Off-Nominal - 203 - 20 Tree and Me

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Jake and Anthony return from their travels with stories, and a ton of news to catch each other up on. And we’ll find out if Jake was the person who bought NWA 16799.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 203 - 20 Tree and Me - YouTubeThe largest Mars meteorite on Earth has sold for $4.3 million | SpaceCongress passes budget reconciliation bill with $10 billion for NASA - SpaceNewsSenate Appropriators Poised to Reject Proposed NASA Budget Cuts, But… – SpacePolicyOnline.comHouse Appropriators Also Reject Trump-Proposed NASA Cuts, Fund National Space Council – SpacePolicyOnline.comCongress moves to reject bulk of White House’s proposed NASA cuts - Ars TechnicaHere’s why Trump appointed the secretary of transportation to lead NASA - Ars TechnicaNASA Research Shows Path Toward Protocells on Titan - NASA ScienceBuilding the future of SpaceNews - SpaceNewsFollow 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. It says fixed. That's fun because now it's fixed, but I can't hear you. So let me throw an AirPod in and see if I can route the audio out here. And then you can keep that. All right. How am I doing here? How are we tracking?

I can hear you. Can I want to say or Jake? Okay. Okay. We good? Let's hope that the recording is better. I have no idea what the recording's going to be, but good thing none of that is being used. Everyone's good, right?

Because I hear Jake in my ear, a little earpod. I got like a little IFB situation. Yeah. Okay. So if this is good, then please tell me that that's all good. We'll just pretend. Just do the music again. Do the cover artwork.

All right, we're good. I think nobody said yes. This is a good situation. So, well, with that, Jake, I'm going to crack my beer now that we've solved the techish. You guys all shout if that starts happening again. We've got some new hardware in the loop. You can see, I built a shelf in the background here, Jake. I put some things up there.

Obviously, I've got some new audio hardware going on that we need to sort some routing on. And the way that e-cam interacts with my new rack-mounted audio gear. We'll have to figure that out. But for now, I feel like. Like I am back to my life as a cable TV hotshot wearing an IFB. So we'll go to that. Yeah. Who knows?

If you want to make it very cable-like, though, you have to hide my face. You can't see me. You can only hear me. Just talk to the camera all by yourself. Put a slide up and have nothing else going on. Now what, Jake? I have no idea what we covered. You're back.

I'm back. You're tagged. I'm not. I did bring something back. So this is a fun. You want to, I've been teasing your project to you that I'm excited to unveil. and see, gauge your level of how stupid this project is of me, okay? Let's do it.

Let's do it. Got the new house, right? Moved in before we left for the trip. We did, right before we left for the trip, we took a big old holly tree down that was like leaning towards the house and going to be a problem. That was really fun. So I've been in the mindset of like. Yeah, tree management, man.

Well, then I was in like, man, I should, you know, we got to plant some new stuff in this, in this yard. And so we're out there in California. and I'm like, what is the like temperature extremes of a redwood? Like how low or high could it go? You know, like, where are we at? And it looks like they can live pretty well between 10 and 100 Fahrenheit, which is like, doesn't really get outside of that up here.

I got tons of humidity, which they love, and only a couple of days a year outside of that range. So I'm like, I can't, I think we should plant a redwood. and she's not going for the whole plant of redwood in the yard situation. So I'm like, all right, whatever. A couple days later, we're at dinner, and we're under this beautiful redwood tree. This restaurant was horribly managed. The service was all over the place. I think somebody was called out sick because there was just general chaos.

We had a lot of time to sit at this nice picnic table. And she's like, you know, over on that redwood, there's a couple of basil sprouts that look pretty nice. And I was like, they do look pretty nice. She's like, you're going to get one of those and try to grow it? And I was like, I thought you were out on this project. I'm like, I am, but maybe you could do it in like a pot inside and make like a cool container tree. So I looked up, you could grow like a six or 12 foot redwood in a container. So, and I'm like, well, if I get, if I am successful enough in making a 10 foot redwood in a container in our house, which is very high humidity because all of our windows leak like hell.

And generally between 55 and 75, which is the prime growing range for a redwood. Okay, okay. If I can get the 10 feet, I bet Katie would let me plant this in the yard. So I've Johnny Appleseeded myself. I have six redwood sprouts right here. Some of them are not, some of them are not looking good. Okay, these ones, one of these three is looking good. This one's looking good and is nice and healthy.

Super janky. I have an actual space-related part. There's a reason this is show content, okay? This sounds a lot like an Elon Musk plan from a long time ago here, yeah. So three of the sprouts were like two days before we left, and I picked them, and then I put them in, I chat, Jebted the shit out of, like, how I should care for these things to get them home, and I, they were sitting on a deck in Monterey for a couple of days getting humidity and whatever else. So three of them are a little older, and then three of them are two days newer. The day before we left, we were eating lunch in, so these ones curled a little bit, but this one, I think, is going to make it. I think this one's going to be the one right here, this tall one. All right. Hold on.

So, if anyone out there has been to Monterey, the main plaza in town is a nice little park, and in the middle, there's this beautiful redwood tree. And I'm like, man, I hope this one has some sprouts because this one's a really good-looking redwood tree. Wouldn't you know it? I walk up to this thing. It's an Apollo 14 moon tree. Okay.

So the kicker, though, is that this is, so this has been planted in like 76. It's been growing for 50 years. It's beautiful. It looks glorious. But they trim all the basil sprouts off this thing. And they sand to the entire ground so that I guess you can't take a clone of this thing. But in the park, like one row of grass over is three ones that have been probably like 10 to 20 years old. And I'm like, there's a pretty solid chance.

These are seeds of that one. Because these are a lot younger. And those had plenty of sprouts. And the three good sprouts I have are from the trees next to the Apollo 14 Moon Tree. They're Apollo 14 grandchildren. I think they might be, yeah. So we're going to see how this project goes. I love that.

That's amazing. And everyone I thought I was crazy until I get home and I text a picture to the guy who just took down the tree in our backyard because he's like the local area's certified arborist. And I texted him. I was like, and his company name, I'll plug him, is called Hyperion, which is the name of the tallest tree in the world, which is a redwood. So I text him in this picture. I'm like, I've got a project you're going to love. I'm growing these things. And he was like, once those are better established,

I might try to graft and clone some of those. And I was like, you've just given me more validation than these actually working out could ever do. So, yeah, so I may have the Apollo 14 grandchild tree growing in my office. I love it. I love the, that's all based on an assumption too. And you're just like, yeah, they're close by. They're younger, probably. Seems likely.

Yeah. No one's ever going to call you on it, so you may as well just go for it. I mean, I'm just looking at the ages. Is there like a 23 and me for trees? 23 and tree? 23 in me? That's the Irish version. That's an Irish accent joke for everybody out there that maybe only hits if you've been to Ireland.

Yeah. It would work in Newfoundland, too. Is that how they say tree? 23. Yeah, they say the same thing. Toyota three times, yeah. Okay. So I didn't realize it was that close. Oh, yeah. I mean, I know geographically, but not, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. The further east you go from Toronto, the more Irish it gets. So, yeah. Attrax. So that's what I brought back from the trip, Jake. That's fantastic, man. Yeah. Did you bring back a huge desire to finally pony up some money and pay Jeff Faust what he's worth and get past the Space News paywall? man like what a weird I just was not

it was not on my bingo card this is like one day just open up a space dude it's like gotta pay god damn it like it's just like it's just such a bummer I'm more mad about it that like that it actually happened

than I am about the price it's basically the but also it is pretty expensive for like a niche I think that's the best feedback they could ask for though right

what do you mean they knew everyone was going to be mad about it. But you're only mad about it for one of the two reasons. Exist. Yeah. I'm comparing it like I have a New York Times subscription and I just checked like and it built my credit card for last month. It was $1.60 for the New York Times for last month, right?

Canadian. So whatever. That's a one, that's a buck and a quarter for you or whatever, right? And it's like, how can I get the New York Times for $20 a year and space news is 10 times? I don't get it. I don't, the pricing is, I don't understand news pricing, apparently. I don't know. Is it in a New York Times is like underselling or they're like, what's going on here?

I love that your plummics by our business model, right? Like niche. How is niche content more expensive than mass media content? Yeah. Because there's way more people. It's just a numbers game, baby. We're more niche than Space News though. And that should make us more expensive and we're not.

Yeah, Space News went only Never Fly RideShare for the whole thing. Basically, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'm just slowly getting myself to a place where I'm going to pay Jeff Faust to the salary that he's due, but, you know. So that's my first take is like I should have been paying Jeff Faust directly. If I could hand him money directly, I would, right? If it was $2 a month, I would have been signed up 10 years ago.

But yeah. That makes it think. Second take is that like this feels like the best news ever for Ars Technica, who now have Eric Berger and Stephen Clark as the space reporters that are free and available and not, you know, behind any given paywall or subscription. Those Aerojet people that buy all the ads in the publications are just looking at that arspectica, like, oh, yeah, there we go. That is a decision, man.

Why do they buy those ads? I don't know. I don't get it. That maybe it tells you how niche that publication is. I'm going to buy an added. You know, a Washington publication, but not just like media or industry publications generally. Yeah, I don't know. Is that winning that?

Is that like, man, I really thought, you know, until I saw that ad, I was not really big on the AR1. But now, like, I got to get me some of that AR1. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, we got bigger problems if the industry folk are being swayed by the ads in space news to make their technical decisions. Maybe they stopped buying and that's why the paywall's hitting. I was I was going to say is like, is there, you know, so the government's money's drying up. So that means they canceled Artemis past three or five, whatever it is now.

Well, it's back on the menu though, Jake. Erijet's like, shit, we got to cut the marketing budget. And now I got to freaking pay for space news. Look at that. That's the cause effect. Donald Trump gets me again. That's son of a bitch. Is that it?

Yeah. The tariffs at space news. This is like that one time I had to pay long distance for that SLS press conference call. Oh, yeah. What was the final bill on that? It was like $60 or something. That's so extreme. I forgot about that.

It was brutal. It was brutal. Man. Yeah. Well, you said they're canceled in the art of submissions, but maybe you've been away so long, Jake, that you need to catch up on the news that everything's back. Yeah. We're back, baby. Yeah, so catch me up.

So I'm not here. I'll give you my my rundown from a distance. So what they passed the big big bill and that like juiced up. That put like ours four and five back on the table, right? That was that one. And there was like, no, we're funding that. And then now we have congressional answers to the budget request. That's what we're looking at now.

We have both a House and a Senate one, right? Yes. Both are making their way through. there's like generic kind of congressional battling over different pieces of the legislation. But it's also still many weeks out from this actually passing and being signed if and when it would be signed, all that kind of stuff. But I think just the resounding like, oh no, we are definitely not cutting that much money out of NASA. The House side is like pulling a billion out of science and bumping up the exploration side a little bit, but it's way higher than, I think

space policy online had a good rundown of the differences. Let me find that. I mean, if they pull a billion out of science and it's mostly born by a Mars sample return, we kind of come out okay. There you go. All right, here's the space policy online rundown. Science, this is the House bill. Six billion versus current level of 7.3.

The presidential request was 3.9. Everything else is kind of on that same scale, right? Like a little lower than what it is now, but way higher than what was proposed. and the Senate side is almost full funding across the board and even higher in some predictable segments You guys just love spending money, eh? Just gotta... You know?

Write those checks. Not only do they like to spend money in these bills, they then add other ones that they additionally just fully fund the gateway. If we just made a little extra funding as a treat just on the side, just a little bit of, you know, a mid-year snack, you know? It's a little extra entire flagship. program. But where are you at on not having Dragon X-L called out as a specific funding item in this

gateway plan here? Like I said, before, you can't fund what isn't real. So there we go. That's your take. All right, here's the paywall to space news on this. $4.1 billion of this 10 billion that's going to NASA in the reconciliation bill is to fund two additional SLS rockets for Artem's 4 and 5. and then the other 2.6 on that list is to complete the Lunar Gateway.

$20 million for the Orion for Artemis 4. So, Lockheed Martin is not kidding about that hardware reuse budget. $20 million? I don't understand that. What is that by the seatbelts for Orion? Like, what is that? I don't know. I don't know, man.

All right. That's a weird number. There's a story there. We need to get to the butt. We need to FOIA that one. What's going on behind the $20 million there? Yeah. And listen, man, was it this show or my other show where I mentioned the fact that the Mars

telecommunications orbiter that was inserted into some of this reconciliation bill? Sounded a lot like the Rocket Lab Mars sample return telecommunications orbiter? Yeah, a little bit. They tweeted about it since. I think that was good confirmation that this is, they are shacking up with Ted Cruz. Rocket Lab Ted Cruz is a, is a, is a, combo I did not see on the bingo card this year. Yeah.

Yeah, we're in that weird timeline. We're all looking to Ted Cruz like he's going to be some kind of hero. Are we? There was a moment there where it's like, as the Dragon XL stand you are, you're like, yes, the gayway's back. But like, well, when the budgetary request dropped and everyone was like, you know, everyone's still losing their shit. And then there was like a moment there where it's like,

Ted Cruz will fix it. I was like, oh, okay, well, we were interesting ways to pick our heroes right now, I think. There was just some large explosion happening out on the street. It sounded like some crazy engine backfire. And I was like, what was that? So that's why I'm distracted. I mean, all of this was,

nobody's shocked that Congress is rejecting the cuts, right? There was a creepingly slow rejection of it from the Republican side. There was like a couple of people going out first. Some people were shocked, Anthony. Some people were shocked. Okay. Well, that's silly. I mean, but there's a difference between being shocked versus like, we said this.

Probably when Casey was on the show, I said it. Like, your job is to go out there and be the guy saying, we can't do this, we can't do that. Like, we should be focusing on X, Y, Z. Like, you need to be ringing the alarm bells. But from my seat, I'm like, this. how Congress manages it from here, I think, is the unknown part. Not that they would have gotten to this part of, no, no, we can cut a little, but we still need to have, you know, what is that? 90% or whatever of the science budget in there, in the House side, right?

What's that math? 82. 6.07, yeah, yeah. Marl's sample return. Give me your price anchoring that is now occurring based on the fact that you purchased that piece of Mars. for $4.2 million. My new Mars meteorite, yeah. I can either confirm nor deny that I own a very large Mars meteorite.

Yeah, 4.3 million. Is that what the... Something like that, 4.2, yeah. I haven't got the bill yet. It's about the number that was... Seems low, doesn't it? I don't know. I don't know.

It's a rock. That's a pretty expensive rock. I think I'm a... afflicted by the NFT moment still. I'm like, it seems low. Yeah. Yeah.

Or do you know about this rock? What's the deal? I feel like I forgot about this rock. NWA, so that's a Northwest Africa one, right? That's where they find a lot of them. There's a big chunk of them there. Most of the rocks,

the Martian meteorites we have are Northwest Africa. I think it's just because of the terrain. Like they get preserved well there. We find them in Antarctica. We find them there basically is the big deal. but it's just large. I think it's just big rock. That's why the price was discounted, Anthony.

It's got a big shipping cost. It's up to $5.3 million, by the way. I just looked. Oh, okay. I'll move some money around. Yeah, you know, like when you go on eBay, it sells you the price and then underneath it, there's like the shipping cost. It's in a smaller text.

That's what you're not seeing there because it's a pretty heavy rock. It's a big rock. You got a local delivery that. Yeah, I'll pick it up. I still feel like with these samples the same way I felt when I went to, is it the Natural History Museum in DC that has all the meteorites and they have the little Osiris Rex sample there and they've got chunks of Mars and all that kind of stuff. And I feel like it's both way underappreciated that we have all of that. And then I still think the context with the Osiris Rex sample is like not, they're not selling why that one. one is so much better than this entire room of all these ones that we have. And I felt like even this

news story, I think it's easy for people. This is the actual part that I want to get to of like, there's all this drama about Mars sample return. And then there's this headlines of piece of Mars sells for $5.3 million. And I think it's easy for people who are not paying the space news paywall to be like, why do we need the billion dollar program if we've got these samples that rich people are buying for $5.3 million dollars? Yeah. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, That's an interesting psychological scenario to play through there when you're trying to justify it. Yeah. Huh.

I never thought of it that way. That's because that's how I found that exhibit. You go through the whole room and the last thing they do is show you the Osir's rec sample in a little canister. And so you've, like there's, you know, rocks the size of a table. And then you get to the end, it's this little metal canister and you're like. With carbon colored dust in it, right? Yeah. And then a small sign that's like, this was really cool because it was pristine.

And this cost $700 million to get. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, here, I'll throw it back of you, though. Like, is that any more difficult than justifying any other part of the space program to the general public? Apparently not. Yeah, you're right.

That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, it's also July, and these kind of news stories just make it, make it out there, right? Like, it's not a lot else going on that you want to cover right now. Let's talk about this rock that, yeah. Maybe it'll show up in the Oval Office. Maybe it will.

A place to Moon Rock, you know? Yeah. I'm just in the segue mood today. Who else will show up in the Oval Office talking about space? Jake is Sean Duffy, who is now the acting mission. of NASA. We've, welcome back,

Jake, from vacation. Did you know there's a new head of NASA? This one is, this one kind of worries me a little bit. I don't, I don't know.

Well, A, I think it tells you that we're not going to have a real administrator for a long time. Yeah. That's definitely the one message I would get from that.

But also, I just like, I'm kind of worried that they may just not pursue it very much. I think they might just be like, We got a guy in there, like, we don't really want to do anything with NASA, so we're just going to put our person there that doesn't need to be Senate confirmed. And what are you going to do about it?

Just roll it. Yeah. I buy it, man. I would totally believe that. Is there any, like, here's the good question for the constitutional law people out there. But, like, is there any way for Congress to compel a Senate confirmed person? Because, like, you could you run an interim the whole administration that way, could you? I suppose.

I don't know. How does that work? What is the law? You want to ask Chad GPD or something? What do you want me to do? How do you want me to find that out right now? I'm just okay. We can just make up answers. No one's listening to it. No one can. Yeah, I mean, the true thing is that we were on this beat longer than the Trump administration of does the administrator matter matter. We'll find out. I was literally saying like two weeks before that. I'm like, they'll just leave Janet Petro in there because she doesn't need to send a confirmed. She's doing whatever they ask her to. So why would you want to change? That's the wild part, man, is that, yeah, they didn't, they had somebody who was game to, you know, have her name at the bottom of all those press releases. Maybe, I don't know, at the same time, right? This is, we had this question when Jared was pulled that, like, Jared would have pushed back on a lot of things that were being forced at NASA.

Janet Petra's been at NASA for how long? So, you know, if she's game to go with the flow on some of these decisions, that's to a point. I'm sure there was, if someone's asking her opinion on how we should manage things, it differed heavily given the fact that she worked at NASA for so long. And she's been part of the organization, been in that mission. You know, I think I've been told she would have been game to go along with the decisions of the administration. But at the same time, if there's any friction, this is not the place where those people last. Yeah, no, it isn't.

Yeah, I think that the part I get hung up on is I totally get the concern. that you're saying, right, that like, this is a guy who doesn't care as deeply about NASA as anyone else that we could have gotten in this position who would have been confirmed as head of NASA. So it's more likely to go along with just, you know, canceling stuff for canceling's sake. At the same time, it's like,

is it also, though, an indication that this isn't the battles we're going to fight? Like, we don't really care that much about the NASA battles that there are to be fought. Have a guy who's like... hobby job is to be the head of NASA. I'll go to a couple launches and we're not going to really affect any gigantic change there. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I think it's too early to tell that for sure, right? But I think if you don't want to fight the battle and politically, wouldn't you want to like offer up the NASA admin position as like a marketing chip? Like someone out there in Congress probably has a thought on who should be in that seat. and if I don't give it, like if I'm the, if I'm Trump and I don't care about NASA, I have a political position there that I can fill as a as a payment and then I'll get something else for it.

You can get away for something else. I got a bill coming your way and I expect your support and signature on it. You know, like, you know, it's got to be something like that. It wants me for a quid pro quo, right? So I don't know. They're saying in the chat here is there's a limit. 210 date, no, 300 days. But that doesn't make sense to me.

300 days doesn't make sense to me because like wasn't lightfoot in there for like a year and a half. Oh, man. Yes. Let's see. Robert Lightfoot tenure as January 17 to April 18.

So that's 14 months. He was in the acting goal. That's more than 300 days in my rough math. In my rough math, yes. So, I don't know. That's an interesting one. I wonder if it's different, though, in that he was already in a position at NASA.

whereas Sean Duffy is not. Right? Yeah. I don't know. There might be some, maybe there's some rule like that. Maybe Jim Free could have lasted for a year and a half, but because they appointed Janet Petro 10 minutes after the inauguration,

then she gets a limit. Maybe because she didn't know. Maybe you have to knowingly accept the head of NASA job. Yeah, I don't know. Again, no, I'm still of the mind that, like, of the problems on the game board, figuring out who is going to be the name at the bottom of these things that get signed is not the biggest most apocalyptic situation facing NASA.

It's the fact that there are so many decisions to be made, and there's zero progress towards any of those. Like, even the way that we're going back and forth on presidential requests and congressional budgets of like, how much are we going to use the ISS, how many flights are we going to do the ISS, Are we going to cancel some of these artists missions? What do we do about commercial space stations? Mars sample return generally.

There's just absolutely no movement on until run a game, run me a calendar, Jake, and tell me when the next moment there is a Mars sample return press conference from NASA. If people are saying there's been people tweeting like, it's going to be four months until we get an administrator nominated or confirmed, probably nominated, right? Well, and even then they're not going to, I don't know. Unless you get like a unless you get a Mars diehard

getting pointed into that role like they're not going to you know Sean Duffy's not going to have a press conference about it until there's some sort of congressional funding right like it has to be because the funding right now is not solved right no one knows how much money they want to spend on they're just like making up some ideas and

plans and stuff and then they got to pitch it to Congress and then Congress is going to come back and say okay we're happy here you go here's your money that's that's you have to wait for that regardless right that's going to happen before they talk about it though. Before they talk about it? Kind of, yeah. I thought previously on the Superturner,

I thought we were waiting for, in like 18 months, we're going to say what the thing is that we're building, and then we're going to go try to get it actioned. Yeah, with that, that was the last Nelson conference. The Nelson announcement. It was like 18 months until we figure out what plan we're doing.

Yeah, they were going to go back to the drawing board and, you know, they got all those industry requests, right? Here's all of our ideas. And then NASA was going to sit down and go, okay, here's now our new information, what's on the table here. But, like, dude, do you think they've been productive over at the Mars sample return NASA office? Like, rocket labs has been productive at the Rocket Lab Mars sample return office.

They got themselves at Mars telecommunications orbiter inserted into the federal budget. They just got 700 mil heading their way. Yeah, yeah. I guess that's one way to look at it. So maybe they short circuited that decision tree. And might have. Just went, you know what? This one looks good.

This late entrant looks good. I mean, there's already some nonsense going on behind the scenes that we won't be told about, as indicated by their presence on this show and the avoidance of that question. Yes, yes. But maybe that's the best game plan there could be from Rocket Lab is just work your way in. One z, two z, a sudden you're the incumbent. And like, I guess we're doing Mars. No, return the Rocket Lab way.

here we are. Yeah. What do they say? They say in hockey, right? They don't care how, only how many for goals, right? That's true. Yeah. And you went to Canada, you brought back yourself some hockey quotes.

That's great. Yeah, yeah. Oilers didn't make it to my trip to, I was hoping to watch Game 7 in, in Alberta, but they didn't make it. I didn't want to bring it up. We didn't talk about it on the show. No. No. Bummer.

Not happy about it. Disappointing. Yeah. Well, um, yep, I got no takes on Sean Duffy. I'll be honest. I got nothing. I haven't said anything. Yeah.

I don't think he knows. He cares. No. He was at some launches. Was he? Right? He was at the, or he was at the crew nine return, the very politicized crew nine? That was nine, right?

Butch and sunny. The one that, the one that, uh, Barack Obama, um, trapped on the space station through cruelty and malice with his. Obama, yes. With his buddy, Joe Biden, sleepy Biden,

yeah. Obviously, because he was the real president. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Because Joe Biden was sitting in a hospital bed

the whole time, the whole administration. And he was, it was a body double or whatever. Yeah. But that's the thing is that everyone wrote, oh yeah, he was at this return.

It's like, well, he was also at this return of a very politicized thing in which, like, his role currently is not not involved in, in space. Yeah.

exploration space travel right like transportation yeah yeah um so it's not that a field um which is i don't know i struggle to have takes on this one yeah i mean it's difficult like i i'm struggling just like in general like trying to find things to care about right now because it just feels like everything's on fire and it's like it's really hard it's really hard to like know what's going on like for real and what's just like completely just chaos and yeah you know It's the forest fire approach. So I'm just kind of like, I don't know, do I,

how much time do I want to spend reading up on Sean Duffy and caring about what you think? Like, I just don't know if it matters. Like, I just, yeah, he'll stick around.

He'll make some decisions. He'll get, they'll get, he'll get falling out. And then he'll get kicked out and they'll put it in someone. I don't know. Like, it's like,

I don't have a lot of energy to invest in him. That's like horrible to say. That's been, no, it's been the tough, it's been the tough aspect of what, what I think you and I, to go inside baseball for a minute is that like you and I on the shows we do and have done in our

past try to be very high signal to noise and there's just a very a lot of noise right now. And the people with signal are clenching because there's so much uncertainty as to what's going to happen and what's going to be in place and what their anchor customer is going to do and this is people running science missions, people running commercial human space flight missions, people that are doing launch startups, whether here or in Europe where there's a lot of clenching for the ministerial coming up in November. Like, everything just feels like a ball of stress between now and the fall. And there's, so on any given week, there's either no stories or one story.

It's either the same story since January or there's no stories going on. And that's, other than Kuiper, you had some Kiper takes. You came in, you told me, the most unexpected Discord message I've ever seen in my life when talking about what we're going to talk about on the show is Jake was like, how about Kuiper? I'm like, you have Kuiper takes? Look, it's possible I am one of... You know it's bad if Jake's telling me he's got Kuiper takes.

It's possible that I am one of the people keenly watching for Kuiper to become something. Just in case it gives me an option. Just in case it gives me another option. You are everyone that was waiting for Fios to get installed in their neighborhood so they could drop Comcast. Yeah. I mean, I don't, it's not going to happen this year. or anything, but, you know, I'm paying attention. I'm not keeping an eye on it.

But it's interesting. I do have like, from an interesting standpoint, I feel like, you know, for a long time, they were like, there's no satellites, there's no satellites, there's no satellites, there's no satellites. And then they just started launching. And in the great Anthony point of wisdom, the time between the second and the third launch is the important one. And they're pretty good here on the between two and three.

I'm feeling okay about that two to three gaps. So that's kind of interesting. Falcon nine gap filler. of like, oh, ULA has some stuff to work on. They've got to rejigger the manifest. Yeah. Also very interesting that Falcon 9 was launch 3. Like, I, you know, I think we were all kind of thinking it was just going to be like they're going to spend all those Atlases first and then and then going from going to take precedence for a little bit.

Are they flipping it? They have to flip it back from Vulcan to Atlas mode on the launch pad. Do they have to do that still? They got to flip it. There's also Space Force launches that are going to take precedence for a little while. So, yeah, there's just general throughput problems. So if you've got, and also, it's if you want to buy another three Falcon Nines, like, I think that's the one comment I saw was like, why do they only buy three?

It's like, because it's really easy to buy Falcon Nines. Yeah, you'll go and say, can I get another couple? You just go buy some more, you know? They're at the store. You go pick them up. The other ones you have to get on the manifest and really schedule out. But the Falcon Nines, it's like, no, I mean, there's, you know, a couple Starlings fell off the truck on the way here. So I guess you can go up on that one if you want.

Yeah. And like even to stress the cadence point more, if they're if they have flight two in the books and they're like, we don't need to flight three and they can't wait for another Atlas. That's pretty good to me. Like I we don't get to see that kind of velocity often with with not SpaceX stuff. We're just like, no, I'm going to buy a filler rocket because I just like, I'm ready to go.

Let's do it. I don't want to wait. I don't want to wait the 90 days or whatever it's going to take to get the Atlas going again. Like that's pretty good to me. I'm happy about that. Now, I saw this when I was, yeah, I saw this when I was on traveling somewhere. I saw a couple of tweets. And then I promptly forgot about it until you mentioned that there's some orbit raising concerns.

Well, it looks like they aren't. So that's a, I guess that's concerned. I assume this is a Jonathan McDowell thing I should be looking for. Yeah, he's got all the tracks on them and stuff. But there's like, I think on the first batch there's like one satellite that zips up. They're like doing it. But the rest of them just seem to be kind of slowly going down. So that's an interesting thing to see.

And the second flight didn't seem to fix it. So either we don't know how these operate and they're very, very different from Starlink or there's a big problem. We'll see. I don't know. I'm trying to pull up this tweet. Where was this posted? Do you know? We've been having it all over our Discord.

But if I open Discord on my Mac, everything will go haywire and everyone will hear. Don't do it. I think I googled. Let me see. Okay. Yeah, I'm not doing that I got maybe his blue sky somewhere I'm just trying to remember where they're

Where do they get deployed to? They get deployed into a 400, 50 kilometer orbit Yeah, for something Because there were also just to throw context in there There was a time where Starlinks were being Either deployed into or stopped at a certain altitude When we thought they would continue to climb higher a little fuzzy on the exact levels,

but there was some moment where Starlink's were a little lower than they should have been, either directly deployed or climbed to that point and stopped. And, you know, Tim Farr, somebody that's like an analyst in this realm was like, oh, this is probably because SpaceX applied for the ability to operate at a lower altitude, and they just start wading out their paperwork at that altitude

before they get allowed to, or before they get the allowance to do that. and I'm wondering if is Kuiper like a similar boat where they're trying to test some things out at 450 because of either right now they want to modify their contract in some way or they want to test something out real low before they go up. Because what are they going up to? I don't know. I can't remember all the numbers, but higher than they deploy to, I think is what is generally accepted. So, you know, I think that the first one, like it went month or two and still nothing, right, which is like a weird, weird sign.

What are they waiting for? So, I don't know. I don't know. I don't pretend like. 330 kilometers is where they're going to go. I go back and forth in this because it's like, I'm just trying to guess things, right? You know, I don't know. But I feel like it's unlikely that like 100 would all.

fail, you know, that seems like a probabilistically not possible. But at the same time, it's just like, well, you know, this is, this is not a space company. This is like, fucking retailers. Like, let's make satellites. They might not be good at it yet. You know, that's a very real possibility is that they're not good at satellites. They could also just screwed something up on the ground and been like, oh, we should refactor the way our control center works before we go climb all these, the final orbits. Yeah, you know, a software thing or whatever, but I feel like you could pick software, but I don't know, maybe you can't,

maybe the OTA stuff doesn't work. I don't know. But the scale of constellations also makes it tough to diagnose too because it could be, hey, nothing's wrong, so we're just going to keep deploying these things. And it could be, everything's broken,

but we need to keep deploying things. That's the other thing, yeah. It's a numbers game to that FCC deadline. The size of them is just like is so irrelevant sometimes because it's like, I remember like the SpaceX, they launched into that solar storm once and just lost the whole batch.

and like nobody cares like just like literally zero impact it's like oh it's 60 of 9000 satellites or 20 of 9000 satellites SpaceX accidentally lost more satellites than any other company had ever made before and and it's like doesn't matter and Kuiper's size is supposed to be similar so like maybe they're just like yeah well they got some flaws but you know we launched them we're getting a bunch of flight experience flight data we love it we're just going to keep flying they're coming off the line you know by the time we realized the first batch was The second batch was already in a container on the way to launch. I'll just fire them up there. We bought the launcher. It might just be that mentality. I don't know.

So it's interesting. Yeah. And they also just straight up have a year, right? It was July 2026 where they've got to have half of the 3,200 satellites up. They're just trying to get them up there so they can go, they make that FCC application and, you know, get the extension in there. Yeah, they got to have enough to get the extension. That is a very reasonable take, honestly.

just there's like we're just launching a man because we got some paperwork to fill out and we want to say we're trying you know totally it's i mean when you when you do the math of like what's the existential risk of we don't get the extension versus we spent 20 satellites you spend 20 satellites every time that's yep that's the decision yeah it's so hard to think i thought Caleb henry had talked like like he he shifted my thinking for kuiper a lot in that um you know early days everyone's like well they're not they don't have their own launch vehicle so the launch cost is really expensive and that's true it is um but the one thing he's always talked to me about was like yeah but when you look at like business expenditures for amazon this is like a lot but it's not it's so hard to think on amazon scale like

it is unbelievable the amount of money they have and spend every day right like it's so it's not when you look at in that context it's not an alarming business expenditure what what was the number I was looking up, because someone, we were having, there's always a discussion about like, whether Kiper's worth it. Like, what, like, why is Amazon do it? Like, are they going to, you know, they're not going to be as good as SpaceX. Why are they? And I was like, well, you know, if they build some sort of service that integrates it with AWS and like, you get some cool synergies there, it's worth it. Because like, if you, if you do the math, if, if Kiper can increase AWS, you know, Amazon Web Services revenue by like 2%.

It's like that's more revenue than Starlink makes. You know? Yeah, it's true. Like, they're talking like hundreds of bagelial. Like, it's just so much money. I can tell you the real number and it doesn't make, it doesn't matter what I tell you. Because the numbers so astronomically large that it's just a made up number. I may as well say six billion dollars and it'll mean the exact same amount.

It feels the same to me for sure. Yeah. So like it's so much, it's so much money that they have and that kind of thing. So, like, yeah, too, man, buying a Falcon 9 launch every month, it's like, whatever. Man, you're coming out here. You're buying Mars Rocks for 5 mil. You're like, you're flying business class. You're talking about buying a Falcon 9 launch every once in a while.

I hit 40. I'm in my prime buying time. Yeah, the other aspect, too, is that there's a lot of talk of like the whole data center in space concepts and and talk of, is that why Eric Schmidt is buying relativity? And I don't think he's just bored and it's interesting and distressed. He's bored and rich. But I mean, for Amazon side, if there's any validity to that and like nobody's really going to threaten AWS other than a name that you can already think of off the top of your head

on terrestrial deployments, they are, they have achieved escape velocity of the scale of AWS. And so they have to look at the unlikely but plausible scenarios in which something else would take over. And if space-based data centers is a thing that they're even one percent concerned about, they should hedge and start figuring out what infrastructure would you need in place to actually do that. Yeah, you're right. Those big tech companies, when they're operating at that scale, they just invest into every area just in case, just in case that's where it's going. And then they're there already. Like that's a total. It's always why I thought Apple was going to get into satellites harder than they've done with this Global Star situation.

I thought they would, I thought when there was conversation years ago of, there was like a Boeing application for some sort of mega constellation, and there was talk of there being some other unknown partner. I was always like, this was the Apple constellation because they have a privacy driven. Someone's banging on my door. I don't know what's happening. I think a child is home. There may be a child on the stream in a minute. I always thought the satellite-based communications was something they could push from a privacy perspective if they're able to pull off like device to device first before anyone.

They could say, you know, not only as I message and then encrypted, it only goes through Apple hardware between you and anywhere else on Earth. And so it always made sense for their privacy-focused business model and the amount of money they spend an R&D. They spend billions a year on R&D, which is nothing to Apple and so much to the space industry. Yeah. It's an ESA a year or whatever. You know, it's crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was my AWS take too, is that's a huge, a huge take for them is they can have, you know, they can have worldwide data centers that are connected and never leave the AWS system, right? Like, you could have them, like, talk to each other without even going to HTTP ever, you know, like you could do some sort of proprietary whatever you want and just have a private network that's global. And they let out the game. with AWS Ground Station, right?

This was years ago. They rolled out Ground Station, which was, which is, and I wonder how that's really went because there's still been a lot of, a lot of companies rolling out Ground Station as a service. And I don't know if that's just like, is that the lowest barrier to entry to run space services? Or is there a legitimate, underserved business need there? Yeah, I don't know. There's a child crunch to come to my room.

There's more Kuiper takes than I would expect it us to have, considering I think we've talked about Kuiper for five minutes in our collective lifetime, total. We were behind then. I know. I think I'd done one show about Kuiper ever. Are they the second largest satellite operator in history now? Are they ahead of one web yet? No, no.

They're going to be there fast, though, pretty soon. Yeah, what is... At this rate? It depends how you count the... It depends that you count the national things, too. When does it stop mattering how you count it? Yeah, no. It's another couple of launches away, probably.

Yeah, yeah. Do you count the NRO all as one? They've had a lot. Could be, could be, yeah. You never know. Zuma could have been a mega constellation. Could have been, yeah. It just broke up into like a million satellites.

I got one off the board topic for you. I've got to pull up my show notes here. Ooh. Because I can click on this link, and I would like to. Spicy. Spice. Dante Loretto was on the show a couple weeks ago, and there was a little Caesar versus dragonfly angst coming up,

and I'd just like to float this story out through everyone that there's like some crazy protocell research happening. Did you read this thing? No, I did not. Research shows Path Towards Pro. Okay, I mean, this is going to get into that whole, like, biology side that I am just like a complete Neanderthal. And like I literally have no idea. Like a protocell, okay, that sounds like magic, but.

Not only protocell, Jake, we're talking about vesicles, okay? Vesicles. Did you ever know about this situation here? Did you ever see this graphic before? Best I can understand it, there's a way that droplets on top of the surfaces of the lakes, on Titan could create vesicles, which are the things that you need to create before you create cells. They are like fancy collections of stuff that could then lead to you creating cells. And I would read this blog post of RU because I thought it was really cool.

There's no way I can explain this again. But they have this depiction of like, here's this drop. I love this graphic though. Like there's this droplet that hits the surface and it shoots all these things out. I think I'm flying out. carbon They are No there's like some

What do they say it was There was like Hyrophobic and Hydrophilic sides of something Who can help us out Polar molecules have two parts A hydrophobic End and a hydrophilic water-loving end

When they're in water Groups of these molecules Can bunch together and form ball-like spheres Like soap bubbles Where the hydrophilic part Faces outward to interact with the water Thereby protecting the hydrophobic part on the inside of the sphere, under the right conditions, two layers can form to create a cell-like ball

that encapsulates a pocket of water on the inside. So this like encapsulation mechanism apparently is what you need to, yeah, we do it to bring my wife on the show to explain science. I don't think she's biochem though. But I just wanted to put this out there that this fits my theory that I expressed all the time and I think Dante Loretta agreed with, which was one of my favorite moments of my life and that life will be everywhere. We'll figure it out eventually. So, yeah. Big boost for the dragonfly budget right there. Big boost for the dragonfly budget. Well, you know, we'll have to see. We'll have to get some samples. We have to get the spacecraft there and right now. Then what? Things are a little dicey over your favorite space agency over there.

I mean. see. Although Dragonfly was protected, wasn't it? I'll have to check out the APL Christmas party this year, see what's going on. I'm going to crash the APL Christmas party for sure. The best place to get gossip. Yeah. Yeah, and it'll be good there for sure. It's in the, it's in the blast radius of Washington, D.C. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, a handful of friends that live down there are just like, man, it's bleak right now. Like, everybody is. People at APL can go to, can go to D.C. for lunch. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Was there one more story?

I don't think there was. Maybe not. I don't know. I don't know. I thought there was something else you mentioned being interesting. I have a list here somewhere. No. Fireflies go in public.

This is out of the way here. Hold on. But I think I have a list. Prop. comedy. No, I think we got it all. Yeah, I think we got. To Firefly going public? That's all. If you didn't know Firefly was going public when Michael Sheets joined, I don't know what you thought was going to happen. Yeah, if you didn't know that Michael Sheets was the go public consultant. Although that's one of those cases, man, I'm good for Michael Sheets, but I'm sad that he's not

like reporting right now. I could use him. I could use some of his articles right now. I don't I bet he'll be back. Because now they're public. Are we going to see that LinkedIn post soon? I'm looking for work. I don't know. How the old cash tag fly was available is pretty amazing to me. That's pretty good, yeah.

Thought that ticker symbol would be taken. What a bizarre one. What a bizarre one. Why do you think this is going to rank on the, like, I mean, what, Rock Alabs been doing well on the stock price lately? is red wire going up, but everyone else is like in the buckets. Where do you think? What's the, give me the best analogy of which company that also went public.

Like we talk in planet, we talk in virgin companies, Rocket Lab. What are you expecting? For Firefly? Yeah. Intuitive machines. Is it going to be a meme stock occasionally? Yeah, it's going to be very, it's going to be pretty intuitive machinesy. Like I feel like the, the stock story for Firefly,

make like a five-year prediction. It's going to be like they'll either survive and it'll just be like kind of like a flat. Like you won't really make any money with Firefly for many years or they'll go to business. That's the only two options for me. Two options. After the five, if they get the end of the five years, then we can re-evaluate. Oh, man.

Yeah. We're not doing stocktips on the show. You can't even say, you can't even say like short it. It's just going to be like, no, it's just going to be flat. This is not going to do anything. Yeah. Although it will do that thing where when they do a moon landing, it'll go up and then it'll go down and they'll go back up again. And then it'll be, yeah.

So if you're really good on that. That for sure. You got to ride that roller coaster. It does make sense why they announced their like imaging service like a month before is that they're having like a, we want to be a services company, you know, recurring revenue. Yeah, it's great to have a lot of really good promises on the books, but when you go public rather than results, you know. Actual stuff. Yeah.

Next week, Jake, the long-awaited show next week. This is a very long-awaited show. I think this show has been, like, tentatively planned for years. Three years? Three years, four years? Not only tentatively planned. it has been, I think, as we've been told in the past, our show has been an element of peer pressure to make this next show possible.

Is that fair? Pure pressure. This is like, this is a reverse scoop. It's like we just made the news happen. We instigated it a little bit. Yeah, we just wield it into existence. With that amount of teasing, would you like to unveil? Who's appearing?

Our good friend Joseph Barnard. Do they'd get really mad if I said Joseph, if I call them Joseph? I don't know. I don't know. What's he talking about? We're doing the meat rocket. Finally. High stakes.

High stakes. His naming never disappoints. It's not really like news anymore. It was a while ago now, but he's finally coming on the show to talk about it because he promised that. The very first time he was on off nominal, I think he promise that? Probably. We should go back and look.

As soon as the meat rocket flew, he was going to come back on and talk about it. Yeah. I think last time he told us every time he came on the show, he was like, oh, shit, I need to finish the meat rocket. So we finally made it. Yeah. That's funny. It's going to be a good time.

I can't wait. Well, we're back out of Jake. It's good to see you, buddy. Thank you. It's good to see you too. Thanks for putting up with our stream mishap. If you're listening to this on audio, boy, did you miss a really fun first five minutes of the show? If you might want to, if you remember the show where I couldn't turn off my computer.

Sorry, I had to turn off my computer to end the show. This is really rival. This is the opposite of that. It just stayed on. Couldn't start the show. And I couldn't turn off my computer. All right, y'all. All right.

We will see you later. Bye. Thanks, everybody.