Off-Nominal - 170 - Luckily, We Did All the Math (with Casey Handmer)

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Casey Handmer, Founder of Terraform Industries, to talk about Mars Sample Return, and the general state of government projects, NASA, and so much more.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 170 - Luckily, We Did All the Math (with Casey Handmer) - YouTubeSLS is still a national disgrace – Casey Handmer's blogWhat is going on with Mars Sample Return? – Casey Handmer's blogNASA awards Rocket Lab study contract for Mars Sample Return - SpaceNewsFollow CaseyCasey HandmerCasey Handmer, PhD (@CJHandmer) / XTerraform IndustriesFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, Jake. Happy Thursday. Hello. You're still there. Your internet is still there. The storm graced by you and hit our friends in Florida. How you doing?

Yeah, yeah. I got a glancing blow. Milton was, he was coming straight for us. And then at the last minute, he was like, no, actually, Florida looks like a more tasty morsel. It went in the other direction. So we got a lot of rain, lost power for, I don't know, 17-ish hours. But we're here, dried out finally. A lot of hours.

Looking good. Yeah. Wow. So, no, it's good. I had a hurricane plan in place. I had like after Barrel, I like, like, you know, in a, in a non-emergency situation, sat down and said, what should I do in what order, you know, when the next one's coming? And I had it all lined up.

So I just went to the checklist, man. No problems. Had everything ready to go. It's awesome. You get only old-timey hurricane names. Like if this is some shit that was named in the 18 or early 1900s, then it's coming for you, Beryl, Milton. Hurricane Edith.

is heading your way next year. Casey, you're here. No hurricanes were you living. You are hurricane free out there. No, I sometimes wish we had a thunderstorm here. It's very strange, actually, didn't you guys talking to me? Didn't that one? It feels like we're talking on the radio or something.

Last year, didn't that one hurricane, like, hook? And, like, come across. Yeah. We get winter storm. I don't really, I don't recall anything. Did it cross Mexico and then go up? Something happened last year. I remember some sort of West Coast hurricane situation last year.

Am I totally out of my mind? Did I make this up? No, you're not. I remember it. You definitely get like six or so big winter storms, which sometimes involve some snow and maybe some localized flooding. But nothing quite as exciting as to what's going on in the Gulf

every other day these days. It's like we've got a... A Starlink launch, then a hurricane, and then a Starlinked launch over the minute it is. Pretty fun. This is the pattern. Yeah. That's bang on, bang on. This is one of those shows where we have about 8,000 topics.

And you came up last week on the show with the SLS writing. There was a little bit of a good old blog off between the, it was you, Eric Berger and Dr. Z, I think, was in on the, the slack on SOS writing crew, which is good. Normally I write blogs in, you know, one sitting, but that one I took a few days on. And it was like every day someone else like leaped up to the breach to like, you know, drop their own poster to like go back and revise and fix things. And it was, I think for the best overall, it's best to have the last word. But obviously this is a salient topic.

It's on a lot of people's mind. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It's a thing. And I think, I mean, to me, it feels like you three coordinates. So I think there's some sort of political motive here. You're all being paid by the same organization. Oh, yeah.

I mean, look at the quality of, you know, why do you be? They're clearly not paying me very much. Hurricane, I'm getting a conversation in the chat, by the way, that Hurricane Hillary crossed over and hit L.A. So I'm not making it up. Yeah. There we go. No, did we ever suggest you're making it up?

Just that way, close. I mean, I'm currently in my, in my work's building here and the roof leaks in new and exciting ways in winter. But yeah, that's kind of part of the fun. It's almost a novelty because it only rains about 10 times a year here. Not a lot of iterations to test out where things are. That's why the Tesla's back in the day.

Was it the trunk that it collected water and then you would open the trunk and it would all dump right into into your actual trunk? There was like no weather ceiling or something. No dear. There was. It was just a little optimistic, I think. It wasn't quite as well-developed East Coast rape.

Jake, did you, even though your power's out, did you maintain a drink supply in your house? I did, yeah. Again, part of the hurricane plan a few days before, get any supplies you need, including alcohol.

Because in Yucatan, whenever anything bad happens, they just say, you know what, we got to stop selling alcohol. It's like their band-aid solution for every problem. It's just like ban alcohol

over 24 hours. fix it. Yeah. So I stocked up. I got some wine, though. So I've been getting more wine lately. So this is Spanish. It's a macabayo.

So yeah, I don't know. I don't really know much about wine. So I just got it because it was there and whatever. But I need the bottles because I've been making mead and I need to bottle it. So I'm like, well, I may as well, I may as well, I may as well, I may as well just get the bottles with wine. Jesus Christ. Feels like a good. Tell me you have a drinking problem without telling me you have a drinking problem.

I needed bottles to make meat, so I bought more wine to drink. Yeah, yeah, you buy the wine, drink the wine, make the meat, put it back in the bottle, and then the process repeats, right? That's incredible. A little bit of an inventory here, you know? So, anyway. God, I love that. So, cheers. I love it.

Look at that. That's fancy as hell. Casey, what you got? A little earlier out your way. Yeah, so. Yeah, yeah. Well, I personally don't drink alcohol, but that's lucky because I opened the tap just before and I got some rocket fuel. So it turns out

Product marketing You can go You know this stuff Exists apparently on the South Pole of the moon And if you go there it just is rocket fuel That's what I keep hearing from From Lockheed and from ULA and from Paul Sputus when he was still with us

And other people who should frankly know better But actually we're in the business here Of turning this into actual rocket fuel It does involve you know 40 to 60 kilowatt hours per kilogram or something It's quite a lot of energy But you know Eventually, it is rocket fuel.

Some millions of molecules in here went through a space shuttle engine at one point. That's the solace you take when drinking water. I love it. Jake, you're the only alcoholic on the show today because I'm drinking this lacalum. I was out at, first of all, I'm dragging today between one month old and also the Phillies just sucked. And it was very disappointing yesterday. but they were given out these La Cologne mocas at like a farmer's market over the weekend and we kept going back to the stand because they're freaking delicious so that's what I got

we have caffeine alcohol and and municipal allegedly contamination free water this is like the three horseman of post-1600 that's the tri-force right there yeah we're going to Now we'll solve it all. Where should we start? Jake, you feel like you, you looked, you wrote the original topic list down. So I assigned you this problem. I mean, I think what I really, really want to get out of our time with Casey today is we got to crack open tomorrow.

I think that's got to be the biggest one that is like this G to talk about and meets all of our interests and that kind of thing. So maybe we'll start there. And I just kind of, I don't know how to, how to, how to. kick that off though. So you have written a lot about this, Casey, whether on your blog or in our Discord. So I would love to hear, I don't know, where do we start with that? I guess we get, we have some commercial studies ongoing, but what do you, what do you make in this, the current state of this program? Lobby softball. Yeah, yeah, it seems to me that like 98% of the stuff that I write

on the Discord is just me like going off on Mars Hampton for like three or four hours at a time. until people are like, can you stop? And part of the reason for that is that I was, I never worked on it at JPL, but I knew quite a few people who were working on it or had worked on it in the past. You know, and I'm not young anymore. I've got children and I'm in my late 30s,

and I remember some of the first books I ever cracked open on space, which were not new books at the time, talked about Mars Sam for return, right? So this is some researcher who's gone and talked to a bunch of nerds at JPL, back in 1978, let's say, back when Carl Sagan was younger than I am now, and they were talking about Miles Sampa returned back then. And so it kind of blows my mind that when the money tap

finally got turned on a few years ago, they kind of dusted off some architectural study and like, you know, hodge-pojed a few helicopters and stuff into it, and then sat there, sat back scratching the head as the mass budget kind of didn't miss by a small amount, and the schedule kind of took off and then acted surprise that it didn't work. And it kind of blows my mind because you'd think like, well, if this is on the on the horizon, we'd be thinking about it for 30, 40, 50 years. Yeah, yeah.

You'd think you'd be ready. You'd think you'd be like, okay, this is it. We'd better not screw it up. Luckily, we've already done all the math. But then the independent review board is like, oh, yeah, it turns out they forgot the mass of the landing legs. You're like, ah, that could be important. But we can just delete them.

I mean, you know, do we actually need landing legs? I don't know. It's making a helicopter. I don't know. The whole thing's helicopter. It comes in, aeroshell, you shut it, the rotors flick out, the whole thing's helicopter. It's going to be dragonfly, man. You got to do that.

I like helicopters a lot. I like helicopters a lot. I think helicopters are cool. I mean, the thing that bothers me about Mal Sampur return most of all is that it seems fairly clear to me that it is extremely difficult to do Mars Sampor Return with our existing Mars, E.L, like entry descent and landing stack, right? So you can get a ton or two down onto the surface with something like the Curiosity Backshell, like Curiosity landing system, but like doing Mars Dampere return within that envelope is really hard.

So instead of recognizing that and then saying, well, this is true. And also it is the case that we want to do humans someday. And we obviously cannot do humans within that envelope. So let's instead of, like let's put a billion dollars into figuring out how to, you know, upscale this by a factor of 10, and yes, it'll take a few years, but we have to do it sooner later anyway. We instead are treated to this insane spectacle of like trying to pack, you know, the proverbial 20 pounds into the 10 pound bag with with this existing technology because it's safe and de-risked, even though it just ends up costing 10 times as much and also remove success

from the set of possible outcomes. It seems insane to me. Like, okay, I'm just some guy on the internet with an opinion. But how did no one involved in this say, this is not closing and every time we take a closer look at it, it's getting worse and worse and worse. Probably we should back off a bit before we go and build the Mars Sampro return equivalent of the space shuttle and then sit back and wonder why it didn't work properly. And of course, you know, it eventually became impossible to hide that. It became impossible to disguise the fact that this project was going off the rails.

And kind of several half-hearted efforts were made to put it back on track. But really all they did was that process and they didn't actually. actually get to the core problem. And I think the IB report pointed that out. Casey Dreyer got in there with a nice interview with him on planetary radio. And like he set the quiet part out loud, which is like we had more people who were working on like, you know, interagency coordination than we had people who were actually trying to close the mass study. That's a problem.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this one, the thing that's like really starting to surface for me on this, this problem is that it is not clear to me that NASA made a decision or understood where they wanted to have a decision made about who's in charge of it. Is Mars sample returned scoped to like one center or is it scope to like a directorate or is it scoped to the entire agency or is it scope to like the national interest of the United States? Right. And depending on where you kind of like put the priority in that stack, you get a different outcome.

Right. And I think the outcome you're describing, which is like, why don't we think of our entire space agency holistically and understand the relationship between what we're going to do with MSR as a robotic mission to a future human mission, that's like a very NASA or interest level decision. And I think what ended up happening is they got like shoved in between the cracks of like somewhere between a center level and HQ level with like this really like amorphous leadership structure. Like there was no one in charge of this is what it kind of felt like to me. And no one was able to like make that kind of clairvoyant decision.

right? Yeah, there's some stuff going on in the background, which is, you know, there's kind of these different things pulling in different directions. So you have, you know, in order to try and make it harder to cancel, you bring the Europeans on board. Okay, well, that's great and we like to have them. But at the same time, like, the European space program has not exactly been like hitting home runs for quite a while now. And there's some good reasons for that. But it turns out that they have many of the same organizational problems that NASA has only turned up to 11. And then, and then, of course, It's like the country is not just senators and senators. Yeah, it's like.

Yeah, so you have a constant infighting between the different NASA centers, right? So like JPL on the East Coast JPL is seen as like the fairheaded child that can do no wrong. Oh, baby, we got APL out here. We got the we got the hot shot out here. Yeah, because they're local. Like, you know, there's this, you know, there's a lot of arguments going on there. And like, Samper return is seen as, you know, much too big a project for just one center to do. especially as JPL is kind of in the process of doing Psyche and Europe for Clipper and

perseverance as well at the same time. Even though all the expertise is to do it there, and of course at some point, if we switch to human Mars exploration, probably Johnson will like end up taking Mars exploration from JPL and like JPL will get a constellation prize of like, oh, you get to like send a Cassini-like orbiter to some icy moon every 20 years or so. But like this is such a zero-sum miserable kind of vision. of the future, right? And I've written a lot of blogs about this, basically saying, like, given that the launch constraint has basically gone away, JPL should be reconfigured around

just like mass production of, of orbiters and landers for all these different things. And I say, well, what would the cost of a program where we just send, like, one Falcon heavy to every planet, every launch window, whatever you've got, like, on it or not? And I think that would, that would help kind of undermine zero sum or even negative sum bickering between the centres, because everyone would have a chance to get some, right? Everyone would get a go. It wouldn't be the case that you wait until you're like on death's door to get your chance to fly your mission and then like that's it.

You're not going to live to see another one, which is kind of the situation room. Anyway, so the upshot from this, I mean, kind of reading between the lines a little bit, but you know, I read the independent review board report as well, which of course is a reflection of reality, not necessarily a copy of a perfect match reality, is that, you know, in order to improve the chance of program's success,

they took the program out of JPL who was working it and sort of care to HQ and a few other centres to do bits and pieces of it, leaving JPL actually only a relatively small part overall of the project. And then acted surprise to that all these other centres didn't really have like the standing army of talent, you know, ready to go on these incredibly complicated things

that are next to impossible to do. And I think one of the, I mean, I'm putting my spicy hat on today, But one of the kind of shibletts or articles of faith that seems to exist within NASA is that it's possible to be a really exceptional technical leader on technical programs without actually being all that technical, or at least not being recently technical. And so you've got, you know, a lot of program managers and so on at NASA have been promoted maybe from the technical staff originally. But they're not really up to date on what can be done. And yet they're expected to make a decision on the basis of like, you know, a 200 side PowerPoint that, you know, a series of interns put together. or a series of other people put together. And you end up with these situations, like we just saw in the news a couple of weeks ago

where Europa Clipper is closed out and ready to launch. And they're like, oh, yeah, by the way, there's MOSFETs that are radiation sensitive. Yeah, we never actually disposition that problem. We just kind of put together a hundred-page PowerPoint and then decided it was too hard. It kicked it to the next design review two years later to figure out. And now they're like, yeah, we think we can annea on the backside of the orbit. Like, Dan, we'll hope so. I guess we'll find out.

The time to solve that problem was 15 years ago. not like, oh, shit, it's already shipped. Yeah. I don't know. It's just, it's super frustrating. You got on about, though, was that you kind of up front argued for a capabilities-driven approach, which I actually kind of buy in this case where you're saying, you know, we've hit the upper limit on what we can do in our current model, go back to Jake's old We Martians podcast about the, was it the 70-degree sphere cone or whatever that whole episode is about.

and and if you were at that point we're looking at it as like an investor of like all right let me solve the next biggest thing in front of me it would be let's just add another zero to what we can land on mars and then once we solve that problem we will figure out what's next that is actually kind of where they're getting to with the whole kick this to commercial and other organizations and get some studies back on how we would do this problem uh or how we could do this differently most of those are going to be like a totally different way of landing something on mars than the typical approach has been of landing things on Mars. It'll be either, we're going to land up with Starship, who the hell knows what Rocket Lab is going to propose origins, like we're going to do a version of our Blue Moon lander. They're all giant landers that can land way more mass on the surface and then figure something out from there. And so I guess it will be interesting to see

if that is really like the next biggest problem to solve. I'm not sure any of us would be cranky if that was the actual statement at the end of this whole process was like, we're actually going to take the next seven years to figure out how to land way more mass on Mars. And we, in five years, based on where we've gotten, we will come back with a new architecture on how to launch things off the surface and what the best way would be to get this samples back. But like, we're going all in on landing bigger stuff on Mars first. And because we can't. We literally can't do that.

And the problem with the capabilities approach with like the SLS-Ryan path was that was a bunch of shit that we know how to do already. That was a bunch of things that we had architectures for that worked. We can launch spacecraft into orbit. we can link up with a different thing in orbit and boost it to the moon. We've got that architecture figured out, but we have never landed more than a ton on the surface of Mars. So there are instances when expanding your capability envelope actually makes a lot of sense. And if this was the flagship program to do that, how much better of a spot are we in than

doing that and a whole bunch of other programmatic shit for the next five years? Yeah, I agree. I think that if you look retrospectively at the space station, we spent 30 years building a thing because we decided that the purpose of the space shuttle in life was to build a space station. You say, what do we get for it? Like, 400-something cubic meters of pressurized volume. Like, right off the top.

Nice one, though. We know now that, like, the cost of developing starship, which has all these additional capabilities on top of that, will probably be like around about 1% of the entire cost of the space station. And the starship itself, if you, like, you know, refinished the interior and made it a pressurizable volume, like similar to Skylab, conception would be about twice the interior volume of the entire international space station,

and that's not including the propellant tanks, which you could presumably pressurize and use as well. And obviously there's like some engineering to be done there. It's like, it's not like, I want to just take an old starship off the line out of poker cheetah and it's good to go. But just like, because we didn't want to spend $5 billion or $10 billion building a heavy lift launch vehicle that could actually launch like a module larger than a medium-sized school bus, we instead spent 30 years and $400 billion, launching it in like sausage fashion. And now we have this giant, you know, wobbly spacecraft in low with orbit

that was basically obsolete and breaking down was even completed. And the answer is like not, oh, crap, we've made a horrible decision. How did this decision occur? We should probably never make this decision again. It's like, well, we're going to deal with the space station in 2030, but don't worry by then we'll have built another space station with all the same architectural mistakes in lunar orbit, like locking us into another decade or three decades or three decades

of like chasing our own tail. This is insane. Why are we doing this? I think one of the reasons that they're kind of kicking mass amphurton return out to the private sector is advantageous is because it kind of admits like we have no idea how to make this succeed within the bounds of what is, you know, within NASA's Overton window. Yeah.

And I saw Rocket Lab got some, got the thumbs up recently to do it. a study on that, which is great. Although I think their architecture is to like will have the Earth's, we'll have the Mars-a-send vehicle and the Earth's return vehicle. So you've still got to do this kind of autonomous in orbit docking, which is like hard, but not that hard. But you have to say, like, you know, if you had the ability to land 10 tons or 50 tons or 100 tons on Mars surface, which is what Starship's all about. And, you know, Elon says a lot of things, but they're saying, we should probably have a Starship land on Mars by 2028 or 2030 at the latest. You can literally put, like, some giant cast a two-stage solid rocket booster,

like the Minotaur, like the Cut-down version of the Minotaur, in the payload throwing, and that's your Earth Return vehicle, right? You don't have to do any kind of docking. You have to do anything. It literally is buying parts off the shelf and, like, bolting them together.

I think we joked when this was out. Somebody posted a clip of our show that we said put the entire electron launch facility in Starship, Land-Starship Launch Electron. That was our plan, and we'll see. We'll see what the Lander and Mav is for the rocket level proposal. It's not out of the question.

We haven't, we haven't, that ship is not sailed yet, Jake. You might still be accurate. I think solids might be easier than the liquids in that case. You would think. You would think. And then, you know, who needs a nozzle? Who needs a nozzle? Well, I guess you saw Joe Barnard's fabulous video on that the other day.

Oh my God. We need to shout that out right now. Joe, it's just an absolutely incredible piece of work. We will link to this of the show notes of him. You go into this, you click on it. You think this is just like a couple of minutes of horseshit from Joe, but then it is like an incredible video that really gets into some solid rocket booster science and just absolutely fabulous, better content that we will ever make, Joe.

Jake, that's for sure. This is my theory. Joe Barnard-Pennard-Fannasor administrator. Can we competition this into heaven? What were we trying to make up? Were we trying to make him admin last week? No, we were trying to make him the head of the FAA last week, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I'll do both. Why don't we merge FAA and the NASA? I don't go over well right now. Let's make NASA regulatory agency. That'll be great. He's not like you're running the government efficiency department or whatever. Department of Government Efficiency.

I mean, it's a bit of a challenge. There's something that I've come up against as well. And in my day job here, and the people who work in the government, they're good people and they're trying to do their job as well. as they can. I've always believed that you should judge the successful program, not by the intentions, but by the outcomes of that program, right? Because at the end of the day, it's not that hard to get a bunch of well-intentioned people together, but it is damn hard to get even talented, well-intentioned people together and actually produce something with value. And it kind of blows my

mind that, you know, here at my company, I pay, you know, payroll tax, and then all my employees, they pay income tax. And every time I buy something, I pay tax on that. And all in all, that, you know, between 30 and 50 percent of the cash flow through my business goes straight back to the government. And then when I say, hey, you know, just a big one example, California has a basically a typographical error in one of the regulations that means that the synthetic natural gas we're producing, which is carbon neutral, doesn't count as renewable natural gas because their definition of renewable natural gas is only biogas. And this is a typographical error, literally their admission, it will take five years, five years, that is like 1,700 days to

fix that typographical error, which, without which we cannot access a certain market. this seems insane like my type of business is I said typographic the first thing I thought you said topographic error

like there was an error in the maps and you couldn't do something and then I realize you're saying typographic which makes this story way worse yeah

yeah and I'm a far enough I'm sorry five years you're saying from like okay we've received this feedback we've turned it around we've enabled this thing

and it is now officially published and you can take action on that have you tried loudly tweeting about this I don't know Oh, constantly.

But when I use Google, right, let's say Google, like Gmail has a bug or something, right? Like, I'm relatively confident that if Gmail has a bug, someone will be working up out of bed and be pushing, like, a pull request to fix that bug, like, as fast as humanly possible. And every now and then, like, Facebook could go down for six hours because they accidentally lock themselves out of the data center, and that's pretty funny. But, like, it's extremely unusual that you even notice, right?

It's just automatic regression testing. And yet when it comes to, like, fixing a regression, in a regulation that is by the admission of everyone involved not even capturing the intent of the regulator, five years. Like, I'm not even planning to live that long, right? Like, five years is a serious chunk of my remaining lifespan. Like, this is crazy. Anyway, I don't want to complain.

You sound like you plan like NASA budgets. Five years, whatever. He'll roll off by then. No big deal. Yeah. I mean, like, if you, if you are trying to solve an important, difficult problem for humanity, whether that's landing mass on Mars or energy problems or whatever, and solving that requires, like, sequentially fixing five major problems, or five major problems, which are nonetheless, like, literally just fixing a topographical error type situation,

and you have to do them sequentially, you're out of time. You're dead. Like, you have died of old age. So this is why we can't have nice things. let's go back to space because I feel like there's more stuff to kick here. Okay, well, so let me take that and run with it for a little bit and go on to kind of a broader thing. Because like, so there are, you know, there are like inefficiencies in government and then there are inefficiencies in government, right? So like there are certain amounts that will just always be there. Like the nature of a democracy just means there is a floor to like, you know, how bad it's going to be. and unless you go and like, you know,

rewrite the constitution, you're just, you're not going to get anywhere fixing those. And then there are stuff beyond that that you can be fixed, right? So there's like some sort of like, there's some sort of place where you can get it to, right? So I guess, you know,

if, if we think about that, where, where do you think NASA should be? What, what should be their role inside of that window of how much inefficiency they're just kind of stuck with by nature of being the government? You know,

like how, what programs should they be doing? within that window, because obviously what they're doing right now is causing some issues, right? You know, we're seeing with MSR, we're seeing with Artemis, all that kind of stuff, right? I kind of want to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah. Well, that's an important question. And I think, you know, it's important to recognize, as you said, that, like, the government

is a very, very large organization composed of people who largely don't know each other, you know, kind of performing bureaucratic operations necessarily. They're just solving hard problems, right? And there's problems that difficult and messy and expensive. In the context of NASA, I think it is reasonable for us to, to, look at some of the best run programs and best run projects and say, if you can do it this way once, why can't you do it this way in general? Right. And so, like to look at COTS, for example, like COTS, I think is regarded as a very successful program. There's actually two contractors

who managed to deliver. They're one of them extraordinarily well and lead to a bunch of follow and stuff. And then we should ask, given that's the case, why did commercial crew go really badly for Boeing and why is clips being probably a net negative overall? Right. for the entire industry. Like, we should probably understand that. And then, and then looking more broadly at, like, more conventionally sourced projects like SLS, Orion, Gateway, space station, shuttle program, and so on.

Like, why are these projects, like, not just a little bit worse, but, like, 100 times worse? Like, you're spending 100 times the money, and they're going 10 times slower. Like, that's, there's an obvious problem there. There's, like, quite clearly something's gone horribly wrong. And I don't think it's the case that, like, NASA has to solve a problem like, I don't know, social security administration has to solve a problem.

Like, it was a really nasty problem to solve there. NASA's problems are much more discreet. They're much more soluble in technology and effort and so on. I have a little bit of agency in picking what problems they are solving, which is another, like, some of their problems I think are, like, the individual programs are run poorly in certain ways, and that's something you can criticize, but you can also criticize the prioritization of the organization overall, and which they're trying to do everything all at once when, you know, know, if it were you and I, and you were looking at it, like, even saying, you know, I had to

fix five things sequentially, this is a thing I should not spend my time on. I should go spend my time on something that doesn't require that. Those decisions don't seem like they can be made at a higher level within NASA. Well, I certainly think that there's, I think, like, the importance of really strong leadership is undervalued quite clearly at NASA. And there are some extraordinary leaders there. But if you if you look at the sort of people who end up running these programs in general, they're well-meaning and professional. But let's say like the really ambitious, competent people, they get head hunted out of NASA, right? Because they can get paid twice as much and they go and work at SpaceX or the origin or rocket lab. Sometimes they come

back. Sometimes they don't. If you talk to people like Girst or or Dr. Z or whatever, like why are they not running the show? Well, you know, this or Kathleen is like why are they're not running the show. There you go. You kind of understand. And so the sort of people who are the people who have never been recruited by Blue Origin. And maybe that's an unfair criticism, but like, um, but it certainly went off, went off and I think. Well, sure, but like, I mean, by their own admission, NASA is having problems with talent retention, right, talent acquisition and talent retention. And you say, well, why is that the case? Why is it the case of NASA a place with an incredible brand, but like every nerd on earth wants to work out sooner or later,

myself included. You know, I spent years getting a green card just so I could work there. And then once I got there, like, why did I decide not to stay there for the rest of my life? I might be personally and the people I knew. And it's kind of catastrophic it away, but I knew hundreds of people at JPL and kind of the people in my general stage of life or career stage, probably more than half of them ever since left. Like I left, but also like a lot of the other ones left. Why is that?

Well, you say, what's the deal? You know, the deal is you go and get to work on space ground. That's cool. That's what I've always wanted to do. Do I actually get to go and turn bolts and design things? No, most of the time you have to beg for money. Like your salary, but you still spend all your time begging for money. You don't spend your time actually building spacecraft. You're spending 90 plus percent of your time begging for money.

Maybe that's why these projects cost 10 times too much. What about the rest of the time? Well, do you get paid decent money? No, actually, you'll get paid twice as much if you've got the same skill level, even an entry-level job at like Apple or something. You won't be working on spacecraft properly, but you make much more money. is it necessary to make money? Yes, you want to live in Los Angeles.

If you aren't able to make that sort of money, you live an hour and a half a half's commute away, and you can't afford a house and you can't afford children, which is a problem. And then you sort of point this out to your bosses or your managers, and you say, hey, like, you know, last year I managed to deliver this program six months ahead of schedule, and do you think I could get a pay rise

that reflects the fact that I've delivered enormous value to this program? And they say, no, sorry, we're limited this year, as we are every year, and you get the standard 0.5% pay rise. say, well, cost of living has increased 8% in Los Angeles in last eight years, sorry, in the last one year. So that's actually a 7.5% paid decrement. And they're like, well, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I guess we're okay because

we moved here in 1972 and we own four houses like Gniata, which actually, by the way, this is getting increasingly specific. Every second this goes on. I'm not even done yet. I'm not even done yet. I can tell you what the supplier is, Jake, but if you take a right out of Kennedy Space Center, you go past their facility. Yeah.

So not only are they. Yeah. So, like, not only, are you, that ends with power tech. So not only, talk about JPL specifically. So like, like, not only, the JPL is actually, in some ways in a better, it's not a secret related work there. No, in some ways, JPL is not as badly as the other, nor does it, who your manager was if I can just do some public document search.

Yeah, yeah, but like they can actually, like, they can actually, so FFR to C does have a little bit more freedom in pay scale, but like, even then, you can't earn enough money to live in. in Los Angeles, you will not be promoted until you've been there for 10 or 15 years. Like the people above you have literally died because they will not retire. And by the way, you also have to spend a lot of your time dealing with bureaucratic inefficiency caused by the fact that the organization is literally clogged. Even JPL is clogged with people who will not do their jobs and will not resign and will not be fired. Right. And you think I'm speaking hyperboically here, but like in private industry, if you fill your organization with 95% bozos

and you don't have the ability to deliver your products on time and on budget, your business will go out of business straight away, and the creative destruction of capitalism will recycle these elements into something more productive, but at NASA, that never happens, right? They just print more money, and the schedule moves to the right, and the budget just climbs to infinity. And you say, why is this okay? So, what a great deal.

I get to go and work at NASA, and my managers have pretty markedly little interest in what I'm doing. Oh, and by the way, when I pointed out that, like, be personally saved a bunch of time when a project actually got in trouble for that for a variety of reasons. And so not only are you not measuring or rewarding productivity, you're actually punishing it. And then you ask like, why is it the case that these people have difficulty retaining talent? Yeah. Like, both of the equilibrium. Over time, you're a bunch of people and all the ambitious, talented people will leave,

and you'll just be left with whoever is not ambitious or not talented. Right. Take you thought I've said about space last week. Well, I mean, this is exactly the question I asked, right? This is the question I asked. And I'm, but I'm trying to figure out, though, is where, you know, of those problems, are there are there problems that you just described that are actually solvable at a government level? Or should NASA just like be out of that business?

Like, if they, if they can't compete on salary with Blue Origin and SpaceX and whoever, like should, should they change something so that the salary is only one part of the equation? and the total equation still comes out favorable for an employee? Or should they just be like, let's just shut down JPL and farm everything out? Because that is not place we should be. That's the follow-on question to that. Right. Is there a scenario where you could fix everything you just described, right?

It'd be very, very tough. But in contrast, like the value of property, say, SpaceX, is you also don't get paid very much, right? But you do get stock. And you get to work on hardware. and because there's pretty quick turnover there for all kinds of reasons. Like, if you're good, you will be promoted pretty quickly. And there's numerous instances of people like basically going up from like entry level

shop floor to like leading programs within a couple of years. And you won't have to work with people who are bad at their jobs because they get found out and fired like very, very quickly. So by and large, the workforce there are like dedicated, switched on smart people like working hard on projects like it actually matters. which is why they were able to deliver the commercial crew, like on time and budget and others less so. How do you fix it?

Well, I think it's important to realize that the default outcome, which is don't make any major changes, is that NASA is already out of this business, right? If the business is flying rockets to space, delivering people to space, they're not in that business anymore. They pay SpaceX for a deal. Like, they pay SpaceX for transport. But, like, at this rate, it's looking like we'll end up with a lunar base

and NASA will be lucky to have naming rights, right? they'll be lucky to even get like the NASA sticker stuck on the side of a module there. Like, how crazy is that? Right. So it's not the case that like Casey like, what do we do to solve this problem? Like, you know, help things out at NASA. Like, you know, like it's already broken. Right.

It's already, it's like in terms of the core functionality of what it's meant to be doing, I went through this list of programs they're working on. I was kind of surprised to find that like there isn't a single program that's not like horribly like on. like on the brink of being cancelled for exceeding its budget and schedule. Like it's vanishingly rare for them to be in case. And so how do you fix that? Well, it's really tough. But like if you're not interested in measuring and rewarding productivity,

you should not expect to obtain productivity. And if you can't obtain productivity, then you can pack up and go home because you won't be able to fly stuff in space. It's really hard. I don't know if you've heard. I was going to bring up, was it last week, Jake? I mentioned that Hera came in like several million years. euro under? Was it like tens of million a euro under their budget? And they sent it on to some other

program. One of the ideas I had last week was like, great, split it up amongst the project team and they've now profited off of being so efficient. Maybe that should make a comeback. Yeah. Yeah, we've got a little bit of a profit share going on there. I mean, in terms of putting in their own back pocket, I think that might introduce incentives that might not be conducive to project success. But in terms of giving the people who succeeded in delivering that, you know, under budget, some say in how that money gets spent in the future. That would be a good idea. Yeah, that was Jake's thing. It was like they, then they get to do a follow-on project that they were, they have been awarded by their free budget to go to another thing. There should be bonus scope in every project that you only get to

do with leftover money, right? That's kind of like if you, if you, you know, at certain checkpoints along a project, you know, okay, you get to, you know, your first review for perseverance and you're, you've saved, you know, whatever, seven million dollars. Okay, well, you get to like spend that on, on a new development to get a second instrument added to whatever thing you're working. Or like extended mission, right? Like, it's a default. Extended mission. But because we are at that point, some of that is complicated, right?

Because we got a thing to fucking Mars. So like, yeah, we've put a piece of metal up there. We're going to use it. Like some of that's complicated in terms of like, you know, you can't make changes at certain points without going back and redoing other work. And that then incurs more costs. And so, like, you have to be careful with how that that cascades, right? But I still think that there would be a way to like, you know, at certain milestones, like, okay, if you, you know, here's your budget. And if you come in at 95 percent, then here's the extra scope you get to do.

If you come in a 90 percent, here's the scope you get to do. Like having something like that laid out so that there is like a path for for doing more and being more productive and having that sense of accomplishment. I don't know. It's a thought. I don't know how that ends up, you know, being architected at the government level. Yeah. Right. Like, like you could take someone who successfully does some project and like pin and metal in the White House. Like that'd be a start. But if you look at how this works in

private industry, you know, if you start a company and you successfully deliver value, like the upside that accrues to you is insane. Right. Like the market says, oh, this is a person who successfully allocated capital very well once. Now they will have like sufficient capital. They can go and do it again and again and again. And sure, sometimes they get lucky. once and then they lose it all. But like every now and then someone comes along and again, like the elephant in the room like Elon is like clearly able to build successful technology development programs over and over and over again. And as a result, he's the richest guy on earth. Like that's kind of how like we should not be surprised. If you find that that is the case.

I'll put it that way. But at the same time, let's say there's a thousand program managers across across NASA, right? And I walked into HQ tomorrow and I said, print out the list of the thousand program managers across NASA and give me their ranking on some quantitative scale for like how successful they are on their programs, like normalized by the difficulty of the program. What a radical idea. What a radical idea that you could even have some idea who's good at their job and then be like, okay, well, let's give these people a 50% pay bump because they're doing well and then like promote them up and put them on a billion dollar project instead of slumming along on a $10 million project waiting for someone to die.

But it's never going to happen. Or like, I don't see any evidence that's going to happen. And in programs that are growing extremely quickly, so like during the Apollo program, the budget was growing quickly. So there was always scope for like more talented people to kind of work their way up. But as soon as you flatline on budget or whatever,

everything gets frozen in place. And that's what we see right now. But I'll push a little farther on that because that's the question, right? Like, can you reasonably change that at a government level? I don't know if you can, if you can, just because of like, you know, there's, there's going to be no elected officials that are going to be like, yeah, let's have a program that just like fires people at like an Elon Musk level.

Like that's just, it's a, it's a third rail for, you know, for a congressperson. Like, you know, whoever's in charge of the JPL district is not going to like be happy about the idea of like, you know, stack ranking all the employees and cutting the bottom 10%. Like that's, that's not a move you do at a district level. like so like yeah it's tough i always i always ask this question like is it really is it worth our time to talk about an unreasonable solution right well is it unreasonable like it really sucks if you're in the 10% that got cut right and and quite often it's not because you're just like intrinsically a bad person right it's just like wrong place wrong time like not not well suited to the project at hand

if you think it sucks to get cut how bad does it suck to be in the 90% who wouldn't get cut who has to work with the 10% who should be cut who has their salary downloaded and their achievements diluted and their career wasted by dealing with that time, right? It's super important to like, you know, not that sort of, you kind of have to prune the garden in some ways, right? It's about group care versus individual care. And this is conspicuously obvious to any organization that is like quite obviously succeeding versus organizations that are quite obviously not succeeding. It's a really difficult one in the government because on the government pay scale there's kind of all sorts of assumptions about stuff. And like the lengths that people go to to get people at

Nasa who are causing problems. I'm not talking about people who are like underperforming. or unproductive, but like people who are just giant assholes who are very difficult to work with, who are like abusive to their fellow staff and you still can't fire them, right? Literally, only thing you can be fired for is like stealing a paperclip is instead they'll promote them and then reassign them to Armstrong, right? So like, congratulations promotion. You've been posted the Mojave Desert, see you later. And then usually they take the hands in design. This is so real. I love it, Jim. Isn't that crazy? This is great. This is like the Gersk promotion, right? The special advice.

eyes or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, McAllister now. Well, you got stuck in a whole Macalston. It's, uh, it's from for all mankind when they get assigned to Apollo applications, right? And they're like, yeah, I'm probably in fucking Siberia, whatever. I would jump at that.

Like, I, I, I checked through Siberia when I was 19. That'd be, that'd be cool. I thought you were saying Apollo applications. I don't know, dude, your blog, your blog would have been so good in Apollo applications era. Like, that would have been the, the best shit. Like, I've got this crazy satirvana. You should do a whole series of Apollo applications. Well, I mean, Nixon gets a bad rap because he tore the Apollo project apart.

But what was the outcome going to be? Like, we'd won the space race, and the rocket was not that safe, and it was crazy expensive. So we canceled the Saturn 5, and then we spent like eight years developing the space shuttle, which was even more expensive, even less capable and significantly more dangerous. Then we killed 14 astronauts, so we canceled that. And then we spent 10 years, actually more than that, but we spent 10 years where we didn't have any intervening flight capacity developing the SLS, which was even more expensive and even more dangerous.

Like, this is going in the wrong direction, people. Like, we should probably figure out what we're doing wrong and not do it. Unfortunately, I mean, the weird thing that bothers me, like, I've written, most of my blogs, actually, people who don't know, most of my blogs are, like, pretty chill. But, like, I've written a handful, which are very critical DSLS. And I think justifiably so. And the funny thing is I get calls all the time from, like, NASA Insiders or, like, associated people.

I just had, like, two calls this morning with, like, randoms who wanted to, like, call me up and take confession. And it's, like, way worse. than I've ever written my blogs. And there are things I can't write about because I don't have first-time knowledge or I don't want to potentially reveal who told me what. But like all these people,

like a surprise number of people are like saying this is messed up. But like clearly within their own organization, they're not authorized to speak that truth. They can't admit to themselves and to their bosses and to their employees. That like we all know that we're working on a sham project here. Like there's a Russian word for it, a Pichomkin.

Right? It's like a fake project. and just spending money in getting no way. I think there's probably people out here that listen to your rants and are like somewhat triggered to some degree of like how intractable some of the problems are in your framing. But I also think that that perspective, like you said it, you tried for years to get a green card so that you could work at NASA.

That was a thing that your life was formed around in many ways. And so the perspective of getting to that point and then being smacked with different reality and these problems that you're assessing that have no clear direction on how to fix it or what we should do about it, the frustration there, like if you didn't give a shit, this would be so much easier. If you just went and started your thing and never gave a shit again, right, and just didn't talk about it, never mentioned it. Let anyone just keep getting their jobs do the thing, but you never mentioned it. I feel like you clearly give a shit about it to be so fiery about it. And speaking about it in the way that you are, I think is the only way

If anything is potentially changing of realizing the situation that people are in when they get in that boat, if you don't outline it exactly the way that you did, it's easy for every generation to just go, like, oh, I guess everything's fine and it still is the place that I want to spend my entire career without having actually heard from people that were there and disappointed by it. Some people are very happy there and good for them. And I'm happy for them. And a lot of people are doing excellent work that gets wasted. but it doesn't see the light of day. And in the grand scheme of government waste, the SLS is neither he nor there, right? But like if you look at, look for example, like what Joe Barnard is doing, right? And I just admire him so much because he's living the integrity of like fighting for his dream.

And he can't bullshit himself. If he bullshits himself, like his rocket explodes and he wastes months of his life and heaps of money he doesn't really have. And so that's why when he talks about this stuff, you can take him seriously and you can trust him. because he knows that you can bullshit your way through parts of life, but when it comes to flying stuff in space, you can't bullshit physics. You can't bully your way through a physics problem. And now we're still like what, 20-something years into building the SLS,

which is trying to bullshit a physics problem. It's saying it's more important to actually uncancel the shuttle program, like, well, the same people are still working the same jobs. We're not actually getting anything out of it for 20 years. then then then say actually the space shuttle itself was a horrible mistake we should probably backpedal on that a little bit and you know like a jobs program is all very well but there's only a few hundred jobs like why don't we just pay these people like a huge payout to retire and they can go and spend that money you want to some productive for the economy instead of like saying well our

budget is a billion dollars a year to like work on rockets and 950 million of that is spoken for keeping a bunch of people in make work jobs that aren't actually contributing and Oh shit, now we don't have any actual rocket capability. It drives me up the wall. And NASA is meant to be an organization that speaks the truth. It's meant to be an organization that studies, you know, science. Scientific origins. The universe we're in.

Science is not perfect. But like if the senior leadership in NASA kind of look themselves in the mirror and say, yeah, something's not right here, we should fix this. I can't even admit to themselves. That's a problem. And this is conspicuously obvious at this point that like none of the people involved who absolutely should have the integrity necessary to say this is a problem, are able to say it, are able to fix it, are able to do something about it.

They're all just kind of, you know, charitably going through the motions and hoping that it fixes itself, but I think uncharitably, they're on the public first. My taxes are paying their salary to do a particular job that is regarded as a job that is 100% achievable, right? It's not like we're asking you to do something that might be impossible. It is 100% achievable. They're taking that money to do that job. they're sitting in the chair occupying the role of the leader of that program.

They are showing and fronting it to the public as the person who is responsible for delivering the success of that program. And they know, as well as any of you and I know, that this program is not succeeding and it cannot succeed in their content to take that money and lie to us and lie to themselves and waste our time. It's it's appalling. If you can't do the job, you should resign and do a different job and let someone else who has a chance take a go, have a go at it. That's my view on it. damn that was a fucking great ass clip

I felt like I was in a movie for a second Jake that shit felt like Aaron Sorkin wrote that rant that was awesome why did we get this goddamn rocks back from Mars is what I'm wondering is it is it moral to take public money to do a job that you can't do right

it is yeah we get into the fundamental challenges of of what the government wants to do, right? Because, I mean, the joke is that like SLS has a jobs program.

So like, it is accomplishing what it's meant to do. Like if the, if the, if the objective is employ people in in Huntsville, Alabama, the program's doing really well. Right? Like it's, it's, it's, it's it's not even, right? You look at, you look at the math,

about 25% of the, of the costs are going into salaries. Right? 75% is disappearing in overhead. So it's not even a jobs program. Right? It's just, like a prop up Boeing's bottom line program. And like, well,

I'm counting those jobs too, right? Yeah, I think that's the accounting that you're doing. So that's not, that's not a job in Alabama though. That's like, that's not going to peril for anyone.

Wherever, right. But there's, there's, you know, if that's the objective, and I know it's not on paper, that's the objective,

but like everyone kind of knows. That's, that's, you know, that's why the, the legislation was written that way. Like, you have to invent,

a rocket and the requirement is it's all the exact same rocket parts from all the exact same factories and all the exact same districts as it was for shuttle. Like that's indirectly saying that it's a job program, right? And so that's where it gets stuck with this. Can I bring up a non-NASA example real quick? Because everybody in the spirit of hurricanes, everybody is tweeting about this whole FCC subsidy situation that, you know, Starlink got snubbed out of all these billions of dollars to do this thing and they were the only ones to have done it.

I'm like, to Casey's point, maybe there was a fucking terrible program, and it's actually incredible that a company did not need any of those billions of dollars to do the thing way sooner, and we should just be happy about that and not have that program anymore. Like maybe it's not, hey, SpaceX should get a bunch of billions of dollars. Maybe we just should stop doing that program and say, well, that one didn't work out. Let's not do that model again, because this other organization was way more efficient at it. Instead of trying to say, write the historical wrong and say, SpaceX should have been included in this, please mail them.

They're $1.9 billion or forget how much it was. There's something in that range. Yeah. It's all pretty dirty given that the competing person you mentioned. We saw the same sort of things

with Blue Origins, intense lobbying effort after HLS. But like, yeah, I mean, SpaceX attempts to play within the rules, right? And the rules are well. FCC commissioners write like public letters to each other back and forth from vacation all the time

and it's like super weird and they're having an office battle that is also involving external companies. But my point is everyone's using it as an example of like Elon Musk's being politically persecuted. When I'm just looking at it, like, that clearly was a bad program that was never going to achieve the goals that it was meant to achieve. And this other thing exists now, so why don't we stop doing that? But again, that's another decision that because SpaceX is suspended on their own. That's like Black Friday salesman.

I feel like that's like, I know you used to work in black. Friday sales, but that sounds like some of that. Like, you've saved $700. No, you just spent $600 on that TV that you didn't need. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, imagine if, like, at the, I mean, people were proposing to do this, right, at the 11th hour, like, they canceled the commercial crew program and clawed back a bunch of of the money that they already paid out to space that program and said, like,

we changed your mind. We don't think you for building that capsule. I expect you'll offer it to us for $90 million a shot, and if you won't nationalize your program. Right, that's, that's like, I don't know, it feels, it feels kind of sketchy, right? Like if you're, again, if you're the government and you're like, hey, we're going to pay for a service, you should pay for it. But yeah, I mean, it's, I think, I think, yeah,

a lot of people in this most recent administration have not gone out of the way to cover themselves with glory as far as, you know, their interactions in this area. You know, and I think actually, if you look into the archives, it's kind of been this way for a long, long time. Yeah, but it just feels dirty to me. Like, and in particular, on the whole, like, SpaceX front, like SpaceX is not exactly secret about what their mission is. They just want to have like a relatively smooth regulatory path

so they can build giant rockets and then launch all us like quasi-autistic technical widows to Mars so we can stop making trouble for everyone here or earth. And like if my if I was Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Trump or someone, I'd just be like, wow, that sounds like a win-win-win situation. Yes, we're going to excise Burkutcheeka from like federal oversight of all these different stuff. In fact, we'll give you a billion dollar year subsidy

to accelerate you, like, getting out of our hair. Get all these weirdos out of here. And instead, they're like, let's see if we can slow them down, so there's more time to tweet. Like, is this a good idea? Like, is this something that anyone actually wants? Dude, that's 100%. Then we're talking about this before the show. The FAA, like, license now seems to be expedited for this next flight.

And part of it, I said to Jake, was like, maybe they just, FAA was like, I just actually don't have the time to deal with this between now and November. So we're going to stop everything else for three days, do what they want. and then get back to the paperwork that other people are expecting on a slow schedule because we don't have the PR people for this. We don't have the, like, that pressure campaign can work because you become such a squeaky wheel that it's so annoying and it grinds the rest of your work to a halt because you have to keep answering reporters emails and you have to keep responding to people in Congress and you have to

keep writing these letters. You have to keep replying to Adrian from NSF. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a tricky situation, right, because, like, you know, the answer will be like, well, the FAA, this office of the FAA is not adequately funded. which is probably true, and they have a lot of work.

At the same time, you kind of have Parkinson's law occurring in real time, right? Like, what a coincidence that it turns out that, you know, the 200 people in that office working 40 hours a week have exactly 200 times 40 hours worth of work to do every single week, week after week forever? Like, what a coincidence? And the answer to why that is the case is the same, you know, the same situation we run up against it at JPL, which is by law there must be 100%, not 99, not 101% full employment at all times allocate accordingly via all the different different accounts and that's just not how the

real world works and so yes of course the FAA a department of generating paperwork in the department of disposing of paperwork and they're both kind of in this battle that will outlast the rest of humanity I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for for them complaining that like it's really hard for them to fix this problem that they created themselves they you know the writing has been on the wall on this front for years and and years and they could quite easily solve these problems in an afternoon if they actually were incentivized or cared enough to do so. That's my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've had the odd tangle with the FAA in the past

myself as a private pilot. And I came away with the impression that it was a organization full of well-intentioned people, but like many organizations full of well-intentioned people, their collective outcome was often starkly at odds with their, you know, kind of individual desired outcomes. And we're seeing that happen, right? Like where SpaceX is grinding up against this reality of like, you know, regulatory and capacity, we actually see like evidence of the problem, the problems that are being caused across the entire economy, across our entire civilization. But there it's like, you know, one particular hotspot.

And the answer to this is not to like say, oh, well, space X should slow down a bit and chill out. The answer is to say, well, if it's this bad for SpaceX, it's probably just as bad for like 10,000 smaller businesses that can't get off the ground because they can't get the person who's, again, on the public payroll to solve a problem on the phone. Yeah. It's, it's crazy. Yeah.

My politics are that SpaceX should, the only law we should pass is that SpaceX has to launch a minimum of 10,000 rockets a year. And if they don't launch that many rockets, then they get severely punished. I think that would align the incentives appropriately. But just to kind of put this in stark a league, it is quite obvious that insufficiently negative or positive consequences occurring to, like, Project Artemis managers one way or the other, it seems to me that none of the people involved are really all that invested in humans walking on the moon again anytime soon.

I do not think that is the case at the Chinese space program. My impression there is that if you're a program manager who fucks up badly enough, you'll be severely incentivized to not. And that if you succeed, you'll probably be empowered to do more so, particularly given that it's a society where like individualism and expression is kind of curtailed in certain other ways. So, you know, I think that if we are serious about not kind of watching Chinese flags sprout on the moon and watching Chinese cities on the moon when it's, you know, a new moon and it's dark on the face and so on. We should probably get out of our own way and let ourselves succeed on that front. Damn. I did with that, Jake. We solved. We solved it again. Wait, we should give, we have one minute left.

We should obviously have, case, you obviously need to plug the business that you're talking about in which you need a typo fix from somewhere in California? Well, I'd say that the regulators we work with are generally fine people to work with. And please don't come and crush my business because I said many things about some other part of the government. For the record, I'm not now annoyed either been suicidal. But yes, we're building cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. It's a nitric on Earth because it solves the climate problem, but it's also necessary on other planets where you need a hydrocarbon supply chain.

So that's the reason we're working on it. We're hiring. So if you like the idea of working for a person who's been badly scarred by organizational interfinitioncy at NASA, and which you would be ruthlessly, you know, read out on a podcast if you ever do anything subpar, I guess. You will be stack ranked. I'm not named names. To be clear, I'm not named names. But at the same time, like, no recruiting process is perfect.

And we've made the own mistake. And to, you know, basically safeguard the effectiveness of the people who work. here we've occasionally asked people to consider finding employment elsewhere. And it's necessary. It's not a dirty thing to say, like, hey, you're wasting your time and you're wasting our time. Like, you should go and find some other job in this productive economy. Right.

Like, I've been fired. It sucked. But, like, I'm better now for that than if I'd stay doing the same thing I was always doing. Like, it's, yeah, it's just a kind of necessary part of how we make the sausage. So, yeah, I feel like this is a good place to work. and the people who work here generally happy to work here. And we're working on a super crazy, like, very ambitious problem. If we succeed, we will cover something like 2% of us land surface with solar panels.

So that's a pretty cool trick. Wow. That is a pretty cool trick, I would say. One weird trick, yeah. We'll also make gasoline cheaper and bring back superzonic flight and permanently cut Cuban's dependence on subsurface, like fossil carbon reserves like oil and gas and coal, salt. the climate problem, solve scarcity, basically solve poverty, all in the next generation or so.

There's a lot of way to be done, but it has to be done that. It's just fucking nailing it. Yeah. It's a step on the way. Again, Aaron Sorkin wrote all of the things that you've said on the show today. I have convinced it. That is not true. Please do not see me, Aaron Salkin. I think it's a wonder at this sort of stuff. I have to say, thanks so much having me on.

I listen to it every single one of your show is going back to forever. and it's just been, I feel like my podcast has come alive and is talking to me, which is weird. We love it. We like making dreams come true. The dose of realism. I think after our... We crush some dreams and make others get true. Yeah, totally.

We needed every set. Jake, I don't know if we have an announcement for next week yet, but we are once again working on things. Yeah, it's coming. Stay tuned. Stay tuned, is what I'll say. That's all I got. You got anything else? Go SLS.

Woo! Go SLS. Yes. I'm wearing my S-Camp shirt today. Nice. Look at this. Just killing him in the way out.

All right, y'all. We will see y'all next week. Bye. Bye. Bye, everybody. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.