Off-Nominal - 196 - ❌ Lady Telescope ❌

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Jake and Anthony talk about Firefly’s latest spectacular Alpha failure, and the skinny budget request.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 196 - ❌ Lady Telescope ❌ - YouTubeTrump Proposes $6 Billion Cut to NASA – SpacePolicyOnline.comNASA scrambles to cut ISS activity due to budget issues - Ars TechnicaFirefly Alpha launches FLTA006 Message In A Booster mission but fails to reach orbit - NASASpaceFlight.comAlpha FLTA006 "Message In A Booster" - YouTube (Timestamped to anomaly, also lol at 1969-12-31 timestamp)Follow 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. Hi, Jake. I hit all the buttons out of order. I hit all the buttons out of order. You little rusty, you little off your game because of the weird, weird Monday show. Super weird Monday show. Worked out, I'm going to be honest, because we were already taking off this week, later this week. I'm closing on the new house, which has been a saga.

And, yeah, this may be the last off nominal in this particular location. I make no promises of my whereabouts for the next several weeks to months. We may do some shows on my new front porch. We may be in a room that looks like I've been taking hostage somewhere because it's just white walls and no furniture and it will be echoey. I have no idea. And neither do you. And that's the fun part.

It's reminding me of the three weeks I spent in an interim Airbnb when I moved down to Mexico and I had like a mattress on the wall behind me and like a blanket draped over because of the crazy old Spanish colonial architecture is not, turns out not designed for podcasts. Like cavernous, that one. Yeah, it was like 12 foot ceilings or something and all concrete and tile. Like it was like podcasting into a tin can and it was some hardwood.

But the rest of that was accurate, I think. So it'll be a little bit. Okay. Excellent. Anything going on? You want to talk about? Off nominal Studios east moving. Further east.

Off nominal Studios, New Jersey. Can we take this opportunity to rename it north of nominal studios north? I think I might not be moving any vertical. I think I might be moved. I'll let you know. It might be like shockingly little north or south from here and directly east is the direction. I just like the idea of you being north of the Canadian.

It makes me happy. Well, I mean, you're a very confusing individual. I know. Nobody gets me. I mean, we can, while you tell me about what you're. drinking, I will let you know exactly how many points of latitude on moving north. All right. And then you can determine if that's enough.

I got a cocktail today. It doesn't look like much. There's some crud in it. What is this? I don't know what that is. You know, to my health. This is a mescal. I got a nice bottle of Ojo de Tigre mescal this week.

So I've been enjoying this. A little bit of orange liqueur, some mango and orange juice. It's lovely. It looks pretty fresh. how's it feel on a Monday? Well, you know, I live in Mexico and I work for myself. So every day's, every day is Friday at 5 p.m. To some extent.

Every day is Monday or Friday. I tell some of my people I work with it because sometimes I get, you know, ask to work on a weekend. Are you okay with working on a weekend? And I go, every day for me is Sunday. I just pick which Sundays I want to work. So. All right.

So it's two-tenths of a degree. Oh. Oh, wait, sorry. No, no, I did the wrong side. No, no, I did the wrong side. It's even less than that. Hold on. I did the wrong side math.

It is going to be, now I've got too many. It's 0.02, 200ths of a point. So almost, almost negligible. How far is that? even in meters. Oh, it depends on your...

I know, but come on. No, latitude is constant, right? Latitude, longitude varies by latitude. Longitude depends, yes. Let's ask chat, GPT. This is such good content. Chat TBT. How many kilometers is?

How many meters is 0.20 degrees? Latitude? Oh, dear. Latitude. to convert. Okay, I don't need to know how. One degrees, 1100 or 1111 kilometers. So it's just less than three kilometers.

Okay, that's not negligible. I mean, on the scale of Earth. I mean, man, the sun's going to stay up longer for you. It's going to be like. Totally different. Yeah. It's a whole new world, man. It's a whole new world.

So there we go. You can tell. You'll be able to tell based on the sun angles, I guess, on which place I'm in. That'll do it. By the way, I'm still drinking field study because I've bought more of it because it's so delicious. And I can only get it this time of the year. So I'm just cashing in. Just do it, man.

Just go for it. It's like me and pumpkin beer. Yeah, this moves fast, you know? I don't know why it's labeled summer IPA, but. That three weeks in October where it's all I drink is pumpkin beer. Yeah. Where are we starting, Jake? The science budget has been obliterated since we've talked.

Well, hypothetically, requested to be obliterated. Somebody wants to obliterate the science budget. They have requested the chance to obliterate. What else are we going to talk about? The Firefly Alpha failure, we've got to talk about. Always got a hat tip, a strong off nominee. Yes, yes. And I followed your instructions.

I have not watched it yet. So we're going to get live. Oh, that's right. I forgot. We were going to break this down live. All right. Would you want to start with that? Or do we want to start with something else?

No, that's a fun one. Let's do that. Let's do that. I have a link that I need to click in the show notes because I have time stamped some things for us, but I can't get my windows out of the way. So this is going super well so far, this whole show here. We're doing a show on a Monday. As you can tell, we're very...

I know. It's so Monday. I'm just making sure I delete my longitude and latitude real quick before I share my screen. That was really specific. So I've deleted that. It depends on how many decimal points you had. I got to talk about valves. I just looked at the show notes for the first time.

We got to talk about valves. I went and saw valves. I learned about poppets. Okay. Firefly Alpha. Just give me your priors on Firefly as a company, Alpha as a launch vehicle. What's you're at?

My priors. Inconsistent start to the rocket. Feels like it's starting to get like, it's almost like Astra vibes, you know, where it's like the first one launched, it was like, oh, it's okay to fail. And then it launched the game. It's like, well, they're hopefully they're getting better. And then they like kept feeling. You're like, is everything okay? And it's like, no, it's not okay. So like, that's the trend line. But they're bullied by the most ridiculous success of all time, which is the lunar land. It just absolutely destroyed the lunar

like just knock it out of the park. So I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's weird. That's the spinning part for me of having nailed it knowing that Intuitive machines twice had the same issue. Paragrin flopped, you know, like the fact that they were so spectacularly successful and Alpha is struggling so hard is. I wonder like, is it just like different teams and there's a good team and a bad team? Or is it like a broken clock is right twice a day or is it like yeah, I don't know, man. It's interesting. All right. So here we go. Flight six. I don't even know if the audio is really worth it other than you're listening to them being confused by what's going on. So we'll just roll tape.

I mean, I guess, oh boy. I'll give you a little sound. Hold on. Is that the sound? I'll give you a little sound. All right, so we're at 2.30. This is, this is Miko. There's not a lot of sound to be had.

Two and a half minutes after liftoff. Marine engine cut off. Coming up on stage separation. Miko. Okay. What do you make of this visual shake? Whoa. Jim, pressure looks down.

So there's just a path of destruction behind this thing. Incorrect. What I should have pulled up, Jake, is the other shots of Firefly Alpha, which at this point in flight, you would see a gigantic engine bell in this shot looking back from the rocket. That is completely non-existent on this. A view from the vehicle here. Is that the payload? That's the payload.

Now we're looking, because they don't want you to look back at the missing engine bell on the back. motion there. Okay. So what happened, Jake, is that everything was going fine, you know, a minute, two minutes into flight.

Stage step happens. Two and a half minutes after lift off. Exploded here, right? You see that... Coming up on stage separation. Miko. It kind of seems like something unfurled. And then they cut to the second stage cam

and just try to pick up on the amount of debris that you can see in the background floating by and then the missing engine bell. Okay? and look at the wobble. Look at the wobble. Do you think it was like a inner stage hit the bell or something and knocked it off or what? That's a thought, is that it kind of seems like the first stage blew up because there is no first stage visible in the second stage separation.

So the thought is that it exploded, damaged the engine bell. At the time they were reporting like, you know, everyone's saying there was a side by side on it. Someone link it to me, but this is the most Thursday Monday of all time. Firefly Alpha, upper stage. I'm just going to Google some just really quick. Okay. Here is a picture of what it usually looks like. That's not what it looks like, usually.

I don't know, man. Someone linked me the other back shots of these things, but what I want to know, Jake, is if you think blasting your own engine bell off of your launch vehicle with hypothetically your first stage exploding. Where does that rank in relation to the Astra-Cool-Aid man, which bumped in the fairing, and then ripped out of the ferrying?

Which one is better in terms of upper-stage failures? I think I'm still on team Kool-Aid, man. I think that one was still good. Yeah. If there was a head-to-head off nominee, this flight versus Kool-Aid man, I think I'd still side with Kool-Aid man. Yeah.

Yeah. I wish I remembered what launched the Astra Kool-Aid man was, but that's a great one. That one had a much more dramatic spin. This one just had a little bit of like, oh, I'm not ready for this amount of destabilization at stage separation. This one has the air of the thing I used to point myself is no longer here. Yeah, so good work. Yeah. I also loved, I forgot to call this out.

It's probably hard to see in this particular broadcast. Somewhere along the line here, Jake, you'll see every programmer's favorite bug, which is one of these videos is timestamped. Oh, yeah, there it is. In the bottom of this second stage shot, the bottom left. You can see it is 1231, 1969. Oddly enough before midnight. I was going to say, hold on a second. How do you get back to that point?

Nine minutes before. That's a negative number on the time stamp. What's going on there? Right. Not even epoch time. It's crazy. Nine minutes. Scott Manley's video apparently has side by side.

Anyway. 540 seconds before epoch. Weird. We're doing live debugging here. Yeah, I just wanted to note it as a very strong. I'll have the side-by-side comparison for the off-nominees show later in the year, but always got a hat tip to an early mid-year competitor. for the off-nominee.

Yeah, you love those strong showings. Yeah. I'm doing better at keeping up that list as we go. So there's some good ones, man. You know? It's always a good year. A year is the perfect amount of time to collect one show's worth of silly things

that have happened. Some years it's tough. We didn't plan that, but it worked out really nicely. I mean, we've got a beautiful launch failure into the waters of Norway. We've got Jeff Bezos, tripping on a hole running around the new shepherd capsule which is also great so there's some good there's some good stuff in there yeah that's great all right what do you want to dig into

the the budget what do you like we should talk about the budget um what else did we have on the list we had got a deputy administrator we got iS activity uh coming down as part of the budget request or maybe not because of the budget request? I do want to dig into that because I find that one interesting. I think there's stuff to talk about on that. That one feels the most likely to be a real scenario that we are presented with, as opposed to the rest of the budget that is going to be roundly rejected by Congress. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, right, because there's two parts to this like ISS, what we're called, like an operational change, right? So they're trying to save money, presumably. I'm going to put a big asterisk next to that because that's my point. But the one idea is to fly crew every eight months instead of six months, which means three crews in two years instead of four crews in two years. That one to me makes a ton of sense if you're trying to save money.

Like if the objective is reduce your spending, then that one is like, it's an obvious one to me. Hypothetically, Jake, if you had to eliminate three flights to the ISS, how would you do it? just to spitball precise numbers. What would you do if there were three flights that you didn't need to fly to the ISS? If you had two spacecraft to choose from. And one of them had three flights on its manifest and the other, and it doesn't work.

And the other one has all the rest of the flights. Which three would you cancel? Yeah, yeah. That is the second part of this thing, which makes it even make more sense, right? That's 100% what it is. It's a way to off board. It's a hundred percent.

It's just straight up cancel Starliner. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, like, I have no problem. Yeah, so, like, I also, the administration pissed at Boeing because of the Air Force One delays, causing problems with this whole Qatar plane thing because of the delays to the Air Force One. For my purposes, Jake, I would like that Air Force One contract to go very poorly because I hate the delivery update, and I would like them to keep the actual Air Force One light blue kind of classy thing,

then the, like, U.S. Airways paint job that it would get otherwise. Yeah. Shout out to the real ones that remember U.S. Airways. I remember U.S. Airways. Ph. Yeah, you probably threw that a lot. Yeah. Didn't fly.

I booked it on the travel age back in the day in my 15 lifetimes ago. Oh, man. I don't even know if we ever talked about that. You should have brought that up two weeks ago. That's why I know PHL specifically means your airport and it's a hub for you as always. I know these things. Anyway, I think specifically this is going to turn out to be exactly that, that the administration and Elon specifically wants to cancel the Starliner.

flights and this is the way to do it and say that it's for operational purposes. And great. Like that is that is a move that like checks everyone's boxes unless you're the Boeing CEO. Like like, you know, I even check that box. Maybe, maybe. But like, like Elon's happy because he gets his competitor killed. Trump's happy because he's, I don't know, asserting dominance, I guess. Taxpayers are not, they're saving money and they're not buying this freaking lemon of a

spacecraft. Like everyone's kind of a weird. on that one, right? The other thing of this ISS, though, is the three astronauts instead of four. And this one makes just like no sense to me whatsoever. I do not understand why you would do this. Like the astronauts salary for the eight months, there has got to be the least worrisome part of the budget line. And it's not like SpaceX is going to give you 25% off the flight because you're not filling one of the seats. Like you're not saving any money. transportation.

Supplies, I guess. You have to send up fewer tortillas. I don't know. Like, what is this going to be? Best I can do is that it's also a plan in motion in case Russia stops giving us the other seat on Soyuz. Hmm. But then again, why wouldn't we just use the other seat on the commercial crew, right? Like, it doesn't make any sense.

I'm back. I've backed off that proposal for everybody. Yeah, I don't get it. I don't see it. It feels like. It feels performative. It feels like we're sending up 25% fewer astronauts. That's a saving for you, the taxpayer.

Maybe that's the ball you lob. And then no one asks any more questions. Maybe that's the ball you lob so that they say, no, no, no, do the full crew compliment. It's like, all right, well, then we are getting rid of Starliner, right? This is the NASA, zeroing out the education line thing all over again. Yeah, it's the way to make the numbers shake out on the back end. Jeez. I mean, it's the way that we think about, you know,

cancel the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, also canceled the rest of SLS. Go ahead, pick one, Congress. Yeah, yeah. Save one. Yeah, that's kind of how I was thinking about it. It's like that ISS thing is a microcosm of the whole budget strategy here feels like.

Forest fire, cut everything, destroy everything, cancel everything, and let people fight for the ones that are important. And you end up some sort of middle ground, right? Which is, I think, the thing to remember is that every administration does that, right? Like, even Democratic administrations had their things that they would always cancel or trim down and plus up the other stuff. You always, in a normal environment, ask for way more than you're going to get through

Congress. And then you're dealing with a Donald Trump administration, which is like, ask for way more than that. Like, that is, if anything he wants to be his brand, it's that. Just like be absolutely insanely over the top with those asks. And if that is what's all, I don't think he's the one saying, like, oh, we should call. the crew compliment down to three. I don't think that's him. That's not his words. But if you are in that environment and you know that's the style and you are given the space policy

portfolio and you are tasked with doing a thing the administration would like explicitly saying we're asking for three of these things, we know only two are going to happen. And the obvious one that you do, because in both of those cases, right, the obvious answer is don't cut the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Don't nix a fourth seat on the ISS. those are the obvious things that that you just reclaim and everyone's happy about it. And you still got on your other thing. And this is where I am like very personally conflicted.

And we talked a little bit about this in the pre-show of like feeling politically uncentered. I don't know what the right thing is. But it's like I do not like this administration. Let's just be candid. If in case I haven't been clear about that, but like this is not my cup of tea. You would have voted for if you were American. I would not. If I were American, this is not how I would have voted.

Say more Canadian living. Mexico. But if you gave me this budget request and said, hey, we restored the fourth seat on the ISS and we kept the Grace Roman telescope, what do you think about it now? I'd go, uh, actually, you know what? You even like cancel the Mars sample return. So yeah, hell yeah, you're in, maybe. Right. I don't, I don't want to cancel Mars sample return. I want them to fix it. Sit in the corner and think about it for a minute. Fifting it may as well be canceling at this point and starting from scratch, if you know what I mean. That's, you know, but I mean, you know, all.

the things we've asked about for years, canceling SLS, specifically canceling 4 plus, which is US and ML2, which are just like the, just the bug bears of that program. And the gateway. And then canceling gateway and, you know, putting your foot down on MSR's shenanigans, let's be clear about that, right? There's good stuff in there in a philosophical sense. And so I'm struggling with this budget because it's like a big mix of yeses and knows for me. and it's very interesting to see how it goes.

But that shouldn't have been a surprise to you. I mean, the personnel picks on the space side. I don't, like, I think we would probably quibble with some of Jared Isingman's takes across the board, but, like, generally, that's in the direction that you want to go. If you cared more about national security, I bet Troy Mink would be up your alley, too, and that he was, one, leaning into the SpaceX in the early days

rather than the old incumbents. And, like, there's, the people that are picked are not outside of the popular current of, like, people that are listening to this and what you would write down as your priorities are not significant, you know, neither of them are like out there being super MAGA. And so that's heavily in conflict with then the people that are circulating budget requests that are super MAGA. And there's that, like, Jared Eisenman tried to personally save the Hubble Space Telescope. How do you think he's going to like canceling a space telescope? Not good, you know?

Well, maybe. But he is apt to say, you know what, let's rename it the Donald J. Trump's Space Telescope and save it. He is, he is, that could be in his portfolio. He may just say, no, we should cancel it because saving Hubble is cheaper. Let's do that instead. I'll fly there. I'll go get it. I'll personally save the taxpayer some money.

It'll be great. Let's, we have to let that one shake it out before we, uh, we get too, to judge you about it. But if you, all right, if you were going to play my game for a minute, Jake, bet on the odds of, of, of straight up, this is as it lands, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. I don't know why I keep saying the full. name but shout out nance uh that gets it gets gets canceled on one end is a d i conspiracy keeps saying i guess it might be yeah um so things that you would bet on give me like a

power ranking of totally canceled totally saved totally saved and renamed something very trumpy or none of this budget stuff sticks i think that gateway is the most likely to stick It ticks. Canceling Gateway ticks a lot of boxes for this administration. You mean it's most likely to stick as in the cancellation of it? Correct. The cancellation of Gateway is sticky to me because A, you save a bunch of money. They love that. Everyone loves that. B, you assert control and dominance. This administration loves that. C, you stick it to the international partners that apparently you guys don't give a shit about it anymore. anyone outside of the border does not matter anymore.

So, you know, to hell with them. Europeans, fuck them. We don't need any of that stuff. And I mean, it's also just like a bad program. The raison d'etre of gateway was like really about finding a home for what ISS did. And the Russians were a big part of that. And the Russians are not part of gateway. And so like it's kind of like, what is this for?

No one really knows what it's for anymore. So I think that that feels like the stickiest one in terms of staying on this enacted budget. Do you think the others, the science cuts, though, are like, like, debauchable? So I think Roman's probably the least likely to get canceled. I think that's the one that gets pretty strong support, you know, all around. And who's going to, like, go to bat to kill that? Like, no one's going to expend capital on that, right? But it is.

If you're being, like, a good politician, right? You do those weird behind the scenes conversations, which is like, listen, I have to say cancel a bunch of shit. And the other person is like, all right, but I have to save something. And it's like, all right, well, let's say we'll cancel Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. And then I'll save it. And I'll say, I've saved the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Like, it is the way that those nomination hearings, right? You're like, do this in the meeting.

beforehand of like, well, I'm going to ask you this and you're going to say that and then we'll figure it out in the middle. When I don't know if I've told this story. When I was a kid, my, my mom had like a part-time job at a carpet store like this like, this like, you know, local carpet store was like Dick's carpet or whatever it was. Okay. And this guy was like totally sleazy and he would do that thing. He would, he would raise the prices all the entire store by 20% and then have a 10% off sale.

And then just like drive a bunch of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how I think politics isn't that is, is ridiculous. Sure. Yeah. I think. This is my take generally.

I've gotten a lot of emails in the last six months, Jake. I've been more mad about the emails I've gotten in the last six months than most six months of my life. And now both sides have yelled at me enough that I feel comfortable saying this, that you can either operate in the world you wish existed or you can operate in the world that exists. And acting like this isn't the way that politics has always worked is silly and very elementary to me. Like, pitched battles is the thing. Go out. Are you going to cancel stuff that most of the Congress? We've always talked.

SLS-O-Ryan is so congressionally approved and everyone loves it so much. But if you are the craziest dude in the room and you say, I'm canceling everything, and they say, fine, just cancel SLS and we'll save everything else. Again, to your point about Boeing and Starliner, like, most people are going to be happy by that. And the ones that aren't are the ones that you didn't really care about anyway. And that sounds cold and calculated, but that is, again, politics, especially so on the 2020s. Maybe.

Yeah, maybe I'm too cynical, but like, I don't know. No, it's a process, right? You do have to remember, like that. And that is, that's what makes your country very challenging to follow because it, like, this one thing. No, but it's, it's the general philosophy of just like, yell point A, yell counterpoint B and then arrive at middle ground. Like, it's, that is the process you go through. And like, I don't know, I don't understand why every other democracy doesn't do it this way. Like, like, I don't know how.

Prime Minister's question time over in the UK. Like, that's some crazy shit. Yeah, we do have our back and forth. But for whatever reason, you guys are, you guys are like every other democracy, but more so. You know, that's like that dent. I'll use that for everything. But it makes it challenging to watch, right?

Because it's like the process, no one, watching the sausage get made sucks in the United States. It just sucks. Yeah. And sometimes you arrive somewhere okay. And then you move on in the next thing. And that's your, that's your world. So I just think your take generally that like save for these few things I'm okay with this budget as a as a somewhat surprised to you is like forgetting that Trump space policy was the one area that most people felt like that the first time around you know like man that speech that Pence gave where like it was the sun a face of God rising over the horizon that was kind of weird but like the fact that he said we'll find contractors who will do our bidding was pretty cool.

That was the same speech like that's how this was you know. Yeah. You are the sum of extremes is what you are. Me personally? No, your country. Okay. All right. United States is the sum of extremes, and the sum of extremes is like the middle.

Pretty much. Yeah. Turns out. Turns out. But then also there's no politicians that are in that location. The United States is like a basketball game. You just go back and forth scoring dunks, and then only the last point matters. Yeah.

Oh, man. that's Jesus Christ that's a really good analogy and the last two minutes takes forever

yeah and no one remembers he scored the first one man that's a really significantly good that's a whole medium post right there

all right let's do it we solved it man we'll put it on the Miko's substack guest writer here's a foreman or telling you how that exists

that exists that exists that totally tracks. Anyway, so. I mean, I don't want to be like, I don't know, it is alarming, for sure. It's not not alarming. I just try to keep it in context of, like,

you already see the congressional, I mean, like, the retired Republicans are out there writing, like, I don't think about, I don't think this is a good idea. They have no skin in the game. They don't give a shit. They're not around anymore. The other thing, I guess we forgot, They wanted to close Goddard, too.

That was the other big, big scary. I couldn't tell. Was that a legitimate, like, explicitly, or was it just all these cancellations happen to be at Goddard? Yeah, I don't know. That one seems really opaque to me. Because that sounds like a thing if you buy into my theory, that if I was someone from Maryland that was in politics, another thing I would make sure get circulated in the media,

is they want to close Goddard and cancel the Roman Space Telescope, and I'm going to go and save all these things. Yeah. How much of Roman gets done at Goddard? do we know that? All of it. I saw the like stuff when I visited years ago

like the structural test article and all that. Yeah. It's probably another place that you were giving me shit about last week. The space telescope, yeah. Whatever it was.

What's that place? Yeah, yeah. It's like feet from where my wife lived in college. The thing I fought you on for like 10 minutes and at the end I was like, yeah, you're right.

Yeah. Yeah, it says manufacturer NASA Goddard space flight. Yeah, okay. I mean, that one, that's the thing that maybe is weird because that could be like a hand in hand thing like you said like oh we canceled roman and so what do we need goddard for and then when you save roman you also save goddard or it could be the other thing you said

which is like i'm canceling both of these you only got to pick one you want to save right and it's like you and then it's like you're still going to get a pretty bad thing but so we'll have to see how that goes but yeah no it's interesting man i and i don't the other thing i try to keep in context with this budget request like everyone always say it's a request it's not the budget it's the first step in this process okay great not a great first step in some cases, but it's still a first step. But the other thing is that it's the first first first step. This is the first budget request when there's no NASA administrator in the line. And so like it's literally like that dude at OMB

that wrote this thing. Yeah, yeah, off the dome. Like, yeah, let's look, stack rank all the expenses on NASA sort by highest. Okay, we got SLS. We got G. We got G. Roman K. Starlin doesn't work yet. Do some. Okay. The sum is now. 25% less than it was earlier. Post it, submitted, right? Honestly, dude, I don't know that that's incorrect. Like that is an accurate representation in my head.

A telescope. Yeah. And that's why, you know, our good friend Casey Dreyer is, and his job is to fight this kind of thing. So he's, you know, he's been up. He's working. He's busy right now, the poor guy. But one of the things they're saying, you know,

the planetary society is doing is advocating like please get Jared Eisenman into his job because we need someone who is sent it confirmed running the show because this football is just getting tossed all over the place and no one knows going on and it's going to cause a ton of damage right it's us they're saying get that get the administrator in there so that we can have some stability right yeah when you when you map it the way you did right like if you made an excel sheet a casey dryer excel sheet and you sorted by is it working or launched yet and you filtered for no and then canceled all that. Like,

you get to 20, maybe you'll always have 25% your budget in the hopper, you know, and that turns out like, because what is, what is still in development

that they kept? Because they canceled all the other thing. Well, that was the other thing was the gateway. What else was, Starliner?

Like, what else was there? If we implemented this, what is NASA working on? Yeah, the pipeline's gone. Because are there any other,

I mean, I guess dragonfly was untouched, right? Dragonfly. Shout out, Hopkins. This goes against my Maryland theory,

by the way. Dragonfly. We don't have new friends. No, set operating missions aside. Give me things that are still in development or not yet done. Well, we got Veritas back, right?

What was the status on that? That one's like, I don't know. That was uncanceled, right? Oh. I thought it was canned. I feel like I saw a Planetary Society rundown. That was like Veritas is canned.

DaVinci was canned. DaVinci was. Maybe I just, yeah. But I thought Veritas. Veritas was canceled. because of the whole psyche fallout and then it was resurrected. What else?

What else? Well, okay, but pause because I'm looking at this, this planetary society thing. And this is the missions NASA may be forced to abandon based on reporting, directly sourced from the budget proposal and is reporting. Mars Sampo return, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, Da Vinci, Feritas. Oh, is it on there? Okay. Tess.

Okay, that's the one that's doing its thing. It is, but isn't it almost done? It's like done its thing? I don't know. Yeah, but I mean, you don't trash an operating spacecraft, right? That's about the worst way to spend money. Test does sound like a woman's name, though. So it does, yeah.

It's pretty close to the line. You know. Hmm. Trying to fly is the biggest one that would still be in development then. And theoretically, you're still developing Artemis 3 and HLS is on there. And science. I'm trying to limit this to science, Jake. Because right now we're to be able to track all the good science stuff in development has been canceled.

And what else is there, though? I mean, there's probably some smaller stuff that we're forgetting. But that's all the big stuff. A flagship level is MSR, New Frontiers. is Dragonfly. The next is not a development. Feritas and

Da Vinci were the two Discovery. Everything else is operating. I'm not, I don't know, Simplex down. There might be some handbooked that under development. Hmm.

Well, there we go. Dragonfly wins again. Shout out in the chat to Dragonfly. You have zero bandwidth right now, Jake. You are merely a pixel on my screen. Yeah.

I don't. Can you hear me still, though? Fund your uplink. Yeah, you're apparently still here. Okay. One thing that's important note... You want to talk about the administration again. 100%.

And another note on that is that I think, like, the reason I had Mark Albrecht on Miko is to just understand intentionality, direction, and inspiration. One of the biggest is that, you know, we're going to cut all this stuff out of every part of the government. and we're going to spend a gazillion dollars on defense, and we're going to have a trillion dollar defense budget, and we're going to spend $150 billion on the Golden Dome, 25 billion of which is in space,

which is more than a NASA budget. I'm curious, though, is like, you know, we've seen, talked about this Caleb Henry recently, like it's trend towards space companies doing hypersonics research. Leon, in the Discord, correct to me that that's because we did not renew our obligation to a treaty in which we can do this kind of testing, and that led to an increase in interest. I wonder when you see significant, like,

like NASA started talking about Artemis and Sys Lunar stuff, so that attracted a lot of companies to say, we're going to do lunar infrastructure, we're going to do solar panels that are vertical because of the moon, and it attracts attention because you think you might be hitting a market there. I wonder if the tractor beam of, like, major NASA science cuts, major human spaceflight changes,

oh, but there's this gigantic budget over in the defense side that I could tap into. The tractor beam of people focusing on the defense side, is also going to have a big impact in people focused on civil space. You're absolutely right. And that is the other very valid argument to someone who's upset about this budget request is that, like, yes, is the start of the process? And maybe it never gets implemented.

But now we have this like possibly year-long period where the United States is saying, we're not doing any of this bullshit. And that's people have jobs and they have careers and they have companies and they have investments. And they got to do something with that in the meantime. Right. And so just like you said, maybe maybe the Roman telescope doesn't get cut. But is this a good signal if you're in the business of making telescopes or anything that supports that business? Probably not, right? Yeah. You start architecting your life differently and that has major damage. It has lasting, lasting damage, right? Is it just the intention and the signal causes harm, right? So you have to think about that. And this is why the, the Mars sample term thing makes me a little nervous. And you know, why I wouldn't want to cancel. Is it like the, the, Mars in general, like it's kind of a cliff right now. Like we got two rovers and so we're still generating some pretty good science. But when those things start going, there's nothing coming.

And if you're a, if you're a scientist, you don't want to start a career studying Mars maybe right now. I don't know if that's, you might want to be like, maybe I'll look at some other planets or maybe I'll look at like heliophysics or something, you know, something like that. You might be, you might be looking in a way. There's a talent pipeline you have to maintain if you want to stay relevant in those sectors, right? And that's, that's the top part. that's alarming for Mars man I could I could totally see a future in which we look at our like childhood to to now as like the Mars era of space science and then like nothing happens for a while yeah because you think about it with Venus right like we sent all those missions back in the day

and then everyone's like too hard not interesting yep yeah we have seasons of this stuff hard to start it again right and we're seeing that so it's uh yeah it's tough that's the I mean you hope that the rest can kind of like, you know, the rest being the commercial space industry can fill some gaps and the interest there for, I mean, the Elon Musk interests himself, like that some of that would buoy the interests of Mars down the future, but it doesn't really seem like that's really hidden. No, and I don't think it would. Like, if you're, if we're talking strictly about science, like, this is not, there's not

going to be some magic science industry that generates a bunch of revenue and all these, like, startups like yeah we're we're sending a new road to make you don't make money doing that you spend money doing it and that's the point and so uh yeah it's not going to really happen that way i don't think um it's tough man stuff does that put into context like the we gotta have dr z back on i feel like he's the perfect person to yeah know how this stuff goes specifically like man i'm just wondering about like um how bad the bill nelson nasson I handled that in that case.

Like, you were willing to hand the baton off to, I guess it's over. I guess Mara Sainter return is dead. Yeah, I will never forgive the Nelson administration for that one. That's like my number one, two, and three reasons why I don't like that administration is Mars Sapt return. I mean, what would you have done, though? What would I have done if I was a NASA administration? I don't know. I would have said, hey, what is the most?

most important science mission that we're going to do? What is the most important project in the largest directorate in my entire administration? What are they up to? Maybe I'll go check that out and ask some questions. That's what I would have done. Just like live there. Yeah, just live there. Right. And that's the issue, right? Is it like it didn't get the attention it merits, right? Like, $10 billion. That's a huge project. Again, science mission director. This is maybe a tough, people don't know this, but the science mission director has more annual expenditures than the human, like the joint human spaceflight thing, right? Or at least it did at some point, but numbers of change of it. But like science is up there. It was a seven or eight billion

dollars a year. Like it's a huge part of the budget. So this should be, you know, if you're talking, if everything in your portfolio gets weighted by expense, this should have been like 40% of Bill Nelson's time. So I don't know. Yeah. And it felt like four maybe. they have a little helicopter on that that was the moment right when we all when we were like what is happening there's two helicopters now like that once there were two helicopters that was the moment when it felt the most weird i think if we look back yeah if you look back that should have been that we because we joked about on the show but we should have been like uh i know the helicopter

is a major issue if that's where we're at this moment Yeah, yeah. Which sucks, too, because then, you know, you go back and listen to Dante talking to us about, like, the coolest mission, sample return. Like, that is absolutely the coolest mission. And that sucks. Yeah. So, you know, there's that. No comments about Dragon X-L in the budget.

That's crazy. You can't. You can't. You can't. You should write articles about how Elon's, like, screwing himself because he canceled Dragon XL or something. I mean, he kind of is screwing himself. Not just for that.

A lot of money. For a bunch of reasons. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay, let's talk about that for a second. Let's talk about the kickback. 25% reduction in dragon flights. Well, I don't think so.

I think dragons's kicking on, you know? Yeah, maybe. Starliner has exactly the number of flights that would need to be canceled to make this schedule work. Stretching it out over time, I guess. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. One fewer flight a year.

The, let's talk about the Elon Musk, screwing himself thing. Because the backlash of all this is something I'm always noodling on to the back of my brain, you know. Not only like midterm kickback and what Congress does mid-Trump 2024 cycle. Because that, I mean, it seems unlikely that that would yet again go the way of the Republicans. Maybe, maybe I'm wrong. Things have been weird in the last couple years. political realignments and whatnot. But I saw someone else talking about this, too.

It's just like the switch of Elon from being such a long-term thinker to such a, so dependent on short-term partisan politics is super weird for someone who's interested in projects as long-term as his tend to be. Yeah, yeah. It's very strange. Yeah. I don't really know how that has a good ending. It doesn't.

It already doesn't. I think even people in the Discord were saying, like, future Republican administrations might not even be that friendly to Elon because of the enemies that will be made in this time period. Well, he's going to be radioactive at some point, right? Like, it's just, yeah, not going to deal with that. It's such a weird call. But then again, if no other competitor arrives and is at the level of SpaceX, you know, do they have, like, the equivalent? They have, like, fuck you political capital. he might think he can just buy whoever it doesn't matter he'll just roll in with a huge huge super pack

set up like he did and you know does it matter who's in charge or can he just buy his way in maybe that's the plan doesn't need he's got so much money that doesn't matter anymore I guess but it's still it's still strange because like even someone that rich can can fall right and so because if if Tesla goes under or something crazy like that like that's that's bad news bear for him, right? I just mean SpaceX continues to be the outlier in the industry.

And unless that changes, I don't really see their positioning with NASA or the DOD changing. No. And they're only getting more money if Starlink does better and better. They're about to have a one NASA-sized

budget per year. You know, like... Yeah. I don't know. It's more than just the business, though, right? Like, getting, you know, getting the contract for whatever thing helps SpaceX, but as we've talked about before, money is no longer the problem for them.

So like it's the influence and the regulatory approval and all that kind of stuff. You know, and if you are embarking on big ambitious projects like Elon is, making humans multi-planetary, it's not just an economic endeavor anymore that is a, that is now a political and human endeavor. And you need, you kind of need support. You need public support for that. Like, just frankly, you do. Even if he was like, I'm going to 100% fund it. He kind of still needs public support because he's got to convince everybody that all the stuff he has to do to make it happen is worth it.

And, you know, like, he just does. I'm reminded of Casey's, Hammers comments on here when he was like, let us weirdos go to this spot in Texas and leave Earth. Whatever he said. No, space goes in chat. People still lining up to invest at $300 billion. That's exactly my point.

Is that, like, have they achieved escape velocity from? from caring about the public perception and the kickback. Like, my point is, regardless of how radioactive Elon Musk gets, SpaceX is still the outlier to the extent that they will not be threatened for major contracts out of NASA, unless another person arrives who can, another group of people, companies, organizations, whatever. Like, there is no second in the industry that is anywhere close in any of the verticals that SpaceX operates in right now. And that is more true today than it ever has been. And so does it matter that there's kickback?

I think it does because I think that the, my, my public support point is that there are all kinds of regulatory issues that they will have to deal with. Like, you know, they've been fighting their Boca Chica battle for the 10 years and they're like finally making some headway on it. But like they've needed significant democratic support to make all that happen, right? They've basically had to buy a town.

to get the support they needed. So I don't know, maybe they can just keep buying things like that. But, you know, that that is just, that's a launch site, you know. And so if they want to go and put people on our planet, like, they need help for that from maybe not just the United States. You might even need kind of some sort of international thing to help with that because other countries could take issue with that and put pressure on United States the same way that you guys are putting pressure on people economically now, right? You know, things like tariffs and diplomatically, all that soft power stuff, it goes both ways, right? And so I think I think he still needs support in some way. And so the short-sightedness does feel strange to me.

It feels like the, it feels like the path of most resistance to do it. Maybe he can still get there, but I don't know. That's a really good way to put it. Yeah, I don't, I don't. It's tough, right? because you could say in one hand, like, well, exerting political will and trying to bend the political structures and society to your end of the spectrum unleashes you on your problems that you have in front of you.

And the other end is like, you're building more of a resistance to you than is otherwise there. And then the third end is like, do you think you significantly altered the outcomes of this particular administration in a way in ways that you like he was obviously the source of all the writing

in the run of the election right Elon Elon Elon's at this event with Trump Elon's at this event he's obviously influencing everything it's like I mean he got a NASA administrator and a secretary of the Air Force that he likes

we'll see what happens at the budget but I can't imagine like the congressional kickback is going to be tough and maybe his influence matters like a couple of percentage points, but I don't think it matters so significantly much to counteract the long-term kickback. That's the way I would put it, is that whatever you've moved to the goalposts on

in the short term feels like it's been counteracted by the long-term. And that's the part that alarms me. As somebody who cares about the goals that he has for some of these long-term projects, right, like we care about the development of space so that we can do more space science and settle other planets and all the other weird things that we've ever cared about in the last 10 years of our space commentary. Yeah, yeah. And if you made the list of things that in the space department,

we care about, and Elon Musk cares about, they're not that different. Like, he probably would think it would be rad to have Mars Sam for return work out and actually get rocks back. He thinks it should be starship. Probably.

We just think it should happen. Like, the differences would be minor in the space side of things. Yeah, yeah. Implementation, maybe. Yeah, so it's, so that, that's the part that I think we struggle with is that, like, you know,

have you made more enemies than you have friends in this department? Is that good for the beyond 2028 times? period or not. If J.D. Vance is president or Democrats win it. Like, in either of these cases, what is your standing politically? But then again, I keep coming back to the fact that, like, I don't think anyone else is going to threaten SpaceX's position in the industry by then.

I think, I mean, the other thing to look at, too, might be, I mean, SpaceX doesn't struggle with this today, but they might, is that there's significant public pushback, talent becomes an issue for SpaceX, right? Like, we've, we've seen people are embarrassed to have Teslas. Like, you can't tell me there aren't employees at SpaceX that are embarrassed to work for SpaceX, right? Like, that has happened. I think we know some, yeah. It's whether it was five people or 500 people or 5,000 people, right?

Like, that's the only point of debate, right? And so, you know, if talent becomes a problem and political will to approve projects, whether it's launches or launch sites or planetary protection or all those kind of things, you know, if that stuff fades a little bit, it can turn pretty quickly for them, right? And especially, and I don't know how the financial world of someone like Elon is like completely opaque to me. Like I don't, I admit to not having a very good understanding how this works. But one thing is that like someone like that uses a lot of their stock as leverage for loans and stuff, right? You say, I got $100 billion of whatever Tesla stock. Please give me some money

so I can buy Twitter and then you don't actually withdraw any cash, right? If that changes dramatically quickly like we saw, you know, if you lose this, let's say Tesla goes down by like 40% or something. Like all that leverage is gone from him, right? Because he's probably over leveraged on all the other things he's already done, right? There's a point where enough of a Tesla dip hurts him quite significantly. You get over a bar where that comes a problem. That's my understanding. Please send me. Economics people, please send me the real thing on that. But that's the way I understand it, right? Yeah, but the difference on the space side is that like, find me a more valuable national asset than SpaceX to the United States right now. But does it stay that way if, for example. They're extreme outlier in the industry. And they operate more

satellites than history combined and the best launch vehicles that have ever flown and they're developing the biggest one of all time. Does it stay that way, though, if Elon's gone? Seems it, because he was pretty uninterested for a couple years. I would offer you the Twitter era. Point taken. I mean, Starship not working out great lately, so maybe that's a thing. But, like, I just, I don't know.

That's my point is that SpaceX is so fucking good at what they do. And so that part has reached escape philosophy. Because as much as I want to point to anyone else, the industry, sniffing their area of operation anywhere. Like, nobody is close. You know, Rock Lab's doing great. Totally different scale. Totally different positioning in society.

Amazon started to launch their satellites, but like, and even just the geopolitical things that have happened in the last five years to show the strength of what it is to operate a network like Starlink and to have a launch vehicle like Falcon 9 while Europe hasn't had a launch vehicle while we've had, you know, geopolitical crisis, that internet activity actually mattered a lot. And like the only thing they don't do is imagery. And that's the other thing that mattered in the last five years was planet and maxar imagery showing the Russian military marching into Ukraine. Like all of the things that SpaceX do, they are so far ahead of everyone else that that value does not go away, even if Elon does the worst things possible.

I guess maybe the response to that, though, is that if you're having a discussion about whether SpaceX will stay dominant in the places that it's dominant, I think you're right. Like, you know, if Elon goes to jail tomorrow, like Falcon 9 is still going to be a good rocket. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Starlink still going to print money, right? But what if we're talking about the things they're not dominant and yet putting people on Mars, for example? That, you know, does, can they, can they still proceed through Starship development and put people on Mars if Elon was gone?

Or if Elon doesn't have enough support to get the kind of regulations? That is maybe the big open question. Yeah. I mean, at some point, enough executives down the line, you lose the, what we're doing right now is not good enough. We need to do better with X, Y, or Z. The whole founder thing, right? We talk about that.

It is 100% legitimate, too. I don't think anyone that says it's not legit has really looked at situations in society. Like, let's say Elon goes to jail tomorrow and he's removed from SpaceX and whatever. They're a great company. Like, then someone says, well, how are we going to get money more? We don't have Elon the capital raising machine anymore. Let's go public. That always works out in terms of establishing a really great.

vision, right? Like that, you know, especially in space. And then SpaceX just becomes the next Boeing, you know, and it's like they, they own contracts for the next 50 years and then fade into obscurity, right? The glide path for SpaceX is either Boeing or Comcast. Yeah, it could be both. It could be both. It could be both. It could be Boeing with a call center you can yell at, you know? Yeah, yeah. I've always thought that too. When they were getting into Starlink, I'm like, do they want to be the most hated company? And everyone's, that was at the time when ISPs were at a particular low. I feel like that's, we've backed off that recent years. And you're not a Starlink customer. So maybe you don't have visibility. But they're,

they're starting to be rumbling to that kind of stuff. They're starting to do some shenanigans. Oh, really? Yeah. Like, I was, so I was really excited because like, I bought a home server. It has a home server thing. And I wanted to have publicly accessible so I can like log a log into my Plex TV or do administration or whatever. Right. But Starlink uses what is it called CGNet? Like, you know, it's that like dynamic routing. Like you can't get an IP address. on the fly and it changes all the time. So you can't, you can't just like point a domain at your house anymore, right? But they had this like $5.

The most old thing you ever said. Yeah. They had this like $5 upgrade you could do or $10 upgrade it was to get a public facing IP. And I was like, great. So I just bought those business plan and I gave me this thing and I paid a little more. And then like three months later, they just like got rid of that and now you can't have that anymore. And it's like, so I had to go back down in the residential and all my shit's broken. And like, you know, and it's just like, that's such a Comcast move.

Just like, yeah, we just inshitiified your service. And it's like, so yeah, it's interesting. And it's, I don't know. We'll see how it does. Well, shout out Verizon Fios, who also serves my new house that I'm going to be getting the fiber optics installed in on Friday. So shout out. What kind of shenanigans is Verizon, dude? Nothing, dude.

I've had the same price for years. This sounds like an ad now. And it totally is because it's a wonderful service. Good. Yeah. They never change anything. It's great. so there you go my Verizon Shill.

All right. Do we solve it one hour later? I don't know. This went places that we've been American politics. I felt different than the last time we have talked about it. Yeah.

Yeah. We'll get emails for sure. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Someone's going to be like, hey, idiot, that's not how stocks work. I'm like, okay, I know. Yeah, he's a idiot social socialist

who is in Mexico. He doesn't know about stocks. Um, we have no idea what's coming up on the show. We're going to be straight with you real quick. We have not booked anyone for the next couple weeks. We're not doing a show this Thursday because I'm buying this house, as I mentioned. We'll be back next Thursday, the following Thursday.

I don't know where I'll be. I don't know who we'll have. I assume we're going to book some friendly guests who don't mind us shifting the time around on them. Yeah. I did just talk to Brendan Byrne. I was on his podcast a minute ago. So maybe he's due for a return. He is due.

We owe him one, actually. We got to get Dr. Z on. he will help us figure this out that's the one what else he got you have anything to plug uh do I have anything to plug not really not right now

no I'm uh what a good piece of show my birthday coming up there you go yeah it is like my birthday officially old yeah turning 40 jeez 4 zero

you're as old as some rs 25s can you see some of the gray in this beard year and this is rough. Look at that. Crazy. It's oldest one of the RS 25. Took you a while. Got there eventually.

I just realized it was true. So you weren't just making a joke. You were telling a real truth. The true fact. Although I think some of the, I think the ones they're flying on SLS are the newer ones. I think they're the late generation.

Okay, well don't. Okay, don't say it. Like, it's like a completely asinine idea to even suggest that. That they're going to fly some old piece of junk that was like, come on. Why would I suggest such a thing? But it's 20 years old for sure. From spare parts. Is that any better?

I wouldn't even the parts that were good enough the first time, you know? All right, y'all. Happy Monday. What a weird. Happy Monday. See you. Yeah, this has been a show. One, two, three, four, five.