Off-Nominal - 199 - The Thing That We Grow Plants

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

It returns. Hot drama. Also a moon lander is happening right now. Also Twitter fights break out. Also a moon lander doesn’t happen.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 199 - The Thing That We Grow Plants - YouTubeIsaacman: people with ‘axes to grind’ about Musk caused withdrawn NASA nomination - SpaceNewsWhite House to withdraw Isaacman nomination to lead NASA - SpaceNewsNASA Copes with Details of $6 Billion Budget Cut, Leadership Uncertainty – SpacePolicyOnline.comNASA withdraws support for conferences - SpaceNewsCommercial space companies to fund launch range upgrades under $4 billion contract - SpaceNewsChinese launch startup conducts vertical takeoff and splashdown test - SpaceNewsKaitlan Collins on X: “As their blowup escalates, Trump suggests terminating Musk’s federal contracts.”Eric Berger on X: “This would both end the International Space Station and simultaneously provide no way to safely deorbit it.”Elon Musk on X: “This just gets better and better 🤣🤣 Go ahead, make my day …”Elon Musk on X: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”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

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, Jake. How are you doing? Dancing. Dancing it up. Yeah, I got this new desk and it's a stand-up desk, so I'm trying out. Stand-up Energy for the show. Nice.

And we're going to see, like, we're going to see if I like it or if I just end up kind of pacing and being uncomfortable and weird. So we'll find out. This is all new to me. I've been a sit-down desk guy for a long time. So, yeah. So how things? Boy, Jake.

do we have so much content going on. I was trying right before, the reason we were one minute late to the stream, everybody, is I was trying to fire up the hot drama alarm for the first time in literal years. I don't think the, I don't know when the last time I hit the button is.

And I don't have it piped into this app right now. And clearly, you all know how good at this app I am after last week's incident. So just to follow up on that, I filled my hard drive internal storage. It's a solid state. Jesus Christ, get off my shit.

I filled my internal storage last week, Jake. So now we know what happens is that the show keeps streaming, but we have no input from anybody about it. No comments come in. Yeah. Nothing. We got nothing. We can't turn the show off.

I just have to quit the app. So we know how it goes if you fill your hard drive. But here we are. At least the show kept going, though. Like that would be really suck if it was like bye and it just like stopped. We did 30 minutes of mystery content or whatever. No, it was like 27 minutes in because I had a partial recording. Oh, yeah.

up until 27 minutes. Oh, yeah, the book, okay, the recording, right. I thought I had enough space, too. I don't know what we were doing. We weren't really showing anything that visually intensive, but. No. Yeah. So are we going to pause in 15 minutes to watch the Icepace Lunar Lander?

I think I'll pull it up. We'll just do our best live stream in here. Might as well. We're live while there's a Lunar Lander happening. But nothing else to talk about, Jig. There's nothing else going on in any corner of space news. It's been pretty quiet this week. Oh, Jesus Christ.

What are you drinking? Let's start with that. Come on, dude. What do you think? That's the same thing in the last two weeks, because I've done nothing but move into this house. I think I did put up a decoration for Jake. I put up my, you can see, I've positioned it on the boxes of the rackmount thing

that is actually going to be this recording desk. So we're going to sleep here this weekend. So I think I'm going to build that. and I might have a better situation. The bookshelves that will be behind me will come maybe next week or something. So sit tight. Jake's, I know, driving you nuts that I'm in this white void, but one more week you can do it. It's also 1,000 degrees in here.

At least now it proves that you're not just like on a green screen somewhere. It's pretending like you bought this house. You can see the window too, right? There's a window there. Yeah. Yeah, we can. Yeah. Can hear that plate glass window.

I did get the electrical hookup for what will be the air conditioning in this room, but the air conditioning is not on yet, and it's 88 degrees outside. So I'm like going to die. I brought a bottle of water too because it's so hot. You're going to count the sweat beads on your forehead. Yeah, yeah. But it's a K-May coastal evacuation. You're going to be sweating like the government contract official of space.

Sorry, Jared. Sorry, shit Yeah, sorry I got something wild today You want to see this? Oh yeah, hell yeah What is that thing? What the fuck is that?

So, tequila Is that a Pokemon, Picocito? It kind of sounds like it doesn't it? Tamarindo! What is this? But, well, so it's tequila, a pop, I guess, you know,

it's like carbonated, but it's got tamarind in it. Yeah. Yeah, and then it's, I guess it's spicy. So pico cito. I'm assuming that's spicy, right? I assume so.

I don't live there. I'm being asked to bump my levels up. So let me know if I start clipping. How is it? I'm going to give you one shot for this taste test. Oh. All right. Okay.

Yeah, this is a real drink. Matches the standing energy that you're doing. It matches some kind of energy. Hmm. The spicy. All right. Okay. All right.

Yeah. I'm feeling that one. Do you want to start with last week we thought Jared Isaacman was going to be the head of NASA this week? And now he's not going to be the head of NASA at all? What else to lead with, I guess, is the don't bury the lead. That's what I always say in capital J journalism, right? That's what we do here. That's what we do here.

Yeah. Um, this, this 180 fast, bro. Like, so you've seen these, this like tweet from like whatever an hour ago? Uh, this, uh, I don't think it's a, yeah, yeah, fairness or whatever. What is this called? Yeah, this is a truth, I believe. A scoot or something. I think it's a truth.

You post your truth, Jake. Okay. All right. Do you want to read it? Can you do a dramatic reading of this for us? In my best Trump voice, is that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if I could do it.

I need more, you gotta get my hands in it, right? Do this, do this a lot. I don't think I have that shot. No, no. I might have this shot, but you can't see it. So I don't think I could do it. I don't know if I have a good Trump.

I've never really tried it. Can you just read it for us anyway? The easiest way to save money in our budget, billions and billions of dollars, by the way, is to terminate Elon's government subsidies and contracts. Governmental subsidies and contracts. X Anthony. I was surprised Biden doing it. That one's really funny to me. He was always surprised continually. Every day he woke up. God damn. He still paying Elon must

money. I can't believe. Elon was wearing thin. I asked him to leave. I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted that he knew for months I was going to do. And he just went crazy all caps. Okay. So this is like a fun unhinged thing. Can we also like this we already knew this was a good something was going on too when when Elon came out with like a black eye at that press conference did you see that yeah I saw that and I saw there of talk of there being an actual physical altercation that preempted this yeah is that true though or was that just like um it seemed I mean what is true anymore but it sounded like it was pretty accepted.

It's not a conspiracy theory. It may have been embellished, but it's not a conspiracy theory. That's my take on it. You think it was a punch or someone threw something? I don't know. Because you know, like, Klobuchar would throw staplers, right, at her staff. So a strong chance something got thrown. Could be a stapler.

I think there's a story of Hillary Clinton throwing something in the White House once. Frequent mentions on the pre-show of Hillary Clinton today, as we discussed the era of Pokemon Go as well. So if you would like the top Pokemon content of the internet, oftenometer.com slash Discord. Yeah. It was a good show. Anyway, something probably got thrown, I guess.

Could be, yeah, yeah. So anyway, this, like, this just, I can't believe how fat. Everybody knew this was going to happen. It was, like, funny. It was one of those things where it was like, It was funny to talk about in a way that was like, yeah, this is probably going to happen. And you're like kind of joking. You're like, well, not really that joking that much.

And then it was like, no, that's, that's too, no, that's like too obvious. I would now. And then maybe, well, maybe. It's like that meme, right? What's that girl? The girl is like, no. Yeah. No.

That's honestly how everyone's, no. Because there was a time period right in the middle, right? Where Jared Isaac was making it through Senate confirmation all right. Troy Mink was making it. That stuff seemed to cool off a little bit. you know, everybody settled into what Doge was and it kind of was not really making, I mean, there's always headlines about it, but it didn't feel as hyped up as his early days. And you thought, oh, maybe there's some time here that it could last. That's actually the crazy thing, though,

is that Troy Mink, reportedly another one that Elon had a hand in picking as a Secretary of the Air Force made it through confirmation, actually is the Secretary of the Air Force. And then this all happened, like, minutes before Charred Isaacman's vote, right? Like, that was supposed to happen this week. It was reported he was going to get 70 votes in Senate, which is, like, not just a party-line vote. And then it was reported before he went on the All-In podcast that it was some, like, I forget who was attributed to as trying to get back at Elon. Somebody didn't like Elon, and then there was a particular individual that was named. I can't keep track of the names, but yeah, someone inside.

Yeah. Stephen or something? It's a good guess. There's a couple of them. I don't know. Steven's a fair guess for like a White House stammer. Stephen from the White House. Old Steve.

If you handed something to someone in D.C. and said, can you get this to Stephen at the White House? There's a good shot. It would get to somebody that would know what to do with it. Isn't there like a thousand people to work at the White House? That's what I mean. If you just took a shot and said, get this to Stephen at the White House, it might make it to where you want it to like that's like a you know a what are the pigeons the carrier pigeons like

that's a carrier pigeon's a pretty solid bet yeah who knows where it would end up white house now there's head of white house personnel office is that yeah sirs sounds right i'm seeing the chat sergeo that sounds correct moon rock got thrown at elon in the oval office that's why it's not on that shelf anymore some moon rock shaped black eye on this that's the most slapstick version of this. Oh dear. Okay. Yeah.

Bleak though, man. Bleak. It's super bleak. Like, we all, we were almost there. Like, we'd almost had NASA escape a little bit. And yeah, not anymore. But I still, even then, let's play it out, right? Let's say Jared did get in.

Then what? Like, this didn't seem like a workable scenario. I mean, we said on the show a week or two ago, he tried to personally say, the Hubble Space Telescope. I don't think he wants to cancel space telescopes. And that one's turned around on the budget, white paper, whatever, that came out a little bit. But what Nancy Grace Roman is only halved instead of canceled entirely. Which I find actually, I was talking about this couple of people this week, maybe more alarming when your budget just gets cut significant amounts, then get zeroed out. Because zeroed out, that never sticks. So it's more of an

indication that the White House is fine with going back into the budget, then they're actually serious about the cut here. So. Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. But anyway, like this, this didn't seem like this was going to be, we weren't going to get Jared Isaacman unleashed or whatever everyone imagines for Tori Bruno

unleashed at ULA. We weren't going to get that. Yeah, maybe not. I mean, maybe that was wishful thinking, right? But I don't know. I mean, all we can really do is, like, base it on what happened in the first administration. and that kind of did happen, right? Like they kept it out of the line light.

Until Brianstein was going to leave at the end. Yeah. He wasn't coming back either, right? So like the arc on all these, the good ones that get in at NASA when Trump is in the White House, the arcs don't end great. No, they don't. This was a little sooner, though. Real soon, yeah. The fall of Jared Aigsman was sooner on the timeline than the rise of Bridenstein.

Yeah. Um, super shitty. Um, very shitty thing to do to a person. Also, let's just talk for a minute. Let's just disaster plan here, Jake. What a, what a crazy timeline for Jared Eisenman who effectively stepped down from his company, rearranged his life to be the head of NASA for a couple years, um, changes plans on the Polaris program. We'll see how permanent those changes are. Maybe they just go back in, but now all of a sudden he's just going to be the chairman at shift four. isn't going to be involved as much in like the CEO role. Probably my guess would be feels a little bit more convinced that his vision for space needs to exist.

In my theory of the case from months ago, we've seen what this guy does when he wants to run a space program. Maybe he just runs the shit out of his own space program and feels like, well, NASA is getting completely derailed and they're screwed in many different angles and everything interesting in the future. is getting canceled. Maybe this is when he's like, I'll fund a Mars mission. I'll do like a Mars rover. Maybe, man. Maybe. Like, who knows what they... I'll take a bill and make a rover. Let's do it. That's one glass half full kind of way to look at it, right?

Is you have two space-obsessed billionaires that just got kicked out of the White House. So, yeah, maybe... That's probably the more realistic thing that he'll end up at a position in SpaceX, right? Back into... Yeah, it is. Some would even say 4D chess. Nailed it. Like, go...

confirmed as NASA, then have a huge falling out, throw a moonrocket at somebody, and then I'll hire you at SpaceX, and you will have quit Shift 4 and joined me in a very clear alliance. There are some out there that will say 4D chess. Didn't I, didn't I say, like, I'm trying to, this is a long time ago, but I feel like at one point I said that Isaacman was the succession plan. Yes, you did. You did make that call. You might have even put it in our predictions thing. It might be in our crackpot theories document that has one item in. Yeah. Because like you, I mean, if you're responsible, you do need to have that. Succession planning is a very key management job. And it's hard for a founder. It's really hard for a founder, right? Let's play this out a little bit because at the same time as this is happening, Starbase stuff not going like the best, as we've talked about. Guess who's running all the star base stuff, pretty much the people that ran NASA for a while there. Maybe it's like, hmm.

up and out here. Maybe you're not the vibe. You'd hear Kathy left. Isn't that a thing that happened? Did she? I don't know. Was that confirmed? I saw like a not confirmed.

Not confirmed. But I saw at least a rumor. Let's see. Let's run that to ground. Run that to ground. Yeah. Before we just publish it. I'm just asking questions.

I'm just saying stuff here. Let's check. Yeah. Oh yeah. At May 2025, she's changed her. LinkedIn from Starbase General Manager to retirement. Good for her. Nice.

Cash out. Yeah. So yeah. So there's some leadership positions open at SpaceX. And yeah, man. Go run Starbase. Hop on a rocket when you feel comfortable. Hmm. What do you find more likely? Isaacman private space program funding something crazy like a Mars rover or orbiter or Venus probe or like some planetary mission or even honestly just a space telescope like some dedicated science mission versus ends up at SpaceX and runs human space flight or some department like that.

Oh, I see him at SpaceX way way. Yeah. Yeah. Flying starship at air shows. pretty much yeah and here we're going to do the flip maneuver we'll get to that that's the china section of our show today that's more of a vagina kind of style yeah no i can i can 100% see that have just all of a sudden slipping into a maybe not even VP maybe a president role you know like sidling up right next to to gwyn

in a sort of it's a big company now they like they probably need more Gwynne level people, right? Or just someone to do the talks instead of Elon. Please, please. If he just was the chancellor of SpaceX, then maybe that would be good. Jared Isaac Green, you're our only hope. We'll get actual new content and a Starbase update. Talk about forcing people to do something, like buying those EVs that Trump's telling

me I got to go buy. I feel bad for the people that understand. I'm just wondering. I think the... What's the deadline here? You're still there on the driveway, but... I feel a little bit bad for the people that go to these Star Base updates, like the SpaceXers, and then it's nothing they haven't heard before.

There was nothing we hadn't heard before. There was a couple things here and there. I will say, as someone who worked in a big corporate environment for a very long time, sometimes you just need to say the same thing over and over again to the... employees, they got to hear it so that they know that things are not different, right? Like, it's weird. It's a weird thing. You have to, like, write the ship and keep everyone kind of calm and steady. Like, nothing's different, you know, especially when, when the scary things are happening, like, your CEO is doing wild shit at the White House. Think you got to just, like,

come back and be like, look, there's still a vision, you know? Stability. Stability is good for the stock price, Anthony. Let me tell you. Good defense. I will allow that. And I have rethought my take on the matter. Breaking news, it looks like Hakuto R has lost telemetry. Well, that sucks. Yeah. Damn, those are some monitors, though. Look at those things. That's what you got one of those, I think, right?

I think those are bigger than mine. That's like a 40-inch. Yeah. That's crazy looking. I'm on a 38-inch, but I don't think those are 38. I think that's more. That's like three monitors. That's huge.

In one. All right. Well, we'll keep this up and see what happens. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah, I mean, so I guess, do, you know, sometimes it's easy to chalk up the changes here. There's the Isaacman change. Oh, they're cut into, they're cut into a B-roll. That's never good.

Yeah, it's not good. Um, so we have, you know, Isaacman kind of implying on all in and the reporting around it was that this was a person getting back at Elon Musk by tanking his, his guy at NASA. but do you put any stock in the Isaacman clearly didn't agree with this budget section of the lottery? Like is that at all something that led to this? Or is this purely stupid interpersonal stuff? I mean, I believe that Isaac would have felt that. Like, I have no trouble. If you tell me like, hey, for sure, Eisenman didn't like this budget.

But like, yeah, obviously, no one likes it. It's a horrible budget. Like, this is a budget designed to annoy the most amount of people. per line item. Like, it's like, you know. So I've, yeah, I've no problem believing that. To be fair, though, I think Isaacman would be fine if you said NASA only gets $18 billion, but you get to decide which 18 billion to spend.

I don't think his problem, like he's stated on all in, right? His, he's also of the mindset of like cuts need to happen. It was just which ones that he's going to deliberate on. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's important to state because that's easy to say like, no, Isaacman, want to obviously if you get put in charge of something, you want $25 billion, not 18. But he's he's a guy that's also being able to focus on the thing that he thinks is important.

And in this case, if he says, yeah, there's probably $7 billion we don't need to spend at NASA. He would find it. Yeah. I mean, he's a corporate officer like that. Operator. That's his skill set. Like that's literally, say, can you do the same amount of stuff for less money in NASA? And he'd be like, yes, like literally like the one thing I'm good at is like, you know.

running a large organization efficiently. So, yeah, I don't have a problem with that. But I mean, that's not what the budget was, though, right? The budget was like cancel everything except the giant wasteful rocket that is like 25% of the entire budget. And we'll soft cancel that. We're going to cancel that program to presidents from now. And, you know, and yeah, call it calling a win. One cool mission and two presidents from now.

Yeah. Two cool missions. That's the one thing about like I'm really glad that someone was bold enough to say this rocket needs to go and actually make the proposal. But like it is it is not dead yet. Do not do not count your chickens everybody like that. We've canceled this rocket three or four times now. So we have to keep that in mind. And yeah, putting it.

So Artemis 4 is what, 2030 like at best, 232? We're going to make this face the whole time. Yeah. That's a that's like a. that's a different era. Like no one, like, I don't even know what the world look like in 23rd,

do, who knows, man? Like, this, where I get that. Wow. So, that was a very dramatic response to 2032. It is far away. That's almost 10 years, yeah. Yeah, I go back 10 years and,

tell yourself how politics are today and see if you believe yourself, right? Yeah, let me tell you what, stop getting bad at some point, right? So, yeah, you know, I've got to think about that. But so, yeah, do I think that that contributed to him on the outs? I have no idea. I don't think that's a knowable thing, really, until. I also think it would.

Well, I mean, I guess you could say he was going to get 70 votes in Congress because he's going to agree with them more adding things back in, which is obviously going to happen. Yeah. Just a fight for which things. It's weird, man. It's like a... He's really big on nuclear propulsion, though. That was odd to me.

He sure is. Yeah, he sure is. Yeah, super into it. I mean, it's kind of cool, right? And it's like, sure, not going to happen in the private industry. So you may as well, I guess, right? That's a good point. Yeah.

SpaceX is not going to develop nuclear propulsion, right? Like, it's just not. Well, but they would if it was obviously the thing. that was unlocking for their roadmap. Right? They caught a giant fucking rocket on chopsticks. Like they would develop crazy technology if they really needed to.

Right, but chopsticks are not regulated by the Department of Energy like nuclear power is right. Yeah, yeah. They only run more satellites than anyone's ever operated and have entered into the military industrial complex in a way that no one has ever really done in 10 years. And like, they've never been like, oh, crazy. You've got to work around government.

That's not, that isn't the thing that scares them off. So that's what I find interesting about Isaacman, though, is that he is so bought into the star base vision, but also thinks nuclear propulsion is a killer deal. Like, why not say we should work on an actual, like, base that we would land on the moon, rather than just landers piped together? Yeah, I don't know.

Like, we should build the habitat. We should build the thing that we grow plants. pick those things. The thing that we grow plants. I'll write it down as a title. Jesus. It's called a greenhouse. The thing that we grow plants.

That's like a Tim Robinson line. Geez, holy. It's very hot in this room. All right. So but here's Jake, I want to go back to this. the Secretary of the Air Force is a space guy. So that's pretty fun. You don't care at all about this.

But I think it's kind of interesting. Mill space does not really interest me that much. I'm sorry. What about all the money that space is going to operate on in the next five years is Mill Space? But I'm not interested in it. I don't know what to say. All right. That's fair enough.

It's, I don't know. I don't really like to get excited about that kind of stuff. It just doesn't do it for me. me. You're so Canadian. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Super Canadian.

Just draft off of ours. Yeah. One day you'll make, you know, the Royal Space Force. Dude, soon and later, after all your shenanigans, man, our, our prime minister, he's like, he's counting dollars. You're like, how many, how many tanks with maple leafs on the side can we make on our, on our own? The Maple Dome. Yeah.

Maple Dome. just called the ice rink I guess but yeah so you know that's a I'm not you have to tell me I depend on you to tell me when the important stuff in mill space is happening that I should care about but well it's just there's you know there's it's a pretty tumultuous time for military spending number one they're getting a bunch more of it not less of it and it's the one area that is proposed to do that number two is um golden dome is like you know a NASA amount of money going into the space sector. And that's spread across a couple different programs,

but that's kind of interesting. And then the other factor that is that all the space companies are, some have pivoted very hard into being hypersonic testing or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot of, like, being in the defense industry

is in vogue again in a way that it was not in the, you know, early odds. I guess it's sort of like a rising tide kind of situation, right? Yeah. I also think there's a shift of my root theory is that the generation of people that are running these companies kind of came of age and in the business world at a time when American imperialism was the big bad in the world and now there's just like actual imperialism, you know, in like an actual war sense happening. And that changes the way that you're perceived if you go work at Andrel. You know, like that was hot off the Iraq war. that was like kind of a weird thing to go into right but when you're watching videos of

ukrainian drones flying and destroying like a third of the russian air force or something in a single movement and then there's like a new there's a new emphasis to it in a way that there are like you know capital w wars to point at that's fair that's like that's a pretty good vibe check on the world right now right where it's like for for a long time like most of our lives the general sentiment has been like, how can we keep things peaceful? And like, now there's very much a growing sense of like, we were the ones that started the wars, Jake. We were doing the wars. Now we're responding to the wars. That's a different thing. Yeah, yeah. But there's like very much now of like, we need to kick some ass and remind people who, how things are supposed to stay, right? Because like,

but they're not listening to us anymore. Right. Right. Yeah. We didn't, because we didn't do the war enough, I guess, for the intervening time. didn't do it. Didn't do enough war, so now there's war. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Anyway, my point is that having a space guy as the head of the Air Force is an interesting moment because it flips the emphasis in a way that, you know, the space force is under the Air Force.

All the other Air Force people have been plane people, not space people. So flipping that relationship and having the head of the Air Force have all these space takes is really interesting. Also, I'm going to pull up this article that I was asking people about. Where did this go? There was this change that allows, here we go. So, you're going to love this.

This is riveting content. So for a long time, if any of the commercial companies wanted upgrades to happen at launch ranges, they had to have the government find the budget for them for those upgrades, do the upgrades, fund the upgrades, and eventually I think the government could get reimbursed

if you used those upgrades, but the government had to be the one sorting all the money out and actually doing the upgrade itself. They were in charge. Now they have flipped this so that SpaceX could fund upgrades to the launch range as they see fit.

So if they want to change something about ways Cape Canaver works or Vandenberg works, they can actually fund that change rather than trying to get something through all these other means, which is more important right now than it's ever been because of what we're talking about with the budget environment. And so these kind of changes are also in this same vein. This second sub headline here does not give me a lot of hope on this one, though.

You don't like Jacobs? You're not a big Jacobs fan? Well, can you think of any other projects that Jacobs is doing that are going really well? I don't know. I kind of chalked that up as like a big no-name. you know, not flashy contractor that's like they're going to be involved in the really bad ones too. So, I don't know. Is that problematic? Because I think that's just, I don't know, that felt like that was more facilitating of the,

did they have to do the work? I don't know. I asked some people about how this works because I don't really get the flow. A contract worth up to $4 billion over 10 years to provide engineering and technical services at the nation's primary space ranges. I don't, I think I don't understand why they got a contract if the other, if, the commercial companies are funding the work. So I guess this is like a retainer that they paid to Jacobs.

I don't know. But that means like SpaceX could pay money and then boss them around. Be like, this is a shit mobile launch tower. Like this thing leaks everywhere and it's delayed. I want to be a fly on the wall when the SpaceX managers try to get a bunch of Jacobs engineers to do something fast. Yeah, yeah. That'll work out.

We could make a whole TV show about that. And every one of our listeners would watch every minute of it. Yeah, I don't think that's going to go well. I don't think Jacobs is going to be working at Star Base. Andenburg edition. Yeah, you're right. You're right about that. Yeah.

I'll let you know what comes in from the middle space world. Your point being that there's money going into space companies is not lost from you. Yeah. I mean, especially when Donald Trump pulls all the funding that SpaceX gets from NASA and then continues to, NASA is totally screwed, man. They're super screwed right now. It's dark, man. If they're going to fight in this particular way.

It's, uh, yeah. And like we're seeing sort of the, I mean, the budget is one thing. And like, so the, the budget details came out on was a Friday that came out, um, like the full technical document. And I, it, it was really dark. Like just like straight up everything is can't like they're canceling everything. Like it is wild how much is just zeroed out on this thing. Um,

But then I think we're also kind of just seeing what you can do without touching the budget and just like all these kind of scary stop, stop orders, like travels being restricted, and their conferences are out. Like they're canceling ISSRDC. LPC has to go to loan now. Yeah. What are you got on that? Not much yet.

But I mean, they just sent an email this morning saying that they're proceeding with or without NASA's help. And so that will be, I mean, I'm glad. It's the Jared Isaacman, Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Yeah, the Jared Isaacman. Oh, dear. Okay. So, but I mean, that's still like not, it's not just the funding for the conference. Like, like NASA probably pays a lot of people to go to that conference too and now they're not going to. And so is the, as LPSC as good as it was if none of the NASA funded scientists are there to talk about their work? Probably not. So, you know, a lot of those special sessions end up being like, you know, there's always a special session that's like a four hour talk series from everyone from the curiosity team and then everyone from the perseverance team. And then, you know, every flagship gets like a block. like that. That's all up in the air, right? So I don't know. It's pretty, it's pretty dark. So there's that. Yeah. It's not looking good. We'll see what Congress fights for and they'll fight for something. Like, you know, this budget, I kind of think this budget is, I've said it is D-O-A

just because it's just like it just has no, I don't know how to say it differently. It's just like is the budget that literally like aggros everybody, right? Like it's like, designed to annoy every single person and has like no one likes this budget except the guy that wrote it so i don't know i don't know how that proceeds but still i mean if if they only bring back 70% of what was cut that's like still pretty bad yeah i mean i think that's the that's the model right that everyone perceives that it's operating under yeah i mean i think that's the thing about it is that you're not building a reliable future leading like coalition of people that want to think differently about the stuff, you're just

putting the clock back a couple years, right? You're just upending a bunch of stuff, cutting the things back to a couple years, but you're not fundamentally changing the model or the way that stuff works internally, you know? And that's that's that's them over this administration, right? It's all by executive order. dysfunction. Yeah. Yeah. And then you're going to get the kickback to it of the reaction against it being, you know, we'll do the old stuff. harder. Yeah. So I don't know what things are actually going to last in a way that is, you know,

what sticks around to 2032 like you're saying is so far away. Yeah. Well, and that's the real danger too. Like, you know, even if Congress puts all this stuff back in, the disruption for, for this kind of thing, it takes a while to recover just from the disruption, right? And so, like, if all the money gets put back in and then we just, like, lose two or three years of progress. Like, what does that actually accomplish? Not really much, right? You don't save a ton of money. You just lower the effectiveness of the money you spent and, you know, kind of like disrupt

careers and hurt the talent pipeline. And like, it's just like, it's just all really bad damage for no, no game. No perceivable game. So it's pretty, yeah. The only other way to go about it is like putting Dr. Z and Casey Hammer in charge of figuring out how to decide like, which missions are doing a good job at operating and building their spacecraft and keeping those ones around and saying to everyone else, like, be like these people and we'll be good, right? If you took, because not all the missions are going well. They're all, some of them are crazily managed and out of hand budget wise and they have not

been adhering to cost caps. And yeah, we talked about as a doctor say that. Like, you have to be responsible. If you've set cost caps, you've got to enforce them. You've got to like follow the things that you wrote down. So if we, if we did the, the, the, the, Dr. Zee and Casey Hanmer coalition to go in and figure out how to reorient internally of like how to figure out which mission is operating or in development well and what are they doing

right and make everybody focus on those things? Like how much of the budget is that that we then reset on? But you're just resetting the budget and not instituting any new way of going about stuff. You're just kicking it eight years down and just turning off the top. Yeah. Yeah. And if we were, and like we're going to, again, I am more of the mindset that at some point that's going to happen to the entire federal government spending at some point. So I'm more, I am more susceptible to like, yeah, we got to start figuring this out now or else we're just going to smack into the iceberg and then have to figure it out.

So like we will do that at some point. But it looks like we still have a couple minutes to like try to rethink how we operate some of this stuff instead of going in this approach and being just super baddily about, well, at least we got 30% reduction. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's so disappointing. Like, I'm so, this is like my general vibe check on the world. It's like, there just seems to be so much like a lure to the idea of nothing is savable and the only thing you can do is burn it down and start from scratch. Like this clean slate, like, wet dream that people have about government is like, it's just, it's just so unrealistic and not helpful. And like, no one seems to want to just go do the work, right? And you turned 40 really hard. I know, right? But like that's, I mean, we live in a democracy and and things are messy and you have to get together and work hard and build a consensus and like, you know, you need leadership to drive these things forward and no one seems to want to step forward and do that, right?

And so you just kind of have this like stagnation until someone comes by with the idea of canceling everything, which is like the worst idea and also the best idea. Like there's just no other way forward that people can think about, right? So it's, I don't know, that's really depressing for me. Maybe that is because I'm 40, but... It's because you're 40. But what if it's because the real reason is that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files for Elon Musk? What if that's the real reason?

I love this. Have a nice day. Have a nice day. Because I'm going to keep track of how many people are surprised by this tweet. That would be really good one. What? No, I didn't see this coming. Man.

Man, I've seen better fights between Well, this is good This is good This was Eric Berger retweeting The Trump truths that we read out And saying this would both end the international space station And simultaneously provide no way to safely deorbit it And this Elon plus wanting this

This just gets better and better Go ahead, make my day So he's in the camp of Let's Tyeonggong, I assess I don't understand this one these guys are just like oh my god you guys are cooked and you know that right we'll be all right listen America's superpower is our self-loathing complex that is what we've done better than everybody is that we know exactly what we do bad at and we like to

shout it out to everybody we go we travel to Europe and we apologize for being American because we know what everyone thinks when we come in the room like we self-loathe better than everybody. We'll be all right. That's my campaign speech. I hope so, man. The other option is never talk about it. And then you're the Chinese government.

Yes. So, I don't know. If I had to pick one, loud tweeting at each other or authoritarian government, I still picking loud tweeting at each other as annoying and drama filled as it is. But Anthony, the fallacy there is that those are your only two options. I didn't say it was. I'm just saying I'm currently picking this option, you know. So, not true. It's the duality of American politics. Anthony edition. We only got two choices on the ballot.

If you knew my politics, that's exactly as I've always thought, Jake, right? Yeah, settled into New Jersey here. So I'm in the safe haven of the state with almost no natural disasters and very boring politics. So, all right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's going great. It's a great day for space policy. Yeah.

So what do you think is going to happen? What kind of, what kind of, I mean, you can't guess the person, but give me the avatar of who succeeds Isaacman in the nomination slot. Oh, yeah. I should have made some calls before this, but I mean, there was that rude name, right? That was more of a, like, defense guy. Who was that? It was like Quast or something, K-W-A-S-T? How do you say that?

Wasn't that who was rumored? Lieutenant General Stephen Quast. You think it's Quast or Kvast? Which one? Was there someone already put forward for deputy or no? Yeah, that Space Force guy, the Space Force Association guy. Pretty plain vanilla kind of guy. It wasn't the name that I had heard originally that was going to be in the

deputy spot. A similar kind of person, right? There was all the deputies that I heard were kind of like more of that ilk. But yeah, I don't know. Like there's, I think it's just no longer the, it's going to be nobody interesting, I don't think. It's going to be some person who's game for this kind of budget to be floated and, you know, the communication that has been, the gross communication still about like the Starliner situation. All that just seems to be floating through NASA comms just fine. Someone who's game for that. But I think you're right.

And that like we've tacked back to the era of the fight in Congress is going to be the actual thing that dictates the next couple of years. Right? Because we're, I mean, shit, Jake. We're months away from being into the midterm battle here. So they got one budget in them maybe before the midterms. Yeah. They got one budget. and a CR until the midterms.

Yeah, that's true. That's how it's going to work out. That's how it's going to look. Maybe one budget and then a CR, maybe two CRs. Yeah. Yeah. Gotta keep running that Biden budget as long as you can. We're running that Biden budget.

Yeah, we might as well bring back Bill Nelson at this point, you know? Just get him back in there. Put him back in the game. Jeez. What a wild. This is such crazy news, man. The thing though is that we... The thing we were worried about above, like, not above all the other things, but in the space realm,

was that the kickback against SpaceX and the Elon Musk interests in this regard was going to be severe, whether that was after the falling out or after the next election Democrats win or whatever, right? It was immediate. Like, if this was a personal retribution because this person didn't like Elon Musk and he left and he just canned the guy that he liked that was going for NASA. That's like an immediate kickback against basically. Now he got Trump tweeting.

We're going to take all the government, what was it, government subsidies and contracts. Yeah. GSCs. All those Biden subsidies, he's milking, yeah.

Yeah. I don't think we either of us would have said the kickback will come in June 2025. Yeah, I don't think so. Yeah. It's happening like, it's happening as we are talking right now.

It is like escalating. Yeah, like live before. This is a live, this is not a live stream of the, of the lunar landing. This is a live stream of the fall, the fall of Elon Musk. The bromance breakup. Well, I mean, it started a couple days ago, right? Elon was out there talking trashed about the bill and went on that old thing.

Yeah, yeah. Which is obviously what the fight's going to be about is that, like, they're arguing about nonsense on Twitter, but the fight's really about, like, the proxy war is this, but the real fight is he's going to fund people in other midterms or, like, lobby for, basically what he was doing before Trump was president going around lobbying Republicans to vote certain ways, right? If that's still what he's going to do for a couple of days here before he like totally

reverts to space Elon mode it's going to be a swifter kickback against SpaceX and it wasn't even like Starship Flight 9 went perfectly. There's still that. Yeah. Man, it's going to be

what do you think? three months, it's going to be a pretty interesting sequence of events here. I'm most interesting what Jared Isseman does from here, honestly. I think that is the most meaningful thing that will happen for space in the next six months is whatever the hell Jared Iszeman decides he's going to do next. Because I don't think it's going to be start another fintech company or just be really involved or take time off and go to Tahiti or something. I don't think any of those are in the cards.

I think it's going to be very space related. I think he's going to dump a bunch of resources into something really interesting, whether that is internally at SpaceX or his own thing. And the like, what is the space environment without NASA? Like, that might just be his mission to figure out what that is. And lead by example and say, like, this is how we should develop space. And I have at least some of the resources to contribute to that. So I'm going to make a good step forward.

If he does something in that vein, that is the most meaningful thing for space in 2025. You're probably right. Yeah, I think that's probably pretty, pretty bang on observation. We should write that one down as a as a one to check back on in the Anthony world. Yeah. 10 years from now. 2032. Yeah.

It'd be great. I'll have air conditioning by then. In the world we cannot imagine, 2032. Yeah. You're not living on Mars by then, Jake? You don't think the humans will be on Mars by then? Man, I'll be almost 50 by then. You'll be great for Mars, though.

Yeah. Your bones will be getting less dense by the day. You won't eat as much. That gravity bump, right? Yep. Your cancer risk will be appreciably less because you'll probably already have it. I'm too tall, though. Too tall.

You are tall. You are super tall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a pretty solid astronaut for anyone who wants to send us up. You would be a good astronaut. Probably. You're chill.

You know, you don't rile up easy. I don't get seasick. I don't know how analogous seasick is to space sickness. Okay, yeah. Good shape. Yeah. Thank you. I haven't seen my torso in a while, though. You don't know. You only know if shoulders up. You haven't seen mine either. So we're not going to go there. I have a new weight loss program, which is every couple weeks I get a GI bug from my son's school. And then I shed a few pounds. So I have the opposite problem.

I'm living too much of the good life down here in Mexico. You're drinking that spicy beer, whatever that stuff is. Too many of these picocitos. You got that and a Steve Ayoki dosakis and you're good. And the only thing that you around here is like refined corn. So, you know, it's like just just bad carbs, right? Yeah, yeah. Is it worth watching that video of that Chinese hop test thing?

You didn't watch it? Did you watch the video of this thing? of this? I haven't known. Is this the one that they did like in the neighborhood or whatever? It pretty much was in the neighborhood. Yeah.

In the typical Chinese way. It wasn't as Tyeonglong three as Tiongong three was. But yeah, where was the unofficial video? That's what we got to find. Andrew Jones on official video because this was this was close. Yeah. You start to see it when the build

links come in, right? You can see the perspective of how close to shore this was. Power lines, yeah. This thing had a single engine, and it flew like, what? Not very high. It's like a very SN10 kind of thing. I think it was lower than that even. Right. Look at the, I mean, look at the port right there. Like, there's shit right there. There were some good photos of them fish in this stage out of the water, too. Let me find it. They're moving very methodically, hey. It's something to watch. I mean, maybe.

There's like 8,000 companies working on things that are like all roughly designed after Falconine and or Starship. Yeah. So I don't know. This is, you know, we'll get the guess we're going to have the day back on, but like, I don't know what things to care about. That's my number one problem is which of these things are legitimately rolled out of the state-run organizations, which are the things actually use tech they've developed themselves? not that that needs to be like I don't want to be like not infinite hair syndrome but

there are a class of projects that's like oh this is using the same engine as the long march whatever so how different is it versus totally you know homegrown new new thinking yeah

to go with your clean sheet gripes from earlier but I mean this thing it looks pretty sweet though this one has the best look about any of the other ones I wonder if there's like

kind of an old old style like Soviet maneuvering here where they have like a bunch of design bureaus that are competing and they're just going to wait to see which one comes out on top. They'll let the good stuff load to the top here, right? It's like that, it's that very Chinese controlled competitiveness, you know?

Right. Yeah. You three fight it out. A three market inside of my square walls here, right? You know, like this one looks pretty legit though. A lot of NASCAR logos on the side. Yeah. A lot of, it does look pretty legit.

there's a lot of people contributing to that one I like this one their name on it yeah into that one I think I did see that Tianlong three was going to fly again which is uh fly legitimately I think

I gotta find that article too Tom long three yeah uh I'll find it I don't know, man. Chan Long three. John Long three.

Oh, here it is. Look at this. That's a rocket right there, baby. That's not going to fly off the static fire test stand. No. That's going to get launched. At least not by accident, yeah. That's going to get launched right there, Jake.

Space pioneers. I love the names of the Chinese companies, too. Great. Yeah, Chinese company names are all good. I always think, you know, there's lots of big Chinese community in Vancouver. So there was like, you know, there's lots of interaction with that community. And there was always like, I always joke that there was this gardener company that did our property, like our townhouse community, you know, or like, whatever. And yeah, the gardening company's name was nice, happy gardeners.

How good you don't want to hire them? Yeah, I was like, what's company like, how we hired nice happy gardeners? You're like, okay. Got it. And it's like that's a car company, the car company that's like really big around here now, that B-Y-D, right? It stands for Build your dreams. Build your dreams.

Is that what that stands for? I didn't realize that. Now are you forced to buy their EVs? Is that a mandate? We are, yeah. Yeah. They promised the Mexican government a whole bunch of money and now I got to buy one. I can't really tell if you're joking.

Thankfully, they're about $48, so it's okay. Man. Did we book someone for next week? You were doing a lot of emailing. Yeah, yeah. Let's, uh, I, now I can't keep them all straight. So I'm going to pull up my email just to make sure that, uh, I say it right. But yeah, we have Matt Geertzden coming on. And we're going to talk about kind of an interesting topic, kind of a dovetail from what we talked about today. I would say leadership in space. And so I'm sure we have some. some stuff to carry from this conversation of that one. So he's a, yeah,

he's got some, some expertise in that area. So I'm talking about that. Should be good. That's good stuff. Yeah. We are entering into, we're doing housekeeping here for a couple minutes.

Yep. A time where you're going away for a couple weeks. Mm-hmm. And that'll be fun to know who's going to do the show with me. But we'll figure it out. I did, I did the very poor, uh,

trip planning where I made, made a three week trip that's three weeks and one day and it starts and ends on a Thursday so I miss four shows. I think we might pre-record one or two. I could have been better than that. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, and your July 4th is in there. So we'll skip that one.

But yeah, there'll be some chaos coming up. It's summer chaos. It happens every year. But the good news is every week from here on out, I will have like one more thing in my background. So by the time you get back for your trip, I will have a full of studio. have the AC, I'll have the background, I'll have the desk built, it'll be great. Love it, love it. Can I plug real quick, preemptively, that right now as I record this, unless something chaotic happens, tomorrow I've got Lori Garver coming on Miko, which will be a nice bookend to the Mark Albrecht on Miko.

Shockingly prescient, now that we know what happened when he was like, everybody knows the administrator of Nessa works for the president. They got to know that. We should have known at the time. we probably should have read into that a little more than we did. But we didn't, none of us did. And then all of a sudden we were shocked. I mean, just to be fair, though, it is not unreasonable to think that the handpicked guy from the guy that spent tens of millions of dollars. Like, there was nothing strange about that.

I would say that unoffensive handpicked guy, too. Nobody was mad about him being mad at NASA. The money part should make some people uncomfortable. but it was very status quo how that played out. So I think, you know, it was, I think we were being shocked is not the worst thing, I think. The fact that it was also one of the most bipartisan picks that it, but it was like it could have been one, probably the most bipartisan pick of the entire, I guess, except for all the people that used to be Democrats that are in the cabinet.

It's maybe different. But this was going over the best, even though they were mad at him for like being Elon's friend or whatever, even though every time he was like, I'm not Elon's friend. I can't say this enough on any show or appearance I do. I'm going to mention several times. I've only met them three times. Yeah, man. That sucks.

That totally sucks. Especially sucks for us because we were about to get the best media accreditation policy that NASA's ever had for independent podcasters. And that has been completely derailed. And I'm furious about this. Your Kingmaker theory is out the window now. Totally out. I'm just another guy with a podcast.

Yeah. Until they put forward someone else who had. on the show. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, but Lori Garver, tomorrow on Miko. Well, recording tomorrow, I should come out tomorrow. That'll be fun. I don't know. Can we?

It's going to be good to game plan with third. Like, what the hell is going on now? What do you do? And then maybe we can have Jared on to debate what he should do with his private human spaceflight or science spaceflight program. He does have some time, so, you know, we can probably send an email out. Yeah. Does he have staff, though?

I don't know. he may not have time or staff right now or he has time no staff he might just he might just answer the email himself that's true it could just be him we'll find out all right y'all um god willing i'll be able to end this show today god willing there's still comments coming through so that looks good we are getting comments i'm down to 104 gigabytes available rather than zero all right so that's good good all right y'all we'll see you next week bye Offdom.com.com. Discord.

Everybody told me we forgot to plug it. Bye. See you. One, two, three, four, five.