Off-Nominal - 207 - Replacement Money (with Randy Riddle, LeonRunningMan!)

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Jake and Anthony are joined by Randy Riddle, retired small rocket chief engineer and long time anomaly (it’s LeonRunningMan, himself!), to talk about his career in the Air Force, how appropriated money actually works from the government side, and to tell a ton of stories.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 207 - Replacement Money (with Randy Riddle, LeonRunningMan!) - YouTubeNational Air and Space Intel CenterAir Force Issues RFP For OSP-3 Launch Services - Defense DailyUSSF awards OSP-4 contract to emerging Small Launch providers > Los Angeles Air Force Base > Article DisplaySpace and Missile Systems Center awards $4.9 million Small Rocket Program-Orbital contract for Agile Small Launch Operational Normalizer (ASLON)-45 mission > Los Angeles Air Force Base > Article DisplayFollow 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. Jake, how's it going to? I'm well. I'm excited to be here today. This is a show, Anthony. How long have we, we were talking about us in the pre-show? We've been waiting for the show for on the order of seven, eight years, something like that. Almost the whole time that we've done this show. We've said, hey, can you come on this show yet?

No, can you come on the show yet? No. How about once you retire? Can you come on this show yet? Randy Riddle, Leon Running Man himself. How's it going? Yep. Hey, afternoon.

We're very excited to see what kind of ITAR secrets we can sneak out of you today. Yeah, you were like, can you send me a list of topics you want to talk about? I'm like, I don't know, all the stories that you've ever told in the Discord. Like, that would probably be a good list to run through. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've been in the Discord for eight years, I guess. I was looked at my data the other day, and it's like, well, it's hard to believe it's been that long. I've been small ones for 20 years and in the Discord for almost half of that.

So that's amazing. Wow. And there's been how many launches? Fewer than that. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Yeah, probably 30 or so. Something on that order. Pretty good.

Okay. All right. And don't dig into it too soon, Jake. It's all show content. I know. I'm just so excited. Mike's floating away on you. It's excited too.

It's just like, yeah. Yeah. Drinks? What do you got here today, boys? What's going on? What do you got? out there, Randy? Early? I got a marble brewery

IPA here. So, Marble is a local brewery here in Albuquerque. That's weird. So I'm having that, yeah. Why did it zoom out like that? Also got it in a bony bob mug. This is an old skull-style glass mug from one of my previous jobs.

I think it originally came from a place in Florida, like the seafood restaurant Treasure Island or something like that. Wow. We adopted it. as our mascot. That's a good idol. It's more of your area kind of thing, Jake. Trinking out of a skull.

Like, that feels pretty Mayan, no? There you go. Mead? What do you got down there? No, I went to the import section this week, and this one had a goat on it, and I was like, yeah, it's a goat, so I'm going to do that one. It's check. Dark.

And I know nothing about it. this. So that's what I got it because it had a cool label. Also, you can take this. This is a fun, a fun Mexico thing that they do. They got to put stuff in Spanish so they put a sticker over the, over the funny. It's good export, export control. I have a victory prima pills, which I have had a million times. And I love the can. It's delicious. And it's cold here. So I probably should have had something darker like you, Jake.

Yeah, cold there and not here, so we're doing it. How's it pouring? How's it? It's pouring. Yeah, I heard it was like 70s on East Coast today with the clouds from the hurricane come through. Yes. Yes, it's one of those weird skirt and hurricanes, though. Look at that thing.

There you go. Wow, nice. I got my frog and onion pub. You keep making me go to your one shot. There you go. The frog and onion puff in Bermuda. Man, it's the easiest to name. pubs, you just pick two nouns and you got it.

The horse and kettle, yeah. Yeah, just pick two things and you got a pub. Randy, you mentioned North Carolina. You're from or lived there for a while? Yeah, I grew up in North Carolina. Yeah, I went to, grew up and went to college there. A little town called Mount Airy up in the mountains of North Carolina. Our claim to fame was it's the town that Andy Griffith is from, so his hometown.

That's an old claim to fame. Yeah. It puts a date on it. Yeah. Yeah. And they still have, one of the big festivals they do there is they do an auto lease festival each year in the fall. And you can still go and get a ride in Andy's squad car downtown, you know, for the touristy touristy thing.

They're milking it. That's hilarious. Jake's looking it up on maps. Looking him over there. He's like, I'm 100% looking up on a map. It's not the part with a huge storm surge, right? now that it's not that end of North Carolina. I drove through North Carolina once, so I'm just trying to place it on, like, on the road I was on. Is it close to it or far from it?

Was you going to $95? Well, no, because I came, let me see. I don't think it was $95. I think it was, it might have been the other way, like through, because I came from Ontario, went down, I drove to Florida. So I came like around through Pittsburgh. and down from there, so wherever that gets me, you know. Yeah, you were either on 85 or 95 then coming through, coming through the coach there. You tell me. I don't know. So how did you go from Andy Griffith's tourist department to small launch? What was the moment? Oh, gosh.

Yeah. You made that jump. Yeah, I went to, the Air Force gave me a scholarship to college, so I went to NC State on an Air Force scholarship. And so I went into the Air Force from there and enjoyed the Air Force. So I did 23 years as an officer in the Air Force and then had assignments in Ohio and Texas and Alaska. And the last assignment was in New Mexico. Retired from active duty there in New Mexico. And I actually did all my Air Force job up to my last assignment.

I was all aircraft. And so I worked in Aircraft Depot. I worked in doing some aircraft intelligence. I was in a fighter wing up in Alaska. and then the air base wing. The hell is aircraft intelligence? I worked at the Foreign Technology Division. So we did, we, that was my first assignment up at Ohio.

And now it's the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, I think, is nasic. And worked on Soviet at that time, surfaced air missiles and aircraft radars and that kind of stuff. So that was very interesting job. And not that great a place to work. work, but it was a very interesting work. And then, you know, went to, did an ops jobs and ended up here at the Air Base Wing here at Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and did three or four jobs here and ended up, ended up retiring here. My last job was in the Rocket Systems Launch Program, which is the Air Force

small launch program here at Curtland Air Force Base with some other small space stuff that goes on here. And I ended up retiring out of that job and then doing another, came back to work for initially missile defense agency as one of the rocket small launch programs customers. And then after about four years with that missile defense agency, I jumped back over to the Air Force site as a civil servant and then did another 14 years in the chief engineer position for the small launch program. So it's been a great career.

I grew up in farm country, North Carolina, and ended up kind of hitting it big with the Air Force scholarship and enjoyed doing lots of different kinds of engineering over the course of that career and had lots of great jobs and it was always interesting. I look forward to coming to work. Just about every job I had was very interesting. I'm kind of an eclectic interest, and so I enjoyed the aspect of jumping from job to job every three or four years and doing something totally different, which is kind of the way they do when you're an engineering officer and enjoyed all of that and then kind of hit my stride with the small launch program towards the end of my active duty time and decided to dig into that. The thing I loved about the small launch

activity is most of the funding that we had is actually customer funding. So it's kind of the closest thing to running a business you can get and still, you know, within the Department of Defense because we had to, you know, work with our customers and make sure we got them what they needed for the mission that they were flying and report the financials to them and all that kind of stuff. And so it was very much like the agency that then works with you, like another agency comes to you and says, I have this mission and this much money, like figure out how to get me there. Yeah, you know, kind of the cornerstone of the small launch program that we run is we, is we, the Rocket Systems Launch Program inherits, inherited all of the retired ICBM motors,

so all the Minuteman 1 and 2 motors, and eventually the Peacekeeper Fleet as well. And so we, all of those motors, instead of just destroying them outright, which would cost a lot of money, we put them into storage, and we run an aging surveillance program to make sure the motors are still good to work. And then we use those motors for a variety of customer needs, targets for the missile defense agency, some research and development type stuff for the Army, the space launch for the Air Force and the NRO and those sorts of customers. So it's a lot, it was running a business.

And I really enjoyed that aspect of it by that time in my career. Early in my career, I hated the program management kind of stuff. I just wanted to do pure engineering. But then after about 20 years, it's like, now I'm kind of getting into the program management. You know what's your back starts to her a little bit?

You want to do some paperwork, right? Yeah. Wait, so tell me what Soviet things you worked on in the aircraft intelligence. You mentioned some Soviet service to air, and did you say ICBM? Didn't work ICBMs in that job. I worked, it was mostly surfaced air missiles and aircraft. I was going to say you could have been one of the few people who worked on ICBMs from both sides of the Cold War. Like you would have been, yeah, that one, that one was not my, that was not my specialty in that job.

So that, I worked in, that was what was called the simulation violation. validation engineer. And so I kind of, my job was to look at the, evaluate the simulators that the Air Force uses in training, and training and testing kind of activities and validate that they adequately represent the Soviet threat, you know, was kind of the idea of that job. I was going to say that that sounded like more like the Alaska job, but the Ohio one sounds maybe more like you were spying on us. I don't know what's going on there. There's something you can't tell me, but. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

You know, getting to learn how the different systems work, and as it so happened when I was working at the Foreign Technology Division, Tom Clancy was being to, you know, he was just, he was a rising star at that time, and he published the book Red Storm Rising, which was about the same systems that I was learning about, you know, in that job. And so I was reading his novel at night and going, how does he know that, you know, kind of stuff. I was waiting for you to reveal your, yourself as the source of Tom Clancy information.

It's a real unmasking. That's really funny. Okay, so the small launch program, you're saying it started out with, what do we do with all these old ICBM motors? And then at some point, the small launch industry developed, and it turned into, okay, can we also buy some vehicles and launches from other providers? Was that an awkward growing phase? It was a little bit awkward. Yeah, it was interesting. You know, we had the workhorse, the workhorse contract during my tenure within the program was called the Orbital Suborbital Program contract. So we had OSP 1, which was a contract with Orbital Sciences Corporation at the time to take the Minuteman motors and be able to fly those as either an ICBM class target or a space launch vehicle. Then when we did the follow-on,

contract, OSP2 was literally awarded like the day I walked into the door of the program. One of my first staff meetings that I sat in on when I was active duty was the contracting officer awarded announcing that they had just awarded the OSP 2 contract. And so the OSP 2 contract then added the peacekeeper motors as a capability for space launch. And then I really got my teeth into the program as we were moving from OSP 2 to OSP 3, which was which the Space and Missile System Center at that time, we were looking to grow that capability from just focused on recycling the ICBMs to a broader market. Specifically, they were targeting with the OSP3 contract.

We were looking at growing from small launch to medium launch and growing the number of providers from just one that we had in Northern Sciences Corporation to having multiple providers that we could compete each mission with, a lot like, you know, the EEO, the NSL lane one program now. We were going through that stage of the program when I first got into RCLP

in that in that time, that 2006 time frame. And we were, it was a lot of growing pains. We had a lot of discussions with at that time, you know, SpaceX was looking to get into the market and they ended up being one of the awardees on OSP3.

And one of the, one of the challenges that we had to work our way through and opening the door for these new commercial providers that were coming on board with small launch capabilities was the pricing structure on the contract because we had very successful pricing with the OSP 1 and 2 contracts versus our previous contracts that we had had because we moved from a kind of the traditional cost plus fixed fee kind of contract to an more incentivized contract. With oral sciences, the OSP 1 and 2, the primary tax tax.

taskwork types on those was something called the fixed price incentive firm, which is there's a cap on what you're going to pay for the mission, but if the contractor has to track their costs, and if they're able to come in under the cost that they bid, they actually get an extra incentive fee. So the government gets to keep some of the money, and the contractor gets to make a little extra money in terms of profit on that contract. So it's a good incentivized structure, but the limitation on that is the contractor has to track the cost. And so our early initial discussion, with SpaceX when they were interested in getting on OSP 3, SpaceX and others were it was, you know, we do not have a certified cost tracking system. The quote from the vice president we were working with was our people don't fill out time cards. So we can't track costs. You've got to make this thing firm fixed price.

And so that was one of our, and you know, we were kind of like, oh, we're not used to working with firm fixed price. You know, most of our stuff has been this fixed price incentive firm where we know what the actual costs are and how are we going to do that. But we eventually got through that. That ended up being a decision. They went all the way to the source selection, the source decision authority that we had was what kind of contract were we going to put into that.

What kind of contract pricing structure were we going to put into place? And we had a big meeting to come to that decision. That seems like such an interesting time for the work you were doing because like not only are you, you've got, first of all, you have this inventory of stuff that is just not designed to be a consumer product. Like, just straight up, that's not what it was for, right? And then you're like, you're already adapting that to like a more consumer-like product. And then you have this whole, like the pressure from the other side, which is like these new entrants like SpaceX that are just like completely changing how we contract these things.

And it feels like it's very chaotic. Like trying to figure out like, how do I sell this thing in this today in the future of, of, procurement. It's like a very, very bizarre conflicts of historical events in the, in the broad history of space launch procurement. Yeah, it is. And it's, you know, and those kinds of decisions have a lot of implications. You know, one of the, the bigger program in SSL, you know, when, when they were looking at opening up to provide more competition, they went through a lot of the same growing pains. They had always done, you know, a cost-based sort of, sort of contracts, in part, when you have a strategic program like that that's of interest to the nation,

that you've got to make sure that you're always going to have the capability to get spacecraft on orbit like that. One of the things you want to make sure is that you know what the actual costs are, so that you can properly budget in the future because, you know, kind of the nightmare scenario is that you go into this firm fixed price thing and the contractor buys in for the first few launches, and then you get surprised that the price goes up all of a sudden because they can charge whatever they want to. And so there was a lot of concern in the costing community that we... Or they did the math wrong and they go out of business.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that was a big concern about moving to that model was losing that insight into what it actually cost to build one of these things. And we were able to work through that on our side, just by accepting a little more pricing risk in hours because the small launch program is not, you know, it's not a major defense acquisition program like the NSL program is where, you know, if you, if the program fails, you might lose the war, you know, kind of thing.

Yeah, different sticks. Yes. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, that's super interesting. I don't know what to. And then you, so that was 06. So, like, you also had to, there was, you started to see, and probably the people like yourself and those around you that could see how this was going to go.

Like, you kind of had the shape of how this might shake out if SpaceX or others were successful in that model. But by the next round, OSP4, it was a totally different ballgame where there was too many small launchers being worked on. And like, you went from one end to the other end pretty quick on like, all right, how do we keep some of these snuggle heads out? Yeah, we did go. And so we were, you know, OSP3, when we did OSP3, it was a very different acquisition. We ended up awarding that contract about 2013, November 2013, if I remember correctly. And it was, it was a lane one, lane two sort of situation. And we had two lane one competitors and two lane two.

The lane one competitors were Lockheed Martin and Orville Sciences and Lane 2, which was the bigger one was Orbital Sciences and SpaceX. And so that, it was still a very, it was a linty and it was a lintymp. limited pool. You know, we had, we knew who the players were. We did a lot of evaluation on the front end of OSP3 to say, to make sure that everybody we vetted onto the contract had to act together. They had, you know, solid engineering program, solid safety program. We knew what the cost were going to be. OSP3, we actually had a pre-priced list of all the options of things we might want to buy on the contract, you know, those sorts of things. But the downside of doing that is you spend a lot of, of time on the front end doing evaluations of things. And so it took us like two years to award that contract because we had a huge amount of evaluation criteria. And then we ended up not using the contract that much because we had that thing called

sequestration that came in about the time we awarded OSP3 and we ended up only buying about five missions off of that contract. And so which was, you know, almost an order of magnitude below the traffic we expected to see on the contract. And so when we got the OSP4, there was a much larger because of the success of SpaceX. There were lots of companies wanting to get into the small launch market. And so we had kind of been, we used to term snake bit by front loading the OSP3 contract. And so we kind of went to the other extreme on OSP4, set the evaluation bar very low and said,

we're not going to dig into everybody's system safety program and everybody's engineering program and all that. we're just going to look at, you've got to convince us that you, that you're able to launch a rocket. And if you can convince us you're able to launch a rocket, we'll unramp it to OSP4 and then you can compete for the missions. And so we saved a lot of the evaluation for once we were actually doing the individual mission competitions. And that probably, if I had that decision to do over again, I would probably stick with that because that has turned out to be a pretty good model. and we were able to to still, even though we were doing a significant amount of evaluations

for each mission, we were able to execute those in a pretty quick time frame within about four months. I'm trying to look up what the original list of providers were because was this the one with some of the weird who was the company with like the carrier plane and the drone plane and the... Yeah, that was... Avon or something.

Rock. No, the carrier plane was... No, not Struddle launch. The other weird one. Like the weird little... Oh, Avim. Yeah, Avum has a carrier plane. Yeah. Yes. They don't really exist anymore. They're not interested in launch anymore. They're still around. Yeah, they're still around nibbling at... They've got the... We still have... When I left the program, we still have one open contract with them for a launch, and they were working towards that. I don't know how things have gone since then.

They're Moon Expressing it out there or what? Yeah, we were just talking pre-show about Moon Express, how they just stopped. Snow grand collapse. Stop being. I mean, were there times where, like, when you're saying you adopted that different approach to on ramp the initial competitors, was there flack internally about taking that approach and hope and wishing that you went with like higher gates out the at the start? Or was it like, yeah, sure, just roll the dice and let's see how it plays out? There was general, I think, agreement within the team that this is the right way.

We kind of got burned how we did things last time. And the environment has changed and our motivations have changed. And the government is more interested in making, interested in getting new providers into the business and not being overly restrictive about making it too hard to get into the business. And so it was a good balance of all the interests. involved out there, I think, that you know, to go, to go, at that point in time to go forward with that

change in how we were doing things. So I think there was general agreement across the board. I don't think there was any any strife as to, you know, whether we're going down the wrong pathway there. How would you do it today in that we've seen so many small launch providers

just evaporate for a variety of reasons? It, I think, I would add probably, you know, every time you make that decision, the pendulum's going to swing back the other way a little bit probably. So given the experience that we've had with a couple of folks falling out from under us, you know, we would, you know, we would probably swing that a little bit the other way and put a little more teeth into it. You know, one of the things that's really hard to judge, you know, with a private company is how is, you know, even the company a lot of times would not be able to tell you, you know, how viable is it that you're going to be here two years from now? Right. Because that's, there's a lot of things that can happen in two years. And, you know, if they, if they, if they, if they're successful in their engineering development efforts, you know, things are going to be great.

If, you know, three or four of those things go wrong, you know, they're, they're not going to be there. And so that, it's really tough to have that crystal ball. And so really the, you know what happens to go out of business. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And so the only, the kind of the, the kind of the choice, choice you got to make is, are we going to on-ramp people before they've actually been successful at launching something, or are we going to wait until that point in time? And so, you know, we made that decision with OSP4 to go ahead and open the on-ramp to people who had not launched yet. You know, other, probably at the strategic level, it's more of a more of a, you want to make a choice that is more risk-averse than that, that has less, is more risk that those companies are going to go out of business. And so you tend more toward having a requirement that you've actually already flown, you know, and done that before,

demonstrated that you have the capability. There's so many variables in, like, a job like that, you know, like, ultimately the task here is, like, trying to stand up markets that don't exist, right? Which is, like, just, it just seems to be like an incredibly complex problem. And, you know, doing this for as long as we have Anthony, like, in watching these cycles, you know, a bunch of companies come in and a bunch of them go and then some stick around and they change and just like then this market's important and then that market's important. Today it's rockets.

The next day it's landers. Then it's satellites. It just bounces all around. Yeah. It's very, you know, it's very flux, right? And it's like it seems like it's a very challenging issue. And I'm curious to hear your take on this, Randy, that like just hindsight's easy, but I feel like everyone's just.

kind of just doing their best and like seeing what happens and then you just go from there. It's funny to hear you kind of talk about it like in a very, I mean, you're very level-headed the way you kind of explain these things. You always have been at least with us. But, you know, it just seems like it's very wild west. And I don't know if there's like the right answer for any of these problems ever, you know. Right. Yeah. I mean, you just have to, you have to make a choice. You know, what in our case, it's as as the government program, you know, we are, we are, making decisions of, you know, what is, what's in the best interest of the government and in these

situations where you've got, you know, a very rapidly changing market with lots of emerging providers, you know, you can make an argument that it's, it's in the government's best interest to provide seed corn out there, you know, and work with, lean forward a little bit, work with some of these new providers to help get them to, you know, provide some opportunities for them to get to a viable capability because in the long run, that's going to be better for the tax, for the government and for the U.S. taxpayer, you know, to have new providers, to have a robust competitive environment. And, you know, some of them are going to make it and some of them are maybe not. But, you know, you've got to make a decision there that, you know, are we just going to buy the

successful ones? Or are we going to cultivate the field a little bit and maybe help the industry get to a point where it's more viable. They have more viable options out there. And that was kind of where we went. Yeah, I mean, the really obvious, like, narrative for that, that question is, you know, for our listeners, probably going to be, like, the idea of Starliner and Dragon, right? And there's, like, so much hindsight that you can go, wow, what a waste of money Starliner has been so far. Like, that just did not go the way we wanted it to go.

And yet, like, if you go back to the decision point of that, like, I don't know if we should have done differently. And the whole point of that, having the two was, you know, because of, it's a recognition of how dynamic that environment is. And so there's, you know, it's like when you're looking forward from a point in time, you just have no idea and you make your best guess. When you're looking back, you have all the information and you know you're wrong, but it doesn't change what you would have done. And it's, it's very chaotic. Right. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, you got to make, you got to make those decisions about, you know, what is in our, what is in our best interest in the, and, and, but. both balancing that short-term and the short-term pain and the long-term payoff of those kinds of decisions. Yeah. How do you feel like with some of these, right, either a company goes out of business or budgetary situation changes on, like, you know, formally your end of the equation, and there's always seems like there's a tension with the timelines of space missions, and then they tend to be very long, or payload lead times are long,

or whatever the case is. But then something can happen in a second that changes what you actually want to do with that payload, whether it's like the program mission has changed entirely. The company decided they're not going to build that rocket anymore. They're going to build a different one, and they want to convince you to just keep paying them so that they can go on the different rocket. like is there is there as much flexibility as there needs to be on how those things get manifested or does that actually have to be handled differently like the way that space force is kind of assigning the you know they choose who's going to fly the nssel missions and then they assign them about a year or two out from from actual launch like is that even a flexibility or you know do you feel like it kind of handcuffed you in certain situations where you just had to ride it out when it was clear that virgin orbit.

it was going out of business or whatever, and they weren't going to actually be able to complete the task order. I don't know. That might have been too specific of a case, but it was the one top of mind for me. Yeah. Yeah. There's, you know, you do have to operate within, you know, within some constraints, you know, on the government side, the primary one being funding, you know, because when we go,

when we go put these launch activities on contract, that's tied to a funding source, and the funding has a certain life on it that, you know, if it's a two-year money or three-year money, you've got to get it obligated before the obligation authority dies on it. And then there's a five-year clock that starts ticking on it, you know, that once the money has expired, you've got to get the, whatever the effort is, you've got to get done within five years. And, and you don't, if you try to go back and ask for, you know, forgiveness on, I wasn't

able to spend this money. Can I have some more? There's just no appetite for that. I'll wait, we got to take a side tangent. and you got to explain to us how the hell money works because I think we were talking some shit about it a couple weeks ago of like, is there a bank account? And you were like, there's not a bank account. That's not that way. Yeah.

Yeah, that is an interesting, that is one of the interesting discussions that we've had from time to time on the discord is kind of how the government money works. And, you know, number one, there is no bank. The government, the government does not have in general. The government does not have money. The only part of the government that has money is the U.S. Treasury. and they've got it all. And largely speaking, there's a few exceptions out there. But like in the government program office, you don't have a bank account.

You have what's called obligation authority, which means, you know, the budget gets passed and we get told you as a small launch program, you have this much budget authority. And so our contracting officer is the person who is invested with the authority to obligate the government to go buy things using that money. And so, like, you know, when the FY2, you know, when the FY2, 25 budget gets passed. You get told, here's how much FY25 money you have and here's what you're supposed to use it for. And so we have, we put together, you know, we have a plan that we go into the fiscal year with that says, here's what we're going to spend all of our money on. And then you go

forward and you go try, you go execute that plan. And that plan is tied to primarily contracts. And so each of those contracts has a procurement activity that you've got to go through to either have a source selection to decide who's going to do that launch, go put a task order on contract to go do the mission assurance, put a task order on contract to go provide technical support for the mission. And so there's a timeline there to get all of that money obligated, to get all of those contract actions executed so that all of your money is obligated so that you don't get it. taken the next year. And because, believe me, you know, we, we make monthly reports on, here's the plan. You were supposed to be 25% obligated here in February. You're only 22% obligated. How are you going to get better? Or should we just take 3% of your budget? And you go screaming back, no, it'll take my budget, you know. And so that is, that is one of the things that program managers spend a lot of time on is nailing down those.

those very specific actions to get the money obligated on the timeline you promised you were going to get it obligated on and that you're required to get it obligated on so that you don't now so that you don't have a different problem of trying to figure out how you're going to make up for the fact that if you lost $5 million because you couldn't get it obligated in time and which which really which will throw your mission for an even bigger curve so then once you get the money on contract it's obligated and so that gets you through that that initial gate but then you've got then there's a five-year timeline to get the money actually expended because the contracts can't just go on forever. And if you have a mission, well, well, hold on that. Okay, there's a couple ways that

clearly can. So, challenge accepted. If you can't get the money spent, you know, then you've got to go get some more money. And that, those are very uncomfortable conversations to have that I wasn't able to get, I put this person on contract, but they were not able to get the money expended in time. And so the money, the money died. And I need to get, I need to get replacement money for it. Those are, there's a very uncomfortable conversations. And, and, and, and, replacement money. I don't think I've ever had a successful one of those. Replacement money. How, okay. I lost my money. I need the replacement money. Yeah. Yeah. But what happens like,

Okay, let's say you didn't spend $5 million that was obligated. Like, who is accounting for that on the back end that as a nation we didn't spend $5 million that we thought we did? Well, that's just $5 million worth of debt that the U.S. Treasury never has to send the check for. And so, you know, the money doesn't actually exist. And so you would go through this whole process where we get a contractor on contract. the contract goes and does the work. You can tell how you're losing this. It doesn't exist.

None of this shit I'm talking about actually exists. Keep going. When the invoices do, you print the money and then when you collect taxes, you burn it. That's the only thing that you can do. Yep. When the invoice comes due, one of my jobs was I would approve the invoices when they came in. Yes, the contractor has fulfilled this part of the contract. They're now due to be paid this, you know, two, three, five million dollars.

And we send it off to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service. and they approve it and it goes to the U.S. Treasury, and the U.S. Treasury sends the money. That's the first point in time that the money actually exists. It's when the Treasury drops it into, you know, SpaceX or Orbital Sciences or Aarkey Martin's bank account. And so the money doesn't actually have to be profound. You mean directly into Elon Musk's pockets personally is what you mean, I think.

That's what you mean. Did you put all your notes in, by the way, Randy? Have you always filled out the notes on those invoices? So none of your stuff got audited by Doge? Oh, I'm sure some of it got audited, but yeah, mostly what they were after was the money that hadn't been spent yet. Yeah, which never existed. They don't have to worry about it. It never existed yet.

Yeah. So they never saved any money at all, then. It never existed. I'm not going to say that. It's like a ghost story. All right. I think I'm at least a little less confused than I was last time. Basically, what you have to understand is that the Treasury Department has, route access to your bank account and they just backface, back, space, back, space, and type in new numbers when you need to.

That's great. Well, yeah, and then part of, you know, part of the money, you know, so when you write your check to the IRS, you know, you send that money to the U.S. Treasury for your taxes. When, you know, part of that financing comes from, like, you know, we, you know, when we buy IT bills, you know, where you're, you're, you're loaning the government, your money, and that's what they do with it is they go, they go pay that day's bills, you know, with it. what a wild time yeah yeah you had a you send us a list of stories

that you should tell and one of them we skipped over which was something about OSP3 and an awkward meeting that you had with Elon at some point which I assume was about time cards no the yeah the time card conversation was one of his VPs we did have one awkward meeting with the one time I ever met met him was

we were running a contract called the responsive small space lift contract, which was a contract that was kind of, that was different. It was a new and innovative thing that we were doing because at that time, SpaceX was working on the Falcon 1, probably the E at that, by that time. And so they were advertising some very low price points, you know, associated with that rocket. And so we set up a contract with some modified, you know, some modified risk language and that would have allowed SpaceX to compete for that contract.

And it was another IDIQ kind of contract. So we had, uh, uh, we awarded two contracts on the up front, uh, to orbital sciences and the SpaceX. And,

uh, we ended up not ever using, I think we ever, I think we only ever issued one task order on that contract because again, they got hit primarily by sequestration, uh, because it was in that, in that,

uh, that same time frame. Uh, but we did have, we did issue one RFP on that contract for a rapid turn mission that we were, uh, that we needed to go. go fly. We had a customer who had a payload

that needed to get on orbit tomorrow. And so we had this rapid turn contract and nobody was going to be able to meet the timeline, but we were interested the timeline we needed. But we were looking for options to satisfy our customers' requirement

as fast as possible. And so we thought, okay, this is what we built this contract for. Let's go see what we can get. And we issued an RFP on that contract and our two providers, Orbital and SpaceX, you know, we're off working on their proposals. And we got a different, we got a contractor that came in with a different solution

using a different contract for that mission. And so, and it was a very, a very viable creative, innovative option to actually meet the timeline we needed for the launch. And so we withdrew that RFP and SpaceX was not happy about that, about us withdrawing that RFP. and Mr. Musk requested a meeting with my boss at the time, Colonel White, and I got to meet him, and we had a very uncomfortable meeting, and he was not a happy man.

You got to get those $5.1 contracts on order, you know? They were flying off the shelves back in the day. Yep. Flying on something. Was it a ride chair? What was the inventive method? Was this original spin launch? Are you holding out?

and that's no, no, no, no, it was a rocket that, that already,

basically it was repurposing a rocket that already existed, but the mission had been like, you know, delayed for years. And so it was a,

let's repurpose that rocket and use it for this quick turn mission and buy a replacement for the rocket that's been delayed for years. And so it was, and it actually,

everything, the timeline and the numbers and everything worked out. We were able to get that launch off the ground in like four months, which is, which is pretty unheard of.

at that time. That's how you sell right there, Jake. I want to, I want to key in on something he said, because this is a, I actually have a very specific procurement question that I'm very interested in, and you kind of touched on it. So we're going to, this is my one chance in my career. Is this what you're going to say, burgl in this show, Jake? You're saying it wants to show.

No, no, no, no, no. Okay, so we all know that, you know, government procurement has to be, fair and transparent and you should be going after the best price for the taxpayer. There's all those rules around what you're allowed to buy and why you buy it, right? But you mentioned that you changed the contract, like the RFP a little bit, in order to allow someone to bid for something, right? And I'm trying to figure out where the heck the line is on that, because I could write an RFP that says requirements,

your rocket must say SpaceX on the side of it to fit the requirements of this contract. and then wow look at that only SpaceX bid you know like this is like going to get the so how do you decide you would do it a little bit more you would be like your headquarters has to have an area code of whatever the Hawthorne area code is right you can do it I mean there's a lot of ways you can do it right you get a little yeah yeah yeah your engines have to start with M you know yeah yeah there you know uh the ultimate answer is uh there is a there is a person at the agency who is you uh who makes the decision the final decision on the RFP and it's normally what we call a source selection authority.

So somebody that's a colonel or hire, colonel or an SES, who's the source selection authority on a given procurement and they make the final decision about what the requirements are that go into the RFP. You know, but that's a one hour meet, typically a one hour meeting that you have where you brief a decision authority on here's what our requirements are, everything from the technical requirements associated with the mission. but also the evaluation requirements that you're going to use to decide who wins the mission. And so, you know, there's a lot of work that goes into that shaping that from both the government side and from the contractor side.

We will typically issue a draft RFP to all of the providers on the contract and say, here's our initial best guess at what we're going to need and what the government's thinking is on how we're going to make the decision. You get comments in from all of the companies. And the comments range from, hey, we, you know, all the way from the minutia of we think you missed a decimal point here in this number on the bandwidth, you know, all the way up to we think this should be, this one should be firm fixed price instead of fixed price and center firm.

You know, so you get a full range of comments. And typically, you know, when we would float a draft RFP for a mission task order, let's say, we would get somewhere between 40 and 50, 60 comments. and each of those comments from the contractor has to be adjudicated. And not only do you tell the decision authority what the comment you got and what you decided to do about it and get their approval on that, you also publish that. You're open come on and you publish that to everybody. Here's all the questions that we got on the draft RFP and here's our decision and our rationale for making that decision.

So the primary thing there is to be open kimono with everybody on what you're doing and why you're doing it. And what kind of comments that you got and what you decided to do about them. And so that's what, you know, that's the primary way that you make sure you're on the legal up and up there is by just telling everybody, you know, here's why we decided to do it this way. And sometimes, you know, you don't, sometimes you have a very firm, you know, that's just that this won't work for my customer because they, they need it to go to this orbit. And I'm sorry you don't have a launch pad that can get to that orbit. But, you know, this is this is a solid technical requirement. This spacecraft has to go to that orbit. You know, and sometimes it's a, well, yeah, that's kind of, you know, your input.

We appreciate you responding. We could make the decision that way, but we're, we are deciding at this point in time to make a different decision. But we will take that into account for, you know, future procurement. So sometimes you have a, you know, you throw somebody a makeup later, you know, on. It's like, okay, that was a really good comment, but that's a really good input, but we just can't do it this time around. But we'll take a good look at that next time and make sure that we keep the competitive environment as open as possible. And then how do you, is there like a prep for, okay, we know we're going to get protests over this one? And do you like kind of get ready for whatever's coming your way?

or is it not as predictable as it seems from the outside? It's as long as you're, you know, we, we had very few, we've had very few, I'm trying to think of a protest that we actually had. Yeah, you've never awarded something Blue Origin, so. It wouldn't result in that. That, you know, typically you're, as long as you're open with, open communications with everybody about what you're doing and why. that tends to insulate you from the actual protests. You know, that, and so, you know, sometimes there are bigger fish at play that you just can't do anything about. You know, in case in SSL, you know, there are much bigger fish than small launch.

And so they tend to be more of a protest magnet for those very strategic reasons, you know, and so that we typically didn't have that much problem with that. Do you think that should stay that way? Do you think that there's, with the industry the way it is, that they could operate? I mean, I guess that's what the other lane of NSSL is now, right, is operating more in the way that you were all along. But everybody's working on a launch vehicle Falcon 9 size now. Do you feel like the stringent requirements of the 9 reference orbits and all that kind of stuff? Like, does that still have a place? Does it still use too much?

What's your, if you were to influence it, what would your route be? No, that still has a place. I mean, those are, you know, valid. valid requirements, they evolve a little bit every time, you know, that every, every procurement to make sure, you know, there's a long process leading up to, you know, each phase of the program there to go, you know, validate, are these still valid requirements? Is this still actually what we need? Is the customer who, who needed that orbit? Are they still there? What's the probability that we would never have to use that orbit? You know, those sorts of things. So there's a, there's a process that go, that you go through each time you do that, do the procurement. to make sure that you, you know, that those are all still valid requirements, especially if somebody pokes back at them, you know, that, you know, you may have to go re-verify again. Well, okay, maybe we don't need quite that much performance there anymore because over the years, the size of the satellites have come down and maybe we don't, we don't need to send the aircraft carrier that orbit anymore.

Maybe now we can just send a tugboat, you know, those sorts of things. So there's a, there's a pretty stringent review process each time you go issue an, an RFP like that to make sure that the baseline requirements you're establishing are still are still valid for what the government needs. The biggest criticism I see is that they currently exclude impulse or any of these like last mile kind of orbital tug companies from actually competing on launch services, right, that you can't go. And if you're somebody who has to buy their own launch to then do the thing with your satellite,

that that is like too many middlemen. We're not doing that on this contract. Right. Does that feel like a thing that will ever get solved or it's weird because that has to have launched off the earth somehow and then that imposes requirements on that launch vehicle that they're using as well? I think that'll evolve as those capabilities mature and the possibilities mature. That'll evolve. The difficulty there is keeping the playing field level, you know, because tailoring your requirements for different kinds of launch solutions becomes very difficult. then it becomes very difficult then to hold a competition because you've got different

kinds of players on the field and how do you how do you judge that all of which is possible it's just it's just it takes more thought on the front end of how you're going to divvy up the requirements and and are you going to have you know multiple competitions you know sometimes um it's possible sometimes to divide up the requirements and say you know for instance i'm going to have one competition for the rocket and a second competition for the post boost vehicle. And, okay, now I'm going to have those two competitions, which do I buy first? Do I buy the rocket first and then tell the post boost folks, you've got to fit on this rocket or do I buy the post boost vehicle first and say, okay, you've got to provide a rocket

that matches this? So it brings in, you know, it brings in those sorts of complications. You know, we had a contract for a while where we were kind of doing a middleman job between the launch providers and the spaceports. We had a separate spaceports contract. And that was, and we learned pretty quickly that you just can't manage that. And so we ended up with OSP3 and beyond, we ended up moving the spaceport work onto the launch service contract and telling the launch service contractors,

you've got to go get the contract for the spaceport because the government is just not a feasible business arrangement for the government to be the middleman, deciding which, you know, holding a separate competition for the space port from the competition for the launch vehicle and that was just untenable. Yeah, the level of abstraction is another, just another one of those variables that you throw into this whole process, right? Right, right. You can go even one step higher and say, like, I'm not, you know, I don't even, I'm not

even going to build the payload. I just want, I just saw me some data, right? And you can go, you can go even further than that. Be the NRO. Right, right. You have really expensive satellites and buy all the imagery and do, do everything. Do it all. How do you take...

I'm sure they've had some of those proposals before. How do you feel about the... I feel like there's a couple of players that are... Not just a couple of players. Like most of the industry is figuring out how do we fit into Golden Dome and are we pivoting to missile defense or are we like changing our offerings? I mean, ABL has pivoted entirely to missile defense related. So is that something that you kind of saw coming or

was this a weird, I guess it's a vibe shift in the industry? It is an unexpected. Yeah, I can't say I saw that one coming. That certainly, you know, the current emphasis and the money that's coming with Golden Dome is, you know, the business is going to go where the money is. And so that's, you know, now that they've got, it's got money associated with it, you know, a lot of people are going to be pivoting that way. You know, there's going to be some stiff competition for that, for that.

program because there's big dollars there and even getting a small piece of something that they're there they don't exist yet though they're just potentially they might exist there's big obligation potential if you pull it off if you can spend it it will exist big obligation big obligation big obligation there yeah yeah it is interesting though because it's it's a weird mix right of like for a long time i feel like people like us who are space nerds are like, I mean, we make a lot of rockets. We just got to point them in the directions that are more fun to like go see what's at Jupiter, go see what's at, you know, Jake's favorite comet that we're never going to visit or whatever. And then it took 20

years and all the geopolitical changes that have happened in that time for defense industry to become like cool to work in again. And that happened at the same moment as the Golden Dome program came about. So everyone who had a small launch vehicles in particular where like half of it worked and you're like, well, I mean, the half that matters for missile defense worked. So let's just keep flying that. Like, shocker that Firefly Alpha is not just going haste style. Like, oh, well, our first stage is all right. We'll just use that. And we're not going to worry too much about the upper stage. Because that's really what it is. You know, it's like, I don't know. Yep. Yeah. It just, it all happened in the same moment that so many of these launch providers had to rethink what are we actually doing here.

Are we going to go and compete with Falcon 9? Are we going to make a bigger rocket? Are we going to stay on the small side? I'm sure you have a spin-launch story in the part of the country that you're in and the people that you talk to many times. I feel like you had a, did you visit Spin Launch once? Can you talk about that? I never got to visit Spin Launch.

I talked to them several times. I was in on, looked at, you know, they had an OTA with the D-I-U, and I worked with that team a little bit. It's a classic, man. What a line. Yeah, defense. Yeah. And so I talked to those guys a lot, but I never actually, believe it or not, it's only like two hours down the road in it, but I never actually got there to visit.

Yeah. They talk a big obligation, right? They've obligated a lot of cool lot of services. Are you comfortable to give us a spin-launch opinion? Or is it too close to the vest? Yeah, I'd rather not do that. That's enough of an opinion. I mean, I was involved in the technical evaluation on some of their proposals,

and honestly, I'm skeptical. So it's a, it's a, you know, certainly, you know, the stuff they're doing with it now with the, you know, doing the suborbital testing and stuff, it's pretty amazing that they, they've been able to make that work. You know, the hard part is getting the rocket part to survive the environments. And so we'll see how that all pans out. I mean, that's a sense.

Like, that's hard for Starship as well right now. So it's kind of the one problem. Yikes. Spin launch is one of these things where I'm like, man, that shit would rock on the moon and otherwise. Oh, yeah. I don't know what you're doing out there. We should get them on the show. Like, what are we waiting for?

We should. You should. Yeah. Yeah. That would be like, like, we should go into it totally open and honest, be like, we don't believe you. Come tell us why we're wrong. Yeah.

I mean, it's just, I mean, so there's like one argument that's been made to me is that it's like the Glomar Explorer. Like, this is a project that they're pasting over the top of like space launch, but actually there's like another thing happening here that is more useful and there's more utility of uh yeah but the only thing yeah right exactly the relativity thing right like what do you actually 3d printing the but i mean it's a spin launch on the moon is awesome fling that fling stuff back to earth man just right off the surface but the atmosphere really complicated it that yeah that's an awesome capability yeah swing right back to earth but in the atmosphere in the

soup it's not as easy no well and you know on the moon you wouldn't need the container so right you just launch it you know yeah you're a trebache at that point are you throwing are you throwing blocks of regolith like i don't know what you're yeah rots from god yeah and golden dome there we're right back to it we're gonna source it from the moon though yeah it's been launched just a giant lunar machine gun is all really is here so trans lunar missile defense yeah man now we're talking listen you're tired now you're available you're If we want to found this, I think we could get $12 to $16 million. You can join the off-nominal consulting firm.

I should one time, Jake, try to go and pitch some startup and see who would believe us and what we could get. See what money we could get. Translunar missile defense might be the thing that we should do. Yeah. Like Golden Dome is great, but what about when China lands on the moon first? But then what are you going to do? and we just, it's a good time

to raise money like that, Jake. It is, yeah. I think we should go for it. And we have to have you back six to ten times, by the way. If you want to make this a recurring segment, that would be great.

Sure, yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't mind doing it again, yeah. Because we barely have cracked the service. I want to hear about Kodiak and spaceports and that one time that there was almost a spaceport in Georgia,

which, Almost, yeah, they almost got there. There's a whole other thing. Yeah. Yeah. I want to hear about Space Force still. Space Force. Well, he barely, he missed Space Force.

Right? Yeah, well, I mean, I miss Space Force as military, but I mean, I worked for, I was actually, Space Force doesn't actually, I think, yet have any civilian position. So all of the civilians that worked for the Space Force are actually Air Force employees, and that's where I was. I was still an Air Force employee, but supporting the Space Force, right? Yeah. And same thing to reservists. They don't have reservists yet. But there's reservists, Air Force reservists who are still supporting the Space Force, you know, in their previous Air Force Reserve jobs. If you track that, Jake.

I'm making the question list for next time. It's like, what are those big words? We had one question in the chat from Benjamin that I think we should end on, which is what is the date that the last thing you worked on will be declassive? The last, I think, let's rephrase this. I think what he means is, not even the last one, but what is the farthest out date of declassification? Is that what you mean? I think that might be what he means. Yeah, I think those can go out as far as 50 years. There's some stuff that'll never, probably never be, never be totally declassified,

like the strategic, you know, strategic stuff. Like what? Like the, what? Oh, you're about to give it away. Zuma? Zoom in that list? You don't have to tell us, but do you know what happened to Zoom? I do not know what happened to Zoom.

I would love to know the answer to that one, but I do not know anything about that one. We got to go deeper. We got to go one. That's a great conspiracy theory fodder there, for sure. That was such a fun time on the Internet. Well, this was excellent. Superb.

Superb. My God, we have too much. We could have went three hours. It could have been a monster episode. Yeah, it could have been. We'll have to do a meet-up in New Mexico because I love New Mexico. We missed each other when I was out there. Right.

Man, what a state. Highly recommend it. It is beautiful. Yep. I was up on the mountain with the dog this morning. Getting in a nice hike, it's beautiful here. Even in the 90s at the nice breeze on the mountain. It's a great place.

Love it. What are we doing next week, Jake? Holy smokes. I got to look it up. Our schedule has been like so wild lately. Let me just see. Pulling it up, pulling it up, pulling it up, pull it up. Oh, we are talking with Ed, I might say it wrong.

Ed Gee, I'm going to guess that's how we're saying it. This is a problem with communicating only via text. He's from ethero. This is a hard word channel. It'll be a great show. It's happening next week. It's got a, it's got a big. Gipsong in it, I think.

So, but it's good talking about satellites and some cool technology they're working on and stuff. So it's going to be good. Who knows? If you made any sense of that, let us know. Completely nonsensical plug, but I promise there will be a show next week. It'll be great. Yeah, it's there. It's coming.

It's good. Randy, you're the best. I don't know if you have anything that you want to plug. Did you write a book yet or anything? Oh, no. Nope. I just barely have any social media, so I got nothing to plug there. Come in the Discord.

out with Randy. He's the best. Yep. I'm going to go. It's the music playing, Jake. Something's very weird. Is it? Okay. I can't hear it. So I'm vibing. I hope it's not too loud because I can't hear it. And this is where we're at. I should be able to end the show today on like that one time. So, I think I'm good. Bye.

Bye, everybody. See ya. See ya. Thank you. One, two, three, four, five.