Off-Nominal - 161 - Ambassador Administrator Senator (with Christian Davenport)

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Christian Davenport of The Washington Post to catch Jake up on what he missed while on vacation. Just a Falcon 9 failure, the ongoing Starliner saga, and a brand new Presidential race.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 161 - Ambassador Administrator Senator (with Christian Davenport) - YouTubeChris Bergin - NSF on X: “Here are two minutes of the SpaceX launch stream where the ice build-up began.”Starlink 9-3 - SpaceX - LaunchesFalcon 9 cleared to resume launches - SpaceNewsFalcon 9 Returns to Flight - SpaceX - UpdatesNASA, Boeing Continue Data Analysis for Crew Flight Test Evaluation – Commercial Crew ProgramEric Berger on X: “It's clear NASA does not want to deviate from its base plan of using Starliner to come home, and this remains most likely. But it is not certain. SpaceX and NASA have been quietly studying launching Crew-9 two astronauts. Suits are available for Butch and Suni.”Eric Berger on X: “For weeks and weeks I was 100 percent confident astronauts were coming back on Starliner. About 10 days ago I was 80-20 they were. Now, I am less than that. NASA needs to be more transparent.”NASA Ends VIPER Project, Continues Moon Exploration - NASANASA cancels VIPER lunar rover - SpaceNewsNASA Cancels VIPER Lunar Rover – SpacePolicyOnline.comFollow ChristianChristian Davenport - The Washington PostChristian Davenport (@wapodavenport) / XThe Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos: Davenport, Christian: Amazon.com: BooksFollow 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. Oh, it's Jake Robbins. Look at that. He's back. I'm back, baby. Yeah, I'm excited to be back. I was away for a while. I had a long trip to figure out, and that's just tough.

And it was like dog years of space news when you were gone. It was, yeah. It was supposed to be quiet because it's summer and NASA chose violence. Instead, there's drama in literally every one of area of your interest. Mars, science news, human, space flight, politics. There was chaos. So I brought a friend, Jake, you didn't even know about me booking this show until I just told you.

By the way, I got Christian Davenport to join us to help catch you up. How's it going, Christian? I'm great. How are you guys? Thanks for having me. We're pumped to have you back. I think we've only been on here one time, which is a crime, to be honest. Two times?

Two times, I think. I think once was without me, though. I think you do one. Yeah, maybe. Still criminal. Only two times. Still criminal. Yeah.

We got to get those numbers up, rookie numbers. Very rookie. How do we start the show, Jake? Did you bring any beer back from Ireland? No, I did not bring any beer back. I drank it all there. So that was a thing there. But I did, in the spirit of that, though, I did, you know, get one of these.

Okay, you know. Nice. Very good. I have a very gravelly voice, as you can hear because I'm sick. And so what better than a little bit of whiskey, I guess? I'll see, I may not drink a lot of this. I might just be drinking a lot more of the water as I get through this. But, you know, we'll see how it goes.

You sound like you already drank a lot of whiskey. I do, don't I? Yeah. I'm working through this Boulevard Brewing Co. Jake. I'm on my last one or two space campers. So got some space camp going on here. What about you over there? Well, first of all, I'm curious where you got that.

I confess, I'm just doing like a bubbly and a DC. Yeah. Double. Why do you find two things at once of this similar variety? It was a great question. I thought maybe the bubbly was done. And then I sat down at my desk to hang out with you guys. But it's like half full.

So I'm like, you know, score. Now you got two things. Did I hear you call that a DC? A DC, yeah. die code DC. Okay, all right. That's what they call it in the Beltway. That's what they call it in the Beltway.

Is that what I was going to say? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Jake's never heard that, which is bizarre. I have not, no. All right, Jake, we're going to let you pick.

I gave you a brief, a briefing on what you missed when you were gone. We got maybe life on Mars. We got astronauts definitely not stuck, but increasingly stuck every day. and oh yeah the Falcon 9 had a failure for the first time in eight years since you were gone and it's back flying. Yeah, that's what I was going to say is that like the first thing I did was checked to make sure all the rocket still worked. And the last time I was on the show three weeks ago, Falcon was flying and it's flying today. So it looks like there wasn't any problems with that, right? The fastest return to flight ever.

Yeah. That's pretty wild. That's a pretty good turnaround. I was actually really curious about that because I think, I don't know, maybe it was like a year ago we were talking about anomaly. and how, like, even when the last time they did it, which was years and years ago, and they had, you know, the one blew up on the pad, the fast fire or whatever it was, like they came back in like six months and that was notable. Everyone was like, wow, six months.

Like, man, ULA would have been out for 18 to 24 to fix that one. Like we would have just like not gone to space for two years if that had happened before. And I remember being like really shocked at six months. And I was really curiously about a year ago. Like, I wonder what would happen today. because like that's like that's a whole industry that's a big deal now like they go off for three weeks and how many launches do they miss like 12 or something you know like it's a lot so yeah that's cool not unrelated to the starliner storyline to be honest right like yeah the major impact would have

been if this went on longer or or if it was a thing that NASA was uncomfortable going ahead and flying with because we had Cygnus flying on it next like in two days or whatever Next week? Yeah. Yeah. No, like I think the third. Yeah.

So we had that coming up and then we're nearing the end of this crew rotation flight and also their Starliner drama. All of these things depend on Falcon 9 as well. So it could have been a incredible incident if this was something more significant than, you know, a sensor line that they could just remove and keep flying without it. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Chris, did you have any vibes on, like, did you underreact to the story like I did because I was like it'll be fine it'll be flying again in 10 minutes yeah I mean like 15 days was the that's how long they were out something like that it's insane I mean that's and the thing too essentially the was a crew nine that's coming up like that's on track for August and Polaris don gets push back a little bit but kind of think like maybe that was going to get pushed back anyway, that NASA's like, go ahead and not just like, is that just that they're returning to flight,

is that they're going to return to human space flight that quickly too, right? That just shows how much trust NASA has, you know, and them and the rocket and everything they're doing to allow like, yeah, go ahead, put our astronauts on, you're good. Like, wow. Do you think there's like... I don't know if you took a poll of all of the

interested in space, space professionals, and we're like, would you, ride on a Falcon 9 tomorrow. I'm not sure there would have been a lot of people like, no, I'm going to wait and see how this pans out. I would have been like, I get on one in 15 minutes after that failure. It'll be fine. There's been 300 and whatever in a row. Right. And then like if you launch it like a hundred times in a year, like they did last year, they know that rocket so well, right? They know every little thing about it. I'm not sure how many times that particular booster had flown. I mean, but, you know,

it's a booster they were familiar with, and it just sort of shows like after, you know, 15 flights or whatever it was, you know, stuff breaks. You know, and in this case, they had that one line and the oxidizer leak, but they know it so well. They can just go back and show the data and they've got all of the past heritage to go to the FAA and we're like, here's the deal. Yeah. Yeah, okay, sign off on that.

You're good to go. Do you think that this spooked anybody because, like, you know, there's a history of this in terms of in the 80s, NASA was like, we're going to make a space shuttle and literally everything is going to fly in space shuttle. It's going to be the one one vehicle to rule them all. And it happened. And like all commercial launch stopped,

all NASA human space flight launched, all science missions stopped. Like there was like everything grinded to a halt while they tried to, you know, resolve Challenger. And after that, we saw commercial stuff move off of that. That's when, you know,

Delta and Atlas kind of came back into the scene in terms of that kind of thing. Ariane taking up all the lot of commercial stuff. Do you think anyone got spooked by this where it was like, wow, Falcon just went down. We can't do anything. Like literally like we're hooked into this in every which way. NASA human spaceflight, NASA science, all commercial stuff. Like just everything's connected to it.

I'm like I'm kind of curious to see if anyone does anything about it, you know? Yeah. I mean it highlights the huge reliance that, you know, that everyone, right? the government commercial sector, you know, science, NASA, the Pentagon has on the Falcon 9, how much is riding on it. And it also just sort of shows like the gap between SpaceX and all the other launch providers. It's not that big a deal if New Glenn is up and running. If Arion 6 is, you know, which is like launching at some sort of a cadence, if, you know,

neutrons online and all these other rockets, you know, that are meant to compete with Falcon 9 that we've been waiting for, you know, it's like, it just shows that they're not there yet. Yeah. There's also, to your point, though, Jacob, like, is anyone going to do anything? It's like, what are they going to do? Like, it's not a lot to do at the moment. I don't know, a national buyback of all the Atlas V's. Like, what, I don't know what other things that we have out there?

Yeah, I mean, they are doing something about it. This might just be bad timing, right? Like, you know, Vulcan is like this close to becoming operational. New Glens around the corner. So like they are working on that per se, you know, working on it as much as you can work on it. So it may just be bad timing, but it certainly is like a lesson to highlight, right? It's good proof of the whole like have two. I mean, this and the Starliner situation, good proof of having two providers is.

the strong strategy. And also, SpaceX still waiting on literally anyone else to put pressure on them, not to like perform better, but like there's no competitive pressure on SpaceX in terms of pricing or launch availability or anything right now. The ones that are out there, we're happy to get all their stock bought up by Amazon. But, you know, take Amazon out of the equation. Take the two outliers out, SpaceX and Amazon. And the market is pretty weird. And, you know, Like, is there enough to have a second competitor that's operating at the pace that SpaceX is? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, even honestly, SpaceX, when you look at how much of their launches are Starlink, right?

They're returning to flight. We're all pumped about that. It was three Starlink launches in a row. So, you know. Yeah, they didn't put too many customers out then, I guess. No, right. They missed a couple of Starlinked. They sunk a bunch into the ocean and they put, you know, a couple more got delayed two weeks or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is interesting, though. I mean, you talk about the competition and where Vulcan is, and that, I mean, they obviously had that good flight. And then I think it was a really big deal that they said, you know, we're not going to fly Dreamchacer on the next certification flight that we're going to fly essentially a double because there was so much pressure put on them by the Pentagon. There was a lawyer, you know, or a letter written by one of the top Pentagon officials saying, like,

know you got to move faster and i think uLA was like does not want to fly a mission without getting paid for it but um i think it's a big deal that they're moving ahead and doing that and it just sort of shows that the community you know i.e in this case the pentagon is saying we need other providers beyond just falcon nine and space six right yeah you guys you got to step up yeah yeah i was kind of using the other day about what it must be like in the in the uLA boardroom the pressure to get that rocket moving it's like it's got to be unbelievable like just all with you know amazon and the dod and nassah all just like staring down at this rocket like when are you going to fly like it must be just the worst and and are they still trying to sell this company i don't know where that thread

is gone is that any news on that front while i was gone but i assume someone is looking at that that i heard that was like you know i mean it's been an avalanche so it's So maybe it's already sold and I just missed it. Yeah. There's been so much other news. I think they were getting close to a deal and then whoever was buying them was like, there's a lot of hobby photographers that are just taking pictures of your rocket and selling them on the open market. We've got to clamp down on that if we're going to, if this business case closes.

That's right. Yeah. What? Okay. Yeah. I haven't dug deep in that one. I don't know what's going on here. Yeah.

But that one's weird, right? Yeah. Okay. All right. Has Tori tweeted about this yet? I haven't followed up on. No, but he did tweet. I think it's an old picture of,

I think it's an Atlas picture going off with some, it's a really cool camera angle of the Atlas coming off. Oh, yeah. But he is tweeting lots of pictures of hardware, which is clearly meant to, you know, as a signal to the Pentagon, like, okay, we're moving, we're to launch. We've got plenty of rockets. We're going to be able to meet your requirements.

You know, don't write nasty letters. and we come to the press. Like, we're moving along here. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Let's talk about Starliner because apparently while we were doing the pre-show, NASA put up some release that Chrisy read, but we did not yet.

So what the hell's going on here? Help me out. Yeah, so, I mean, they did this static fire of the, of all the thrusters, or not all of them, like, I think all, but the one. All but the one, right? was 27 of 28. And from what I heard, that went really well, but they're saying they want to take more time to, like,

evaluate all, you know, the data. Teams are taking their time to analyze the results of recent docked hotfire testing. So, okay, like, I mean, that's good. We had thought that by the end of this week, they would have that sort of agency level, you know, it's like a flight readiness review. and, you know, kind of look over all the data, decide, you know, as they call it, the flight rationale,

make sure everything's safe to come home, that that would happen this week. And now they're saying that's not going to happen this week. That's going to go into next week. And on the one hand, you know, I think you can say, well, that's not a great sign. What did they see? Why is this taking more time? is this, does this mean that there is, you know, an alternative that they're going to look to SpaceX and Dragon to fly the crew home? In the last briefing, you know, they always left the door open and they said,

you know, that's a possibility and that's the importance of having two providers, as we were just talking about, that if we need Dragon to come get the astronauts, we can do that. But, you know, our primary goal, they stress this over and over again, particularly, Mark Napi from Boeing saying like, no, it's they're going to come home on Starliner. So that's sort of the one version of it. On the other hand, I mean, it's hard. We haven't had a briefing and a chance to ask questions about the status now. It's been about a week. But you would like to think, you know, if you're giving them the benefit of the doubt, that they're being super careful, right, that this is lessons learn, you know, particularly from Columbia and that they don't, there's no reason to

bring them home tomorrow or the next day or next week. There's plenty of food, plenty of water, plenty of resources on the station. They can stay, you know, the batteries appear to be good, well past the 45-day limit. Let's not mess around. Let's look under every rock. Let's, you know, really test out all these thrusters. They're going to need it. So on the one hand, you say like, you know like you can just see the story it's like it's like oh there's there are all there's this pressure on them now to come home and then if they leave tomorrow and something happens and then there's an investigation shows well wait if they had done x y and z tests they would have known that the thrusters didn't work or that the helium line they didn't have as much margin right

and then it's like well why did you rush them coming home why did you leave right so So it's hard to kind of, and I don't envy the position they're in, right? They're under an enormous amount of pressure, and they can't, they cannot mess it up. And, you know, here's a question. Like, if Starliner doesn't come home with Butch and Sunny on board, I don't think they get their full certification, right? And NASA then doesn't get, you know, the second provider that they need. I mean, maybe there's some way to work around that and give them the certification. but they've already said that like the crew one mission which I think was tentatively slated for

February is now going to get pushed back to like August or September of 2025 just because they know they're going to need so much time. And they're double booking it. They're having SpaceX prep for that as well, which is a good indication. I thought all along after we knew these issues that they was not flying again until 2026, which to your point presents a huge challenge. There's there are going to be changes that have to happen on this. spacecraft between now and when it flies again, and they're not going to get the test set out

for a year and a half. And so what happens then when that goes, and you might need somewhere, like, just the, this is like an expansion of the universe problem. Like, everything's getting farther away from each other, and the space between is also getting a farther away from itself. Like, this is how the schedule works out for Starliner, because they can add best fly once per year. You could theoretically, like, if all you need to do is research.

certify like getting astronauts coming home on the ship. Like you could fly a mission that doesn't go to ISS and forget all the parking stuff and just, you know, put a couple of test astronauts on there and go back up. But doing it around, test all the thrusters, do some navigation to come back. And then be totally out of Atlas V's by the time they need to fly their sixth vehicle. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that's already off the table. Let's be honest, right?

Yeah. And it's not cheap. I mean, they said yesterday and the earnings, right, with yesterday, day before, this delay has cost to $125 million, and you tack that on to all of the other. Yeah, $600 or so, yeah. Yeah, so it's getting expensive. I talked to the head of the space flight division of Boeing.

This is like now, I don't know, like nine months ago. And it came out straight. And it kind of blew me away. It was like, yeah, I don't know if we're in this for the long term. Like, I don't know if I can make a business case. And this is not helping. That's how they were feeling before the flight. and now it's costing them even more money.

They've got a new CEO coming in. Is this something they're going to stick with? And then it's like, well, I mean, then you go to Sierra Nevada and you're like, can you guys hurry up and get Dream Chaser like human rated? Like, what do you do? Because as we saw, like, Falcons a great rocket, but it can go down. Like any rocket can go down. So what, you know, what are you going to do?

Yeah. It's not a good position. I have to ask, there was. that news thing, I don't know if it was news, but something popped up in my feed, at least, that there was like a study contract that NASA had issued to SpaceX for like their emergency readiness or something. Did anyone ask any questions about that at the, at the press conferences? Yeah. And I, yes, or there was some sort of a statement that that was, you know, that was done well. We do this all the time. It was like the statement. Yeah. It's not related to this instance. But on the other

hand, we know we have dissimilar redundancy and, you know, SpaceX could go up and get them. I mean, it's worth noting, too, you know, this isn't the first time it's happened. I remember Frank Rubio and that coolant link on Soyuz, and that's why he ended up, like, breaking the record for time and space, right? He broke Scott Kelly's record. Then I think it was broken by Mark Van High. I can't remember all these records. but his stay was like extended by several months because they had to send up a rescue Soyuz.

So it's he was he moved his seat to the dragon at the time right didn't they move his seat from soos fully into the dragon? Yes. He's just going to stow away under the floorboard. That's right. Yeah. So I mean it's yeah it's a little bit. Can't do that in a Soyuz can't really have to lay across everyone's lap if you're doing that in a

Soyuz. There's no way to sort that one out. But the thing, too, about all this is, like, I don't think NASA or Boeing did themselves any favors just in terms of the way it was communicated. I mean, I think they're pretty good. They're trying, on the one hand, to have all these briefings, but them being adamant from the beginning, this was going to be an eight-day mission or a 10-day mission. And that sort of set the expectation. And then they kept setting all these other dates of when they were. they were coming home. They set like three or four dates and of course didn't make any of those.

And then finally said, oh, it's going to be, you know, it's like indefinite. And by then it, you know, especially by people who aren't covering this day and day out, they're like, wait a minute, what's going on here? And this, I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm a little bit touchy because, you know, I get that, you know, they came out and they said they're not stranded. And, you know, very forcefully, not stranded, and I hate seeing all of those headlines. And I get it, you know, and, you know, I think we've all reported that because they've made it clear, like an emergency situation that can come home in Starliner. And when there was that satellite that came apart, they did go into Starliner and prepare

to come home. But then they're also like saying that they're not stuck. And I'm like, well, that's not true. They're stuck. I mean, I'm sorry. if I'm on the metro or the subway and it breaks down in between stations, like, I'm stuck. And that's kind of where they are. They're stuck for the moment.

That doesn't mean that they're never going to get home. But, you know, I think they should just be own it a little bit more and, you know, pushing back on the reports when, you know, you're not doing a great job of communicating in the first place. But that's, that's just me. The study thing you were talking about, Jake, was around. the same time that there was this that Eric Berger tweeted this out. I think this was after one of the press conferences that he talked to

some sources who apparently they've been quietly studying launching crew nine with two astronauts and their suits available for Butch and Sunday. I don't know if you talked to these same people, Chris, but have we ever gotten a clear statement that every astronaut has a suit made for them for both

spacecraft? Because if that is not already a policy, like that the result of this incident should 1,000% be that is the policy that we have these suits. Once you're no longer an ASCAN, you get fitted for one of each of these things. Right.

Although, was Sony at any point assigned to SpaceX? Because she's like... I think she's the only one that's been assigned to this from the beginning. From the beginning. Yeah. Because it was Chris Ferguson for a bit, and then I want to say,

Fink, it might have been on this for a little bit as well. They had drift around. There was going to at one point, which turned a dragon. I don't know, I like your thought process there, but that's a lot of suits, Anthony. Who gives a shit? You don't want to be in this scenario again? Like, the whole point was having two options.

It's a fixed price contract. It's a fixed price contract, though, right? Well, then NASA needs to go buy some more because they realize. Yeah, they got to buy some more suits. Yeah, they got to buy some more suits. This is the whole point. I don't know if you know about this, but suits are a service now. The service is contract.

They get calls. We've been meaning to ask you about your extent. warranty on these suits. Yeah, yeah. But this is literally the whole point of having, like, it's your point, Chris, they have said this at times during calls that, like, you know, we have redundancy and whatnot. That, they have been scared to say that because they don't want it to look like

they might come home on a dragon instead, but that should be an acceptable reason because from the outset, it's been like, we want two things in case one fails. So, like, there should, I don't know. I don't know. There should be suits. If we're paying $1.5 billion for a deorbit vehicle, I think we can probably pay for, I think broadly, it's pretty polarized out there in terms of politics these days. But I think if you polled people, should astronauts have space suits? I think everyone would be like, that's fine.

We can sort that out. Yes, that is included in the expense. Yeah. Well, we live through that with the all-female spacewalk when the suit, you know, and McClain's had to fit, right? And if you pulled herself from the spacewalk. So that caused an uproar. So we know we have some test data that shows that, yes,

the American public strongly thinks astronauts should have suits at free. We support astronauts having space suits. Yeah, pretty bipartisan. Hmm. Man. Yeah, I don't know. The Star-Leyer thing is, it's obviously getting worse and worse and worse. But I don't know.

We were joking beforehand. It's like if, you know, if they end up having to send these astronauts home on another provider, what do you even continue to write about Boeing? Like it's, I don't know how much worse it can get for them. I mean, obviously you can get worse, but like, what do you do about it? I'm just like, I'm at the end of like the possible. I'm always like, I'm a pretty charitable guy when I think about like unknown. So it's like, well, we don't know this.

It's let's, you know, let's take it easy. We'll think through it. This is still a possibility. This is not, you know, I'm running out of all those avenues. I'm going to go. We're running out of time. We just spent money on a thing that's going to end the ISS. This is the problem.

This is my take with Gateway, right? That like the longer it gets delayed, the closer in time gateway is to the lunar landings. So its value becomes less. The longer that Starliner gets delayed, the closer it is to the end of the ISS. If right now, if they don't make that August 2025 slot, there are maybe four flights of Starliner before the ISS is deorbited. So if you end up. Twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-nine, thirty-one. Yeah.

No, I mean, I don't know. No one's put a specific date on it yet, but it's probably 20, 30 to 32 is how the deorbit vehicle stuff is written. And I have a suspicion that the last years of ISS will be a lot of decommissioning missions and it'll be all weird operations and stuff, right? Bringing stuff home. So if you get into a situation where you might have, you might have three operational Starliner missions, you might have four. Like, is it worth the collective churn? Right? I always thought so because you want this redundancy,

but there is a point in which it becomes like, maybe we should just scrap it and not pay out the operational mission budget and focus that elsewhere. That's a great point. It's milestone-based, though, right? So they do get paid for the flights. The thing that I'm now wondering is, and it takes sort of a lot of theoretical leaps to get there,

but if there is a commercial station in Leo, you know, an orbital reef or the nanorax one or the Axiom space station, can NASA transfer the contract to say, okay, instead of flying to ISS, you're going to Axiom, right? Yeah, yeah. That's a good idea. Or if by that time, Boeing's just like, forget it. Yeah, we could.

We just wouldn't. Right. We might not. I need someone to go and do, like, check all the payments for Starliner. I'm really curious to know if like the like if there, you know, there's a scale of like we've, we just started this project and now we're done, right? So in terms of like amount of work done. And then there's also a scale for amount of money they've received from zero to the,

you know, the four point whatever billion it was. I'm curious how mismatches those are. Like have they done more work and they need to get this money? Oh, absolutely. Or have they, have they, like, has it been on pace? Like, have they got paid for everything they've done? And if they cut and run, it's not really like a big deal, you know? I mean, they're paying.

out. They keep doing this whole accounting business where they're like, lost another billion on this program. And that makes me think that makes you think that they have a lot of kind of payment. Like, it's backloaded, you know? So like their, the dev work is done. And if they can just get to these operational flights, then they start like bringing in a bunch of revenue that's like really easy. Right. So I'm really curious to kind of know where that line. We don't have visibility in how the money works, right? We don't know like when SpaceX flies crew nine, what what money gets sent to them in. I think we see like people can see pay. like individual payments like we can like like boom like 128 million dollars was just deposited

into space x bank now for now it's like a chain kind of thing yeah and and they'll usually put like a like a project name on it right so you should be able to go yeah yeah yeah you would love that all doge in doge coin yeah no he doesn't like crypto anymore i don't know if you heard that but i did not that's news to me yeah because i've been using twitter so i feel like a lot of those Elon accounts keep telling me crypto's great. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Well, Starliner, so you're saying, wait, you're saying based on that, we skipped over the meat of this conversation, Jake, you're saying we're saying we need to pull wherever that's from all of the ones to Boeing and know how much has been sent to them already. Do we? Yeah, because if you have, if you've received a lot of payments already, then you're incentivized to cut and run. Like if there's not a lot of extra revenue on the table, however, if it's the flip, like, if the dev money was kind of like tight and NASA was expecting you to contribute, but you got the bank like the payout for the actual operational flights, then you're, that's, it's not sunk cost fallacy at that point. Right.

He's like, no, it's, it's a lot of potential revenue if we can get to this, right? And we've, we've absorbed all this money. The money that we spent on all the over, that's gone, right? So like, you know, how much money do we have to spend starting today to get to those? six payouts, and maybe that's a lot, right? So that would be the reason that Bowling would want to keep going. But if it's the other way around, man, the best indication would be if they buy a,

if they make some deal with Amazon to buy one of the Matless Fives back. That could happen too, yeah. That's some Seattle drama. What's the, so that, but just following Jake's math there, right? If there are milestone payments, what do you think they charge per launch? Like 100 million? something in that range or is it more? So what's left out there, you know, is it at least $600 million?

It's even for Boeing, that's like a pretty good payout. Not to mention, like, how much money is riding on this? Sounds, you know, maybe a little crass to say that when you're talking about the lives of two astronauts. But, you know, the financial incentives is what's going to propel the company to keep sticking with it. How much money will it cost them if they don't come? home and Starliner and they'd have to do that again. Yeah, yeah. Well, they'd have to fly again, like some sort of cert flight, presumably, right?

And that's another write-down or whatever, right? Another Atlas 5, another service module. Yeah, that'll play into the math, for sure. Do we know, like, I did not follow that whole, like, $125 million loss or whatever it was reported? Is that, are they getting charged for the ISS time? Like, what is the... I think it's more just the, you know,

know, the amount of time that they're spending and white sands testing the thrusters. And probably a combo, right? Like operational stuff that's going on because the mission's still going on, white sands time. Yeah, they had to take a service module right from cert one and bring that out. And, you know, I mean, you know, dealing with the hardware, getting it ready, getting the engineers, preparing the report, sending that to NASA, all that stuff. I mean, it's.

And that's not Boeing doing that. when you say Boeing brings the service module out to white sands, it's Boeing paying Arrowjet Rockadine to do all that, right? So you're going to get, you know, a cost there. Like L3 Harris is not going to take that big a hit unless, I don't know. Who knows? I know there's bad blood there too, right? So it's, uh, yeah, it's a lot.

Everyone's going to want their peace. So. For sure. What a mess. What a mess. Man. If only the eyes has had more drama going on, you know, if there was more to talk about on the ISS,

falling apart, maybe being deorbited, this spaceship's not doing great, the spacesuits not working. Bad times on the ISIS. You would think an enterprising administrator would be using all this to get more funding for the ISS and its follow-on programs. One would think.

Well, Anthony, I think an enterprising administrator would, but... Yeah. As we discussed in the pre-show, we actually have an ambassador administrator who is treating it like an ambassadorship to NASA. I'm going to, I, I, I need, we need to get Eric on here, Eric Berger on here after the Nelson administration is over and see if we can rehash our argument. Yeah.

Because, yeah, we had an argument way earlier, Chris, about whether Phil Nelson was a good administrator. I think we had two of those already. Yeah, and Eric was like, no, look, he started one midstream. You know, like he got, he got SLS flying, all this Artemis court stuff, and I said he's not. And so we had disagreement. And now I'm going to see if he still feels the same. Well, the idea of him as the ambassador administrator is really interesting that he's really just sort of embraced the Artemis Accords and signing up all these other nations. Something, which, you know, I think is interesting because I do think there is the way the Biden administration sees the Artemis program is for the sort of soft power diplomacy, which, which by the way is something that Jim Brydenstein talked about.

out a lot. And Jim Brideside and Mike Gold are the ones who, you know, sort of came out with the artist in the first place. But they see it as a return to this big power, you know, superpower competition with China. And the more people they have on their side sort of the better and they're working a lot with the State Department on that. You know, in the State Department, which like early on in the Artemis Accords, I mean, you knew they were sort of involved, but they didn't, they weren't in, they just weren't as vocal and up front about. it and now they really want to press it and make it clear that they're you know doing a lot of this but that's that's a fascinating analogy that that bill nelson as the yeah i mean because you would think as a

politician and you know worked in the senate he should do what what jim brianstein spent so much time doing and that was like essentially being like a college president like they just fundraise like we need money right that's that's what college presidents do right i need a new athletic facility. It's like, I need a base on the moon. I need, you know, we got to, you know, I need more money. And Jim spent so much time doing that and was somewhat successful because he had such close ties with Pence and the National Space Council and Scott Pace. Yeah, but we're just, you know, they're, they're keeping, I guess, the SLS and Orion and Artemis budgets going, but it hasn't gotten the real boost. Yeah. I mean, and like, not the,

put too fine a point on it, but if you look at, I think it's a great idea to keep Artemis Chord's going, that that's been valuable stuff to put out into the world. But then you look at the ISS scenarios that we're in and the Mars Sampere return specifically, those two things, are areas that in the Mars Samp return case, they actively wanted to punt it until after the election. And in the ISS case, things are in chaos right now. And there's been no movement. towards talking about the ISS budget at all or going after a bigger commercial Leo budget when you have the opportunity to do so You know USD orbit vehicle is the biggest thing that they went for and that went from like We need 500 million we need a billion we need 1.5 billion pretty quickly

So I can't point to a lot of things that have been like 4D chest from the Nelson The ambassador administrator senator Nelson era Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I have like a, my main thesis right now is it's like he hasn't managed the money problem post-COVID very well, right? Like I think COVID presented like a serious economic problem for everybody. And I think that we didn't like it was just there was nothing good to take away from how NASA managed that. Like basically they just canceled a bunch of stuff and like ended a bunch of stuff and kept the SLS lines flat. Like I don't know.

And let other things go, right? Like Viper. Up until recently, just kind of climb to climb to climb, dragonflies, the one that you get heated about too, Jake, that's like all of a sudden a flagship mission. We should talk about Piper. You didn't, you missed that whole bit. Yeah,

I did. Yeah. And this has been a bugaboo of yours. I'm just spicy, but I'm actually, this is a weird thing to say, but I'm kind of glad to cancel it because like it, we need to,

we need to make a couple examples of some of these planetary projects that are just going hog wild, man. Like, it's out of control. The heads on stakes theory of philanthropy science. But so Viper was always kind of like bad. Like there was there's, if you go back and look at the history, you're kind of like, wow, how did they even get this far like you said, right?

Because it's like it was canceled once. I love that we went from Jim Brynstein did a great job to like his flagship thing. Fuck it sucked and it needed to be canceled and I'm glad it's gone and it should never come back. It's great. But that, I mean, that's part of it. Right. So like it was already canceled and then like Jim sort of like.

Necromancy out of the garbage bin at NASA Johnson like you are alive bringing it back and renaming you and then they made it really important or like yeah actually this thing that you've never heard of we need it need it for Artemis

we don't know where any of the ice is it's really pivotal now and we're like okay very important cool awesome and we're going to put it on this experimental lander program that is designed for like 20 small payloads and we're going to buy a bigger one and put this as the only payload on it Oh, that seems kind of weird.

Yeah. It's right. And then by the way, it's going to triple its budget because whatever reason. And it's like, oh, my God. Like, what a wild story this one was. So, yeah, I have, I have a lot of thoughts about that one. And I, I am weirdly kind of glad that they put the plug in it. Wow.

That's my spicy dig. Where are you out on this, Chris? Well, I mean, it's funny because there is this move in the scientific community to sort of like try to save it. And it's just ironic. Like, it's the whole point is Artemis is to go to the South Pole and to go to the South Pole because of the water. And you're killing the project that would do the prospecting. Then what's the point, you know, like, what's the point of Artemis then, right?

Yeah. Are the Artemis three astronauts like Jessica Meera going to like, you know, just start like with her hands, like moving the regalith and like digging in the sand. That's how they did it for all mankind, you know. Like she's in the beach at the beach and like is there water here? So I don't know. And then you know, you have to wonder too like at what point because China seems like they're moving, you know, pretty fast and steadily and are going to be able to characterize

the water whether it's Changi eight or nine. And I keep waiting to this thing about like. like, oh, they're going to land astronauts there, like by 2030, which means before 2030, which means 2029. And then I keep waiting for like 2028 watch. They're just going to like go early, you know, and like surprise them early, 27. You know, we're like doing Artemis 2 and they're like going to be waving to us from the, you know, from the South Pole.

I mean, to your point, they even static fire test stands can't hold them back, you know, they just, just go for it that was good that was good that was yeah yeah yeah so it's like

the whole point is go get the water and then here's the and I get it and it'll be cool that I mean so astrobotic they're going to do the mission

anyway but with like dummy payload and just land seems or maybe they can find I guess John Thornton the CEO said they're already talking to other customers and a lot of other payloads on there but it's just like

weird, this is what you've been planning on for however many years. And it's like, well, actually, no, you're going to take something else. Yeah, yeah. I would love to see one of those contracts, too, though, because I don't know how that is legally possible. Like, did they, did they buy, is this as servicey as it seems? Did they buy delivery of that rover to the moon? Or did they buy delivery of a certain payload to the moon?

Or did they... I mean, it's all through clips, right? So it probably follows a bunch of the clips language, and it's probably just like, we need this much payload space on your lander and whatever right special built ramp and a special accommodation it was all anomalous man this is it shouldn't have never it should never have existed this is all wrong this is like it's against the natural way of how clips was i think the crazy thing though with viper is that it's like the extreme end of the sunk cost fallacy and that it's probably like apparently it's making it through testing still you probably should just

spend the extra 80 million and get the row right you know like whatever it is Maybe this was the, maybe this is some 4D chess from the Nelson era that we were expecting. But like it, I thought it was not going to go through testing. I thought when they announced this, it was done. But then I saw people talking about it's already done two of the three tests it was going to do and it did, did well. And the last one, they've already component tested. The last one was like thermal or something. And they had already component tested everything.

So we're going to save 84 million by not flying it plus whatever, this is the kicker is plus whatever we would have. to keep spending to keep it in storage until Griffin is ready. That's the real variable. I mean, and I think part of it, though, would be that for PR planning purposes, like, if this rover is that important to Artemis, and then Griffin crashes, which is like not an unreasonable thing to presume could happen, like, then what do you do, right? Are you ready to handle that? And maybe NASA would just like, you know what, there's, there's too little upside and too much risk for this to, you know to keep going right but and i also i i question how important it actually is for characterizing the water at these sites because i feel like that was kind of like the shoehorned reason

for making it exist oh it's part of artifice you know and blah blah blah but i don't know i don't think it was going to do that much like really critical man such a marse alitist god one mars rover drives over a funny rock and all the sudden all the other rovers can eat shit. No, no, no, no. I don't think that. All right. Crazy, crazy thread.

Let's do this. Let's do some crazy theorizing on Viper. No decisions get made between now and November, because why would they? Trump wins. Brianstein sweet talked himself back into the good graces and returns. Does Viper get uncanceled once again? Which of these parts is least likely? Jim coming back, unfortunately.

Yeah, I think so. I'm curious who the administrator will be under Trump if he wins or who would be under Kamala Harris if she wins. I mean, I don't know. Give us your short lists. Come on. Make some predictions. Let's go for it. I mean, there are some people who are definitely vying for it. I mean, you could see Greg Autry, you know, has, he's pretty vocal and was he going to be chief financial officer, but then never took office. He was on the transition team.

I don't know. Mike Griffin, you could see him pushing to come back and do that, although I think he wants to kill Artemis outright. But you wonder, I mean, if Pence isn't there, you know, guiding the space policy, like who, you know, is Scott Pace going to come back and advise and sort of be involved? I mean, Artemis is his baby as well. I don't know. Have you guys heard anything?

Well, Anthony has his favorite theory. Let's just take it a quick account of who's on this show right now. Which one of us three writes for the Washington Post? And have we heard anything. Definitely not. No, all else, I have two theories. One is J.D. Vance likes Dieter Mountain Dew. That's a fact that we shouldn't leave out in the wild. I feel like that should just be said for the record.

number two is I have the stupid theory that John Culvertson is going to come back into the fray my only calculus on this is that he's a

Bridenstein-like figure in that he had completely non-parochial interests in space and loved Europa Clipper for no particular reason and that's where

the non-prorial part comes in and he was from like what town like Houston? I don't know yeah but there was some area

there right like southwestish, I don't know. Some, some spacey area. But he, like, would fly to JPL all the time to ask about Europa Clipper. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a dumb theory. So he's not going to revitalize Vipar.

He's going to bring back Europa Lander. Yeah. Oh, Landon, if it sort of was, right? Yeah. His name was floated the last time around, I think, you know, when Trump first one is in the running. I'm floating at this time. So.

Okay. Although, what do we read? Oh, he, he, he didn't. He didn't like the Hubble servicing. Oh, nobody did, apparently. That Jared would go and fix the Hubble. I guess he was not for that. That should be Nass astronauts only, but.

Sounds like he's in the running. All right, so if it's, there's two, all right, on the Harris side, there's two things we've got to figure out, right? Give me a scenario. She hasn't announced who the VP is yet, right? I haven't heard it out my window from her event in Philly. Looks like maybe Josh, I mean, who knows?

I mean, a lot of people, obviously, in our little neck of the woods are pulling for Mark Kelly, but it seems like... I have all vested interests right now. I like my governor a lot, and Mark Kelly would be rad. So I am, like, pretty split on this. Yeah, yeah. So if it's Shapiro, I mean, that's what a lot of people think, too. I don't know. I mean, I think Mark Kelly would be a, that would just be a boon for the, you know, the space council.

But would he pick an astronaut? as the administrator. Yeah. I think Scott Kelly. Yeah. Yeah. I think Scott would be like, have you ever talked to Scott?

I actually, I talked to him like a week ago. And I was like, I was actually talking about Butch and Sonny, but I did say like, you know, what are you hearing about? He's like, I don't know. He's like, gosh, it's a lot of paperwork. You know,

everything he says, he just sounds so grouchy all the time. time I love him. He's just, yeah. Seems like it's really funny. Yeah. It's funny. I don't know a lot about Mark Kelly's, I said this last week with Lori Garvers on the show.

She had heard him speak at an FAA conference last year or something where he said like, I didn't believe this whole commercial space stuff, but I was wrong, which I admire if that's kind of where he's at. But beyond that, he's never really put himself out there in terms of space policy too much. No, not really. Yeah, I don't know. That's a great. point. I don't know that much. I think Scott has, though. I mean, Scott's, you know, pretty pro

space, commercial space and all that and sort of the new space movement. The other thing I know, I think they are, they're really close, though. So I wouldn't imagine that, that, you know, that they're going to have radically different ideas about this stuff. The interesting thing with the astronauts is that as you get more into this generation that we're talking about, right the not the young astronaut cohort but that middle range who were the ones flying on these new vehicles and saw all of their flight opportunities in the commercial space era is that there's probably more of an affinity for that because at an astronaut office level that's where all the value was in their career was that direction it was the new thing that gave them mission assignments

it gave them opportunities. Whereas, you know, the Grunsfeld era, for example, speaking of Hubble, were very much shuttle era, NASA's the way it is, like, do things the old way. So I don't think, when I think of astronaut administrators, we haven't seen one from this kind of middle era yet. And that could be a significant difference in terms of their general vibes towards, you know, the modern way of things. Right. No, that's a great. That's a great point. Look at like, I want to call it a transformation, but I do think it is that Bill Nelson has gone through, right? Here's the guy who created SLS, but now if you hear him talk about SpaceX and Blue Origin and the commercial space sector, he's like all in on that. And he's embracing it. He's the one saying, like, we can't do Mars sample return. So what do you got commercial sector? Like, can you save us, you know, on this? So I do think I mean I'm of the opinion that

You know that that train has left the station like this is the way we're going And and SpaceX can't you can't stop them at this point And can't do a whole lot without them So if you want to have a vibrant space program Which I think people do then you sort of have to continue that That the movement now is actually in some sense like it's even more so because I think people are like, this is, we can't just rely on SpaceX.

We need these other guys going back to the beginning of our conversation. We need the commercial industry to be not just SpaceX, which, you know, as people have said to me, is there a commercial space industry for real or is it just SpaceX? That's, you know, a conversation worth having. But I think they need all those other providers to sort of come online. Yeah, we need more killer apps. That's the problem.

If I hear that phrase again in my life, Jake, I swear to God. It's true, though. Scott Kelly is your best guess on who the administrator is if Harris wins. Come on. Who else we get? I didn't watch the show last week. Did you ask Lori? She didn't rule out her being contacted.

So she was game to talk about it, which I thought was indicative of probably not expecting a call. Yeah. I don't know. I figured when she wrote the book, she was like, me. like that Hillary shot was the shot. Yeah, it might have been. Might have been.

Yeah. Now, if this time doesn't work out, we'll get the real book. The real book. The second half. The stuff I didn't tell you the first time. The thing that's interesting is that my theory has been that the closer we get to election day, the more space Harris is going to try to open up between her and the Biden administration policies because they were not polling popularity.

It was not going in good direction. So that's true. then she would want to get a little bit away from the very close buddy that is Bill Nelson. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I don't know, it's a weird spot, right? Because things have shifted significantly in terms of whose friends with who has shifted a lot in the last four years. So it's hard to know who still has the year. And also, I mean, it's not like Kamala Harris is not familiar with, like, she is the head of the National Space Council.

not has not been a lot of public meetings but she definitely knows the people involved yeah um i don't know have you christian have you like really kept up on what the hell was going on with national space policy in these couple years because we didn't get the like here's me in front of the space shuttle but what was happening with that right no no it's been much more low key um under under harris it's you know i mean just as part of it is it's like the space x phenomenon when you compare it to know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I can't remember which one it was, but the last space policy directive was, like, done in, like, December as they're, like, closing the office. I mean, they're, you know,

you know, and get it out. Number six or something. Didn't they get to six? I think it was six. Um, yeah, it's so, so, so. it's a little bit embarrassing. Like what, if you ask me, like name a space policy that they've passed, I don't know that I have.

I don't know. Does the, I guess the orbital debris stuff has been pretty hot, right? The no testing. In the A-Sat. A-Sat stuff, yeah. Yeah.

Wasn't really their decision to go into that one pretty hardcore, you know, kind of happened. Yeah. Yeah. Something happened along the way. As with many things

of space policy, it was about something else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but I think, I mean, you know, Trump administration showed that, you know, space has, you know, real cachet. And there's, you know,

Todd Harrison from the American Enterprise Institute had this great essay yesterday and he's talking about like, we're not in a space race anymore. He likened it to a space Olympics because there's so many other nations involved and you're competing in so many different events, you know, from the military to growing a commercial space sector that's going to build this

infrastructure that allows us to get to space. And like the moon and of itself, it's like this big team sport involving lots of different countries banding together to do it. So it's a whole new sort of dynamic. And I think it actually, once people begin to understand that, it does, will resonate and have at least some effect in national politics, or at least I hope it will, because it's that important. I mean, if they're looking for somebody, I'll run Ness, for sure. Either party wants to call me.

They could consult us. I should. We'd be good deputies. Yeah. No, I just want to be on the transition team. I want like a short gig. Actually, that's a great idea. Yeah.

Yeah. The off-normal transition team. I'll give you a ton of opinions about stuff. My God, we'd be so good at that. See later. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. We just crashed at Chris's house.

You just go. hang out for a month. Yeah, stay with us. They have an office for you in NASA headquarters, and then everyone kind of hates you because you're like telling them everything they did for the past four years is wrong. Yeah. Benefit with us is that we've already told them that,

and they've probably listened to at least one of our things where you said it. When you look at you, though, in Washington, they call it the webees, because you're like the political appointees, and they're like, you know, the staffers who are there, and they say, we be here when you arrive, we be here when you leave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, I always, that's how I laugh at like, when the like, you know, the space billionaires are looking at administrations and they have little, you know,

tuftles sometime, right? Where I think, you know, didn't Trump and and Bezos get into it a little bit at one point? And it's like, that's, that's the Bezos thing. They're near Webe. It's like, dude, I was in charge of the space company before you were president and I'll be in charge of it after your president. Like, move on, buddy. Let's go. Yeah, he offered to fly Trump on New Shepherd. My God, that would be unbelievable. Oh, man. Wow.

That would be a sight. Who would fly with him? Name the other five spots. That would be great. That would be really good. Shane Gillis. I'm putting Shane Gillis in one of the seats so that there's two of Trump impressions happening in there.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's a really funny thing. Yeah, New Shepherd has like a way to shake out personality traits. I find like a motivating thing. I feel like I learned a lot about Michael Strayhan when he went on there.

Yeah, yeah. You know, grew up. It's not a big Michael Strayhan fan growing up in the Philadelphia area. But, you know, after that, it was like, look at that sky. Go to space. It was good.

Yeah, good, too. Mm-hmm. All right. Man, I can't get that picture on my hand. That broke my brain for the end of the show. The hair in space. The Heron Zero G. Wow.

Man, he would look so uncomfortable the whole time. yeah you would I don't like this let's move on no I need to think about anything else literally anything else Christian

what should people be following of your work these days also I may have spoiled something last week I don't know if you listen to the show but we may have spoiled some news do you spoiled some news I didn't one of the guests did yeah

I don't know if you have any news do you have any news? I'm working on a book I'm on book leave yes did we know that already I didn't know if we knew that I don't think so. I've been pretty quiet about it.

I'm, you know, now just sort of slugging away. And I'm supposed to be on book leave, but keep, you know, getting pulled in mostly because of Starliner. But it's a sequel of sorts to the space barons. Rocket millionaires. They lost some. They lost some money. Biggest way to become a millionaire in space started out as a billionaire, part two. Yeah. Right?

It picks up with the last one and focuses on Artemis a little bit more. And this one, it does focus on the billionaires, but also a lot on NASA in the Trump era policies, and particularly Jim, Brian Stein. And, you know, this idea that we now have a deep space human exploration program that survived presidential administrations for the first time since Apollo. And, you know, what all that means and all this, you know, talk of China and the geopolitical tensions. So it's not out until late next year. That's good because I feel like this fall is going to be busy.

So I have Eric's book. What else is coming out this fall? Oh, I just meant that like there's probably going to be some stuff you need to add to the book after the election. Yeah. It'll come out in time for the next Starliner flight, yeah. Oh, my God. Eric's book, I don't know when Caleb Henry's book is supposed to come out. He's working on the one.

Yeah, that's right. He's got the one web book. Yeah. I don't know if he has a publisher for that yet, though. But yeah, no, that'll be cool too. It's going to be good. All right. Nice.

Jake, you're back now. What do we got? What we got next week? We have a wild one. Yeah. So I don't know if you've ever seen these pictures of when they like, it came up when Orion was being tested. They had like the Orion space capsule in that room with all the speakers like, you know,

doing like audio. testing like, you know, vibration testing with the audio. So we have that, that organization, the people that do the testing as a service coming on, MSI, I don't know, do you say MSI DFAT? It's a big, it's a big, it's a big, it's a company that's like a seven-letter acronym. So these folks are going to come on and tell us how the heck these giant Marshall stacks work. And I'm going to ask them whether they play any Van Halen in it. That's basically the extent of my interview planning so far. Panama. That's great. That's hilarious.

That's amazing. Yeah. All right. Between this and the Trump and New Shepard thing, I've just totally flopped at the end of this show. I'm broken. That's all I got. Welcome to Up nominal, baby. I'm back.

I will mention, per our politics discussion, I just had Mark Albrecht's on Miko, and we got into this from his perspective, having gone through same party transitions, different party transitions. he was involved in the transition eras of McCain, Romney, and original Trump administration. So didn't know that. He was tied in the whole time. So there's some good stuff in there about like what happens. So check it out. We got to have them back on here when it's closer to the, well, we'll see how things go. And then maybe he won't be able to talk to us.

Yeah, yeah. You know, who knows? We'll slot him in after the Chris Davenport book tour. Oh, yeah. All right, y'all. thanks for hanging out with us Christian it's always always great yeah that was fun we'll see you all next week bye bye