Off-Nominal - 146 - Stocking the Shelves

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Paul Niles, CLPS project scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, to talk about the science side of CLPS.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 146 - Stocking the Shelves - YouTubeEclipse 2024 Meetup - Off-NominalCommercial Lunar Payload Services - NASAPeregrine payloads returned useful data despite no lunar landing - SpaceNewsNASA Releases PRISM Call for Potential Lunar Surface Investigations - NASAFollow 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. Hey, buddy. It's a weird pre-recorded version of this show. So we don't have any of the jackals in the chat throwing us off this time. It's going to be so nice if you'll just have a conversation with all the hooligans harassing us with funny comments. Zero, 20-calorie, no title suggestions. We're doing it all ourselves. No title suggestions. Yeah, it's great.

That's great. Yeah, that's how good. What do we got today? We got a friend with us. We do, yeah. We've got Paul Niles with us from NASA Johnson Space Center. Paul, welcome the show. Hey, thanks for having me.

Thanks for inviting yourself on the show. We really needed it, actually. Yeah, so we've had a lot of conversations on this show recently about the clips program, the commercial lunar payload services program. And we're always kind of just shooting our mouths off because we know a little bit what we can read in articles and stuff. So, I mean, I've had you on We Martians before and you send me an email. I was like, hey, I can come on and actually show you some of the things that are actually going on with some of these payloads.

And we were like, thank you, please. this is what we actually want. Thank you for giving us this opportunity. So we're excited to talk about that today. Yeah, no, I'm super excited to be here. And yeah, I was just listening to, I'm a listener, long-time listener, you know. And it just felt like there was a story that needed to be told. So I hope I provide.

Great new model for us booking guests on the show. Loudly shout about things people work on, have those people email and be like, I should come on and help. And we're like, yeah, this is great. So I just want to put the call out that this is a great model. And you can just let us up. Yeah, exactly. Jake, before we even do drinks, I think you should talk about something up at the front of the show

so people know what's going on since we're getting close to eclipse time. Yes, yes. And I think there's a website I'm supposed to pull up about this. Yeah, yeah. So we are go for having a little bit of a pre-eclapse meetup. So if you are traveling to where I'm going to be for the eclipse, so that's going to be in the Niagara region of Canada. So if you're up in, you know, St. Catharine's Niagara Falls,

St. Catharine's Niagara Falls, like kind of that area, Buffalo, even if you want to cross over at the border and come say hello, we're going to have a little bit of meet up at Sunday, April 7th, which is the night before the eclipse. So you can go to Offnom.com slash Discord. No, that's not it. Offnom.com slash Offenom.com slash events. That's the one we're going for.

Slash events. And that's where you can get the, I mean, you can go to Discord. You could go in there and ask, but that's not what you want, if you want the address to the place. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's kind of my old stomping ground, so I'm really excited because the eclipse is going to pass right over it, and I'll be there. I'm going to be in Dayton. I am picking my son out there, so I'm not confident enough to book a meetup destination, although I am the day before, planning and going to the Air Force Museum, which I've always been dying to go to.

And I realized the other day I probably should go to the Wright Brothers stuff while I'm there. Like they have the little cycle company. I don't know if any, Paul, have you been to any of these things at Dayton. I don't know if this is a thing people have been to, I don't know. This Air Force Museum has a full-on Titan 4 just like sitting in the museum. So, and the Valkyry. So I'm pretty pumped to go see this stuff. So if you're going to be in the Dayton area, hit me up. And if you don't mind going to see a bunch of rockets and airplanes with a very excitable almost four-year-old, then we'll be there the day before.

It'll be great. Awesome. I was teaching him how to use Eclipse classes this morning. I gave it to him on, I was like, maybe we should start practicing. So I had it to him on the ride to school. Like, you got to look through this. You won't see anything but the sun,

so practice finding the sun. And he enjoyed it quite a bit. So it's going to be good. Awesome. Okay. Anyway, did you bring a drink, Jake? I did, yeah, yeah. I have another one from the beer company at my favorite store around here.

And this one is, this is the rest. Look at this. Pepino Especial. It's a space pickle. Wow. Space pickle blonde ale. So I don't know. With sunglasses and a visor.

With sunglasses. With eclipse glasses on. He can only see the sun. This is what I'm having today. I don't know what it's, I don't know. No idea if it's going to be good or not. So good. These local beers are really expensive now, too.

really climb enough. I think this bottle was like $9 or something. It's because we got some new customer in the region. Yeah, I guess. We start dragging these things up. There's this white guy down here. You'll buy anything we put a label on. Put a space helmet on this big. Yeah, so that's what we're doing.

Paul, did you bring anything with you there? Yeah, yeah. I've actually got two things. That's all right. Well, one's empty, so that's why I brought to. Nice. But I felt like it needed to be. be mentioned. So we've got the bent run moon hopper. Nice.

So this was actually from a palette of beer that was delivered to astrobotic during the mission. So I was, you know, coming in and you know, doing our operations and one day there was a palette of beer, like a pallet. Like it was stood several feet high and I was could it have fit on Peregrine to the lunar surface? It was it more than that. That's what I want to know. More or less than the payload capacity. More than the

payload capacity. Um, and then this, so the one I'm actually directing, this is space train. Space train. Local, uh, Eureka. That's Houston, Houston Brewing. So, wow. I got a Texas one. So there's that. I've got the fourth of our star base brewing batch that, uh, I've been drinking this one. I like the name of Colch. I still love you. It's the best name of all of them. That's the best name of all the, all the beards. I haven't gotten to this one yet until now. Wow, wow. Yeah, that's great.

It's a really good one. That's really funny. Yeah. I have something to report about Pepino Es Bastial. It is not just a gimmick for the label. There is definitely pickle in this. Oh, wow. It's like a pickleback.

It was fun to discover, yeah. Wasn't expecting that. All right. Well, then with that, we're rolling here. We're rolling, yeah. So maybe we will start, like, Paul, you want to just tell us what your job is and give us your credentials so we know what kind of context to put this conversation? What do you get to do at your work? Yeah, so I joined NASA in 2005.

I'm a geochemist. So I worked on Mars geochemistry, so Martian meteorites to start my career. And then I worked on Phoenix and MSL as a project on the science team for those two missions. And then in 2019, I was able to join the Clips Project Office here at Johnson as the scientist in residence at the time. Got to have at least one of those on the program, right? Right, that's exactly. You guys should have a scientist in it.

Now, to be clear, the project office is the sort of, that's the, that's how we execute. these task orders at Johnson. And then there's a headquarters office, which handles a lot of the programatics. So there are program scientists and scientists involved there. So it was the next step down. You might understand why people might think, hey, we don't need a scientist on the execution side.

But I think that we've shown that having scientists involved have been really important. Yeah, so I've been involved in the Clips office since basically it started. And yeah, it's been a fun ride. And you got to work on both of them so far, the ones that have flown, both Peregrine and Odyssey. Yeah, right, right.

So I was the... Odysseus, you Mars elitist. Jesus. Oh, whatever, Odyssey. Yeah, sorry. I got all the Mars gear on me. I know. I got a red planet on the brain here.

I should lean over and cover that one out there. Yeah, so I was the project scientist on Peregrine 1. mission and that was the lead project scientist. And then I also supported the project science on the IM1 mission. So, yeah, I've been able to be participating operations for both missions. That's cool. That's great. Can you explain the difference of the two offices that you've mentioned between the stuff that goes on in Houston and stuff that was on at D.C. and like, I just always have a hard time getting my head around because I think there's the program manager at Johnson, right, Chris Colbert, if I remember correctly.

Project Office Manager, yeah. Okay, Project Office Manager. And then, so what's the DC side? It's like how it fits into the Science Mission Directorate, or what's the breakdown responsibility? Yeah, so it's the office called SEO, E-S-S-I-O, and like most acronyms at NASA, I don't remember exactly what it is,

but it's Exploration Science Integration Office, I think. They basically have the budget, that runs and that's Joel Kearns's office that they have basically the budget that runs the clips enterprise amongst other things and and they are staffed with program scientists as well as program executives that help sort of manage the whole process so the budget comes in through them and then and they helps for sort of the formulation aspects mostly on the clip side. And then once they formulated a particular task order,

got together a set of payloads that they want, they handed off to the project office. The project office writes the request for proposals, and they're mostly involved in the vendor relationships. So they handled the RFP and then the request for proposals, and then the review reviews that go through for the vendors. But as far as payloads are concerned, that's all formulated at the headquarters level.

Obviously, the project office folks have some input in the reviews, but that's not managed by us directly. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of an interesting process, right, because you've got like all these sort of disparate payloads that have to come together. And I can't, I think that I'm sure the ultimate dream is just like you could just reach into the bucket and grab whatever payload you want, any 10, and they would just fit on the space graph. And you wouldn't have to think about it. But that's not actually true, right? because you've got like, you know, different sizes of payloads and power requirements, mass.

And then, of course, like, the science they want to do, right? Do they need to be on, like, a specific side or the top of the spacecraft or can they be inside? What part of the moon are they useful to study in? So, like, what does that look like to sort of select your palate? Like, you know, how do you put that together and how is that, you know, what part of the decision tree does those two offices and all the scientists and everything where that will fall together? Yeah, so the original, if you guys remember the shots on goal aspect, this one clip's first got stood up. And these first two task orders were part of that, sort of this initial phase

where they wanted shots on goal. And so they basically asked both NASA and academia, what are the payloads that you guys have lying around that we can throw on, right? And we literally just told the vendors, you could fly whatever you want. Here's a list pick, you know. And yeah, so the goal of those missions was much more of, let's get off the ground quickly. Let's make these things happen.

And the science was sort of riding in the backseat. But as we move forward, that has progressed. There's been a lot of interest in, you know, obviously making more targeted science investigation. So the prism process, it was stood up at the headquarters level. And that is an, that's a program where they're really trying to accomplish to Cato level science. And it's really kind of a mini discovery kind of a process where they're asking for suites of instruments that are, will accomplish, you know, comprehensive science goals. And that comes with a landing site too. So,

so the so a prism payload is picked it gets to you know sort of select the landing site that it wants to go to and it's got a set of pillows that attached to it now what can happen after that prison payload is picked is that the additional payloads are added on and and that can happen sort of in the process of the of the formulation so that that has resulted in some interesting combinations and you know Once you kind of have an idea of where the spacecraft's going, then you can really think about, you know, what payloads go well with it. You know, and I'd like to think that one of these days we're going to have sort of, you know, the Walgreens, the Walmart of the Amazon superstore of payloads.

And you could just sort of, you know, formulate these missions by putting together, you know, whatever you got, whatever's sitting there on the shelf available. Add to cart, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The Prism thing that you're talking about is that that's like a, I'm curious to just understand that how it actually works. Is that a person or group of people that put together the proposal and one of them gets selected to go forward? Or is that like a committee that puts together a bunch of Prism-like ideas?

Yeah, originally it was the, it was actually targeted. So they said, hey, we want to go to this spot on the moon. give us your best instrument suite. And so what happened was they asked the science community to do that. Science community is a variety of scientists get together into teams and led by... They're like PI led, right? A PI lead, yeah, exactly. Okay, okay.

So it would be a PI led, you know, instrument suite to attack that particular problem. I think that was for Brutheism Domes, I think that one was the one, which you're going to have to forgive me. all sort of run together. I think that's the CP 11 or 12. Anyway, um, forget it. Never mind. I will not get into the nominal picture. I'm Googling. That's a really long story and it doesn't need to be told. Um, okay. Yeah, so, so the Grudehausen Domes mission, that one was, was originally that way.

And then what happened for subsequent ones was, hey, let's, we'll be open to any landing site. So propose your best science and your best annual location. So that turned out to be, I think, I think, you know, it allowed for a lot more robust competition amongst various PI-led instrument teams. That's interesting. So I don't think there was like, that's like almost like an anchor payload really then, right? Like this prison thing would be like sort of like a core, you know,

like we're building the science around this one thing and then we're just, everything else is ornaments that go on the tree, right? Yeah, exactly. Makes me wonder, though, that like, is that level, because that's lander agnostic at that point. They don't have a, like, they're probably payload classes, right? You got 100 kilograms, 500 kilograms, whatever, but it doesn't matter what Lander they're proposing,

their proposal matches to. Yeah, exactly. So this is all before we've selected the vendor. and so the requirements of the payload are written into the request for proposals to the vendor. And so the vendor's proposals have to correspond to the requirements that we have developed on the payload side. It makes me wonder about like a future version

where we have a couple landers that are actively working if the landers would get pulled into that package as well where it's like, I'm going to do this mission with this lander for this amount of money and you're going out and winning like the whole set because there might be certain vehicle features or capabilities that you'd want to take advantage of and at some point down the line you'd be choosing between like full on sets right i'm just curious if that is something structure wise now probably doesn't make sense but does that track with like a future possible direction or are there not are there more benefits to the agnostic nature of these

suites than there would be for like a fully integrated thing I think that the selection of the lander or matching the lander to the payload set happens in this proposal process. So the requirements are written. It's part of the RFP. There's a free and open competition. And then if one of the landers turns out to have a better design that suits these payloads, then that kind of comes out in the process. You could see that various aspects of the mission.

become really hard for some of the vendors based on the requirements that we're placing. So we want to be in a situation where, you know, we have a good competition. So we're not putting these requirements that are so excessive that only one vendor can. Your name must start with eye and end with S.

Otherwise. Yeah, yeah. But how does that match to like, you know, if there's a world where Astrobotic has a whole line of landers that make use of a lot of the rovers that they have, there might be people out there that have ideas for certain instruments

that would also be helped by having like three or four rovers that can do secondary tasks or something, would that be part of the requirement? Like, you have to put this payload on a lander, but then there's these other payloads that need mobility. Like, would it be abstracted to that? And even if there is only one that matches, at least you're sending a signal to the market that, you know, hey, intuitive machines or whatever, you should develop a thing that kind of matches this capability because people are realizing that they could take advantage of that sort of stuff. Like, is that more shaping the direction, or is that even then too particular?

The first, the first Grutais and Dome's prism call, actually the proposal that was picked had a, had a rover that was part of the whole suite. So they proposed a whole rover that would be part of it as a pillar that they manage. Then at subsequent prism calls, we actually said, hey, if you want, if you want to use a rover, we're going to have a vendor provided rubber. So they didn't have to pay for the rover itself and the vendor provides the rover. So we're actually trying two different methods on that. And we'll see how it turns out. I think the jury is still out on what the best way to do this is. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there's just like even just talking about this, like there's like all these different things that are popping into my head. Like what if this? What if this? Like, you know, like what if, you know, you've got payloads that need to be subbed out after the task order has been, you know, awarded, right? You've got, whatever, some payload falls behind and it's like, we're not going to make the launch, and you pull it off. Then you've got to go find another one, but the lander and the missions are already been picked, and so you have to like narrow your set that way. And yeah, there's all sorts of like weird things that kind of shake out when you're trying to put together these missions in such a, such a Lego brick kind of way, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it's really just, one of the great things I've really enjoyed with this is, is, is, the ability for us to sort of learn as we go, because we have so many iterations at this, we're like in a way,

we're kind of like the vendors themselves and that we're learning, what's the best way to put science together in a structure like this? You know, what's the best way to have in this situation? We've definitely had these situations where, you know, payloads are, you know, maybe they get taken off, maybe we want to sub them out.

Like how it's the best way for that to happen, how do we get the best science out of the resulting mission and things like that? So it's really the process of starting with the shots on goal environment and moving to more and more science heavy missions has been really helpful in making sure we get things right. And we're still making mistakes.

So we're always hoping to make better mistakes tomorrow. That's that's good. Same, which is why we brought you on this show. What did we get the most wrong? What did you stop your car when we were talking about this last time and email us? No, I don't think there was anything major. It was just like, so from the project, so one of the things that we developed that I helped develop on the project's office was a role called the project scientist. So the project scientist is the job I did for astrobiic.

we have a project scientist for each one of these past quarters. And their job is to sort of shepherd all of the NASA pilots through this whole process and through operations. So our job is to make sure that the NASA science gets done as best efficiently and, you know, as best efficiently and, you know, and effectively as possible. And that's a job that I sort of felt like you guys were sort of, There was some misunderstanding about how that was being done. And I wanted to come on and just say, hey, no, actually science has been a big part of how all of this is being considered and being formulated.

And even all the way through the operations. So we're there in the vendor facilities, you know, interfacing with the vendors directly and helping to make sure that those science operations go off the best way possible. So you mentioned there's like, in case these first two missions, it's like, you know, what do we have lying around? Let's just get some stuff just kind of going so we can try this out. And then you've got these prism calls coming in that are presenting sort of new purpose-built, you know, payloads or payload suites for these kind of things. The stuff that gets added after, is that still coming from the sort of, you know, the Kmart bin of stuff we have in the back room? or is there going to be like new proposal opportunities for step coming in to the not anchor payload? Like, and how does that kind of work?

I'm kind of curious what the pipeline ends up looking at. I know there's probably like a backlog to start, but as you, presumably if you fly a couple of these a year, you're going to clear out the backlog of instruments reasonably quick. I don't know. You tell me, is John doesn't have a hundred instruments lying in the background somewhere? I don't know, but like what does that look like from a pipeline perspective? As far as I know, I don't think we have anything like super lying on the shelves. We don't have a storage room or anything yet. I'm hoping for that Indiana Jones warehouse.

I've been in whatever building resource prospector is in, and that sure looked like a storage room if you ask me. There's just a lot of random stuff around there. It was like the scenes of programs gone by. There's that weird rover that's always, you know, like the pressurized rover. Yeah, that thing, like a lot of weird stuff in there. So you should go in that building. you don't think there's stuff lying around.

Building nine, there you go. Yeah, we don't have a Clips warehouse yet. There you go. We're going to start taking stuff. Just fly the resource prospector model that was in that building. Just send it there, test it out. See what happens. It's got to be fairly super cheap.

So there's a manifesting board, which is run at headquarters level. And STMT and ATSDMB. So human exploration technology, all of those are our participants in that. And so in that, through that board, then a variety of payloads can get flown. And as you've seen, you know, we've got not just SMD payloads on these missions. There's SDMD payloads and I don't think we have a ton of ESD payloads yet, but maybe one or two. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot to keep track. If we have over 40 payloads that have been,

that are on track to be even flown. And one of the interesting things is that we've actually got multiple copies of several of these. As part of this manifesting process, it was like, hey, we need more than one copy of this instrument to, you know, add on to one of these other payloads. So there's been a lot of, a lot of opportunities to get other payloads flown multiple times. So I think that's been a real, that's a real boom to the whole philosophy, which is the

other thing I wanted to talk about here, but, but I don't know. I have a payload question real quick, though. You mentioned that there's stuff that was existing or things that you have multiples of. Thus far is, how did those payloads become themselves? Like, how did they end up where they're at right now? Did they fall off other programs? Were they things that have flown previously, but there were spares? Is that a complete happenstance right now that you have ended up with these payloads that are available?

Or is there a process that those things are constantly getting developed and slotted in when the time is right within the agency? For the spare, for these first set of payloads that we got from academia and from NASA, the ones that were just sitting on the shelf. That's what I'm wondering. Like, what the hell is this shelf? Why do we have a shelf of moon payloads? It has been my question all along. Yeah. So a lot of them were instruments that flew.

Either they had an engineering model that was flight ready from something that had flown before or it had been developed for a mission that never went. Or it was a copy of something that had been flown multiple times. So the Letts instrument, for example, example on PM1 on the astropotic paragraph mission was a radiation sensor instrument that they've flown on Orion's and multiple other missions. So just building another copy was like pretty straightforward for them. So while it maybe wasn't sitting on the shelf, you know, they had all of the parts. They knew exactly how to build these things. You know, it was able to... All the NRA was done on it. So they just need to manufacture one. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then another example would be Pitmus, which was the one of the ion trap mass spectrometer that was on Peregrine. That one was originally part of the ESA payload in an ESA rover.

So it had already sort of been developed and there was a partnership between ESA and NASA Goddard to bring that, bring that forth. So that, you know, that's how these things kind of, a lot of these things. A lot of these things are sitting in that in that valley of death, right? Like you have the TRL, you know, the TRL like 6, 7, 8, you know, kind of we can get you get funding programs that gets you up to that stage where right before flight, but you never, but getting that instrument to a flight level readiness is sometimes pretty hard. It's hard.

So is there a idea or is it possible within the structure of clips that there might be a funding track focused on clips for lander agnostic payloads that to like, as Jake's saying, if you clear out the backlog really fast, if everything goes as we envision it and there's a bunch of these like you're going to be pretty empty after a couple flights. So

now that we have this path, is there a like funding or development pipeline that can be set up to develop a string of these and kind of bulk by useful payloads and restock the shelves rather than just letting them get restocked by way of program cancellations, which

like the saddest way to stock the shelves. Yeah, I think there is, there is an effort of foot to do some standalone instruments. So Prism have an additional program alongside the Prism process where we developed these standalone payloads that could be sort of picked. You know, they would end up on the shelf and then you would be able to pick them for, for, for a mission. Yeah, so that is something I think is really close to coming out. I'm not sure what the statuses of it is.

You know, obviously all this budget uncertainty has but that's definitely something that could develop a lot of payloads on the shelves, you know, some would say. That idea has been thought about a lot. Yeah, we're not cutting the budget. We're stocking the clips shelves, okay?

That's what's happening here. We can't fly these Venus parts to the moon, though. That's the thing, Jake, you know? Yeah. We can't fly these Mars sample return vehicles to the moon. I mean, that's actually a question that I wanted to bring up. Like, you know, how flexible can we make this program? And we're getting, you know, we're trying out this sort of like, you know,

location on a body and vehicle of transportation agnostic. Like, those are variables that you don't get to lock down now. Just kind of makes a proposal. But, like, could we have a sense, like, here's just a payload that will work anywhere in the solar system. I'm just looking for a ride somewhere. Like, you know. Yeah, no.

I mean, I think that a lot of the payloads that we've got actually were on missions that were going other places. So, you know, obviously the radiation sensors are things that fly at a lot of places. There's actually a lot of payloads that are like the mass spectrometers. You know, they're pretty useful no matter where you put them. And they could be used in different ways. ways. So actually, that's kind of an interesting, it's really interesting thing as to how you could recombine things. Now, a sample return, I've got a half-baked idea that I've been trying to get people interested in, but it's my own personal. This is the best place for a half-baked ideas.

Yeah, yeah. Everything we say is happening. That's works out. Yeah. This is not a NASA. This is not a NASA. No, no. But if this works, we're putting an off-nominal sticker on it. That's my only, that's the only rider. We'll let you roll it out here as long as you do that. If you're listening in from NASHQ, just cover your ears for a second, and then we're going to hear this great idea. So, spin launch. And he's going to roll out spin launch right now, Jake. It's going to happen.

So the question is, is what if you could take advantage of the clips program to help deliver some of these sample return payloads? So instead of flying one sample returner mission, you fly eight you know so it you build eight copies of it and that way you get you get the savings from building many copies and and then also you get you don't have to worry so much about it working the only time that you fly it and and then you know it's sort of like the mer rovers we always say the mer rovers cost 400 million each right but they were 800 million that really was a million because there were two of them.

But you were able to divide that too. And so you could use that as the number. Or if you could divide the sample return payloads by eight and take advantage of some of the aspects of the hopes model to deliver these payloads to the surface. So that's the half-bake idea. I think that there's a lot of baking that needs to happen as far as how you split up.

I don't know, man. aspects and the, you know, is the rocket eclipse provided? Is the, is the space clips provided or not? Is the, you know, how do the sampling happen? Do you a rover that goes in collect samples still? You know, but anyway. How many helicopters, you know, that's a major thing? Exactly, exactly.

Are the helicopters, you know, vendor provided or are they not provided? I'm just thinking about budgets. And I'm like, you know, we always keep, well, there's this JPL RFP about, what's the thing called Jake, it's like the commercial Mars services or whatever. Yeah, they're more than just landers. But, yeah, I mean, if.

But it isn't landers, to be clear. It's not landers. No, they're tipping their feet in the water for like orbiter's and consats and things like that, right? Yeah. Well, I'm just saying, if we, did an equivalent budget on this half-baked idea of Paul's. And we're like, here's the Mars Sam-R-R-R-Turn budget,

divide it by eight, and award that to eight companies. Do you think none of them would work out to get something down to the service? You don't want to do eight companies. That's a ton of, that's a ton. That's a ton. All right, four. Everyone gets two shots. Everyone gets two shots.

You got to split it up. That's even better. Then they're going to get, like, you know, how much is, what's the latest Mars-Samp return budget line, Jake? On that estimate. 9-50? is the max they can spend this year, right? $950 million.

Two bill apiece. Like, figure this out. Get to the surface and launch something off of it. It's just then all the other stuff, right? Get it back and do the thing. Yeah, yeah. The thing that I always think about about clips, which I really like about it,

is that at the end of the 10, you know, we've had these literal 10-year master contracts. At the end of the 10 years, it's not like it's the end of a sample return, if the way we're currently formulating it, we're going to be done. And then if you want to do it again, you're going to have to do it all over again, right? Yeah, yeah. With clips, if the end of 10 years, all of a sudden, all of that money has invested,

you've invested it into a capability that you can now take advantage of at a much cheaper price with much more reliability because the, you know, assume, I mean, my assumption is that These guys are really smart, the gals and gals that are running these missions. And they are incredibly, you know, they have the capabilities. We have the technology. It's just really a matter of if rather than when they're successful. And they have developed this, you know, capability that we'll be able to utilize. And at the end of these 10-year contract we've got, we're going to be able to take advantage

of that and we'll be able to build on all of that progress that we've made. So it's really much more of a buildup process, which is not, I mean, we have a little bit of a buildup, you know, with planetary missions because we're able to utilize various technologies we develop in one for the next one, but it doesn't save us so much money as it can possibly. Yeah, like the resulting asset is not as obvious as the resulting asset of a full-on, machines that has flown a handful of times of the moon. Right. Well, I mean, it's hard, right? Like, I mean, to think of even something, like,

what's a spacecraft we've flown, like, from a planetary perspective, like, the most? And it's like, you know, the things that come to mind are, like, you know, the Maven Bus, which is also a Cyrus Rex, which is also, which is also, like, there's a few things like that. There's, like, the Insight, slash Phoenix slash Mars, South Return Land, or, like,

that's, you know, a common bus. Even just, like, the aeroshell that goes to Mars, we've flown that, roughly that same thing, like, you know, half dozen, eight times. All these Canada are. Yeah, all these Canada arms. But you don't get like mass production benefits when you make five or seven over over 20 years.

Like you just don't get any benefit with that, right? And then of course, like there's no one else buying these things from NASA. And so there isn't like a market incentive for say Lockheed Martin to like find a way to do this aeroshell at one tenth the cost and sell it to 100 people. Like there's not there's no opportunity to do that. Why would they? Right. And so, yeah, I think you're right about that.

It's tough. But I think, I mean, this idea sounds a lot more baked than you made it out to be, Paul. I'm going to call you out on that one. Because it's, I mean, it's smart. That's like one of the biggest, that's one of the biggest criticisms of Mars Sam or return, right? Like, no one's disputing that doing it is not worth it. Because it's like the most critical science that any, like, the planetary science community has agreed. This is number one priority for like 30 years.

Like no one disagrees this is the top thing that we should be doing. But how we do it is a whole other thing, right? And you're right. Once we're done with this, it's done. And then like, that's it. None of this is reusable in any kind of way, right? So maybe $10 billion is worth it for Mars not for a term. But to only do it once and then not have anything left to show for it except for that one ounce of science, it's tough.

It's a tough pill to swallow. Whereas if we had something, you know, that we could use over. it's exciting to think about. This all like distributed Samberg Turn from the Moon thing would also please a lot of the people that are like, look at all these technologies that are transferable from the moon to Mars.

Like you would certainly feed forward whatever base technological jumps you need to make in terms of getting that rocket to the lunar surface and how it interacts with the lander itself, the Regolith, you know, does this like completely blow the lander apart when it takes off so then there's no more useful payload after that?

Or can you still do stuff on the lander beyond that? Like, can it coexist, or is it the only payload? Yeah. And you get a rapid iteration cycle, too, because, like, back and forth to the moon a lot easier than back and forth to Mars, right? That's always been my biggest thing about, like, the moon and Mars stuff. It just, like, yeah, regardless, actually, I had, I chat with Andrew Jones on Miko earlier today, Jake, about Chinese space program, and he was trying to convince me

that they're not wasting time in lowerth orbit on their space station, and they're not going to get stuck because they are getting a lot of like engineering and integration and operational reps. And that's the same thing with the whole moon to Mars debate. It's like I get that, yes, not 100% of these things line up from the moon to Mars, but if it's right there. Like there's so much we can do it, it's right there.

I just, it drives me crazy that we're not doing stuff on it regardless. And we'll get so many reps in. And yeah, think about it at the end of the first, iteration of Clips, the collective experience base that has been built up. Another thing I always ran about is like companies don't have experience, the people do. The amount of people that will have worked on a mission that went to a planetary body will be enormous compared to where we were when we started it. And that has huge benefits that whether or not the same engineering thing works in both places, the people do. And that has huge benefits as well. Yeah, it's an argument to say

that like something like Clips program is just a package around away from NASA to train a really great engineering talent workforce, right? Like you're just getting a whole bunch of people that get to do real on the ground experience, flying missions and doing stuff in space, right? And whether the program amounts to anything, those people still come out of that. And then they go on and found companies and make amazing stuff, right? So, yeah. Yeah, if you look at like just the number of share number of payloads, you know,

not to mention the vendors, the, you know, 40 something, 50, almost 50 payloads, payload teams, all of those people getting flight experience, all of those people getting, you know, real, real world, you know, space mission experience. It's really amazing to work on this program and to see that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, science perspective, too, like, like, we're talking to engineers right now, but you're exactly right.

Like, scientists, I mean, how, like, as a, you tell me, as a planetary scientist, how many opportunities in your career do you get to be a PI for an instrument that goes to another planet? Like for many people, that's a zero to one number, right? It's a lot of reticago. And so, you know, just the opportunity to just like blast these payloads like rapid fire at the moon is like a great, great way to give a whole bunch of scientists opportunities to like, you know, execute an investigation end to end, which is pretty cool. Yeah, and consider most of that work happens before even launch from the video I side. and all that preparation and all that that experience that's not lost that's that's you know somebody's

you know somebody's banked that and they could take that to the next project and it'll make their project the next project better yeah yeah i got some things i got some questions here i may or may not be circling 20 minutes back in the show but um you mentioned that the first couple eclipse missions were the shots on goal mentality of like you know to get some payloads that, I mean, let's say it, are likely to crash on the moon. And we either got more of them or this one wasn't that expensive in the first place so we can fund another one. There's probably a lower, there's tiers of payloads of like, you're not going to send Viper on the first one of the first eclipse mission. Like we're going to wait on that one for a minute.

But how does that come up against like, or how do these two tracks either coexist or diverge where over time, the more. clips missions that go, you want to work your way up the tech tree of payloads. But at the same time, you might be onboarding new clips providers or new landers altogether. Are there these tiers that could kind of be sorted out? And it's like, these are first flight appropriate payloads, and these are second flight appropriate payloads. Because you're going to have, in a handful of years, the third Intuitive Machines flight flying at the same time as the first draper, first firefly or whatever. So how do you manage the like, different payload lanes that there are in a world where we might onboard eight clips providers

in the first 10-year segment. Yeah, the, let's see, I'm going to be careful here. The, I'm not going to speak for how we, you know, are really super, you know, the overall philosophy here. Just in general, it makes sense. Paul's half-bake segment. From this point forward, Paul's half-baked ideas. No, this is just, this is in half-baked.

This is just, I'm going to speak to answer that more in general, I think. So in general, it makes sense that we don't have too many vendors in the final pool. So if you give out, like, if you have eight different vendors all doing things, then none of them will get enough money to survive because there's just not enough money in the overall pool to support that many. So there's obviously a strong desire at NASA to get as much competition and as much innovation as we can in. So there's that balance that I think people are trying to strike for how that works. And then obviously, you know, as we move forward, I don't think that I've sort of, I don't think there's any kind of, there's any kind of element as far as like, after these first couple missions,

I think that we've pretty much moved on and the RFPs that go out are the things that we want to fly and we pick the best vendor for that flight. There isn't any kind of worry about path performance at this point. Yeah. I guess that tracks with what you said about trying to make sure that you're funding multiple multiples of these payloads in the first place to get more benefits

because either you're able to refly it or you can fly it again to a different spot altogether and both are successful. Like, there's no failure scenario if you were to fund every payload three times. You know, the failure scenario is we got data from one spot rather than data from three, but not, we didn't get data at all, and this was wasted money. Yeah, and past performance is something that we haven't in the past used, but is something that is going to start becoming something that is added to that, to the mix. So, so that's, you know, I mean, I guess it's probably going to,

too. I'm not in charge of that. I mean, flipping on side, like what I would think would be that you don't, having a requirement like you must have flown X times is, is silly in a way because amount of flights isn't a requirement. Like, you know, what you're asking for is a certain level of reliability or robustness. And you prove that, whether through, you know, a capability demonstration and testing or from relevant flight experience. Like, you know, the way you prove that can come from different directions. But at the end of the day, you know, you guys probably just say, like, we want this level of, you know, assurance that our thing is going to get to the end and

tell us how you're going to do that. And then you look at the proposals. Like, that's just how it goes, right? So that's true. Because right now, based on, like, if you had a payload that needed to be on the top of a lander facing up into the sky, neither of the competitors that have flown yet have done that. So, which one would you, it doesn't matter, you know, like, we're both so working on that. It's staying in a vertical situation. So, Yeah. So the LRA is the best example of that. That's the lunar retro-replictor,

that sort of passive thing that you could shoot lasers off of to get ranging. I will never understand that, by the way. I will never understand of those things work. I'm never going to look it up. I just like thinking that it's magic. That's how I appreciate LRAs. It's just a mirror, man. I know, but at some extent it feels magical.

So whatever. There is optimism that it will work for the, for the IM1 Again, see my comment. Those things are magical. I don't understand. You bounce it off the moon underneath the lander to hit the retro reflector and then back on.

Again, I'm never going to look this up. I'm going to keep it magic. This is how I prefer to interface with these. Oh, wow. I have one on the same. Oh, go ahead. No, no, no. Go ahead.

This was something I, I don't know if we mentioned this the last time we were talking, but in a situation relevant to you, as having interacted with the Peregrine mission, you get like a day into the mission, right, and it's clear you're not going to the lunar surface. What is the process? I think we were spitball on this with Elizabeth,

which is probably when you emailed us, but what is the process for running through the payloads that you have on board and saying, we can't do this mission that we thought we were going to do, we could probably do this set of missions. Who could make use of these things? Is there a process for that today? Is this something that is weird

and it totally depends on what the situation is? Because I did see a thing in Space News today Jeff Faust wrote from the Woodlands, Jake's favorite place in America, I think. That, you know, here are the payloads that return data on Peregrine. So, you know, what was the process like for understanding who was going to be able to make use

of a high elliptical orbit? Yeah, so that was from a session that we ran. at LPSC, which was really successful. And we got to present, the payloads got to present some of the preliminary results. I think Jeff was in the room for it. So before the mission started, we actually had a whole conversation in the payloads about contingency planning.

And we actually brought up the situation where, what if the spacecraft, the spacecraft doesn't make it to the moon and we're you know left in in a cis lunar space what kind of operations would you guys want to do and so we have that whole conversation one of the pilots told me I was crazy and this is you know we should tell you what so not to be named but P.m. I was crazy but the but but it turned out that that was exactly what happened and you know we were able to really rely on some of those initial thoughts that we come up with.

One of the biggest challenges that we faced was that the mission was never designed to operate the payloads during in CISL lunar space. So the spacecraft had a lot of features in it that were designed to only be useful on the surface that would enable a lot of the payload operation. So that was a real challenge for everybody involved. And all of the people came through. the astrobiotic team and the NASA Pailor teams really came through an amazing way is to enable all of that data to be collected. So it wasn't just a, oh, we'll just turn it on and collect the data.

It was never, it was never that easy. So, and especially given the power and the data constraints that we had. So yeah, that was a process where, you know, that was what the project scientist was supposed to be there for, is to help manage the process of who gets to operate first, who gets to operate second, How do we prioritize the various things that we want to accomplish in a situation where we're not going to get everything that we want? Yeah, that's interesting. The contingency planning. That strikes me as like a thing that is both like really fun and really tragic to think about.

You know, like no one wants to like go down that path. Like what's going to happen if this doesn't go the way I want? But then it's like kind of interesting. Like, oh, yeah, well, what I could do is, you know, all the all the juices start flowing. Well, actually, if I did this and this and this, I could actually get some data that would be in some data that would be in some. some way. So let's try that. You know, let's, let's go for it. So that's kind of an interesting thought process. That's probably a fun meeting to be in. I don't know. If you guys did like, if you workshop. It's frustrating to me. Get a bunch of pizza and donuts and just like, just,

you know, get a whiteboard and see what you can come up with. But it's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of fun. Yeah. And it turned out it was really interesting. Like, so Pitness, you know, the mass spectrometer was able to collect data on the, on the, you know, the degree, what, what the nature of the stuff that was flying outside of the spacecraft was. That was really something that was actually operationally interesting. Same with Nervis. The pictures they nervous took were operationally interesting for everybody involved. So the Natsin pilots were able to sort of do a little bit of help out on the operations side.

Were there more ideas on what to do in that time than there was time to do it before Perrigan was sent into the Earth? sphere? Like, did you have more of a list to work through, or was that you kind of like, well, we got what we could in that orbit? Yeah, I mean, there was the amount of stuff that we could do with the instruments in orbit. I mean, these were all designed. I mean, we're all thinking about operating them on the surface. Obviously, there were a variety of things that were coming up with operations, though radiation instruments really interested in operations through the the radiation bands. I'm not a, I'm a geologist, so. But the various radiation bands were on Earth. There were, obviously, more information

would have been interesting from PITMAS as far as the system or space environment, especially if you could kind of get rid of the background that we were seeing. I'm not sure that would be so useful. But obviously all of the experiments wanted to operate as much as they could to get as much information because they're going to operate again almost all. I think all of them will fly again.

So all the operational experience was useful for the future. Is it even like I imagine it would even be useful just to like power it up and just send some information back and forth and just, you know, just turn it on and use it, whether the data is useful or not just but just to have that. that operational experience of doing it while it's actually in space somewhere far away, right? Yeah, we did some operational tests where we actually had when we had Blander at Astrobotic. It hadn't been shipped yet. And they actually like plugged it in, the antenna into a like thing so that the antenna was shooting. You know, we were broadcasting through the antenna to back to Astrobotic. And, you know, there's obviously, it went to like a computer rack and a computer wreck was simulating DSN.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of, like, things that weren't particularly realistic, but at least all the instruments were all in the lander, and they were operating, they were using the power that was from the lander. So all of that was really good. And then so doing that, again, in space, where everything was operating on its own. Yeah, that's an extraordinarily valuable experience.

Interesting. Wow, okay. What's the next thing that you're on? Yeah, that's an example. Yeah. Yeah. So I think I'm going to, I'm stepping away from, from clips a little bit. We'll see.

Working on the sample return. It's going into PI mode. No, I do actually have a lab. One of the things I do, one of my other hats I wear is we run a triple oxygen isotope lab, where we analyze samples from various places. So meteorites and martial meteorites. We're interested in understanding. So we're really interested in Mars samples.

When I come back, we'll have a lot of interesting analysis that we could do with that lab. But yeah, my next step is, I've been working a lot on, so I want to kind of try and focus more on the science and then focusing on the other hat I'm wearing is I do, human science objectives, human science planning. So planning for science on the moon, I mean on Mars, I'm sorry. So I've been assisting with some planning.

So we did a science objectives workshop a couple years ago. So we've been involved with trying to formulate what a science objectives for humans to Mars is going to be. So that's going to be, that's an ongoing process. Yeah. An ongoing process. Yeah, it sure is. It's a journey, some would say.

A journey too. Used to be. Once and future. Oh, dear. Okay. You're wearing that. You're going to get shipped for it. I even have, I think this is a Marr's shirt too.

So I asked for it today. But no, this is great, Paul. I'm really glad you came on because this has been helpful. I may have more questions. I'll have to kind of think about it. We might have to do a round too. We'll think about it and see what we come up with. I have a feel.

Yeah. But this is good because now I can think about these in sort of different ways. Sounds good. Thanks for the conversation. It was really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Next week, Anthony, you are not around, right? Am I being scheduled right here?

Yeah. You're off on a trip somewhere. A four-year delayed trip to France. To France. To France? I had this trip. in April of 2020 and I never went. So, here we go.

Good, good, yeah. Yeah, so I will be writing the show and it's going to be Wee Martians takeover. Shocker. We've got planetary science takeover again. So one of my friends, Simon is coming on the show. He was at LPSC, as we mentioned on the show today. He's going to give us a little bit of a on the ground report about things they went on. There's some interesting stuff, I think, about sample return and,

maybe starship and why that is at all related to planetary science today. So some fun stuff to talk about. So that's what we're going to get into. I wonder why. There was, yeah, and nothing relevant in the last week or two. Nothing happened in the last week ago. I'm still like mind blown over the imagery from that flight. It was so good.

It's real good. It was so good. I'm still waiting for, I want a night launch so that I can stand up in my roof and see it. I think I'll be able to see it, but just not during the day. It's been too bright so far. So, we'll see it. I mean, or we should just go at some point. Yeah, or we could go, yeah.

We could go to it. It's just that I'm not in a point in my life where I can get an FAA license one day and be there the next. I'm not at that spot. No, it's tough. Because, yeah, there's a kid in my life that really likes Starship. but I will have you know I've mentioned this before that he really just wants to watch

the Falcon Heavy demo mission and even when I showed him Starship he still wanted to watch that so it's not even like he's a Spake-Sex Homer he's just a Falcon Heavy kind of guy so yeah yeah we should go to the one of those it would help if they put the launch site somewhere remotely accessible so that would be

yeah said the guy who lives in Mexico it's like pretty bizarre statement yeah I mean you can literally like like fall off the rocket into Mexico Oh, it's that close. And yet still, it's still very far away.

It's still impossible for you. Yeah. Still impossible. All right, y'all. All right. Great show. At home slash events. Go to meet up with Jake.

Slash events. Hit me up here in Dayton. Yeah. It's going to be great. Eclipse is going anywhere. Are you, you probably going nearby, Paul? You've got a short drive. I mean, it's probably as long of a drive as I've got, honestly.

It's also nine hours. Which may as well be. it's the whole way across the country so yeah all right everybody see you later all right bye bye everyone one two three four five five four three two one end of death