Off-Nominal - 143 - Maneuver Without Regret (feat. Warfighting Domain) (feat. Tim Fernholz)

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by journalist and author Tim Fernholz to talk about some of his recent stories on the Space Force, Kam Ghaffarian, and let’s be honest, we’ll probably get distracted by Intuitive Machine’s first lunar landing attempt.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 143 - Maneuver Without Regret (feat. Warfighting Domain) (feat. Tim Fernholz) - YouTubeGoodnight, Sweet Prince: Saying Goodbye to IM-1 - PayloadKam Ghaffarian’s Moonshots - The New York TimesMeet True Anamoly, the startup working to win America’s space race against Russia - VoxHarry Stranger on X: “A very high resolution satellite image of Blue Origin's 98 meter tall New Glenn pathfinder standing on the pad at Launch Complex 36 on Friday.”Can Space Force Stop Somali Rocket Pirates? | Guest: Anthony Colangelo | Ep 101 - YouTubeFollow TimTIM FERNHOLZTim Fernholz (@TimFernholz) / XTim Fernholz, Author at PayloadFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, everybody, in the era of a thing successfully landed on a moon, and you can debate how qualified of a success it is, Jake? Unqualified. Unqualified success. Didn't you listen to the press conference? Unqualified success. Yes, so let's spend the next hour discussing all the qualifications at which we need to. But, Jake, we've got a great friend with us today.

Tim Fernholtz, you've been on our list forever. we've had several email threads, we've been at bars together, and maybe may or may not have talked while we were there together. But finally, you're on the show. Welcome. Well, it's a pleasure to be here after all of our hard work. We were like the R-slash-misconnections for all these years, and we finally did it. Now I'm trying to imagine what that little blurb would look like. Yeah. Saw you in a bar in D.C. We talked about spaceships.

You also getting drinks off the SpaceX corporate card, me, also doing the same thing. Oh, wow. Well, Jake, we got a bunch of stuff. We got highly relevant topics, Tim. You wrote a couple of great pieces that, one of which in particular, Jake found extremely enlightening. It's someone who has never thought about the Space Force before, felt like you finally decoded a whole mysterious subject for him.

The other was about Cam Gaffarian, who is. was a very mysterious individual and as part of the Intuit Machine storyline. So I feel like we've got a nice throughline of all of this. I'm excited. But first, what did you want her throughline for Space Force and Tudit machines? Oh, yeah. I don't know about that. Mysterious.

Luter higher, my friends. The Space Force is interested. Both things unqualified successes. That's the third line, right? Not qualified. What did you bring to drink today, Tim? I'm three hours behind you, so I'm not quite having a beer, but I'm having coffee in a very tropical mug.

So I hope that's the party spirit if I can offer that. That's excellent. I love that. What are you drinking? Jake, a little bit earlier in the time zones? Yeah, I'm a, I'm blue collar today. I got like plain old desecis. So I'm like, you know, I'm probably what some people will be describing as a beer snob.

Like I like real fancy beer. But I think it's very important. Unlike some beer sauce, I think it's really important to have a very mainstream pedestrian kind of blue-collar beer that you like. And for me, that's Telski. So this is my like, when I just like, I just like, I just like, I just like, I just like, I just like, I just like, I just like, I just like, I just like, I'm like, yeah. Cheers. Like how you said that, very similar to like their marketing and tagline. Like it had this, you had the same kind of cadence and flow as their, that's their whole marketing campaign and just missed the whole thing.

That's great. great. Yeah. What do you got? I've got the second of the four Star Base brewing beers today, Jake. Right, right, right. Star Hopped. This is a cool little greenhouse on this side.

There's a cool little, what's on this side? I need to hide my face, but also look at it. So this is impossible. I guess these are robots that are growing the plants. Grobots, maybe? Could be robots. I don't know. I got a whole box from Starbase Brewing, Tim.

So I've been working my way. The influencer thing when they put their hand in front of it so that the focus is right when they're showing off their affiliate links, right? Just got to teleprompter, Jake, so I'm working on it. You guys are gross. Yeah. I mean, there was a hot minute there four years ago when we were doing better broadcast than 85% of television. So we've calmed out of that IRS a little bit. The week after the lockdowns from COVID, we had all figured out and no one else did it.

It was great. Yeah, we had the greatest broadcast of all. All right, where should we start on Intuitive Machines? Jake and I already joked about this unqualified success pit, Tim, but where were you at? What's your vibe on IM1? Well, I think it's a big success. I agree with the bullishness of, you know, Steve Altimus.

And I also think that, you know, NASA's sort of, we got the data back. You know, that counts as a success. but, you know, as you guys have hinted, there have been like a variety of sort of missteps along the way, and not even missteps, just like things that didn't happen, you know, NASA payloads that didn't deliver their data. And obviously the landing was, I think, softish is what I, the term that I usually got.

But, like, if you look at it, I don't know what your expectations were going into it, but I, you know, in my head was like, there's like a 60% chance we just never hear about it again. Like, it just is not going to tie. They're going to crap. Like the last, how many different landers have crashed into the moon in the last five years. And even like a lot of confidence and intuitive machines and no disrespect to them, it's just harder than I think people think.

And so I was preparing myself for like a sort of post-exploding starship world of being like, no, no, actually, like, this is good. So the fact that they did get good data and there are heavy metal pictures of the leg snapping and stuff. And I do think Ultimus and the Intuitive Machine guys are right when they say it's going to really improve the chances of the next one. And, you know, I talked to Chris Culbert, the guy who runs clips, the NASCAR program is hiring all these guys in January before this. And he was also sort of stressing, like, we expect these to fail. And this was also pretty the astrobotic mission. Like, we expect a certain percentage of these to fail. and like they chose payloads for this mission figuring there was a good chance it would fail.

So I think relative to that baseline, like we can feel pretty good about Odysseus, even if it. I think it may, and I think Althma sort of hinted at this when he was talking about communications in the last press conference, I think they may have set expectations a little too high on the first day when they reported the lender was upright. And then when they have to sort of explain how we were mistaken. And I appreciate the transparency. Like, I'm glad to have been living through that with them. But I think for the general public, they were like, hey, wait a minute. I don't know.

Yeah. I don't know. What are your qualifications? The landing broadcast was really funny to me because, like, you know, the time passed when it was touched down. And then, like, it was very quiet and there was no confirmation. And, you know, the NASA streams, they had the NASA people on there. And they were like, well, at this point, we should have heard this. And, you know, we're looking at, but, you know, we're just going to look at data.

We're really excited about this. And they're really positive, right? And then you can see the intuitive machines, people are kind of like trying to figure what's going on. The body language was the best part. Yeah, the body language was real, real tense, right? And then finally, they were just like, okay, look, we got a carrier signal. So it's not exploded. And so like, this is enough for us to at least say, okay, we're on the moon.

So we're like, okay, let's get that out there. We were on the moon. So we don't know the status, but we're on the moon. And then they had an applause. And NASA was like, great, they made it by. And they just shut the stream off. It was like the end of the day. We don't want to get any more information

because we're happy with what that they just said right now. You missed hit the big Bill Nelson button. Yeah, they hit the Bill Nelson button. There was a free-recorded letter. I feel like I actually should FOIA, like, the alternative message. Right? Yes. Yeah, we got the letter from Apollo.

So, yeah, we need this. We need this. I wonder, do you think he was more like, he did the ingenuity diminutive, like, that little helicopter kind of, thing on the unsuccessful version. Like, that little lander did its best, and it made its way down there, but, you know, sometimes we'll try again or whatever.

I wonder how diminished. That's what Bill Nelson's built for, you know? You mentioned that, like, crashing was kind of the expectation and how we were adjusted for what to expect. I equated this. I just recorded a Miko with Eric Berger that will come out later tonight, and I had this analogy there, but I find it's probably more at home here, Jake, because a couple weeks ago, we talked about. I took a trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and I was real nervous because you get

down there and you drive on the left. So I'm like, I've never done left drive. I was like, really nervous about this. I arrive at St. John. The rental car is the most beat-up Jeep I've ever seen in my life. It barely makes it up on a hill and the entire island is cliffs. And immediately, I didn't even think about driving on the left. I was like completely over it. It was the least worrying thing of my whole trip. And I feel like that is for Intunuchines, we, all were like the engine, is it going to work? This whole test firing 18 hours in. That's the moment. If it's probably not going to work. And if it does, then cool, but if it doesn't. And then we forgot about it immediately because there was like eight other things to worry about. Nobody really knew

what was going on with it. We never even talked about the engine ever again. I think it came up at a press conference once. But we just completely ignored that they flew a methylox engine and it worked. They like did, you know, we got to change the gimbal angles or whatever they said. But like, it just worked and it went all the way to the moon and it was stuck the landing. So, yeah, that's huge. That was amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

Nailed it. Yeah. But also, nothing else worked on the descent. This is the wildest descent that there's ever been for a space mission. The altimeters didn't work because they left the pin in. And then they switched to this NASA LiDAR thing, which turns out didn't even contribute anything to the landing attempt. So they landed on optical navigation in an IMU and somehow are intact.

It's the craziest little. It's wild. What? It even happened. I'm so confused. It's not quite the Hollywood story of the emergency on orbit patch, but it's still, I mean, it's impressive. I mean, whatever software they designed to do like the visual navigation, I mean, I feel like that has got to be state of the art that they pulled that off. Yeah, yeah.

You know, like saying Hollywood, it's kind of funny because this is the exact kind of thing that if they did it in a Hollywood movie, we'd be like, oh, this is so overdramatic, right? Like, you know, like the thing fails and it's like the heroic engineers come together and write the software patch in and deploy it and test it in one orbit. Like they're just like, get it out there and it's like, oh, we made it through that. We got it up there. And then that fails and they're like, oh, now we've got to just like, we got to get the old crusty guy with a joisting to do this by hand. Like that's like, that's almost what that feels like, right? And then they. And Baldwin comes out and lands us like.

Yeah. And Baldwin comes down with a shaky hand. He's like, I got this. you know, like, this is how it's going to be. That's kind of what that felt like, but it's actually real. So it's kind of interesting. Yeah, sometimes the truth is straighter than fiction. Yeah.

You mentioned Tim that Chris Colbert was saying, you know, we expect a lot of these to fail and all this kind of shots on goal that Zerbukin was all about in the early days, right? Do you think, though, two press conferences in on the company's first landing attempt, like, what number is it going to? get tiring to have to do this exact press conference for Firefly, for Draper, for who else has a lander in the mix? There's a bunch, right? Like, who else is in the closed task? Yeah, they're in the program, but yeah, the Griffin first one. Intuitive machines are the only

one with multiple missions of the same lander type. They're the only ones right now with a task order that doesn't have a press conference in their future that is not their first press conference ever. Like, it's crazy. I'm going to be curious to see how excited people are. for the third or fourth one, you know? Like, I think people are going to be excited for Firefly when they launch later this year. Like, hopefully, hopefully they will nail it. But who knows? I mean, again, with them, just like with anybody's first time, my expectations are not high.

It's not reflective of that engineering team. It's just like, it's hard. That's part of landing on the moon. That's how it works. Because we're old for two so far. We're like 1.2. 0.5 per 2? 0.0.0.0.0.0. That's low.

I'm going to give them an 8 or 9. 0.8 to 2. Yeah. Okay. I was like, I was curious to see how like the non-space door community like followed and reacted to this. And I think people were actually excited. And I think if they had just had a few more cameras working and giving us some more pictures, it would have been.

But. Yeah. And I think that's the lesson for the next one. I feel like all these companies are watching their communication strategies. You know, Astrobotic had a tough time of it, but they were very transparent, which I was very grateful for. and now we've had I am, and it's going to be curious to see how Firefly handles sort of the same situation.

Hopefully has transparently. I have a theory that Firefly is not going to be very transparent because they're all in space force mode right now and they don't have to talk about anything, you know? And they're just going to be used to that. And that's what we're going to get. Hopefully they'll use the moon as an opportunity to just let it all out.

Yeah, totally. We do have to talk about. the picture though, Jake. We do, yeah. This picture is amazing. Because at first, my favorite part of this picture is at first you think, oh, this is just the landing leg that is like bending down from this side of the lander. And then you realize, no, this is the landing leg and this, this is the other side of the landing

legs hitting this landing leg side. This is completely chaos. And Phil Metzker is going to get like eight years of papers out of this one picture. My God, he must be dying though, because scouts didn't work, the, like, stereoscopic thing. especially when they said that part of the landing phase was the engine bell was in contact with the surface and thrusting. In firing? Being a hole. Starship all over again.

I hope they sent astronauts to like salute Odysseus and see exactly what happened or a rover or something. This would be a good museum installation for sure, up on the hill. Oh, yeah. But I was excited just for like how like hardcore that landing was. Like that's like Elon Mothalck and stuff. Like, I'm going to suggest that maybe Elon Musk has not done anything as hardcore is trashed this into the moon. He's going to have to do this with Starship. Now, he's catching up.

It's pretty awesome. I can admit, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I will, uh, sometimes I come across as negative on this, but like, this is a freaking rad landing. Like, like, like, forget, throw out the word success or failure. Like, I don't want to talk about that, but just this was fucking rad. I mean, a good way to bring it to your own life, Jake, is if you had this lander in Kerbal, how would you feel about your mission? You'd be like, well, I did get some of the science out of it. I got up the tech tree a little bit.

Like, you would feel good about this. I'd have something to tweet about it, that's really sure. You got to bring back KSP history just for this mission. And be like, this is how it goes sometimes, friends. Can you bring KSP history back and do this mission? I'll think about it. I'll think about it. That would be epic.

in KSP2 then my game was just crash Tim you got to understand I'll say Cam Geferian a bit as part of this

case you did for the New York Times and he is a very interesting individual so I'd love I'd love to dive into this a little bit because I don't even think many people know about him no and I don't

I mean he is like he's low profile I think intentionally but I just you know I'm covering the space sector, I started noticing. He's got a very unique name, obviously, Cam Gepharian. I haven't met many Cam Gepharians. And it was just like, oh, Axiom Space, co-founder, Cam Gepharian,

and Intuitive Machines co-founder, Cam Gepharian. It's like, oh, who is this guy? And he also was the founder of this big sort of traditional NASA contractor Stinger Gepharian Technologies with another guy. And, you know, I was just sort of curious. I love to follow the money, love my rocket billionaires. I'm like, who's this guy? And managed to convince his folks to let me talk to him. And it's a really amazing story. He's a guy who came here from Iran when he was 18, like a very classic. I saw the moon landing and had to go to space kind of a guy, which is like an incredible genre. We all know very well. But just like worked his way up, was like an engineer at Lockheed, started his own company, became a contractor for NASA

and it's like just one of those like classic like networkers who just like knows people for many years and like gets and then suddenly appears and like offers them a job like I need you to go like

build a nuclear reactor for me and I like meeting these people because I wish someone would come to me and be like Tim I know exactly you're going to do next no one has never done that so someday maybe Camwell but the thing that

is substantially interesting about him is, you know, we've seen a big change in how, like, we do business in space, which is sort of the SpaceX story like, now they're flying the rockets, not NASA. And he sort of made that transition, because he made his sort of first fortune being the guy who did the engineering for NASA. And now he started these companies with Axiom and with intuitive that are doing their own space operations. And he's figured out, you know, there are a lot, there's a good history of like companies founded by like top NASA people to do space stuff that absolutely crash and burn because they don't know how to run a company. And Cam has this ability to like grab a top NASA person and let them loose on some technical

problem. And also the company continues to be financially sustainable. Like it's pretty neat. And I'm also curious, no intuitive machines is publicly traded. And it's like cool that you can buy stock in basically a moon exploration. company. Sometimes people quibble with this. You know, they have some other contracts, but they're basically a moon company, and that's cool. And also, like, not a guaranteed financial success story, but they're out there.

They're in the public markets. I think it's really balsy. And Cam is just, like, absolutely relaxed. He is a huge believer in meditation. All of his ideas come to him while he's meditating about things that he, like, wants to do. I don't know. It's a very marked contrast from Elon or Jeff in the world of space billionaires. And he's not done yet.

He's also like he's got some real far out things. He's got a nonprofit where they're doing like warp drive research, which is like. Everybody needs one of those. Yeah, you got to have one. I like that. He's like he's also like I like in my space billionaires where it's like, what would you do if you were super rich? It's like, yeah, I would have a nonprofit that's doing warp drive research. I was going to say.

If any of us had a wealth that was measured in B's, yeah, we would have to have, we would have to have a warp drive. Well, they- Fought, therm, or whatever you call it, right? Cam Math was always interesting to me, though, because I could never, I could never do the math to understand how he was to the level of having the warp drive non-profit. Oh, like, where his money comes from? Yeah, not to be like one of those people, but I just, I couldn't, I couldn't figure out that storyline

enough because the SGT side got acquired for a bunch of money. $350 million. Well, basically, like, he's an entrepreneur, and he started SGT in the early 90s, and he also started investing in D.C. and Maryland real estate. Between those two things, he was very financially successful, but I think it's important to understand that, like, the billionaire net worth thing, you. We're talking about paper valuations here. So for an axiom or intuitive machines, he's probably invested tens of millions of dollars,

if not more, but those companies are valued much higher than that. And he's also a very talented fundraiser. One of the things that he's very good is bringing in other investors just like VCs in the U.S., but he's very good at raising money abroad. When I was trying to set up time to interview him, it was like, no, he's in Korea this week. No, he's in Abu Dhabi this week. Like, no, he's in Riyadh this week. Like, he really has an ability to find capital for these projects that is pretty impressive.

And, you know, if you've ever tried to, like, raise money for a space company when you don't even have, like, hardware yet, like, it's a very uniquely hard challenge. And you need to be a very special kind of salesman to make that deal, I think. You got to have that nice countertop that you can touch, that Iranian rock, whatever it was. It was onyx. Onyx. Yeah, gently flowing. A great Pokemon. Yeah.

Is that a Pokemon? Onix? Yeah, man. He was like the rock worm thing. Oh, yeah. Rockworm. You know what I'm talking about? The Proustian Game Boy.

Onyx, Pokemon. I'm going to pull it up. It was Onyx or not, apparently. I missed Pokemon by like two years. You did? I was two years younger. Yeah. You don't know about this onyx?

You don't know about Onix? No. Rock touch He's good It's a good Pokemon Don't you forget It

Pretty great Cheers Yeah No it's cool I like the It was definitely I like how you said I don't start contrast

Between Jeff or Elon Because it I feel like there's I think We have more than one of these stories Of like the The not Elon's And the not Jeffs

Of the space Rich entrepreneur Guy world You know, like, and they're starting to come out a little better now. Like we've got some, you know, your book and Ashley Vance's book and all that kind of thing, you know, we're just talking about Peter Beck or the Branson or whoever, right? And we're starting to get a little more of these. And it's nice to see some more figures like that to see just kind of like the different perspectives on how they do it, right?

Because for a while there, it was like, there's the NASA way and there's the Elon way. And these are the only two thought processes that you can have. And that's, he, like, you know, characterized all rich person activity in space. And it was like, he's, you know, even for a rich guy, Elon's pretty weird, right? Like, he's not, it's not the only way to do things. And seeing some, like, different perspectives on it is definitely interesting, I think. Yeah, I mean, the most exciting thing about SpaceX is that it is, like, opened up the possibility for all kinds of new and different activities and people in space.

And KM is definitely one interesting facet of it. And, yeah. I don't know. It's going to be fun to see, like, can they make, like, commercial stations in low Earth orbit? Steve? Like, is intuitive machines really going to, like, put a nuclear power plant on the moon? Like, if they do, that's pretty cool. It's better than Leo. Jake, here's the one thing, though. Cam is, like, the Lorenzo de Medici of the Johnson Space Center mafia that you have been desecis.

really trying to entangle. So, you're on a mission to take down this whole organization that he is doing nothing but propping up. And I would like to unpack this a little bit with you, right? Axiom, he goes into Johnson and gets Mike Suffradini. No, no, I just, I'm just trying to figure out, like, where we're at on this. Because Axiom's space, right? Mike Suffradini is running that thing.

That was just former ISS program manager. The Intuitive Machines, co-founders were straight out of Project Morpheus doing doing, and a whole Lunar Lander thing at Johnson. So, Jake, what's your vibe here? This is, like, taking this mafia thing that you've been running with, and it's expanding it out to the private sector. So, wait, I want to know what your theory is. I'm not familiar with your, with your mafia theory.

Roll it out, baby, roll it out. Let's, I'm going to kick back. You do this. These are the people who are running these companies, but I want to hear what your degree is. Okay, so, like, this is like, I can get in trouble for saying this, but I'll say it anyway. It's fine, because I don't have any allegiance.

From who? I don't have any bosses. Who's going to get in trouble? No, okay. So there's a general theme. There's a general theme with NASA right now of trying to modernize a bit and embracing this burgeoning commercial sector and moving to fixed price contracts from the old, you know,

cost plus contracts and trying out new vendors. Like there's some really interesting, am I still here? You lost your video. Your audio's here, but your camera is gone. This is it. man. They're in. They're shutting you down. They're in. He might even just have to come back.

Oh, man. I'm going to have to switch cameras. Oh, yeah. This is the angle. Actually, any time that you start talking about space conspiracy theories, this is the angle you go to, okay? You cut to this angle and you unveil your conspiracy. Lean over. You like, let me tell you what's going on here. Okay. So, so I'm like totally off my train of thought now. So NASA's trying to like, you know, making a pretty genuine effort to modernize and do this like really interesting stuff right um and my theory is that johnson space center is like at the core of the resistance to that because they have like

you know so they first of all they're the the center of i s which is like um aside from the commercial crew and cargo is like pretty still in the old spacey camp right all the astronaut core pretty still in the old the old way of doing things um but But then we have all these examples of like where Johnson has to like do all these kind of like new fangled ideas. So clips is a great example. Clips as a program is managed at Johnson. And then we we see these examples of like the Viper on Griffin, for example, which like doesn't really feel like it should be a Clips mission. And there aren't really operating it like a like a fixed price contract.

Like they're like adding money to the task order like as oh, we need to do more testing. And then like they just like get more money, which is like not how fixed price. works and and they have like that is actually something they've done before on other fixed price programs but they did it with dragon yeah yeah yeah with Boeing right yeah I can see the through line right so Boeing not exactly a new kind of contractor right so we have like this this like by example and then we see this axiom thing which is very much like how can we do exactly what we're doing with ISS but just like put a company in charge like they're trying like really really like institutionalize that in a way and

So I just have this like, Oh, and the one other, the one other that Axioms working on. The spacesuits, yeah. So space suits, which like,

ostensibly is like, space suits as a service or whatever, but like this is, this is the weirdest fixed price service. Like, and there's not really like transparency on like the task orders for that. It's like,

okay, we're going to give you some money to develop a prototype and here's a bunch of money. And then, okay, and the next thing I're going to ask you to do is to like prove that it works at this pressure.

And then they give a bunch of money. And it's like, where's the service part of this? Like, this is a service thing. It should be like, we've got a mission of the moon. We need two space suits and they need to work. We'll pay this much for it, have them ready. And that should be like the end of it, right? Like, why is there all these like, you know, development milestone?

It doesn't feel very fixed price as a service to me. So my semi-reel, but half-joking theory is that. It's the task order thing. That's not, it's not fixed price. Because fixed price always like commercial cargo and crew. It's the task order-based stuff that gets doled out in a weird way. is definitely very much like a well I said for clips like the task order thing is not too bad

because it's like one company gets like one job but task order should not have changes task order should be the task order if it's the fixed price development contract that has some changes I knew that's going to be a German reform podcast yeah baby let's talk about contracts

with his upward facing webcam yeah this is great but wait so your theory The theory is that Johnson Space Center is doing this whole fixed-price task order-based thing, but continually chops it up into smaller and smaller bits so much so that it can turn into an effective cost-plus with like a flexial slapped-on cost-plus sticker on it. If I can't change the price of a fixed-price contract, I can just give you more fixed-price contracts. And then it's like that now you've made that smaller units just a cost-plus thing.

I'm not familiar with Axiom Spassooth contract. But for Clips, there's like a cap on the top of that money. you know there's 2.6 billion in the bucket and that's going to go out so viper we'll eat all of it yes so the history of viper right is that it was going to be its own NASA mission and so the fact that they're having managed not aware by the way where was that managed that was that managed that's good but yeah it's like conspiracy theory but like I think it's going to be like the most valuable asset we're sending to the moon as part of clips. So I would say it doesn't surprise me that they're asking them to do some more testing

and do some more of this to make sure that Viper gets there safely. Yes. But I think on the space stations, it's important to keep in mind that while Axiom is sort of in the lead there and has the module on the ISS, NASA is giving a ton of money to Blue Origin and Vast and Voyager and all these other folks are doing it. So it's not just a former Johnson executive. Unless the ISS flies until 2040. Well, we'll see.

I mean, if the ISS flies until 2040, that will be the Johnson Space Center gravy train. But I don't think there's enough money in the budget for that. Or air in the space station. Yeah. We shouldn't do that. No, no, exactly. My theory is only, like, half serious. But, like, there are some definitely, like, some things that I see out of how Johnson

manages his programs from. Just like, you guys are really fighting this. Like, I don't feel like there's a full-throated engagement. Some would say fighting and some would say being, they're taking advantage of the situation. They're making good use of the situation. That's true. That's true. I want to defend Clips because I do think Clips is, like, the purest, like, commercial

partnership, like, we're not even asking questions. Maybe there should be asking more questions, but we're giving you this money go on the moon. Like, I think Clips is like very much in the spirit of the original COTS program. I think, like, commercial lunar destinations is a little more betwixt in between, because I don't think, I think it's a little harder to operate a space habitat than to land on the moon, maybe. And I think it's a little more vague about what the requirements are, right? Because like for the mood lander, like, put X on the moon. For commercial lunar destinations, they're like, operate a space station,

obtain money from somewhere else, and maybe we'll send you some customers. Convince people to do things. Yeah. And the other thing is just like, there's a reason Cam Gavarian went to Johnson to find people to run these companies is because, you know, that is the world's leading center of human spaceflight. So it's also like if you need like an engineer, that's where you go. Yeah. But I do enjoy your theorizing because I definitely, there's like, I've heard theories along these lines before. And of course, we all know that Johnson figures greatly and be like

SLS conspiracy of post-constallation era too. So there's, there's lots of things going on. Yeah. Yeah. What I'll challenge you on, I'll challenge you on now is, it's like now that I've put this dumb seed in your brain, you're going to start reading the news there for me, and I want you to look for it. Yeah. I'm going to start a set up here and I'm going to have like a whiteboard and I'll be like, you're all connected. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. We'll see. We'll see what kind of emails I get now from Johnson employees. Yeah. We've got some angry ones before. Yeah. Yeah. We've triggered a few in the human spaceflight department or the human research department,

I think, Jake, when we've talked about, like, radiation stuff, artificial gravity. There's some people that get real offended in there. So, let's see. Yeah, let's see. Maybe Cam will email you and be like, listen, man, lay off the speed, you know. We're going to make Tim have a canary statement about I've never been contacted by Cam. JSC conspiracy. Bill Mesby, but what's it going to cost?

What's it going to cost to get you to shut up? it's finally his project. Stop being a reporter. Oh, my goodness. You can leave this show whenever you want, Tim. Oh, dear. So anyway, should we talk about the Space Force, Jake? I think we should, yeah.

Here's what I want to know. I want to know what you learned about the Space Force, because I think this would be a funny way to go out about it. Well, okay, so to preface this, so, like, we talked about getting on the show, Tim, you're like, oh, I have this great article on the space force that we could talk about. And I was like, oh, shit. Because, like, I just don't know anything about it. Like, I don't follow military space at all.

I'm like, what am I going to do? Like, how am I going to have a show where I talk about the space force? So I pull up this article. I read this article through. And, like, it was so good because you lay out, like, it was written for me. It was written like, okay, dear reader, you probably. I was passionate a email I wrote it. Like, dear reader, you probably aren't an expert on the Space Force.

So let me tell you what's happening. And then it was like this. it all out for me and I was very happy about that because then I could actually know what I was talking about when I read it. So thank you for that. That's the first thing I wanted to say. But it's super interesting because I have had this thought and we talked about this with, was it Brian Whedon we had on to kind of talk about the space and military and what was happening in Ukraine and stuff. And I was kind of coming up with this thesis about how we're really seeing sort of like this is the first major scale conflict where we're seeing space act in a not just a different way, but like a really, really prominent way, right? Like, you know, just in a way we've never seen before. And it was like changing everything. And so like, I kind of have this like lingering interest in sort of how this new kind of technology is,

is making a lot of difference in how we think about conflict and all that kind of thing. And so reading about the training exercises has like really painted that for me, you know, because like you have this article, you can talk about it. But this article about the, this article about the you know, how do we do simulations in war games with the space stuff? And it's like, it's not ready. Like, there's a lot of gaps there and how we do that, right? So that's what I like to buy that. So maybe give us the rundown on what that was,

then we can bring it up. Yeah, it's like, I think it's hard to understand the space force. Because, like, when you think about, like, what war is in space, like, you immediately sort of go, or at least I immediately go to, like, science fiction, like, and I'm in my X-wing, and I'm blasting. And like, that's not reality. And in fact, you know, for a long time, you know, what I hope I do in the articles, I sort of lay out sort of the tit for tat history of, like, how the U.S. military has evolved its use of space.

And for, to be really reductive for, like, the longest time, no one else could really get up there. Like the Russians could, or I should say more specifically, the Soviets could. But then after the Cold War, there was nobody else. And so the sort of, and this is very reductive, but the thing that we did was we built a lot of, like, very big, expensive satellites and put them in space. And we didn't have to worry about protecting them because no one else went up there. But fast forward 25 years, and all of a sudden China is here with its own technology. And all of these sort of trends that gave us SpaceX and, like, the Ballyhoo, like, reduction of the cost of access of space. That's happening everywhere, too, on some level.

And so now, like, India is blowing up satellites. And China is sending up all of these inspector satellites. And China now has, you know, reconnaissance satellites and spy satellites that are starting to rival the U.S. And the big phrase that you heard about the Space Force is that space is now a warfighting domain, which is an amazing thing to look at someone in the eye and say very seriously. what that means basically now is that they can come up and get us and when and so my story is really about this company called true anomaly which is such a funny name in case you were wondering what that is it's one of the like six ways you describe something's orbital position and apparently it's the only suitable one to call a company according to the founder of it's it's a company of former air force guys because it was

before the Space Force when they were serving, who were on the red team, which is sort of the people who are like pretending to be a near pure power, aka China, and what would they do to go after our satellites? And they would do these simulations and just take out all the US satellites. But even the simulations were just sort of like

around a whiteboard because nobody ever thought when they launched these satellites, like they're not really designed to maneuver. They're not, they don't have countermeasures. They don't even have, like, really sensors to see what's, like, coming up to them in different ways. And so all of these guys started a company. We're going to build spacecraft that can go up and do what they're calling inspection, which is to fly up and look at other spacecraft up close.

And the Russians have been doing this to American military satellites for a few years. And there is a question, as far as we know, the U.S. does not have the ability to do this. Maybe there's a top secret satellite out there doing it. I don't know. We just have Scott Tillian. He's Canadian. But that's basically what we use. Yeah, there's an amazing community.

There's like a, we have had the Dutch space guy whose name I really should be. Marco Langbroke, also a Dutch. We have no Americans doing it. We just have all like friendly countries that are doing this on an average level. That's what we want you to think. It's a NATO program. Yeah, they're all in the CIA. Five eyes.

But now. This nuclear, supposedly nuclear Russian weapon that's in the news the last two weeks. Russia has supposedly launched a prototype of some kind of anti-satellite weapon. It's sort of hazy on whether it is a nuclear-powered, like, jamming satellite, or if it's like a nuclear electromagnetic pulse satellite? And wouldn't it be nice if the U.S. military could fly a little camera up there and take a look at it and maybe see what it is? And we don't have the ability to do that right now.

And so that is the first step towards something called, and God, the military loves these phrases, maneuver without regret, which is an amazing phrase. And it basically is like, right now. My favorite album from the 90s and also what the military is working on now. It's my post-rock band, Whenever Without Reader. It's the band you joined after you left Warfighter, yeah. Yes. war fighting domain yeah

the satellite it like you run out of wait wait wait wait we got to make a poster that's like a death metal concert and it's just all like war fighting domain true anomaly I'm going to do a generative AI after this show for that oh my god I would go to that tour I feel like you've been to that tour

yeah I haven't to that tour I want to go back Yeah, so satellites can't really like move around. And I mean, what maneuver without regret really means is like dogfighting in space. And what they're really talking about is when we have like an international aerial borders, you know, whenever there's like a Russian, you know, bomber flying into international waters, the U.S. will send out some fighter jets to sort of accompany it and keep an eye on it. And they basically want to do that but in space. And the frightening thing about that is that these sort of norms of behavior that we have for doing that with like airplanes maybe aren't the same in space. And our like control of space vehicles is maybe not quite as good as, you know, because these are things that are really like flying autonomously, you know. So it's like it's a whole new can of worms.

And when you start thinking about how it's all going to play out, it's sort of like, ooh. But you also sort of understand why all of these U.S. military people are like, okay, we've got to get a handle on this. And here we are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely some differences. Like even just thinking of like rated like a raw physics level, like you send an airplane out to rendezvous with like an enemy airplane. You can arrive, take a look.

And then you can, you know, get your message across. And then you can peel away and you're gone. But satellites, like the amount of energy you need to get into that orbit, like, you're probably just going to stay there. Like whether you're done with that job or not. Like you're, it's a very slow like, you know, change and that kind of thing. So I, and it takes, I mean, you sound like you're maneuvering with regret, Jake. With regret. You're not doing it without right now.

That's the thing. You've got to switch your mindset. It takes a long time to get into those orbits. And once you get in them, you can't really change them that easily, right? And so like, are we going to get to a place where like, okay, you know, Russia sends a satellite up? So the United States just grabs it on the shelf and sends it into the same orbit, you know, like a few revolutions later. Do you work for Virgin orbit or what?

They wanted to have like a fleet of these things in orbit and they're refuelable and serviceable and they're able to go where they need to go. And the other thing that they're sort of pitching to get it off the ground basically is that, you know, the Space Force needs, it has training needs and they want to get like all the junior guardians. Did you know that they call people in the Space Force guardians? I think they should have worked up to it more. They get all of the Cleveland guardians. Yes.

They both should have, isn't that the baseball team now? The Guardians? Yes. I haven't known of them in years. We were all hoping for like Stormtrooper or like, you know. The commanders. Just adopt Naval Ranking and let it be. Honestly, though, that's the, that's the answer.

100%. Yeah. One lesson we can learn from science fiction. Got to get out of the Air Force if you want to do that. I'm getting there, Jake, all right? Come on. But they want to have, like, the junior guardians, like, flying these things around in space to train and understand orbital mechanics and all of that. I don't know. And, I mean, like, the thing is, it's, like, all of this is sort of coming from a high-level thought process of what, like, U.S. space doctrine will be.

And, you know, some of these generals are, like, vying to be, like, the guy who invented carrier. warfare and like changed, you know, the military scene forever. Like, is that what's going to happen here? I don't know. Maybe not if Russia destroys every satellite with nuclear EMP, but there's a lot happening. That's been a whirlwind. Remember that one day when everyone was like, what are they going to destroy all the GPS satellites?

And the next day the Russian commander of whatever was like, well, we might look at all those GPS satellites and see what we can do with them. It's like a very quick turn about on that. Tim, where were you pre this piece? What was your space force vibe pre and post? Like, where were you? Number one, why did you even start writing this? But also, what was your vibe?

I mean, so I have always been interested in the space force just based on talking to people like Brian Whedon, who I'm glad you had on the show. He's my source for a lot of this stuff. But he's someone, I think, is very reliable. But talking to people in the military, really, talking to, and not just like PAOs or not just like the general doing an interview, but like talking to actual like people, guardians, people who serve, people who work on this stuff,

or people who are at intelligence agencies that do geospatial stuff. And their concern about militarization of space and what China is doing is like very palpable. And when you look at, you know, one of the big geopolitical bogey men right now, it is Taiwan and what China may or may not be trying to do to annexed Taiwan. And that is all very space-based. You know, the concern is China has this missile force that is going to, you know, go after all of these, you know, U.S. or Taiwanese ships or weapons or installations, and those are all going to be space guided, and is China going to try and take out our space assets before that happens?

You know, we're doing this thing now with the space development agency. and when I say we have been, the United States government is doing this thing now with the space development agency, where they are suddenly realizing, oh, shit, we shouldn't have like $10 billion satellites. We should have like $110 million satellites. And they're doing that, but they're a little bit late to the game. And so there's a sort of race going on between how quickly we can sort of make our satellites difficult to kill again through proliferation like Starlink style and whether we need what are called counter space weapons to like go after other space stuff and none of this is really decided yet

and the other thing hanging over all this is of course building fancy space weapons is very expensive and Congress has feelings about that but it's going to be a big topic of conversation and the other thing is even if you don't care about like military space like nothing is more important than like the national security space launch contracts to like the future of the u.s. space sector like so much of the decision making at the pentagon about who they hire to build spaceship is going to have huge repercussions for the commercial sector and the civil sector going forward uh-huh anyways that's my space for spiel i even answer your question so i always i always understood why i mean your vibe yeah 100 percent i would say this is the first time i've ever

convinced anyone else that it's important This is the first time I've written it. I remember I wrote a story like, and when Space Force first happened, it was like, yeah, Donald Trump is kind of crazy, but Space Force actually makes sense for three reasons. Yeah, yeah. Dude, I went on a couple shows about it.

I was on, I don't even know if people know this, Jake, you knew this. I went on the Blaze TV talking about Space Force back in the day. I was just going to all these places banging the table about space getting its own, you know, and I'm still mad, as Jake alluded to, I'm still mad that it's under the Air Force because I think that we should shed these shackles and go up top level, give me a seat at the real table as space. And I actually feel like that's a thing that is not really being talked about anymore because we don't want to do that whole thing again. But at some point, space needs to break out of the Air Force architecture. Yeah, I think the change that we've had so far has been so significant that, wow, the point you're making is true.

I think people feel like space is like higher up the priority list now. But one thing I thought was interesting, I forget if I put it in the story or not. But like in China, their space and their cybersecurity and their electronic warfare military organizations are all the same group. And it's like so much of our information is over satellite communication networks. Like why isn't the U.S. organized in a similar way? And that would be like a huge bureaucratic fight. but it is interesting to think about what actually makes sense to silent together. The other interesting aspect, though, is the last two years have been a really good example of the fact that a lot of this is on the military to figure out, but a lot of it is not.

Like, the war in Ukraine showed that SpaceX and the imagery companies are like significant national assets for the U.S. that we have all of this launch capability through SpaceX and communications through Starlink and all of these imagery companies were putting out real-time imagery of Russia invading Ukraine at a level that was good enough for most intelligence. Like, yeah, we've got 10-centimeter imagery off of the NRO satellites. But all of the planet and all of the black sky and all of the SAR imagery that we had was good enough for the rest of us to have a strong understanding of what was going on. And none of that was, you know, obviously they had contracts with the government agencies

to become the companies they are today? Yeah, I mean, there's a reason they have that imagery and the reason that we all right to see it for free. But it wasn't the government funding the development of those satellites. Like, Planet got onto their architecture in the same. They got on their architecture on their own volition, and Black Sky did, figuring out what inclinations they wanted to launch to first, and what were the things that were most important?

SpaceX made use of government contracts to get where they are, but I think they would have gotten there on their own through whoever wanted to be their customer. like they were going to figure out a way to do the things they were going to do but they are also having to structure they're not going to pay for them yeah I mean

they have to structure their products in a way that make them useful to as many people as possible and that also includes significant overlap with the things that the space development agency is working on today and that's that convergence is really interesting because you know are these companies five years ahead of the SDA

in terms of acquiring the capabilities that they need there's obviously exquisite it stuff that the military is going to need for their own com networks and their fire control and all this kind of crazy stuff. But on like the baseline communications imagery level, these companies are providing that baseline for us today.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know if you talk to somebody who worked at like the National Geospatial agency, would they say that commercial satellite imagery providers are the baseline? I think they would say no. Yeah, yeah. But I think they are providing a lot of unique capabilities, particularly around

like revisit rates, particularly around different kinds of resolution, now like hyperspectral imagery. I guess I should clarify my point. If hypothetically, if China took out all of the NRO satellites, we'd still be all right. Like, we wouldn't have specific license plates off vehicles, but we would probably have good enough understanding of the situation. I think, you know, you're maybe forgetting there are satellites that we have that we, stuff saying with the U.S. government has satellites.

I mean, we bought them. Me and you. We bought them. Jake didn't. But we did. Yeah. There's no commercial company that's doing like infrared missile launch detection. Yeah. And there's no company that's doing like electronic listening like. The Orion 300 foot antenna out of geo. Yeah.

What you are your your your point is well taken that there are all these new commercial capabilities that are much cheaper in many senses than government. And a lot of people in the Pentagon are excited about how to bring them in and make them work. I think one thing that is, you know, there's, you know, we complain about like government procurement regulations, but there are reasons that we have those rules. And I think if you look at the case of Starlink, you can see a ton of positives, but you also see a lot of issues about did they turn it off over Ukraine? Is it actually being provided to Taiwan or not? Like, I think there are people who are like, the Pentagon is in a weird position of being like very excited about everything that SpaceX can do and wanting to get that stuff and being very concerned about. about Elon Musk's behaviors. I mean, not his tweets.

More of like we think he actually does. The stuff that he does in his companies. But yeah. The companies raise the floor of what we have available to us in a way that is still somewhat unique on a global scale. I think it is really about a couple things. One is proving out like the swarm architecture in low Earth orbit. Like that is what the SDA is.

is desperately trying to copy. And we wouldn't be there without commercial companies like planet showing that that is a thing we can do. But also, I totally lost my train of thought. I mean, that was a solid first point, so I feel like you landed it. I'll leave it at that. You got there in one step. I don't think we should underestimate, though, how much these commercial companies are, like, built around selling to the government. And, like, as exciting as we are about commercial companies, like,

one of the things that we haven't seen come to fruition yet is like a lot of non-government customers for like Earth observation data. And we're getting there and there's more of it. But that's still like a nut they have to crack. Yeah. So pretty expensive. It's like Harry Stranger getting pictures of launch sites and then the DOD buying all the rest of the money. I think that's the two things. Yeah. The counting the cars in the Walmart parking lot and then that's about it. Yeah. Wasn't that Gerbertson was on that thing where like Planet was counting how many trees the earth had every day or something? Did they ever actually do that?

I just always remember that as like a thing that he would talk about. I don't think you would say trees, but they do now have a measure of basically the carbon mass of forests. And so I don't know if, I guess they're, yeah, they're doing every issue. You can do some division. I bet if you wanted to ask them, they could tell you roughly how many trees or at least like you get to be a mass of global trees. a really useful metric wild stuff wild enough i mean it is in the sense that like you know

you've seen all these scandals about you know carbon offsets and a big problem is the data is not very good so i don't know i would like to see it work it's like i i am really impressed by a lot of the very specific intelligence that these different earth observation companies can get and i'm really hoping they can monetize it in the way that they want because it is very cool and hypothetical useful information. Jake, I'm glad you got a couple thoughts into the Space Force before Tim and I violently argued about it in near

agreement. I hope you learned your lesson. Yeah. This is great. Tim, there's some people that come on this show and we're immediately like, yeah, this guy's the vibe and this guy's the vibe right here. Like, 100%. It's an honor. It's an honor. Yeah, you were so polite about

my NASA Johnson Space Center conspiracy. We'll see how many emails and phone calls I get about it. We can compare notes. We can show notes. What else have you been working on lately? You need to plug more than just these two articles that we've been talking about this whole time. Yeah, well, people should subscribe to the payload space newsletter, which is where I am writing more or less on the daily, on the very often.

And yeah, I am looking at lots of cool stuff. I'm interested right now in Rocket Lab quite a bit. They had their earnings report this week, and Peter Beck came out and said some very interesting things. He said he's going to get Neutron on the launch pad by the end of the year, which just seems wild because they haven't even hot fired their engine or built their launch pad. I was going to say, have a launch pad. Yeah, so that's like, I mean, but if any, I mean, Peter Beck is up there as an executor. We'll see what he can do. But he also said, which I thought was very interesting, because he doesn't,

You know, I've followed Rocket Lab for a while, and in a sort of SpaceX vein, they often say things that you're like, I don't know if they're going to do that, and then they do it, or at least try to. And he was talking about how he sees the future of Rocket Lab being like SpaceX, like a vertically integrated rocket and satellite maker and operator. And then he was going to operate some kind of low Earth orbit constellation providing a service that wasn't Earth observation or communications. So is it like a refueling network? Is it like space situational awareness? Is it like missile warning satellites from the Pentagon? I don't know. I want to hear the most outrageous ideas for what Peter Beck's future constellation is going to be.

I mean, I don't have any guesses, but the DOD certainly likes those black rocket launches. So they, it fits the vibe, 100%. It's five-eyes country, nice already stealth painted. we're good. It's already stealth painted. They didn't with Manta Black, actually, Jake. I don't know if you know that. Jeez.

I don't know. I got to say, I could have named specific rocket colors like that. That's impressive. They don't. I don't think they do. That's very expensive. That's like the stealth bomber paint that's like made of, you know, whatever. You force you crap blood or whatever.

Literally made on radar. Manta rays themselves, yes. Matha black. Also on tour with maneuver without regret. two anomaly and war fighting domain. That's all of them. Oh, man. Jake, what have we done?

I don't know. We have a rock festival we have to put on now, apparently. And so we've got to get the Off Nominal Band on there, too. There's some band from, like, Indianapolis that is named Off Nominal. That's right. That's right, yeah. Yeah. Try to find a way to have them on the show, but we don't really have a podcast about heavy metal music.

it's like now we do so now we are yeah this is it yikes all right

well Tim this has been awesome thanks so much for coming on I'm glad we finally we had some fun

scheduling stuff with the two machines last week so I'm glad we were able to get you on yeah I'm glad to be on

we got to do it again once we figure out some good new band names we'll do it at the show we'll organize the concert and I'll do it live at the show so great

Perfect. Jake, what else we have to talk about? The pre-show was pretty fun today. Pre-show was fun today. We mapped the ISS to try and find the leak. Figure out where the leak is. How many dragons per day or week it was leaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I pulled out the ISS owner's manual to figure out what the transfer chamber is that's leaking. Yeah, yeah. Based on our very poor back-of-the-napkin math, one cubic meter of air every day. leaving that module. So, um, even though they, didn't they seal it off?

Well, we're trying to figure out. I thought, I thought the NASA guy was like, we're trying to figure out. Yeah, but then Tim, that's what I'm sure for you.

Does that mean that part gets pumped to vacuum over time? And then they have to like, how did they have a thing to repressurize that? I don't understand how that works. That's a great question. I don't have a good answer for that. Send that along.

It doesn't make me feel better about the ISS for sure. No. Yeah, I guess that is cold comfort, actually. It's not great. It's not great. So, yeah, so if you want to hang out with the pre-show and do weird shit like that with us, you can do that. Offnom.com slash Discord and join up for five bucks a month and help support the show.

So it's great. We can get more people like Tim on. Yeah, man. And next week, we're making it very filly next week, Jake. We've got Swapna back on the show from the main line. So it's going to be, you're going to be outnumbered finally. We're going to talk about WIS and WADA, I think. Oh, my God.

Water. You don't even understand what's going on out here. This is an outrage. No one understands it, man. No one understands it. All I know, Philadelphia, watch me eat this whole chicken for 40 days in a row. Like, what is the city? Like, I don't understand what's going on.

What? I don't even know. I just referenced. I would have gone to for Philadelphia. What reference was that? I don't even say it. I'm talking about wing ball? Like, what were you referencing?

I don't understand. I guess we're going to have to talk about this after the show. I'll send you some weeks, man. I guess I don't know about this link. You got a weird city. We do. We grease the polls. We do the whole thing.

It's great. We put Chris go on the telephone polls. That's great. That's great. Yeah. So some more local Philadelphia knowledge next week on off nominal after this metal band-based show. Thanks for hanging out, Tim. See y'all.

Bye. Thanks, Tim. Thank you. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.