Off-Nominal - 153 - Gyros on the Butt

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

Jake and Anthony catch up on the news, and Anthony returns from vacation with a few reviews of some recent Smithsonian Air and Space Museum changes.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 153 - YouTubeNASA and Boeing moving ahead with Starliner test flight after propulsion issues - SpaceNewsMDA Space joins Starlab Space commercial space station venture - SpaceNewsSpaceX sets date for next Starship flight, explains what went wrong the last time | Ars TechnicaSatTrackCam Leiden (b)log: The NROL-146 payloads: observing the 'train' of 21 Starshield satellitesNASA and ESA complete agreement for cooperation on Mars rover mission - SpaceNewsPrivate mission to save Hubble Space Telescope raises concerns, NASA emails show : NPRFollow 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

Oh, Jake, we're sort of back. We're sort of back. We're going to see how so back we are. We're going to see if the Mexican Federal Electricity Commission is interested in maintaining the show for an entire 60 minutes. That's going to be the name of the game today. Jake has had three power outages today. So we decided we were going to part of the show, so we had a series of unfortunate events, as you might be aware, if you are someone who watches. the show and noticed a two-week gap in your feet.

Sometimes, you know, guest things happen and then travel happens in the same in a bad order, and that's what happened. So one of the segments we were going to do today, Jake, was a review of recent changes to the National Air and Space Museum down at the Smithsonian because on my trip I was down in D.C. So we're going to do that, but we're only going to do that segment during the time at which your power's out. So if it never goes out, no one will hear that. If it does go out, I'm going to have to jam all my content in your power outage.

Love it. That's what we're going to try to do. And then you will have to watch the show back to get the content. I'll have to guess. Yeah, yeah, I'll come back and be like so. Yeah. So that sounds cool. I will say one, this is just a little, the only tidbit I will give you is that Will,

my three and a half year old, almost four year old now, really liked Neil Armstrong's space suit and started learning one small step for man. Right. So he says that quote now and then. And one day I asked him, like, do you remember who said that? And he was like, um. Darth Vader like we'll go with it

now I'm just imagining him being like one small step for man you're like one small step for oh man get it right man get it right that was the one lie

that Neil Armstrong went to his grave with right yeah we're all aligned on that where's where we at I don't I don't know if it matters I just want us to be the show where we debunk lies from the 60s space race where no you want to know what happened was faking it and

neil armstrong was totally lying let me tell you i'll tell you exactly what happened can you know how uh in when you do a podcast or you do a show like this you get show fugue and you just don't remember oh for sure for sure you think neil armstrong didn't have show fugue when he stepped onto the freaking moon like the guy has no idea what like i'm like 10 minutes later he has no recollection of what he said he had to go back to the tape like everybody else and it was all garble, she's like, I don't mind what I said, man. It's also one of those that like, everyone who heard it without the letter A in it,

totally knew what he meant. Like, come on, you knew what he was saying. You got the point. Everyone knew and saying. Everyone knew. Yeah. All right. Anyway, that's that.

So what do you got? You drinking something fun? You drinking coolant for your power system or something? What do you know what's going on? I found a new beer today. So this is, let's see if we can. Charo, Charo. Cerveza Clara Pilsner from, where is it from?

Where is it from? I didn't even look. I just saw a new label and grabbed it and we came here. So brewing company, it says Mexico, but it doesn't say from where. Somewhere. Mexico City. Man, like everything else. The Toronto of Mexico.

Yeah. Well, Jake, it's officially, officially cultural, officially cultural, officially cultural summer down here. So, up here. So I've got the Vernacha out and about.

Cultural summer. Did it work? Did my influencer thing work yet? There you go. There you go. The Vernacha. De Sam Jiminyano. Yep.

Cultural summer. Yeah, it's not, we're not past the solstice, but we are past Memorial Day. Everyone goes to the shore once again. Cultural. Yeah. Okay.

All right. I thought it was like something like this is what we do in the, in the mid-Atlantic cultural summer. Yeah, summer is from Memorial Day to Labor Day. We drink wine and we mix a little cicada in it. And what else are you going to do with all the damn cicadas, man? You got to do something with them. Manly eat them. Lots of protein.

They don't. Honestly, cicadas freak me out. Just the concept. The concept of cicadas freaks me on. What do they do it all the time in there? Having a little nap. How's that work? They have work-life balance figured out, my friend.

We could learn something from them. All right. All I know is the rundown today is star everything. Star ship, Star Lab, Star, Star, Star, Shield. Oh, oh. Let's see if this is a power outage, folks. No, no, no, no. I still hear him in there.

His video is frozen. No, he's back. He's back. Yeah, a little choppy. I got excited. This is a fun game. All right. Star, which star do you want to start with?

Well, do a Star draft. Star draft. Someone like, a piece of paper will, like, hold it up. Like, it's going to be Star. Chee you. You pick. You pick fast.

Okay, let's do Starliner. Let's start. Let's start a little of our friends from the, the Boeing company. Let's see how they're doing here. You're concerned. You have concerns. I am.

I'm a little worried. A little. Give me a rating. Give me a, give me a, give me a NASA-style risk rating. Like one in what is your concern? I don't,

I don't have the math. We don't do math on this show, Anthony. I was under the impression there'd be not a math. Here's, okay, here's math for you. This is the third time

that Starliner has gone to the pad ready to fly. and zero of those times have been problem-free. So, and not like- And which time they found other problems before or the next time. Yeah, and it's not like, yeah, one problem that keeps cropping up. It's one problem causes a problem and then they discover a second one. That's happened like, I think every time now?

Every time. Every time, yeah. So, like, if you just do the, if you want to do the math, the statistics on there being a 10th problem that we don't know about, is non-trivial. It's non-negligible. And we're going to put people on it this weekend. So I'm just,

I'm like pretty sober about this one. Starliner is like for people in our line of work, Starliner is a great punching bag for all kinds of gags. And I'm like not into any of that. I'm just like, no. That's like, I'm just, I need to this.

No. Right. This is the thing that like, for all of the culture war that we want to do, at the end of the day, me and all the other Americans that are listening right now, we bought a spaceship. Yeah.

And it's supposed to work six times, and plus a couple others. And only one of them sort of did. Yeah. So it's problematic. You definitely want the spaceship that you bought to work. Yeah. Here's the thing that concerns me.

Are there high severity problems too? Like, crashing into the series of the service module flammable stuff in there, stuff leaking, propulsion not working. These are bad problems. Let's linger on the propulsion not working, because this is the one. I've kind of been a little bit,

maybe too zen about it, of like, you know, there is no, there is no scheduled pressure on Starliner. They're like, it'll fly when it flies and it's fine. They can keep flying SpaceX missions till forever. So I've been,

my mindset has been, like, NASA does not need to put the pressure on this one to work. So if it is, if they are going to fly all six missions at the end of this ISS program, it doesn't matter. NASA will be fine with it. They'll figure it out. But then the one today, or a couple days ago, whatever it was, I was catching up in reading today, about this. All right, we had the leak, the helium leak, and then we went back. And when we were thinking about the helium leak, we found out, we realized we might not be able to do a deorbit burn. if two of the, now they're calling them dog houses,

which is a dumb name for these propulsion things are on the side of Starliner Service module, but if two adjacent ones fail in this way, we wouldn't have been able to do a de-orbit burn, but we figured out a way to remap or add a new mode that will let us do it now. And people were like, all right, well, how common would that failure have been? And they were like, it was like just about 1% of failure modes. And it's like, that's a lot. That is a high percentage of failure modes based on all of the like loss of crew loss

of mission numbers being way less than one in 100. Yeah. That's I didn't like the dismissiveness of like, oh, it's only a failure mode in which one percent of time that might happen. It's like that's a significant amount. You're right about there being no schedule pressure from NASA. But this being a fixed price contract, there's now a. schedule pressure from Boeing, right? Because every month that they don't fly is the month they're

paying for this program, right? So that's one thing that does worry about me. Like, NASA scheduled pressure, okay, you know, it's got a bad rap. It's done some bad things in its time. But like, there's an accountability to that in a way because it's NASA, right? But like, if the shareholders of Boeing want to push, like, I don't have. I just don't think any of them are like, man, that's Starliner. That's the one that's getting us these days, you know? I hope not. It's not the one that Boeing is worried about. They're not the one, yeah, it's not the anchor in the boat, but it's, yeah, there's stuff

there, right? So, I don't know, I'm just like, I'm pretty apprehensive about it, and I'm, I really hope it goes well. I hope they figured it all out. I hope we've played whack a mole and whacked all the moles. Yeah. It's weird, man. And it's four years.

years since SpaceX. That's crazy. That's a gargantuan amount of time between these two. Mm-hmm. You made me not super thrilled about this, so that's good. You really lifted me up on Thursday. And now I've... Well, no, I was fine until I was reading the flippantness of, like, just one percent of failure

modes. That's so... If you ever... If you ever told NASA in these loss of crew, loss of mission ratings, one in 100, they'd be like that's we're not flying that thing right they're all like one and obviously all these are also some form of made up and computed values out of like the chaos of the world but it's like we're looking for like one and two was one in 270 or whatever one and two's no whatever it was i don't know i thought it was like one and one 30 or something where it ended up is that i don't

remember which number was made up which one was fake which one was earlier which one was later yeah i mean yeah the shuttle ended up a little bit lower than a hundred but Yeah. You know. I don't know. This is concerning. All right. So,

but, like, which part are you concerned about? Like, getting to the ISS, staying at the ISS, being at the ISS. Well,

that's the thing is, I don't know. Yeah. It's the uncertainty that bothers me, right? Like, it's,

every time. I don't get flying with a helium leak and then attaching it to the ISS for so long. Granted, I don't know a lot about helium leaks. Yeah.

I don't know. We're flummox. This is why I said, do we actually have that much to say on Starliner. I don't know. We're just doing just greltled noises for seven minutes. Yeah. All right.

I guess I guess like I have to trust NASA on this one. Like if they're, if they say it's okay to fly with the leak, then okay. Like I just have to believe you. And it's your people and that's how it's going to go. But I just, I really, really hope that there is no. Yeah. There is no go fever driving that decision because it's just we've, we've been down that road. and no one cares to take it anymore.

Fairly like the knock-ons from this would be like just a magnitude that we are not prepared for. Commercial space is reputation is on the line with this one, right? So. On the Boeing mission. Yeah. That's a wild turn of events. You could not write that more dramatically. Please save new space, Boeing.

That's where we're at. It all comes down to this. Save the other fixed price contracts, Boeing. What? What storyline is this? Yeah, that's wild. So, yeah, it's interesting, man. It's a, even if it's the right decision, like,

it could be interpreted in a very bad way if this goes poorly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just, I mean, like the, it's always been said since, like, in our lifetime of space followers, right? that the next big failure is like, I mean, people, you can dial up, you know, salt to taste, the end of NASA, the end of crude space flight, the end of this, the end of that thing. But it has always been stated as a cataclysmic moment. And there's a generational, like, kind of vibe to it, right? where like there was a generation that dealt with Challenger,

there was a generation that dealt with Columbia, and they passed down all their wisdom to us, so we will never do it again, because it would be the end of NASA as we know it. And everything has been imbued with that from the beginning of this program. And this is just the nagging one that like, God, man, it's not,

nobody could have expected to get to this point where it's four years after the SpaceX mission, and there's all these little things coming up, and we thought about the flammability of tape, and helium leaks at the, like, it's just, there are so many little things. You would think it would be one big thing of, like, you forgot the check of the solid rocket boosters work at that temperature, or we didn't listen to people that said it didn't.

But it's a bunch of little things that then put people like you in a situation where, like, I don't know, if helium leaks, does that, like, how is that okay? Why is it fine that there's, don't you need it? Isn't that why it's there? Yeah, why is it in the other earth to begin with? The best helium is no helium is what the situation would be. Yeah, I didn't get that. No, it's wild. And I'm sure there's like, man, if no one will ever write this book, but like, you know,

comparing the, the Dragon engineering philosophy to the Boeing engineering, or even not, skip Dragon altogether, just like looking at Boeing's management of Starliner compared to Boeing's management of any other space cost plus contract where like, I just feel like they took on that contract and all the tools that they had in the, in their tool belt, for resolving problems. We're just taken away and they just stumbled through it. You know, like,

oh, in the past, we were just asked NASA for more money and then built the thing three times as durable and added six redundant parts, and it would have been fine. And then that's, it doesn't matter for breaks.

Yeah. Oh, we lost a helium valve. Okay, we got 38 more and they all work. So it's fine. Like, you know, it doesn't matter.

But I can't do that on this. And so their levers were gone. And they were just like going, like, what do I do? Yeah. The plane is spinning out of control and all their controls are gone. The one thing I've been wondering is like, all right, this mission goes up, goes fine, they get back.

I'm wondering what the gap between this and the operational mission are. If there's big redesigns or big rethinks or recertifications or reviews, something with R.E. at the front. Another year and a half, two years before, for operational. I might make that bet. I think I might make that bet that it's going to be what are we at? We're at crew seven or eight now?

Eight. Eight, I think, yeah. Eight is up there? I think. Like Starliner doesn't fly Starliner 1 until crew 12 is flying. Like I would probably take that bet today. So, I don't know.

Crew 12 beat Starliner 1 is what you're thinking? I'm thinking. It's not out of the question. original, I will remind you, before the new Discord prediction system that I have not yet partaken in because I just did not have the relevant bandwidth in my brain, I was the old champ of the old system back in the old days. And I, my best prediction was SpaceX will sign more, more like an extension to their crude missions before Starlight Air Air Flies a human. And that was like years in advance. And I nailed that one. Yeah. You were like way ahead of that one.

I'm on that vibe. I just feel like there's a gap here that's going to happen because they're either going to fly this mission today or tomorrow or whatever and they're going to fly it sometime this summer, right? Because the ISS schedule, that's the problem, is that the ISS schedule is such a pain in the ass. If you don't hit your two-week window that you get that port, who knows when you're going to get back on the manifest.

So it could very easily, if a lightning bolt hits the wrong spot, this could slip three months, of the ISS schedule. And then you get into the Vulcan schedule of it all and the national security missions that are due to fly. It could slip pretty easily a couple of months. And then they're going to fly.

There's going to be a serious look at what they did on the mission and discussions around which of these things that came up need to be rethought entirely and rebuilt or change for the future ones. So I don't know. It doesn't feel like they'll fly an operational mission in 2025 to me for sure. well and they're going to have to yeah like already they have to go back and do some sort of changes for the healing leak like that's already a problem that's now on the on the schedule for them to fix before starliner one flies and like something's going to come up this is the right

it's it's a point of having a mission but like it's it's this is still a flight test and it's the first one with people so like something's going to come up right it may not even be like a like oh this thing is a catastrophic life changing a bad problem them, but like maybe they just get, they've come down and the astronauts like, this is unfliable. Like you got to change. Just control this control. You know, there could be something like that, like a total UX thing that, that changes or whatever, right? And so they're going to have scope of work between this flight and the next one.

It's not just going to be a copy paste of this vehicle, right? So you have a flight cadence thing. How fast can Boeing get the next one ready? And also it changes, you know, change request. And then there's the Atlas, the Atlas five of it all. The Atlas five of it all. Is this the pad? They had to swap it back and forth between Vulcan and Atlas.

Yep. So it's a huge pain to do the swaps right now. I don't know how much of a pain it is, honestly. Like, I know they have different launch tables or whatever. But I mean, it takes like a long time to go between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. So, yeah. And that's SpaceX. So project from there.

Yeah. Yeah, because then they're going to want to get. You talk about schedule pressure. Vulcan is in it, man. They're swimming it. And Dream Chaser, another ISS thing. And that pad's got a lot of ISS strife on it. It's actually like a pretty, maybe because of Atlas and Kuiper, it's okay.

But the interesting schedule pressure of NASA is like, we need to fly our starliners. And then like the DOD and Amazon are like, no. we're going to fly we're going to fly Vulcans only right and I don't know if NASA wins that fight not when there's the

dragon flying off the other pad every other week like it's not just take the bus man the bus is going there already we have saved so much money and not having to extend the Starliner contract

we'll just buy a few more dragons it's okay honestly wow that's a way to look at it that's a real way to look at it Yeah. Yeah. All right.

That was depressing segment. That was super depressing. That was maybe the most depressing content. We got it. This show has had a tantric relationship with talking about human spaceflight, uh, yeah. Incidents and we, that remains.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Uh, next up with the second pick in the star draft. Your turn. I choose a quick one, which is Star Shield. All right. Unexpected, Jake.

Unexpected. Yeah. Who had the NRO would launch 21 satellites on a single launch on their bingo card this year? Maybe some people did. This is an interesting technical question because like the Starlink functions by virtue of its size. Like no matter what time of day, I just look up and there's three or four satellites that I can pick from. Right. But if you only have 21 plus whatever a handful they had before, is that enough to like,

what's the reliability of that? Is there a point on earth where you got to wait, I got to wait three minutes for a pass or something? That's why there's going to be five more, Jake. There's going to be five more this year. But I mean, like 21 is not 5,000 or whatever that the other commercial. Right. So like what is the point where you have that. Oh, I see what you mean.

Yes. But no, you have, number one. Satellites is not a lot when you think of the size of planet Earth, is what I'm saying, right? Correct. But first off, you don't know what the NRO is doing with these satellites. No, I will say that. That's a good baseline for us to start at on this. But there are five more batches this year.

And these weren't going to like sun synchronous orbit. So it's not, this isn't the case where like it's probably doing imagery, but of what kind or sensing of some kind. Who knows? Let me look at... I'm going to pull up my notes from earlier. If it's in a start-linky orbit, like if it's like a, you know, a mid-inclination orbit, like that's not really... 70 degrees. 70 degrees.

That's not super optimized for imaging, is it? Like, you got 70 degrees, you probably got to precess a bunch to get photos. Like, although maybe just because of... Yeah, but you think about, like, black sky, for instance. They fly at the mid-inclination, like, you know, 30 to 50 degrees in that range where, like, all the humans live. So, yeah, Sunsacritus is good when you want, when you want the same lighting every time. Right.

But if this, you specifically don't want that here. You want like, you know, North Korea is about to do an orbital launch. I want a picture. You need a shot right now, right? Yeah. So it doesn't matter what time it is. You just want something that's capable of getting that shot. Yeah.

Now, like. Yeah. So that's the exact same use case then for the communication, right? If you're in one spot on Earth, how long do you have to wait for a satellite's overhead of you, right? That's, it's literally the exact same use case. So whether you're going to talk to it or get your picture taken. So here's the thing, though, is that these were launched to like 300 kilometers, very starlinky, a whole, whole slate of them.

We don't know how high they're going to go. They're probably not going to stop at, maybe they will. I don't know. I doubt it. I doubt they're going to stop in the Starlink band. Like, they'll probably go up a little bit more. So they could be a bit higher. Yeah, that's what I'm waiting on.

Yeah. I just found it interesting that, you know, the last thing we heard, there was like, for Star Shield, this is the SpaceX classified thing, by the way, for all those people who have not heard the name Starlink before. Starlink, but for guns. Starlink, but expensive and probably black. I don't know. Yeah, they launched like four test ones that nobody could figure out,

and then all of a sudden they got like the USA designation, which is our classified satellites. And then one of the NRO people were in Congress saying, oh, we've got our first launch coming up with like a proliferated system. So we're like, oh, it's going to be like a constellation of things. That's pretty cool. I don't know. I think I just assumed like it would be like six or eight or something.

I don't know why. Completely unfound it. Just felt like it wasn't going to be a whole 21 of them. But no, it was just a whole stack. You know what I'm curious about? So there's the thought process of like we need or don't dedicate satellites for whatever security reasons, right? That's kind of why they have their own Star Shield specific one. but do you think there's a way for them to use the

the Star Shield ones as like a bridge and connect into the regular network? Like could you using some sort of, you know, could we own this device and we do the encryption or something there and then we can step into the public world to get data down because, you know, the clean data never ever touched the public. Is there something like something you can do like that where that way you could have a few? I mean, I love where you're going.

I love the place that you're going, which is, this is not an imagery at all. This is like just snooping data off of the internet. I mean, anything really, like, it could be data, right? Like, can you take a picture of a North Korean satellite or launch site? Get the data to your Starsheeled device. Break it into 12 pieces, encrypt each one differently, send it out in the public network, and then they are reassembled back down on the ground somewhere.

They come back together and then your other key decrypts it. And then there you go, right? And that way you can have the security of your own device. Like, you know, like that clean photo never touches a public network, but it lets you leverage the rest of the network and have all that kind of reliability and performance and all that kind of stuff, right? That's my thought. I mean, that is the idea that they have with the, like, the space of film agency has the tracking and the transport layer. Have you heard these terms?

Sure. this new constellation, that one is like, basically Fender agnostic Starlink where it's got laser interconnects and extends data between ground stations and satellites, and then one is the missile defense sensors, and they would send their data through the transport layer. So it is similar to that. Yeah, I don't know. I think everyone assumed, oh, NRO does like spy satellites, but they also do like the big ass Orion 300-foot diameter listening devices.

So maybe it's just skimming off some skimming off some Starlink data. And maybe that's why your Starlink has gone out so much today. No, this is all the Mexican government's fault, not Elon's. Here's the directed energy weapon of the sun. Yeah, so I would love to blame Elon for this one, but it's not him. All right, third pick in the Star draft. What do you got?

You want to do StarLab? Star Lab. Oh, I know why you want to do Star Lab. Yeah. Hit me. We're back, baby. MDA. Arm sales.

Getting in on that hot commercial space station money. They heard our suggestion for Candid Leg, and they went and they tacked it the other way, back to arms. Yeah. I'm hearing you. legs, but let me pitch you something else. Arms. More arms. No.

But so my question for you on this one, because you're falling this closer than I am, but like this Starlab one really feels like it's like stepping into like ISS 2.0 territory here. Like, man, they're collecting partnerships. And I'm really interested to see what that looks like overall because all the, the international side of it is very interesting because it like, that makes the market huge for it. Like, not huge, but bigger.

Bigger. At least two to three times as big is just focusing on the U.S., right? So, yeah, it's kind of interesting. And now there's commercial cargo coming out of Europe and, you know, I don't know, does Canada ever want to try and do something through the East side instead of through NASA? Is there a commercial partnership up right to there and, you know, send up a, I don't know, there's a little else of interesting possibilities that kind of pop up with this, right?

That's why I always thought the Starlab strategy was interesting in that the first place they went was Airbus and no one to that point had engaged any European anything. So like there's, we'll buy a pressure vessel from Taliselaide or whatever. Yeah, yeah. But to the extent that this was Airbus being a top line partner on the thing, I thought it was good play because you are spreading all the reasons that those programs on the governmental side get spread between the partners is that you're. spreading some costs, you're making it more sticky. But it was, it was weirder in the, in the, um, post-ISS thoughts because

I thought you needed to have some form of engagement to make sure that those partners wanted to continue to fly like with you, for whatever that means. If the ISS goes away, there's nothing specific that says, uh, like, Issa needs to keep flying wherever NASA decides to fly.

Like, they didn't sign a, they didn't sign a pact or anything. It's not, You know, I mean, there's Orion stuff tangled up in that, but. But that's just on the ISS, like, we'll give you ISS seats, you build Orion things, and then we'll give you seats out to gateway. You build gateway things and on and on and on. But, but, you know, to the point of which a couple years ago, there was, you know,

East astronauts training with Chinese astronauts in the thought of, maybe we'll fly to Tongong someday. So I always thought in the post-IS market, you needed to have, you need to have, you to be like shuring up the fact that these partners want to keep their attention focused together. And also the budget that you need for a commercial space station, you know, if, granted, I guess we don't know that, but like if what people are saying that are working on this is correct, I still think that's more in the grasp of partners like Issa and Jaxa than them developing their own human space flight capabilities or their own space station entirely.

Like, who's your boy from the Mars Rover days that now works at Blue Origin? He's a patron saint of this podcast. Steve Squires. Steve Squires, yeah. Yes. He was doing that workshop for missions to Apophis recently. Did you catch this? No, no.

He mentioned, like, we want to send a blue ring out to this. This will connect to space stations in a minute. where we want to send a blue ring out to Apophis when it comes by. Everybody kind of wants to. But if everybody kind of wants to, and they send a little bit of their budget to a partner just with them, no one will fund an actual mission. Instead, if we like, everyone kind of wants to kickstart this,

we got to figure out a way to pool these resources to have a single mission because we could actually accumulate. It's like the Patreon for space missions. Like, accumulate enough small dollar donations to make their way out to a mission. I kind of feel like that in the space station market, where it's pretty cool. clear NASA is not going to have a big old budget for a commercial space station. They don't want to be, they are going to be the anchor tenant, but they don't want to be the anchor tenant. So they aren't

going to send anchor tenant money. They're going to send less than that because they can't. They don't want another IAS. They want something different. Yeah, that's not the point. Right. So, but if they send a little money and ESA sends a little money and Jackson sends a little money, can you get enough money from that to actually have a space station? Yeah. And that is the Starlab thesis. Where you get into territory that people, like if we had a third screen here in Eric Burger was here, the Eric Burger on my shoulder is yelling like too many, too many divisions, too many cooks in the kitchen, you know, too much reliance on partners that are on their own schedules or on their own funding.

Yeah, yeah. But it is tough because they haven't really stated what they're going to contribute in any of these projects. No, and a lot of it should be, like, a lot of the expense should be like build the thing. And so, like, if they can all, all these partners can contribute. here's my component that goes up in the station. You put them all together in space. This air bus wing and the jacks a wing,

all these different little things. And then it's up there. And then it's just operating it, right? And so like you can have some sort of like revenue sharing agreement where it's like, yeah, we all, you know, contribute a little bit of the ops money to maintain this thing. And then we collect the revenue. And like that's all it has to be. Right.

So after a certain point, the like too many cooks thing is not that big a deal because it's just like, oh yeah, we just get money from this thing. If you can close the business case, then it's like, yeah, we just get money from this thing from operating in space. And it's fantastic, right? Like, you can go off that. And if you can get the anchor tenants, if you can get like, if NASA and Issa and Jaxa are contributing one crew a year, that's enough for you to like kind of sustain yourself.

Right. Then great. And then you can just, you can go after the growth markets, right? You can get the, the Emirati astronauts and the Indian astronauts. and I don't know, maybe even there's a Chinese astronauts. Shout out. Get Tom Cruise in there, right? So does Latin America want to start sending astronauts?

Does, I don't know, there's all kinds of that growth market for astronaut cruise or commercial crews, tourist crews. There's all kinds of the stuff you can grab from that, right? It's funny when you think about it that way because it's like ESA and Jaxa. And I always want a good way to say the Canadian Space Agency when I start out. a sentence by saying Issa and Jacksona and I never can't. What do you do? What am I doing here, Jake? I just say Canadians. How do I refer to this to not offend you in particular? Just say CSA. I know, but I didn't start out ESA and it just feels a little disjointed. I think they should come up with the nickname is my only point.

CASA. CASA. Kasa. If CASA, ESA and Jaxa are like, hey, you know, because right now the partners are like Airbus, MDA, and the Exploration Company and. Who am I forgetting? Somebody. Mitsubishi. That's the Jackson connection. If instead of those companies, it was like actually Issa, Kasa, and Jaxsa, it would be kind of funny because it would be like, hey, we figured out a way for NASA to send us $1 billion a year. We will make a space station.

They will send us a billion dollars a year. That's pretty solid. Yeah. They could flip the relationship on its head. Love it. Yeah, they're bartering their way under your space station. I don't know. I think it's cool.

I'm excited just because, like, I have no idea if it's going to work. Like, that's super unproven business case. Like, I'm actually pretty skeptical of human spaceflight as a business at this point. But I applaud anyone trying stuff. So that is cool to see. And it's different idea. And it's not one that depends on NASA. And that is like, that's like the name of the game these days.

is like how can you reduce your dependency on the whims of Congress, right? So, yeah. And it's a single launchish kind of thing. All launch on Starship. Yeah, it's a monolithic station. I'm there for that. Yeah. I'm there.

All right. Let's do it. You picked Star Lab. Fourth pick of the Star Draft. I guess we haven't done Starship. It's the only one of the stars we haven't done. You have Star New Shepherd written down. I'll pick that one for the hilariousness of Star New Shepherd.

New Starboard. New Starport, yeah. Yeah. Parachshy didn't work. All right. Is that a big deal? I'll fly on that tomorrow. I'll fly on it tomorrow.

Yeah. No, it's not a big deal. Whatever. Parishes do that sometimes. It happens on SpaceX missions. I can't tell anymore, man. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

It still failed. It did, just like the abort and everyone lived. So everyone lived and then they waited a year and a half before they flew again. What you see is an issue. What I see is a thing that Virgin Galactic doesn't have the luxury of every single flight. I see an opportunity. Yeah. No, I just, I see a thing that's like, well, that's still a better design than Virgin

Galactic. Yeah, yeah. That's a fundamental question. Do you want the spaceship that failed twice and saved everyone's bacon or the one that hasn't failed yet? It has none of the safe features that happened. Has failed. It's not recently. Yeah.

Not recently. Yeah, this is a non-incident for me. Didn't this happen on one of the SpaceX missions in the not too distant past? Maybe, yeah. There's been too many drag, I can't keep track of them anymore. There was supposed to only be three parachutes, and they have four. Yeah, that's right. Which always makes me nervous.

When they bounce around, I hate that part. I hate that part of the live stream. When the parachutes come out and they bounce into each other, like I know the scale that we're looking at is crazy, but it always, I just hate that part. I hate watching that. It drives me nuts. I hate it.

Yeah. Okay. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about parachutes as a thing. Yeah. There's a couple of things to give me pause about flying to space. Okay? One is I'm not a cruise guy,

and I realize that space travel is just a cruise with completely encapsulated air. That concerns me. The second is parachutes, I think. You have a very interesting view of what a cruise is, but okay, I see your point ultimately. The details fall apart when you look a little down, but yes, okay. I mean, what a cruise is is a place to go and get neurovirus in beautiful environments. And so at least hypothetically, you could open your window on a cruise and be a little bit less at risk for airborne diseases. Yeah, yeah.

Not so in a starship. No. That whole diamond princess moment would have happened a lot differently on a starship. That's why they quarantine, Anthony. Yeah, I wonder about that. What's up with you? How do you feel about the quarantine that the Starliner astronauts went through and then flew home and we're still in quarantine?

I'm like, weren't they, didn't they fly? They're very, well, they flew in their jets, right? But they're very. T-38 is an approved quarantine environment? You're telling me no one else went in that T-38. They landed, they got out, and no one else went in that cockpit? The definition of quarantine in this case, I think, is pretty, blacks. Like it's

because it's not like, I don't know, it's not the point is just like don't get a cold and go to space. Like that's really what they're trying to prevent here. Right. So it's just like, okay, if you're like 95% less people than you're normally, that's fine. That's, that's acceptable. Like it's not, because like if, what if they got a cold? It's like, well, it's not really a big deal.

They're just going to have a really uncomfortable few, first few days when they go there. And then maybe the other astronauts that there will catch. Yeah. They'll have a couple uncomfortable days. But that's not the end of the world. right? So it's like, it's more just a, for your convenience, try not to touch any other humans in the next two weeks, you know? I just wonder, what are they done for this long? They've been in quarantine for.

Yeah. When was the original flight date? We're back to Starliner on the draft, but when was the original date? I forget. Beginning of May, right? Yeah. Beginning of May. Been a month. Yeah, yeah. And they were in quarantine since April. presumably.

Yeah. I don't believe that. I don't believe they've been in quarantine this whole time. I'm a quarantine truther in this case. I'm pretty sure they went home and slept in their own bed when they were in Houston. They might have, man. It's not a big deal. They quarantined in the sense that most people did during the like mid-pict of the pandemic.

I didn't invite my friends over. I still went to the grocery store. Like killing. Yeah. You know. They flew. Actually, I have. unique reporting that Sunni Williams took off from Kennedy Space Center, flew and had dinner at the French laundry, and then flew to Houston, maintained quarantine the whole time.

That's what I think happened. Love it. All right. Lighting round, Jake. We're out of the star. We're out of the star news. Lighting round. Is there anything I should know about NASA being back on the XOMR's train?

Do you think there were any awkward conversations about the fact that they're only in this situation, because NASA bailed on this previously, and they had to partner with Russia who then invaded a neighboring country and NASA's back. It's definitely... That's a book I'd read, man. Project manager for X-O-Mars.

That mission has been through the rigor, but... No, I don't know. I think it's great. It's exactly what I thought would happen. I was like, there's no way that they're going to let Russia cancel X-M-Rs. So this took a while to get there, but here we are. And, yeah. Do you think the part of NASA's contribution to XMR should be a Ukrainian flag on the rover?

I think it'd do something. Maybe a little, like, a little more subtle than that. It should be painted like the flight suits from the ISS. No, this is just the colors of some university. Painted with that university. Put a sticker from there on there. They should have like a Ukrainian priest blessed or something when they, you know, when they. They got to do some sort of hat.

That's it. I just want to know who had X-Mars. If it had gone the regular road, there would have been one of those Russian Orthodox people at the proton monchite doing the thing, right? So now we can have a Ukrainian Orthodox person who did at the... Common P on the wheel of the rover. I think that's... That's not a fast planetary protection, right? Yeah, I don't think that'll pass planetary protection. So, yeah, all right. But let's go through the things that NASA decided, or, I guess had to contribute.

New engines for the ESA provided descent stage. Did I read that correctly? Do you know any details about this descent stage? Throttalable engines for a new taluselania designed landing platform, I believe. That's interesting, you know, because you're not a great track record for landing stuff on Mars. So that's like at one point I'm like, maybe you should ask NASA to do that. But then on the other hand, I'm like, you guys got. to figure this out. So like, okay, keep trying.

Out of the nest. Keep at it. Dogging, stay, stay dogged on this. Keep your teeth clamp down. You're going to get it eventually. So I guess I'm kind of fine with that. I mean, the engines will be good. They'll probably be just those aeroget ones that have landed everything else on Mars. M.R. 104s or whatever. Whatever they are. One or whatever's. Yeah. It's been the ones. Yeah, the ones that have been on everything. So I'm sure that'll be fine. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah. And then they're building the the heating unit.

So there's like little radioactive things you put inside the rower to keep it warm. And then because the U.S. is contributing those and those are nuclear stuff, then you have to launch it from U.S. soil. And so therefore, also giving it a rocket. Yeah, baby. All right.

What's your prediction? What is it going to fly on? Falcon 9. Does it have, it doesn't have the nucleotting yet, right? They got to do the paperwork for that? Hmm, good call. Do they? I don't think so.

just fucking heavy though oh I guess what's coming up that's nuke powered Europe clipper isn't so I don't think they've done the paperwork yet for that or installed whatever what do you need blast shielding what do you need

what else do you need on that but this is not an RTG though this is just the little little nubs that go inside so there's just like little little like literally just like pieces of of nuclear stuff that you just put in a container just you stay

war. It doesn't have to do anything, right? She was doing a lot of work, yes. Just pieces of nuclear stuff. Yeah, that's fine. Just some uranium. Don't worry about it. So that mandates it flying on a U.S. vehicle by, what?

I think because I just think because you guys don't want to put it on an airplane and fly it over the ocean and landed in a foreign country and blah, blah, blah. Putting it on a rocket and launching it around the entire Earth. I love that. Well, no one's going to hijack a rocket. What are they going to do with it if they get it? I don't know. What does anyone ever do? Cricking uranium, man.

I don't know. It's plutonium, 238. It's not a thing that you make a bomb with, is it? I don't know, man. I don't understand it. Who's got... My understanding is that it is much easier to just send it to Florida, put it on a rocket to just try and get it to a foreign country.

The safest place for nuke's nuke material, Florida. Yes, they've been so trustworthy with everything else. Yeah, I think it's probably just like some ITAR shit. Also, I guess the other thing, Jake, is what else are you going to launch it on? Yeah, fly it where? Let's complete that equation. What actually happened? What actually happened was Europe was like, we're going to just put a minute amount of nuclear material on this so that we have to fly it from a U.S. vehicle and not mention that we don't have a launcher of our own.

I mean, it's 2008, right? So you could go to French can and put it on Arian 6. Hopefully at that point, Arian 6 is going to be rocking and rolling. right but I don't know I guess that's an option actually I don't know that's the launcher that's a question that's an interesting question like how are we going to do with arian 6 no just who had to be convinced that it was okay to not fly on air and 6 for x-mars like when this all came up someone said put it on area on 6 like period like some politician somewhere's like no it's going on our rocket period like right but

then it's like, well, we need the heating units and we don't have those and we have to go to the end of the, and that would have been a, that was probably an uncomfortable meeting, you know. The better, so what was the, what was the heating unit plan before this? Was Russia had some Russia had them, yeah. Okay. I would have loved it that that was a late addition and they were like, we're just going to put it on there just to, no, no, no, Russia had them. So, um, yeah, because they got new stuff, right? So they, that's why, maybe that's why it was on. Maybe that was why it was on a proton. They do got new stuff.

They got stuff. Turns out. All right. Well, whatever. Is it going to work? Is it going to land? You got to be pumped up because you thought this rover was toast. No, I didn't.

Oh, you thought it was, all right? The day it was canceled because of Ukraine. I was like, it's come back, baby. You've never been more sure. I'm on record. I'm like, there's zero chance they cancel this. like there's this no way. Yeah.

I'll go find the point of pride. I'll go find the Discord message for you on February 20. There's probably a show. We probably both said this on a show triumphantly and forget about it entirely. Someone will find it for us. There's a bunch of listeners going through the back catalog and now they'll dig it up. Yeah. We need an LLM that sorts through previous takes we've had.

Yeah, we do. Got to transcribe them all first. What else we got in here? You want to do five minutes on Hubble? Five minutes on Hubble, yep. I don't know. Did you read the story about John Grunsfeld being a yucker about Jared Isaacman? Give me your best elevator pitch on what the story actually is.

I don't know yet. This is the thing with this is that I felt like that article was both revealing like new information and also told us nothing. There was just a lot of stuff going on there, you know, that didn't feel very. coherent because it was like the article is basically like there are concerns about this happening and then like they share some emails that it's like what if the spacewalk goes wrong what if they mess up the satellite the telescope like just a bunch of concerns and then like the article just kind of ends and I was like what am I supposed to take from this because like it could be two things right it could be let you know exactly what jared's sort of implying that like oh we had this

great idea and all these people don't want us to touch their sacred vehicle and they said no completely unreasonably which like these emails support or they went through the study in a perfectly healthy study process those concerns should have all come up like like if if the end goal was what the end outcome was that NASA said we looked at the risks we love it this is a go those emails would still exist. And so, like, I don't, I don't know what, I don't know what about to take from this, right? Like, what, what's the, the actual solution? And then the study is not released. So all we have is like, John Grunzfeld's like, I have some questions. And then Jared Eisenberg was on Twitter being like, I can't say anything, but they're squashing it. I was like, okay, well, I understand you're

upset about it. But like, I don't know, I don't know why they're squashing it. If that's true, we don't know that yet. We haven't heard anything from NASA. And then like, I don't know. I guess there's also like a lot of complication to this too. Like it's not a clear cut case to me. I don't think it's like, oh, it's a no brainer to get this fix for free because it's not going to be free. Like it is going to cost NASA money. And it's not going to happen tomorrow.

It's going to happen in a few years. Like when is Polaris two supposed to fly? Like two, three years earliest maybe, right? The thing's already going to like die in early 2030s anyway from instrumentation. Like when it loses a. gyro or the whatever. So like there are, it's not a simple thing. They can fix with the mission.

Well, I think they, it sounds like the study explored it because they were talking about like attaching a new module or something that would. Yeah, I'm guessing would be a gyro, right? Because you don't, you can't really add an instrument to it. But like, if you stick a couple of gyros on the butt and you get some control authority, great. Love it, right? Gyros on the butt. So.

But you still have to connect it into the communications and the control system. pen to write down the title of the episode. Well, because like, and they were talking like, oh, we will plug it in. I was like, okay, is there like an interface? Did they, when they designed Hubble in the 1980s, did they add a USB port to the outside for some like add-on gyro? I don't know what that means. How do you have to open it up? There's a lot of questions I have about how much risk, effort and money it's going to take to do the things that they're promising.

and then does that, does the weight of that way against the benefit of extending the life of an old, old instrument already, right, versus money that could be redirected to, I don't know, more JWT time or something. I don't know. Maybe there's something else you can do with that money, right? Anyway, I'm very, very confused. Yeah, well, we've got a comment in the chat here. A, B, A, A, M.D.

Wonder if an M-E-V could do it. Guess what would probably cost about the same amount of money as a SpaceX dragon human flight? Probably a ComSat that has some more, I don't know. It depends if the pointing of an MEV is precise enough. They don't really want to sell MEVs anymore. They want to sell the little pods that go on that, like, they attach. So I don't know if that could do it as well. But like, yeah, this one always sounded, all right, I'm going to give a little bit of red meat to all the camps here, right?

this story smacks 100% true that old astronauts who did a heroic thing want them to be the only ones that did the heroic thing that that rings so true on the other end of things yeah are you going to get enough value out of this Hubble thing that humans should go there for a big expense or if we just wanted to boost it could we send not humans there to boost the thing and not have to do as much understanding of an environment and analysis of what the humans would do and how they would touch it and how it would hold it, and what if they take a memorabilia from the satellite, like whatever homework you have to do there. Yeah. Feels, yeah, and that the other aspect is,

let me throw this one out there. I don't know if Jared listens to this show, and he's been on my show. He seems aware of stuff that we do, so maybe he does. Like, if you're doing this study, are you also doing a study of, like, I want to make the Isaacman Space Telescope

and just see which one is cheaper at the moment? Like, at 2.4 meters, mirror in space, how cheap can you do that these days if you're doing it as a not NASA program? Legitimate question. I've never made a mirror that big. I've bought mirrors from my house. They're way more expensive than I thought they should be. So it's probably expensive.

But like what would a fully private Isaacman Space Telescope cost? Kind of just curious about that. I've never really tried to do the math on this. Yeah. I have no idea. Can you pull a number out of the place where you put your gyros? It's probably going to be expensive, to be honest, because the instruments are be the most expensive part, right?

So how much was Hubble? Like in a Casey Dreyer style accounting? Two, two and a half billion? Then? I don't remember. Yeah. Then it's like, well, what's missions do you count as Hubble? Yeah.

Yeah. If you add the repair missions, then it's astronomical. Right. The first one ever was like two? The repair missions cost more than the satellite, I'm sure. How much was the Hubble Space Telescope? No, I mean, like I just, like I said, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what to think about it, right?

Like, I just, I don't know. This article came out and everyone got very upset. And I'm like, we don't have enough information to know what this article means. Like, it's just straight up. I was like, okay, let's send a report. Give us a report. Like, you know, I'm waiting for Joy Roulette to FOIA so we could look at it. Yeah.

That would be good. You know, it's really interesting, too, is like there was a, NASA had to put out an RFI for this, right? You can't just take a free proposal to do it. They had to put out the RFI that says, Jared, please give me this, right? So, but like, did anyone else submit to that? That would be really fun.

Maybe there is an M.EV proposal out there. Probably is. I don't know. Well, there's my eight minutes on. There you go. You got it, nerds. Do you want one minute on the air and space review since your power stayed up the whole time? Yep.

There's like nothing open in the Air and Space Museum on the mall right now because like all the milestones of flight stuff is off display as they redo it. I went in the new moon exhibit. It is laid out really cool. The quarter or the one and a quarter F1 engines that they have with the mirror thing, I always thought was the coolest smoke of mirrors trick of all time. It's still really cool, but now it's just vertical. So you're standing under the rocket. It's still awesome.

strangely the moon lander they have not in the moon exhibit apparently that's going to be in the other exhibit felt like a good opportunity to put the moonlander near the other moon stuff not not the case very odd the thing i am most annoyed about jake is that there's an x-wing hanging in like a very prime spot in the museum now and i just feel like we should keep this museum for real stuff that flew to space as much as i love star wars i don't feel like it needs as much real estate as it's received and i'm a little bit i feel weird about it i feel real weird about it Just an X-wing fighter It's an X-Wing fighting

Where it used to be the F-104 Starfighter or the X-15 It's like near where that used to hang It's weird Yeah, I'm with you on that one Get that out of here As hell Put the X-15 back up

It's weird man Maybe they'll move it When the whole museum's done or something I don't know It's weird that there's a gigantic X-wing hanging as if it's one of the other Spaceships that flew to space That is weird

That's concerning That's weird Yeah There is One thing I will note There's a whole section Of like connecting our world And it's like

Got a planet dove in it Remember the giant Serious XM satellite Bus that was in The Udvar Hazi when we went In the back behind the space shuttle There was a huge commercial Satellite bus

The SSL-1300 That's now in the one in the mall They have it there with the solar array extended And this exhibit Jake Watch this transition This exhibit If you look at the donors that made that exhibit possible in the Air and Space Museum on the mall,

the first one listed is Matt Desch, who is our guest next week on this podcast. Nailed it. Boom. So we'll talk to him about what he thinks about the X-wing hanging across the hall from where his donation has thrived. How do you feel about your dollars being spent on a Star Wars X-Water? I'm excited. I keep telling Jake, the question I'm going to ask Matt Dash is how it feels to go from hero to villain of the SpaceX storyline

back in the day, all anyone cared about was the Arridium Next missions launching on SpaceX, and now it's just the other satellite constellation. Yeah, it'll be fun. That'll be great stuff. Okay, good. But, anyway,

also, sorry, on the way out, I went into the Natural History Museum on the mall as well. They have a little piece of Benu there in the canister. Nice. It is the most hilarious arrangement of a display of all time. Because to get to it, you have to walk through an entire room of pieces of the moon that astronauts brought back, pieces of the moon that just got here some other ways on other sample return missions or

a bunch of pieces of Mars that got here from asteroids, gigantic rocks that are asteroids, just huge amount of mass of rocks that have come to space to get to. to the end where I don't feel like they've done enough explanation of why we sent a whole rocket and a spaceship to get the tiny little dot that you're looking at when you just went through a whole room of giant rocks. It's, I felt like, I was like, oh, boy, that's like a weird. That felt weird. Yeah.

I'm surprised they got it there that quickly. Yeah, maybe they dropped on the floor or something. They were like, ah, throw it in the museum. Well, they had a leftover crudz on the outside, right? I think it's just probably one of those, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I just felt like funny framing that it was like at the end of this whole. I just don't feel like it was explained enough how why it mattered that it was different

than all the other rocks that you just went through that were like, touch a piece of Mars. Like, no, but this one. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a half a teaspoon of. It wasn't that. It was literally like something you'd pick out of your teeth. Like it was so tiny.

Oh, no. Okay. So, anyway. Oh, dear. Okay. All right, y'all. Matt Dash next week. Hopefully Jake's power works better. I mean, it worked great this time.

So.