to Apple. So this is really good. Yeah.

That's good technology. Yeah. So yeah, so enough about Apple. We have a great guest with us today. Elizabeth Frank. Thanks for coming. Welcome to the show. We're excited to talk to you.

Thank you. Excited to be here. Yeah. We're going to be digging into some interesting topics. So the reason we really want to dab you on, obviously, you've been on We Martians before. I don't know if you've done Miko yet. I can't remember. No.

I listened to it. Okay, we got a fan, a fan. She won't after she sees my 3D visage. One fan. But no, but you're uniquely positioned to talk very authoritatively on the, the blending between planetary science and commercial space, which are sometimes kind of sounds like the blending of Anthony and my interests. Yeah, that's our Venn diagram.

It's the perfect Anthony, I guess. So we're excited to talk to you about, because there's been some news about this kind of stuff lately. So, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I guess that Clipson is the one that's been on my mind recently. We're in between the first and the second launches now. And, yeah, the future of the program, really.

remains to be seen. I think NASA's holding firm for now. But I believe was it February 22nd is the IM launch? Is that? Or no, it's when they land on the moon. Yeah. And launches whenever. Next week, Valentine's Day or something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've always been an advocate for commercial space as I've, you know, been in here in the sector for the past eight or so years. But I would say the Clips program is an experiment and we're watching the experiment, out in a real time. Yeah, yeah. And as a scientist, you know that sometimes the results are not always what you expect.

Yeah. No one likes publishing a null results, unfortunately. But I think you happen. Oh, there we go. That's the new tagline for clips for me. Nobody likes publishing a null result. Don't put my name as associated with that. For no reason, can we quote?

On background. That was on background. On background. All right. Jake, did you bring a drink back from the beach, by the way? You probably did. Well, kind of. You travel and you bring drinks back for off-nominal.

I'll tell you the story about how I tried to do that and failed. Okay. So I went to this, I was on Islamu-Harez, which is like this little island off the coast of Cancun. And I went to like a tequila place, like a tourist tequila place that was like, here's all the weird kinds of tequilas. I'm like, this perfect. I can make a weird thing. And so I'm like, this guy, you know, the salesperson was this chatty guy. And we had tastings and stuff when we were playing around. I'm like this. I like this. I'm picking out bottles. It's looking all great.

And I picked out like three of these little bottles that are like, you know, I don't know. They're not a full-sized liquor bottle, maybe half that. I don't know what you call that. There's regional days. We'd call that a Mickey back home in Alberta. But I don't know. I don't know. What's the derivative of that? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where it comes from. It's a Mickey. That's what it is.

So I picked these bottles out, and I was all excited for them. And I finally get to the till, and I rolled over and look at the price tag on it. And the prices were so bad on this. Like, you know, a normal price for that liquor bottle should have been like $15. And like I was ready to pay double that because I was on like in Cancun. And it was 10 times that. It was $300 for this little bottle. And I was like, what?

So I just like, I've wasted this guy's time. And I was like, I'm sorry. but like there's nothing, there's no way you're bringing this price down to where I want to spend on this. And so I don't walk out of the shop. And so I come back empty-handed. Apparently a mickey is just a pint. Okay. And a half-pine is a junior Mickey or a flat in Canada.

Okay. So now I'm Googling, why are pints called Mickey's in Canada? I don't understand. Anyway, so I just made a normal margarita with normal tequila. So that's what I did. a tamron, a tamarin, a tamerine, normal thing. Inflation eating into the alcohol interest of this show. I mean, this, this tequila is also from Mexico, so.

That's fair to. Well, on the topic of clips, this is, I've had this on the show before, but this is also like Peregrine made in Pittsburgh, ghost bomber gym. I made a little gin and tonic. Jake, I just, you left the pre-show a little early, but with the rest of the people, uh, 3D, made a gin and tonic in the headset.

And then I carried up the stairs, two flights of stairs, a sharp knife, limes, gin, tonic, and a glass full of ice. And I made it all the way here. So for anyone out there doubting the pass-through capabilities of Vision Pro, I'll have you know. It was dangerous. Like the Cliffs program, you have a high-risk tolerance. Yeah.

My propulsion was all good all the way up, though. So, you know. Yeah. Navigation on point. Yeah. Elizabeth, it's early where you are. I don't know what you're rocking out there. Yeah, I brought, we'll see if I open it and maybe a show beer, just, you know, as a prop.

But in case I do feel like drinking, I have the Fremont Skycracken, which has a pretty badass label. It's a giant squid going after a blimp. So it's from Fremont brewing, which is a Seattle institution. And then I also, for hydration, have sparkling water with some Yuzu juice. So just in a lot, I'd feel like that. Yuzu juice. Is that coming to Mickey? No.

It comes in a small, expensive bottle from, like, you know, Japanese imported goods stores. So Yuzu is a Japanese citrus. That's quite delicious. And it makes for a great homemade sparkling water. Wow. Wow. All right. Look at that.

I got so many fun Google things to throw in the show notes today. Mickey's and Yusus. Why is tequila so expensive in Cancun? Because Cancun, I think is the answer. Because Americans. Yeah, that's all your fault. That's right. Because of the mickeys.

They call them Mickey's down there, Jake. They go all the Mickey's coming across. Okay. All right. Jake, I dare you to go to an American bar or brewery. and order with Mickey. I would love to see the reaction. Yeah. I got all kinds of weird Canadian drinks I can order and get laughed out of a bar. What's that horrible one that you make sometimes?

The paralyzers. Paralyzer. Such a name to. I explained that to the tequila guy and he was like, what? You put milk in it with the coke? I was like, yeah. Already lost me. Horrible. This is how bored they get up in the park.

prairies. Yeah, it is. Yeah, I got a lot of milk. So, anyway, uh, commercial space. It's a thing. Yeah. Not a fad, apparently. So, um, yeah, where do you want to start? So I guess maybe we, we start with clips and talk about, maybe we just get your thoughts, Elizabeth, on how you think a Perrigan went, because it's all done now. It's over and over. So, uh, what do you think? How'd I mean, I really respect the astrobotic folks. I think they're great people and great engineers. And so I'm really sad for them that they weren't able to attempt the lunar landing. I wish we'd gotten to see that attempt.

And I haven't spoken to any of the scientists with payloads on board. I'm sure they're really sad that they didn't get to collect or have a chance to collect any real scientific data because I know that the instruments were turned on and tested and communicated with. but like when you're however many, you know, thousands of miles away from the moon, like you're not going to get anything worth publishing. But it's all part of the risk going in, right? So, yeah, I mean, it's sad for the team.

I hope they were able to leverage what they got in terms of experience. I mean, I'm sure they got some great ops experience that they can learn from. And I wish them all the best for the viper landing. Yeah, yeah. I guess I've been thinking about. that too and I'm kind of figure out like I don't I don't know the payloads that well so I should probably do a little bit more reading on some of the stuff in there but like is there any kind of data that could be recovered like obviously it's not going to be 100 percent but I wonder if there

is something that it was worthwhile like I don't even know if all the payloads were fully optimized for the surface or if there were some that were meant to be kind of turned on all at least part of the way before it operate on the surface you know even just a good question yeah um yeah um I'd have to pull up a payload list to even guess. Like if you have, because it's a lander, I would assume, although this is me assuming, but they were optimized for surface science as opposed to anything else. Like maybe some are looking at the exosphere. I'd have to look at the list and speculate.

But still, I don't think they, even if you had an imager and it got close, oh, that's good. Is that the website? Yeah, this is the manifest. I can make it. I can make a giant one of these buttons, does it? I mean, these are just the names. So the linear energy transfer spectrometer. What do you think?

What do you make of that? I actually don't know what that is. That's radiation sensor. We'll collect information about the little radiation environment. It relies on flight-proven hardware that flew in space on Orion spacecraft and inaugural on crewed flight in 2014. It's being developed at Nassiz Johnson Space Center. So maybe for radiation, again, this all depends on the instrument. We're going off a sentence here, but it's possible that they're able to get lunar, greater, like, cis lunar environment radiation data.

They turned that one on. Nervous. Yeah, that one's for surface and subsurface. That one, I don't think we'll be able to find anything from without landing now. Neutron spectrometer system. Yeah, those pixels tend to be really huge for orbital data. And I'm guessing that was supposed to be really close to the surface. I don't know what the minimum distance to be away from the surface was supposed to be.

But I'm guessing whatever astrobiics. Not a great badding average so far for this. No, no. 42 radiation detection? Yeah, maybe radiation. Like, there's definitely heliophysics data, and I don't know, again, if this is optimized for heliophysics, but heliophysicists love to have, like,

a wide distribution of sensors across the solar system. So there could potentially be some meaningful data there, but because of it was such a short mission, like, was there a solar flare at the time? That could be interesting, but that would be really some luck. And then an instrument wasn't optimized for solar flares and heliophysics, right? It was probably optimized for the surface, And I don't know.

It depends on what the range of particle energies would have been keeping in mind. But I'm a geochemist, not a radiation person. So I'm just making things up. What do you think happened to this one Bitcoin that was on the surface? How do you feel about that? Do you think they still have the wallet for that? I don't know. Yeah.

I'm out of my depth here on this one. I don't know if you follow cryptocurrency, Anthony. But the fact that that Bitcoin was destroyed is actually good for Bitcoin. Should have bought the dip on that. It doesn't actually have any value. So the only way we create scarcity is just by eliminating other coin. This is how it works, okay. The Thanos snap of Bitcoin would be great for all the Bitcoin owners.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think Estabotics can get any of that benefit. I don't think their milestone payments were in Bitcoin by any means. No. Yeah, that would probably be against the far procurement policy at NASA. If I had a guess, yeah. The other thing I was thinking, too, is like, I wonder what NASA is thinking in terms of, like, reflying some of these, right?

So if, you know, if they're going to have a program that's got an appetite for risk and they have this big bucket of payloads, like, do they have some sort of process by which these payloads get recycled back into the pool? Are they just sent to the back of the line or do they get some sort of priority? I'm kind of curious to see. I don't think we have answers to this. I'm just speculating at this point. Yeah.

Well, the first batch... Wasn't the first batch of instruments just basically whatever folks at NASA had off the shelf, basically, like in their closets and storage? I'm serious, though. I think that's what... And I forget the name of the program. I think it was like whatever folks had sitting around that could be relatively rapidly integrated into one of the landers, right?

And then for future and upcoming prison programs, I haven't read the solicit. But I don't think that they expect or funded two of the same payload. Like it would have been a good idea potentially because I think that it's not going to be double the cost necessarily, certainly for the design phase. Right. You do that. You get the engineering done. And yes, you have to do I&T and that kind of thing.

But like it's not double the cost for two instruments because there was a level of scale ability there. But I doubt that's the way that it was funded before if I had to guess just based on other programs like Picasso and Dolly that are planetary science instrument programs. Yeah, that's something that could be forward-looking. And you need an instrument pipeline, a healthy instrument pipeline in parallel with the lander pipeline, right? And we'll see how it all shakes out. Yeah. I thought I had heard that there were quite a few instruments.

So I kind of feel like maybe there's not going to be some of the line jumping because there's just lots ready to go. Like I got you probably 40 to 50 instruments. We're like ready to okay to go right. So that's that's old information. We'll see what it's like now. I mean so if you flew an instrument on the first Clipslander like you might be like I'm going to wait a couple out like I'll go on the sixth.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll take the six weight for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mentioned that there's a backlog of instrumentation just from the TRL Valley of Death right between what TRL four to six. where you have all these new instruments that get created and just can't get flights to space.

And so they just don't get matured. And then they don't get selected for discovery, new frontiers, et cetera, proposals because they haven't been proven. But they also don't have enough chances to go to space to become proven in TRL nine. So if I had a guess, yes, you're right. I don't know the numbers, but there probably is a backlog ready to go. Do you think that that's a factor in sort of the, I'm just spitballing now. Now that you've said that, it's like triggering thoughts. But do you think that's a factor in how this program may, like, let's assume it's successful.

And Clips, like, they start working and this becomes a real thing. And it's still like, it's still considered higher risk in the end because it's like, you know, you're not taking full control ownership of the vehicle as if you're NASA, right? You're just sort of like buying these rides should be cheaper and higher risk, even when it's working. Do you think that then Clips sort of becomes that place where higher or I guess lower, you know, worst TRL stuff starts to live. And then like the really critical, you know, secure things that we know work are going to be still reserved for the fancy missions. Like, you think that's kind of how it's going to end up being?

I would love to see that happen. I think it would help rebalance the planetary science risk portfolio and help move the technology forward. Like I worked on Messenger as a postdoc. I was on the science team and the X-ray spectrometer that I did data analysis for. like the original version of that instrument, which as far as I know wasn't that different, flew on Apollo. So there was like, you know, generations of scientists that used effectively the same instrument, the same general architecture of the instrument. And so I think there's a lot of potential.

However, there's a big caveat there. I think that the clips program probably needs to have some kind of standardized payload interface that all the instruments are designing to in order to make it both cost effective and profitable for the lander companies and also just easier for the instrument folks who are doing the design because there's one of the things that I experienced when I was the chair of the commercial advisory board for the lunar exploration analysis group or league just from talking to the the cab members they just had so much extra work because like astrobotic I think they had originally and I'm not sure if this is the final number but 14 NASA payloads and they had 14 unique

interfaces between the vehicle and the instruments. And so if you're working off of a fixed price contract and you, I don't know if they knew the instruments ahead of time. I'm not sure how that worked with RFP, or RECN out, but it wasn't an RFP, that's task order. Like that's just a lot of extra work to figure out how to connect the instrument to the vehicle. And that's NRE. That's not recurring engineering.

That can't be scaled over time. You just have to eat that cost. and that eats into any kind of profit margins over time. And so we attempted to create a working group around standards. It didn't quite take off the way that I wanted to, but I know that folks are still thinking about this, like what would a payload standard look like for the CLIPS program? But the thing is you need to have buy-in from the instrument side, right,

like ahead of a design cycle for that to happen. So you need to have like some kind of, I don't know, synergistic like flow. And getting folks to agree to standards in the first place, like that's a non-trivial challenge. That's really a more people issue than a technology issue, right? I think that in success, like once that hurdle is crossed, that's what clips could be. And I think that would be freaking amazing to be able to de-risk these novel technologies

or beyond any kind of science return, right? Like to me, almost a science return could be bonus. But yeah, at the same time, it's not going to help with all payloads because some of them have to be tested on Mars or Venus's atmosphere or Saturn or whatever, right? So it's not going to be the perfect test environment for every environment because that's part for every target. But it could be a start and it's better than nothing. So yeah, it could be.

I hope so. That remains to be seen. That thing was like, I was one of the most disappointing things for me with Clips is that they didn't, like, NASA didn't come out strong out of the gates with some sort of, like, even if they didn't have to like invent, you know, like whatever, like. like planetary science USB like they don't have to like invent a whole thing but like if they just kind of come out with like here's like three classes of of payload you know like with different

I don't know power and thermal or whatever whatever the interface has to be you know just like yeah even just like grouping into like maybe like a small handful so that there was some commonality but it sounds like that was completely just kind of lost over I probably for the take an expediency, but I don't know. It sucks. Yeah, so the first, the first call or two, and I'm forgetting the program names, I think they were very convoluted and hard to remember, but I can't remember them. But again, those were instruments that were already designed that were sitting in people's labs. So like they missed the boat on that. So maybe there could have been an opportunity for the first prison instrument cycle, potentially. But I know from talking to the CLIPS program folks that they didn't want to artificially constrain, you know, the market, quote unquote market,

in a way that could negatively impact the success of the program. Because none of the lander companies wanted to initially agree to some kind of commonality and standard that would require them to make compromises on their own design. Understandably so. This is why the people issue, not really a technology issue because you have to get people who are competing against each other to agree. But I think that as some of these companies who have to, have tasks or task orders and had gone through that INT phase or seeing how hard it is to

integrate multiple unique payloads like they're seeing the value of having that and then you have to get NASA on board at the same time so yeah maybe if if Clips ends up being you know successful that could be something that finally has the institutional inertia from everybody to kind of come together and make it you know come to an agreement on how that would look yeah yeah we had the discussion last week about um uh international docking standards document after for the space station. That took a while too. That took like 50 years. We're still doing it. 50. We're still dead. Maybe we have some time to figure that one out. Yeah. Yeah, I know it's interesting. And I'm really curious to that like I'm just now thinking

really far future in this thing. Like, you know, what are what are some of the common like capabilities that every instrument's kind of taking care of on their own right now that that could eventually maybe be outsourced to the vehicle, like, you know, like bring it downstream, right? So if you think like, I bet you a lot of these instruments have their own, you know, compute processing on board and then storage, right? So like that's two examples where if you have 12 instruments, do you really need 12 little solid state drives to store all their data?

Or can there be some sort of like software interface where it dumps everything to a common drive on the vehicle side? I mean, you have some, that's a point of failure problem, I guess you have to think about, but it could make the instruments cheaper and it could stand. standardized some things too, right? So that's one thing I kind of think about sometimes. Yeah, I think electrical. There's already a few electrical interfaces that are relatively standard. I think thermal is, that one could be problematic. Pointing is like if there's pointing requirements or kind of mobility requirement, that just gets tricky.

I don't know how you standardize that. So I think that there's definitely classes of standards that are easier to tackle and agree upon than others. Yeah, and as far as details go, I mean, I would leave that to engineers to discuss, but at a high level, yeah, it's a thing. There's another aspect to this of like planning payloads that I'm curious about. For missions like clips that are experimental in its nature, clearly like there are things that happen during the course of these missions. and the fact that there's not, the fact that this is so different than commercial cargo and crew

and that it wasn't like two providers picked for development phase and then into operations means that we are not for a while going to get out of the teething phase of landers because there's so many different landers to fly. So from the payload planning perspective, I'm curious if

you're someone that has an instrument, like, what would the process be like, hypothetically? If somebody designing an instrument, you could say like, This is my ideal operating environment, surface of the moon, this distance from the surface. But I could also get this sort of data from these other environments.

Would that be something that is within the imaginable realm to write out? If I was stuck in lunar orbit, I would do X, Y, and Z with my payload. If I was stuck in a high Earth orbit, I would do X, Y, and Z with a payload. Is that sort of stuff even game planable in advance so that the providers could have like a manifest of,

all right, well, crap, something went wrong, we're stuck in this, let's look at our payload list and say, well, if we can maneuver over here, we can get 80% of our payloads to do something, or if we maneuver over there, we can get 60% and, you know, then you can make some trades about, well, you know, we could stay in higher Earth orbit, but we could probably do a lunar flyby, and that would get us some additional amount of capability. I'm just wondering, are the options like too expansive to even imagine, or do you think there are, you would be able to create like classes of utility? I think that would be hard to execute because Clips is a surface science program currently,

the way I think that it could expand in the future and success. That's my understanding. It's not exclusively for surface science, but it means that if you're a payload, if you're a surface scientist, like a lunar geologist, geochemist, or you study the exosphere, that kind of thing, your payload and your science goals are going to be specific to that location. And so I don't see a scientist, who has that expertise, that motivation, those scientific objectives,

finding any value in an orbital regime and coming up with anything of value that helps them achieve their science questions that they're trying to go after. So there could be exceptions to that. But for surface science, I find that really hard to believe. Let's say if you were, like even if you're an orbiter, let's say hypothetically there's eclipse orbiter, you still want to get really close to the moon to do good orbital. science, right? So if you're still over at Earth, like, you're still not getting what you need.

And so, unfortunately, I have a hard time envisioning a case where that kind of structure for the program could exist. Only one I could imagine is, like, you know, if Peregrine was able to do a lunar impact, like, could Astrobotic have tested enough of their descent navigation, like, to train relative navigation stuff that they had on board? They'd be able to test that on a impact to descent, like a descent to impact? Or would you be able to capture anything on the way down through, you know, the lower altitudes of the moon on the way to slamming in? Are you going too fast at that point to do anything interesting?

I mean, I guess it depends on how good your data relay is at that point, right? And like, stars are literally aligned. Yeah, like there's that classic image from, oh, shoot, what was the, I'm totally blanking, what was the spacecraft that visited a comet 63, P? No, 67P. Rosetta. I don't remember this one because Jake's all about that follow-on mission. Was it?

I think it was that. Yeah, Rosetta is the. Fila? Hold on. Hold on. Actually. I think I have an image of this on my website and this is embarrassing and I can't remember. I love it.

Google me. She says. Well, I'm not Googling myself right now, which sounds bad. So, no, it was near Shoemaker. So near Shoemaker, like, it did a crash landing, right? Right. It wasn't what it was designed to do. And I don't know how to share this with you guys, but there's this image where the very last image, yeah, there we go.

The last image, it's just, it was sending data all the way until it crashed. You can see where it crashed because the image pixels just kind of like die. That was it. Mid image. So maybe if you can do something like that, like that can work. The DART did this too, right? DART had the red line at the end. Yeah, yeah.

So I guess it depends on your column. And like, I don't know anything about that stuff to even speculate. But like now that I'm thinking about it from a mission ops perspective and timing and designing an instrument, like, part of it's hard. It's hard, which, and it takes time, time is money, all of a scenario driving off your mission costs and your instrument costs. And so is this going to be a low cost. simple instrument if you're trying to optimize for all these different edge cases. So like maybe, but I'm not sure it's worth it. I think in general, it's to try and do low-cost science, I think you have to be really focused,

have a very specific question that you're trying to answer, know exactly what data you need and have it be really as simple as possible. And so all of a sudden you have this other stuff going on, like you're going against that objective of simplicity, which in turn results in low cost, often. This, I mean, this often, like, this is the question we have a lot about the idea of how far can you commercialize, you know, planetary science because, like, so like, science is, like, science is inherently hard to commercialize because, like, it is sort of by definition going after novel new things.

And so, like, the idea of mass production is hard with science. Like, you can't, they, they're, they're, they're. kind of incompatible ideas in some way. And so like, you know, if you think about science on Earth, there are some things we can mass produce. We can mass produce your rock hammers and your compasses for your field geology. Like that's, that's great. You know, everyone needs a compass.

Let's make those fine. So we can like we can mass produce some things. But, you know, when it comes to the, at the, at the mission level, it's, it's hard to to mass to produce that. Even if you could reduce the cost by a factor of like 100, it still becomes kind of challenging because then planetary science layers in this additional problem compared to other sciences where every place we go is a unique special snowflake environment like yes and even like not just the surface is like the orbits of every planet are unique special snowflake environments right and so like

yeah temperature radiation like dust depending where you are it's like all the things you're going to make some sort of like magic orbiter that you can just send in like you know make a thousand of them and send them everywhere like it's even just at the orbit level it's really hard to to do. And so at the instrument level, it's even harder, right? And so it's kind of, it's kind of, I don't know, I don't know what the solution is to that, but like I kind of admire the clips program for even going after that because it's tricky. Yeah, yeah. I do under like in a different timeline, if they had done the CC dev type model, were like more akin to commercial crew, commercial cargo, all that, as opposed to throwing in, like doing this task work.

ID IQ type contract model because that requires instead of like putting your eggs in two baskets like for CC dev etc where you're helping in the R&D phase the development phase like bring that technology to fruition and then flipping over to a services model like here you've got small businesses small companies going after these task orders and I think the challenge there is like beyond what you're talking about Jake, like there's no guarantee you're going to win every task order or any task order and how do you do business planning like from a long-term sustainability perspective. Like let's say astrobotic didn't win Biper, would they have to be, would they be laying

off all of their staff right now if they didn't have another contract, right? And so I think there's a real business sustainability side of this, given that the lunar economy, in my mind is also still a hypothesis that we're testing right now. Like, yes, there were non-NASA payloads on, on, on the. astrobotics mission and there's going to be someone I am but like like how much we can admit they were a little gimmicky those commercial payloads right yeah I mean like marketing one-off type things right it's like what what is the sustainability angle from from a business perspective like where is the longevity when you do business protections

when you need to the moon every year yeah what is the market for shipping big coins to the So yeah, no, it's hard. It's really, it's tricky. Yeah, and especially if you look at some of these early task orders, like the prices on them, you're like, did you make money on that? Yeah. Honestly, civil space is a really challenging market to make money. And I think there's intangible value.

Let's say like for Lockheed using Lockheed as an example. They can talk about their civil space missions. It's inspiring. It's exciting. It helps us recruiting. Like there's definitely intangible value that's brought to companies that participate in these types of thing with publicity is great. That kind of thing. Like you can't talk about defense, you know, these like top secret type contracts and stuff.

And the marketing isn't going to be as good, you know, compared to something like, you know, touching an asteroid like with the Cyrus Rex. So there is intangibility there, but you also have to pay the bills and make payroll and that kind of thing. You can't just generate a business off of inspiration. So I've heard some people, I've talked to a lot of people about clips lately, and I've heard some people talk about the task order sizes, Jake, that you mentioned, and how, like, you know, a third to a half of the money is just headed SpaceX's way eventually. Like, that's just kind of the state that it's in. And if NASA is looking at this as, like, they want to bootstrap this industry,

this is an argument that I've heard that I don't know where I come down on yet so I'm throwing out here for discussion why not also buy a handful of Falcon 9s and like the way that you think about these landers where we're going to buy a lander and we'll just slot in some payloads on it

like how about we buy a rocket and slot in some landers on it that that's like a thing that would be valuable to bootstrapping like a bulk order even right like buy 10 of them at a lower cost no right exactly buy a ball, get bulk pricing, but then also try to like put, you know, landers together,

like that kind of situation. I don't know what anyone makes of them. I like it. I can see, like, from a science perspective, it would probably allow you to put together more coherent science missions for, let's say each, if you had like, okay, so right now with the way that the, the clips landers are manifested in their pills are manifested, but, you, Each scientist is basically fighting the other scientists for the resources of the lander and the time and the BLD to their data, right? But if you had a more coherent set of instruments that are complementary and trying to achieve similar objectives and answer similar, the same questions,

I could see that being like more O-O-I, R-I, purely from a science perspective, because you have planning at that level. like traditionally at NASA missions like give a science team who's like adjudicating these conflicts trying to balance the needs of the instruments and the needs of the scientists and the science they're trying to do. I don't have particular insider knowledge, but I'm pretty sure the companies are the ones who are adjudicating those conflicts from Mission Office perspective.

And they're not necessarily suited to figure out what science data collection gets the most ROI, which is like a very hard to quantify unit of measure, right? Like how do you quantify that by its publications? So I can see the value of what you guys are talking about there being just having a more coherent mission where that's balanced at the scientist's level by a team of folks as opposed to a bunch of engineers and who don't necessarily understand at like a very detailed level, the value of a particular instrument. in the context of like the science of the moon.

So that's one first thought. I think one thing that bugs me about it is that like I don't feel like that was a decision that was really on the table. I think that Clips was approached from like a, the only way we're going to make this pot, you know, if you're NASA, the only way this is going to work, the only way we're going to get money from Congress to do this is if we like, everything is just commercial. Like we're literally just buying the ride. And so we're just going to like outsource every.

responsibility and every cost to these companies. And then that way NASA was not really a big deal to us. We just a little bit of money. There's no harm, no foul. And so if they're getting in there and buying the rockets and organizing the groups more and doing all that, then it's not the program that you would advertise, right?

And so it's tricky, right? I think it's hard for them. Yeah, I think that there's actually not that. So procurement is a boring topic, but it's also incredibly important. And if I remember correctly, I think I heard from someone in the clips program that if they had,

at the time of the program's creation, if they'd gone, if it had become a more expensive program, it would have triggered more regulation from the far and more rules and oversight. And so I think that there was like a programmatic reason at NASA to not do that. I'm not sure whether having Viper changes that.

Probably not because it's an active contract. and I'm sure that stuff gets set ahead of time. But yeah, honestly, I would love to have you guys talk to some procurement on the show, get a beer to in, and then just, because like I think a lot of what's happening in commercial space, like, yes, you've got all this technological revolution, but contract vehicles are incredibly important. It's like, what incentives do you have in place to create what results that you want? And I'm wondering if what we're seeing now is, yes, there's the

quote-unquote, like, lunar economy that we're testing with the idea of a program, but like the procurement side of it, like, maybe the original sin, if this doesn't work out, is in the contract method, which could be a paper that I and maybe one other person would read if somebody were a little location on. Paper for two. You and Casey Dreyer would pour over it. The peer review is the same people as the audience for it, yeah. Casey and I, yeah, yes.

We're in, you can do it on this show if you want. Because that sounds up right. Yeah, you can live read it if you want. Oh, man. It's weird, though, because you're right, Jake. The Eclipse is in a situation where it was like, we started at Google Lunar X Prize and we wanted to end up at commercial cargo. So I guess we're here.

This is the model we're at, you know. It was bound by the start and the endpoints envisioned. So my big fear if the clips program ends up getting canceled because of mission failure is that the science community just is like, oh, commercial's bad. Let's not do commercial. Like, that's just a bad thing. And there's a lot more nuance to it than that, I think. And so, I mean, just having been.

I have questions, though, if this even meets like the fully commercial setup, though. Like, you know, this is. Yeah. Like Viper? Yeah, yeah. Like there's. Viper is a cost plus contract in a trench coat, as I call it. Yeah.

It says commercial on the tin, but I'm like, is this. This is, and that's why part of why I'm like trying to dig into this stuff so much is that I don't think I, I think I would get it if it was a program, if this was like a typical planetary science program managed in the way the typical ones are. I just want to analyze it then as that, not as the model that we're seeing with commercial on the tin elsewhere, right? Like it feels to me admittedly one mission in that this is more commercial on the name, but not necessarily in the execution. whereas the other ones like commercial I mean let's use space stations as an example that I always ran about like that's going to fall apart in my view because they're being true to it being commercial and they're like find the customers or else like this is it this is all we got like we've got a hundred million dollars figure it out you know and it's like all right well it won't

work then so that's fine but I don't know that I want a space station program that's just contracted out ISS so yeah I don't know yeah yeah yeah it's tough I don't know. I'm just, I'm trying to, I guess my point is, I don't think I care either way, whether this is like true capital C commercial or lowercase C commercial. I just want to be able to then assess it appropriately. Is this a weird offshoot of the regular planetary science program or is this commercial cargo for the moon? Nobody knows. I think they know. I think they want it to be commercial cargo for the moon, but but it's structured, they don't, they, given the political constraints,

right now, I don't think we could go get a commercial cargo program for the moon where we pick two providers and we, I mean, there's only one peregrine. There's only one peregrine ever. And it's, that was it. That was all the peregrins that there were ever be. They're on to Griffin now. Whereas, you know, in the other model, you'd have, you know, a dev flight or two and then six task orders right off the bat. And there's some sense of stability. And like you're saying, Elizabeth, like not an immediate sense of confusion about what our future is as a company. I even wonder that about Griffin. You're telling me we're all going to put this half a billion dollar rover on the next one up.

Like they tested a lot of stuff out of their mission, but are we doing that? You know? I'm like, wow. I mean, number one, Jake and I like two weeks ago were like, yeah, Viper, I already got delayed to 2025. It didn't. It's still on the schedule for this year. We just made it up in our heads that it was delayed a year. So, you know, like we already, our subconscious doesn't believe that it's flying this year.

So that's my rant. Yeah. It's tricky. So Mars then. Yeah. Commercial Mars. Commercial Mars or Comps, as I like to call it. Oh, that's terrible.

Change that acronym. Oh, my God. The commercial Mars payload service is comps. So we saw this news from NASA. So it's pretty interesting. So they're, it's just like, it's not,

it's not an RFP yet. It's like an RFI-ish type thing. They're like trying to figure out. It's an RFP now, isn't it? Is it full RFP? I thought it was, it was for a study though,

right? Isn't it just for a study? It's for a study. It's for a study. It's for a $200,000 study. It's an RFP for an RFI. Yeah, there isn't RFI back in October.

Right, right, right. Okay, okay. Yeah. So they're looking to, they're basically like four like reference missions. There's like, tiny pay, and tiny hosted payloads and then medium

and medium hosted payloads. Then we have an actual direct imaging service like buy the pictures rather than the instrument. And then we have this other one, which is the communications network, which I've been asking for for like 10 years. You're a pipe stream. I know. I'm so excited for that.

This is pretty cool. I'm, I'm jazzed with this. So I'm just curious to know what you think about this. I love that we set up 45 minutes of this context of like, I don't know, is this going to work? And you're like, what do we think about this one? That's a zero harder. But you're pumped. You're all in on it. I didn't know where you land on this. Wow. Yeah. I think that the Mars community sees, you know, what's happening after perseverance. And of course, we're watching MSR fall apart in real time at the moment. And so,

you have this entire community of scientists and engineers. You have this super new checks piece on the operation development science of Mars missions. And what are they going to do now, you know, after these missions that are currently active on Mars and like I have colleagues, friends who are scientists who are like looking at the end of perseverance, whatever that might be and saying what, like where's my data going to come from then? Like what now? Like who am I without these missions? And so I think the Mars exploration program, is trying to understand how to leverage or how to get their own version of Clips, like essentially, but perhaps not fully appreciating, like what I said earlier,

is that the lunar, like, Clips is an experiment in and of itself. The lunar economy is still an experiment in and of itself. I'm not convinced that it's going to come to fruition. I think it's, we should give it a good go. I think we should try. I think there's a lot of exciting work and development from a technology standpoint. There could be so much benefit from a science standpoint. I'm really passionate about low-cost science exploration, just of the solar system.

And so I see my career series of experiments and being a different startup trying to understand, like, is this model work? Maybe, no, okay. Move on to the next one, right? So I'm passionate about trying to make it work. But from a business standpoint, I have a hard time believing that there's a case to be made for Mars. And just for everyone to have context. You've worked at a company focused on asteroid mining, and you're saying that.

I have. So I feel like that's a good thing to note in this conversation. Yes. Yes. Said the guy who wore a headset all day and worked inside of that environment. So just a level set on my side as well. You know, I feel like context helps. Yes, that's how I got my start in commercial space, asteroid mining, for sure.

But yeah, so Mars, I mean, I think I think the most. viable option could be like of the three sorry four DRMs that are they that have been described and are an RFP I think the calm one is interesting we know we know that um is our MRO right is the one that they use currently primarily use for coming and Auditney a lot too right I see yeah right so we we know that those are slowly dying and that we need a replacement this has been a talk something is talking that communities we talked about for forever and and so now can we leverage community. Now, commercial services, like on the imaging side, I look at a company

like Planet and I see, for the record, I love Planet. I think that they've really revolutionized like how you can do space, science from space and then, you know, also creating different markets and verticals. But there's so much activity and change at Earth is so dynamic. Mars doesn't have that level of industry or any industry right now or level of even geological dynamicism. Like it doesn't things don't change on a daily basis. And so from the imaging side, I can't. I can't see transferring that model to Mars and it being profitable. And I spent about five minutes a few days ago trying to figure out if planet is profitable.

I don't know, I haven't answered to that yet. But if it's not, and again, I don't know. Although I think the information is publicly available. Like I can't see the case being made for Mars. Communication, again, maybe, especially because international space agencies, ones that aren't NASA, they could be customers potentially. But then who else is a customer? And the way that these services models work, you need multiple customers. It's not just NASA.

That's how you make money in the end and theoretically have this cost savings for everyone. I think it's an interesting model. And I'm skeptical it's going to work at least in the next decade. Have you considered approaching this from an NRO National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, perspective and saying that China has assets on the surface of Mars and we need to keep track of them at all times. Could probably shake loose a planet constellation worth of funding on that is all I'm saying. Yeah.

Planet. Give me a ring. You know, I'm a short drive away from D.C. I can go. Yeah. I can go to Congress. If someone from the DOD trips in D.C. and like some money falls out on the sidewalk and NASDA can take it. I have a little dustbin. I'll scrape it right up. Maybe really just decide to. out there. Space Force currently, I think for the 2023 budget, like they have the same rough

budget as NASA does. Like they've only been around for a few years. And they've about the same budget. And so I think that's just worth noting is how much more money is in the DOD. So maybe that's actually an interesting point then, right? Because a lot of one way to make a space business work is okay, you have your civil space plan in business, but you get most of your money from like intelligence or from defense or someone in the military, right? And that's where most of your money comes from. But of course, you talk more about civil space stuff in media and publicly. They're all rockets.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly, right? And I don't love that, like, as a scientist. Like, I definitely want the peaceful use of space, et cetera. But we have to acknowledge that there are things happening on a diplomatic plane of existence that I don't exist at or think about very often, but I know it's very important to consider. So I don't know.

The Cislander space is becoming more everything for the intelligence community. Absolutely. Whether that's being extended to Mars, I haven't heard, but the White House has a couple of years. This is it. Right. Right. Right. We're doing it.

Our lobbying group. We're making one right now. All right. I'll call up Casey. Get him to join and we'll go. It'll be good. Yeah. It's all about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I generally agree with you. Like, I'm, I am. I guess I should quantify or clarify why I'm hyped about this, right? Because I don't think I see like a explosion of science payloads like happening because this, like, I don't really, that's not why I'm really excited.

But I think more this offers a commercial vessel to allow some companies to finally do something on a different planet, right? Because right now, they're just like, there is everything outside of the Earth-Moon system is like fully in government control, right? And that's been great. We've done lots of cool stuff. But like this, I've always said, like, you know, take a look at someone like SpaceX where they talk Mars, big talk all the time.

Mars, Mars, Mars. We're going to invent a new civilization and a bunch of other like, you know, mumbo-jumbo, right? But like, what's been standing in the way of that, and if you follow their pattern the whole time, is they've always got their customers to pay for their R&D. Everything that they do, like, pays for the next thing, right? And this is that bridge they need. A Mars ComNet is now a government-sponsored excuse to send stuff at Mars

and all their new fancy spaceships, right? Like, this is what they're looking for. Like, someone in the Starship department is like, like, you know, got a lot of, got a lot of drink spot for them when this RFD is about. It doesn't even need Starship. You got all these other rockets laying around? We're going to have, you know, Take an old-ass Falcon 9 and get some Starlink out there, see what's going on.

They can build the Mars link now and do that whole thing, right? And it's Starship. There's some room on there. They can knock out all four of these RFPs on one flight. In fact, the FAA would love if it never came back to Earth. Probably be great. It's like, what do you want? SpaceX will be like 100 million.

I'll do 100 of the little ones, 100 of the medium ones, 50 Mars links and 12 cameras. I'll do it all for you. whatever you want. We can fit it all in one flight. We'll send it over there. So now SpaceX has an excuse to do this, and they're going to get some experience. My fear would be, is it's the only SpaceX that does it?

That, to me, kind of ends up sucking in the long run because I don't want one company to be in charge of that. So I hope that impulse and relativity and all these other companies that have said Mars and a press release somewhere are going to also jump on this and be a part of it. But I think it's kind of one of those opportunities. And like you said, sometimes these models don't work, but we got to try them and this is it.

We're trying it. Let's go. Let's do it. I'm excited. Yeah. So one thing that comes to mind too with this, the study contract, they're only for 200K, which isn't actually that much money for the level of detail that they're asking for in the statement of work. So we weed out the noncommittals. Yeah. Well, noncommittals. Like I don't know that anyone's going to be making any money off of a study contract. And when you're making a decision of whether to go after an opportunity like this, like you go after a study contract if you see a big opportunity in the future. And that's, I think there's a nebulous opportunity that like we know this need exists,

but I don't think there's any funding at a very significant level dedicated to it. Right. So I'll be very interested to see how many people or companies actually respond to the opportunity. You know, space doesn't care, doesn't really care about it because they're going to, they say they're going to do it anyway, right? Like we're going to do it. So like if we can get some extra revenue on the side, it's fantastic, right? And I'm hoping some of the companies.

I'm talking about everyone who isn't SpaceX. I'm hoping some other companies are thinking that way too. Like if, you know, like, yeah. So relativity is one that comes in mind. They have like explicitly said like we really want to do Marr's stuff. We want to like all the stuff we're doing now is to do Marr stuff. So like now it's this is where they have to put their money where their mouth is, right? And it'll be interesting to see.

Yeah. Nailed it. All right. I guess, yeah, you need only 56 minutes. Oh, yeah. Huh. Okay. Well, I'm excited to read, I think we'll make those studies public.

It'll be interesting. Oh, maybe. You think they will be? You think they will be? Maybe. I can't tell. I don't know how that stuff works. There's the problem with all this commercial stuff.

You don't get to know anything. It's all IP. Yeah. No, actually, you're right. They're not going to be because I was thinking of the most recent time that there were planetary science, mission concepts, and studies put out. But that was for the Decatal Survey, which is by definition publicly available to everyone. But there's definitely going to be IP and confidential info in these reports. So unfortunately, we might see some like

blurbs about the concept or certainly a list of who gets awarded to do the city contract. But yeah, well, we'll see if anybody chooses to make their results public. I hope so because I want to read it. I'm curious. The RFP was like apparently 496 pages long. So that sounds like that's what I was thinking about. Like it takes, it's going to, people are going to spend $200,000 just bring together the proposal for $200,000 of work.

Yeah. You got to spend money to make money. If you want 10 people to read the RFP so they can work on, that'll be already $200,000. Oh, wow. Well, okay, well, we solved it, I think, guys. I think it's figured out. I mean, did it.

We're at least getting a lobby. Every time we do one of these clips, we do this clips episode every once in a while where we're like, what is clips? You know, we like do that? And every time at the end, we always do the same thing. Oops, solved it. Yeah, I guess so is it. But we end early because we're like, I mean, that's all I thought about clips so far.

Oh, man. I just was interested to pick your brain on like, because you said you were interested in talking about the future of clip stuff, whether that was like, you know, the survivability of the program overall. I'm curious about that. And the budget environment in it we're in. Also, it's now the season of clips. Like, how many landers can we crash into the moon before people start asking questions

in a tight budget environment? Not a great combo in my view. Nope. But also the task orders are out there. And like, what we know from Maston, when they close, up shop, a lot of the task order money was already paid out. So I think the milestones at the end are very little relatively to the overall thing. So even if it gets canceled, is that okay? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about exactly the milestones. This is like we turn it into cable television.

You have 60 seconds. Go. Oh, shoot. Let's see. Let's just hope for the best, I guess. I'll sum that up. Hopefully I am succeeds and then Astrobotic has a chance to, I mean, I can't imagine astrobotic wouldn't get a chance to, I mean, that they're so far along at this point. Have you thought that they're going to be launching, you know, next year? But if it's happening this year theoretically, then that's going to go. After that, I don't remember what the next good admission is. But I hope that. Draper, Firefly?

One of those? Probably Draper. Draper, I think. Was like the last one. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I guess the question is if these are all failures.

not going to win that they're not, then what? And I have a hard time believing that NASA is going to be able to justify use of taxpayer funds to continue this program. If there's mixed results, I hope that they can stand by it. If it's successful, that's awesome. And I can't wait to see what data we get back from the moon. But we have to acknowledge that a company like SpaceX can put together videos of their rocket failures and make almost a joke out of it. Like they can kind of spend that however they want. but NASA has to be a good steward of taxpayer funds.

And so they're under a different set of circumstances and restrictions and considerations when it comes to this kind of thing. So I mean, at the end of the day, because, you know, as we say, space is hard. And if you see fail, I can't blame NASA if they eventually just have to cancel the program. My hope, though, is folks, can I just appreciate the nuance, which is a lot to ask of people who don't know all the nuances? Yeah. The fact that the procurement may have been a factor in all of this, like, that's, again, me and Casey will read that paper, whoever writes it, and then it'll just fit two of us. But yeah, yeah, knocking, I have a cherry desk. I'm knocking on wood for all the luck in the world down to. I got some weird, cheap Mexican wood. All right. Didn't come from that tequila store.

No, I hired a guy on Facebook to build this. It was $15 or something. Elizabeth, where can people follow along if they do not know about you? Sure. Find me on LinkedIn or my personal website, Elizabethafafrank.com. Which has a, under the fun menu,

has this travel photos thing that we did not talk about, but these are fantastic photos. So everyone should go check this out. Thank you. Yeah. Been lucky to see a lot of beautiful places. That's awesome. There's some rocket launches in there too for the space nerds.

Yeah. Jake, you got anything for us? No, I'm just getting back in a swing of things. So you and I have work to do. We've got to start doing some episode planning pretty soon. If you wanted to see me in this thing, where should you go, Jake, hypothetically? You should go to op-nom.com slash discord and sign up for five bucks a month where we do a pre-show. five minutes before this show, the live pre-show, only for Discord members. And we never know,

it's even more crazy than the real show. We never know what's going to happen there. So, today was just straight up a Vision Pro reveal. Like, that's all it was. Today was a Vision Pro review and me very uncomfortable with the entire secret. And my weird 3D hands. Yeah, weird high Anthony avatar. I do like really sleepy in the in the Metaverse. So yeah, that's what you can get. That's what you got. That's what we offer. Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, thank for a good. And get jacats like them. Elizabeth, you're fantastic. Thanks for hanging out and putting up with us. We're glad we finally got you on. So thanks for hanging out. Great to be here. See everybody.

Bye. Bye, everyone. 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 4, 2, 1, 2, 1,000, 2, 1,000, end of death.