Off-Nominal - 214 - Blasting Through the Pork Chop

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Jake and Anthony do a good ol’ news roundup—Jared Isaacman may be back as NASA Administrator, Stoke Space raises a ton of money, New Glenn gets ready for its next launch, and we have thoughts about the communication of phasing orbits.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 214 - Blasting Through the Pork Chop - YouTubeTrump, Billionaire Isaacman Said to Meet About Top NASA Job - BloombergStoke Space gives us another reason to take it very seriously - Ars TechnicaPentagon contract figures show ULA’s Vulcan rocket is getting more expensive - Ars TechnicaActually, we are going to tell you the odds of recovering New Glenn’s second launch - Ars TechnicaESCAPADE trajectory design creates new options for Mars smallsat missions - SpaceNewsHow America fell behind China in the lunar space race—and how it can catch back up - Ars TechnicaWe’re about to find many more interstellar interlopers—here’s how to visit one - Ars TechnicaFollow 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. I'm like in mouse-clicking mode here, Jake. None of my hardware switchers work. How's it going? It's going good. Am I doing this? Are we live? Comment in the chat. Well, the time is off nominal.

Yes, it is. We are early. Sorry about that. No, I'm not sorry about it. Okay? Listen, sometimes we make decisions for you, the live viewers, and other times we make decisions for those that listen later. This is one of those times you're supposed to not say,

I'm sorry. You're able to say thank you for. for your patience. Thank you for your understanding. I don't apologize for anything. Oh, man. And you're, you're doing like your whole,

you got a brand new computer, your new setup here, what's going on? Tell us what? It doesn't work for the one. All right. So you remember that time that we were doing the live show

and then I couldn't turn my computer off because I ran out of storage space. Remember that? That was a great, great day. Yeah. Yeah. So I just decided out in

in off-nominal technological history. I decided, um, you know, I should maybe get a new laptop. for, because it was just, it was time. It was doing bizarre things, right? This is the mysterious part is that I'm,

I am a, as people call it, a computer guy. This is what I do for a living, specifically with this platform that we're looking at. But yet, I don't know why that computer was so janky, but I couldn't launch, if I was using my microphone in one application, I couldn't launch another that would need my microphone or else the whole thing would beach ball for a while.

And I was out of storage space, so I was ready for a new laptop. So here we are. I migrated probably 95% of what I needed and the other 5% I forgot about until it's time to use it. And this live stream, I thought I got it all. But nope, I missed two things. I missed two items. But I was so confident I wiped my old laptop yesterday to send it in for the trade-in.

And unfortunately, now I can't go look exactly which checkboxes I had set in two apps that I crucially need to run this the same way I did before. So, well, you know, sometimes you just got to make the mistakes to learn what it is, you know? Sometimes you got to figure it out. And also, sometimes it's good. Got to give it a hard reset, see what you really needed. Strip it down to bare bones. It's like declaring email bankruptcy, but on your computer. Yeah.

So. It's like, if it was important, I'll find out about it. One way or another. And I think this is the first time in like two or three migrations where I did the total don't migrate anything reset. I've been keeping the same install a couple of versions in a row, but this time it was time.

Also, probably good every, I would say like six to seven years you've got a new workflow hardened in but just still got all the stuff installed from your prior workflow. So there's just a lot of junk that you don't need anymore. I do hard to reset on every new device.

I never, ever do the migrate. Never. Ever? Never. Wow. No. Forest fire approach. For a fire approach. I just I don't trust. I don't trust the migrations. I never I don't know if it's just like my years of being like a computer text poor person. I'm just like every time you do one of those it just brings over a bunch of junk that you had been like like accumulating and crusty. Were you selling yourself? Is that what happened?

You started selling yourself that? Well I just like I'm like there's nothing will will make a system cleaner and safer than if you just factory reset it. And that's like that's right. That's just, that's right. I'm addicted to it. Love it. So even when I get a new phone, I don't transfer my photos over. I just dump the photos into my backup drive, like on my home server and I just start from scratch. You don't maintain like a, you're not a cloud photo guy? Well, I have like a, yeah, I have cloud backup on my home server, but not on my phone.

Wow. You're living old school. That's crazy. That's a wacky. That's a wacky take. And it sinks. It sinks to my server. So my phone sends photos there. That'll die. Yeah.

And then it, you know, so it makes them available in the cloud and it also makes it backup as like a S3 kind of thing, you know. This is not what these people are here for. That's the other show. Forgot which one we were on. Yeah. What do we got today? You gave me a nice list of like, here's all the newsy things that we should talk about. Yeah.

We didn't even know this kind of snuck up on us. So it's kind of like, actually, we have a full list of a news round up here. There's enough to chat about. I want to talk about the three-eye Atlas. I want to talk about interstellar objects and the discourse around them. I would like to talk about that a little bit. Yeah, okay. You're hot about New Glenn, Stoke Space, getting a bunch of money.

That's pretty interesting, yeah. That's good. Yep. We got a zombie Isaacman administrator coming up here, looks like. All right. I want to dig in that. What are you drinking? What are you got?

I've got a... Let's see if my switcher works. Look at that. This is a 95. From Golima, it's a nice little, kind of tropical, light, light beer. Super light. Look at that. 3.8.

It's a nice, it's a good pool beer. Illegal in Utah kind of beer. In Utah. Oh, he's giving it a to smell. Nice. I've got a leaf seeker IPA again and then I've got a graffiti highway IPA which is a good back-off. Graffiti highway.

Yeah, I guess that's a local, more local reference than it might let me flip a photo this. Is there a highway in Philadelphia that's graffiti? No, so there's a town in Pennsylvania called Centralia in which there's been a coal fire burning. underground for... Okay, I know about this one. Yeah, 150 years?

How long has it been? Centralia Minefire. It's only been burning since 1962. I thought it's been burning longer than that. I don't know. But anyway, it's totally abandoned, and then now there's this highway that is just all graffitied up.

That looks pretty red. bad. But there's like holes in it and it kind of steams and smokes and whatnot. And it's definitely not a place you should go and hang out all the time. But yeah, it's a cool spot. So whoever lives in that goddamn state knuckleheads. Are you chalk it down to Pennsylvania? Yeah, yeah. From your pie perch across the Delaware. Yeah. Wow.

All right. Where are we starting? Let's talk about the Isaacin thing because that's, that's been popping off like today, right? Is it when that broke? Yeah, I just saw it today. What's your level of,

did you read this article? I haven't read the full article. I just saw some summaries yet because, well, whatever reason. Because you're cheap and you don't pay for Bloomberg? I'm not playing for Bloomberg. Yeah,

that's definitely not happening. sorry Lauren I love you the yeah I mean it just sounds like I don't know what I'd now that I would brought this up I'm like what is there to say about it it's like yeah we kind of postulated this might happen

but it's it's weird though I would have believed this before Sean Duffy was really all hot on being the NASA administrator I don't know it's like nothing's permanent with this group, you know? Like, this is not their thing, permanency.

So, I don't know. It's just been kind of a thawing out, I would say, too, right? There was like, Elon having dinner with Trump again, and the on again, off again, relationship is on again. Yeah. And maybe Isaacman was like, oh, I could make it stick this time. I went to that dinner. I was at the dinner thing.

He was polite this whole time, just in case. And, yeah. Yeah. He was. Yeah, it certainly was. He was Biden, his time. you know what I mean brutal

all right but let's say let's just let's run the course though on because I think that I think discourse now is different than when Isaacman was going to have the run of the place originally it feels there's been congressional hearings there's been starship mishaps there's been starship recoveries

like there's a lot that's happened in the last year right year ago Isaacman was nominated in December so it's been is that right? Yeah. That was one year ago? Yeah, it was pretty, it was pretty early like after the election, right? But that was one year ago, right? I lost the plot here. Christ. Oh, it was 10 months ago, yes. Yeah. But think about, I don't know, I think, I think the, the combo of the starship start to the year. That was awful. And then the way that we saw

the arguments in Congress shift with the whole Ted Cruz pulling the rug on the commercial space side and having Bridenstein there talking about how no NASA administrator would have selected Starship. There was a lot more where we thought Isaacman might have the run of the place when he was becoming administrator because there was a big momentum behind Starship had momentum and people were supportive of him across the industry and, you know, there was this mandate about it.

and then we saw a couple months worth of like, oh yeah, the old space contingent is still there actively fighting and positioning around like, oh, China's doing all their lunar tests and there just feels to be a lot of different Lego bricks on the floor than there were the first time that he would have got nominated. So let's just play out if he does get nominated again. Do you think there's different emphasis or different approach or is it exactly what you would have seen if he got nominated and confirmed in March? I think it's going to be closer to the same than you might think. Okay.

I don't think that Isaacman would be like, I don't think he's distracted by that shifting political situation. Like I don't think that makes him think differently about how he would, what's best for NASA. Like I think his strategy would be the same, but what he wants for NASA hasn't changed. I suspect I'm making up stuff. Oh, no, this is this segment is purely about making shit up, Jake. Yeah, yeah.

Like, I would presume that his values and his virtues and his and his priorities and objections for NASA are unchanged by all of the circus stuff. Like, I just don't think he'd be super distracted by that. But that's not what I mean. I mean, though, that the countervailing forces were not as evidence from December to February as they have been from June to October. Yeah, but is that because? something's changed or is that because there was no NASA administrator and they knew they had a chance

to get in there and muck stuff up, right? Like if there's no administrator and Congress is running the show, old space is like ringing their hands. They're like, yeah, now we got it, baby, let's do it. Drum up some China fear. Let's get Brinstein in front of somebody with a bottle of Mountain Dew. Like we can just really, we can really get it going here and lock some stuff down before a leader comes by and realizes that we're, you know, realizes that this is all a rug pull here. So like, that's kind of how I'm interpreting that. Like, that was very predatory, how all that's been playing out. And I don't know.

Like, that was opportunistic. And they would have been there working under the surface. I mean, and we knew that because Isaacman's nomination or confirmation hearing, right, there was whatever he had agreed with Ted Cruz on to get in front of that confirmation hearing. Like, there were things that he was saying to play to, well, no, we shouldn't cancel SLS right now. We should cancel it after Artemis 3 or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah, I think you can play that game. It just feels different to me right now. Well, yeah, I mean, everything feels different every two weeks. So it's like pretty hard to keep up with it all, right? But I, I have faith. Maybe it's just that Eric Berger wrote that long article about how he blew moons like the goat of lunar landers. And he wants to personally fund it to land on the moon first. That will be interesting.

Yeah. Maybe I'm reacting to that. I think, honestly, I feel like I can't, I feel like I can't make a lot of good judgments about anything until we see a real budget written and put into law and signed. You know, like, seem close to that, Jake. But like, I just, that's where the, the rubber hits the road. Everything up until now has been talk, talk, talk, yabber, yabber. And then when someone signs some money down to it, that's when we'll know. where the result of this whole clash ends up, right?

That's just like such a big indicator for me, especially this year. So when we see that, we'll be able to make better judgments about which Congress people have influence and which projects have influence and which that's going to tell us so much, I think. And then we'll be able to see. And I imagine that someone like Isaac would also be looking for that. I mean, like, what am I up against, right? is going to be the situation here, right? Because I don't know. I just don't think, I don't think the white house actually gives the shit about it.

So we'll have to see, you know, who does and who fights to own that space, right? Power vacuum. Is that a, is that a non-answer? Is that a, is that a good content? No, it's your middle, you're back to, your unhinged Jake has left the building. You're back to centers for reasonable Jake. Yeah, I don't know. I think I'm a little bit, I don't think I believe this story.

Oh, yeah. We should be very upfront about that. This is one report that, oh, he's meeting with Trump and. Yeah. And I don't, to be clear, I don't distrust Lauren Grush, our very reliable reporter friend. I don't distrust. I distrust the way that these meetings have been positioned. Yes, 100%.

Yeah. And more than that, this meeting very well could have been, hey, do you still want to be NASA administrator? And tomorrow it could be different. So like, I just like the- Or someone heard offhandedly in a meeting when Trump was like, hey, you were going to be an ass administrator.

Maybe it will be again, right? Yeah, yeah. The off-handed comments that he does. It could happen again. You never know. And then it was like, oh, they've been talking about it when, in reality,

I don't know, because I don't think Jared Eisenman went to that dinner of like, I bet I can win them back on this. I think, I don't think that was why you went to that dinner. because he might be the NASA administrator again. Yeah. Now, why he did?

I can't speak to that, right? I think whether he just wanted to be there because it was a cool event with a lot of interesting people and he could rub elbows with whoever to figure out what he's doing next because now he's not doing shit for and now he's not doing an asset administrator and he's got to figure out what he wants to do. Well, and he's a smart guy. Like he may very well have like known from the moment that his nomination was rescinded. He may well be like, you know what?

This is a very mercurial administration. I'm just going to be, I'm going to take it like a big kid and I'm going to, I'm going to be nice about it. And I'm going to just wait and say good things. And who knows, everything could be different in six months. So like that very well may be what has been going on, right? Like his whole strategy this whole time. So I don't know. I think I'm not, I think there's, I would absolutely support Jared Eisenman running NASA. I've never been mystical about that. I think, or mysterious about that. But I think they're, I don't know how it turns out well for anybody that's, that's

running NASA at the moment. Because I just, I feel like they're still avoiding questions about certain programs and how they want to approach them, what they want to do with them. And I don't necessarily think the congressional support the last few months has been, no, we don't want to do that budget request that cuts all this stuff. we want to support everything pretty broadly, and there's been, we'll reassign some of science over to the exploration side,

or, you know, that's sort of like high-level prioritization, but I still feel like NASA has ignored the actual problems in front of them in the way of like, which of these things do we want to actually fund and which of these things do we not want to fund? And they're kind of half doing everything at the moment, like keeping all of the irons hot,

rather than just decided. No, and that, and, I don't know that a single person changes that. Banging that drum for years now and it's still... Because even the commercial space station stuff, right? They've shifted this strategy to be more supportive of an approach like VAST. But I still don't think they've clearly stated what they actually want out of that branch of NASA. Like, okay, they now support, as their commercial space station strategy, they support short duration missions.

What do they want to do with that? Why do they want to do that? Do they want to do it just for flight experience? Do they actually have goals with it? That's something that a NASA administrator is very useful for, right? Like someone with a little bit of vision can help coalesce those ideas and pick out the ones that are good and emphasize them and then go to war to clean up the stuff that doesn't belong. You know, like those are the tough calls that you need to have an admin for. So I don't think Sean Duffy's going to do that, right?

No, because he's heading the sand on like we're definitely obviously beating China, right? Like that's obviously happening. It's not obvious that we're doing anything. Yeah. I don't know. I'm standing by I don't believe this story. I don't think it has anything to do with running Ness again. I think it was oft-handed at best.

So on the over-under of, does he get nominated again? You're under? Way under. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. This is obviously the thing that they're most concerned about to on October 9th, Jake. Yeah.

Just deep into a shutdown here. deep and getting deeper. Yeah. Man. All right. We beat that one to death. Yep. We can move on.

You take a pick. I got a bunch of links up here, Jake. Let's talk about Stoke. Stoke space. 510 million. And that was fresh after, when was their other... They raised like $170. something not that long ago, right? Yeah, right at the top there, it says 990 million overall.

Total. But I think it's only, wasn't it only like a year ago that they, I've had this up in another tab. Let me find it. Do you remember when we, when relativity got that big, they did that big raise, it was like a billion? Yep. And we were like, oh, like, whoa, that's a lot of money. Like, this is pretty close to that. This is not, this is, this is, this is big boy money. This is, uh, this is, They can do stuff with this. So that's pretty exciting. It was nine months ago that they raised $260 million. January 15th, $2025, $260 million.

Was there evaluations in those news stories? Do we know? I don't think there is. Let's see. Let me click on a link again. No. They declined to disclose the valuation. Yeah.

That's interesting. I'm excited for that to happen because I like, as I said before, I don't know if they're going to be successful. I don't know if they're good at this. I don't know if this idea is smart, but they're doing something different. And yes, yes. I support that so much more than any of the other things. I just so tired of just like some other like former SpaceX employee coming out and being like, hey, we're going to make a small launcher. We're going to mass produce it so we can launch every two days for anywhere in the world. And it's going to be so cheap. This is our new idea. And you're like, okay. It has nine engines. and then one engine. Look at that. It's partially reusable. You're like, okay, this is just not interesting anymore. Like, I just don't care about that. Every other company passed what already exists that jumps into that space. I'm just like, I don't care.

So this is something different and new, and I'm interested in that. So I'm fully supported. Let's go. And I think, didn't they talk about this before that, like, the, no, the only, like, hesitation I have is the size that they picked, right? Everybody picks random sizes of the rockets. It feels like, and they say that the market supports it. But the market supports what flies frequently and cheaply.

The capital supports this as your development platform, I think, is the more accurate. That might be the case, right? But I think that's what's interesting about their architecture is that there's a cleaner path from this to scale up to a bigger size than other platforms, right? Yeah. Yeah, because they have like all the all the, all the, the hard stuff, right? Like the long pole items is figuring out the weird tech. And I think, you know, it takes money to like change out your tooling or whatever.

But still, it's not like, it's not hard to like fundamentally realigning your laws of physics. You can't take an air launch platform and then have a heavy lift vehicle out of it. That's not the rocket science part of this rocket science, right? So that's interesting to me because, and what I mean is that, yeah, like, okay, going from electron, yeah, you could, yellow electron to be the size of neutron. But those are different vehicles. You know what I'm saying? Like they,

Brockelab decided to go build a bigger vehicle. You can't use electric pumps on the big one. You can't, yeah. Yeah, they're different tracks. Whereas this architecture, if they prove out that this is a viable architecture, and if they prove out that they actually can get to a fully reusable vehicle in this way, then they've solving that lets them say,

all right, now what size could we go in the future? Could we go big heavy left one? Could we make it? Could we approach it from a different angle that lets us get more payload to different orbits? But you've done that without solving both immediately. And so three to seven tons, I think it's like, what is it,

three tons reusable and seven tons expendable, which is like not that much. No. So I'm curious what they're going to launch there. Yeah. I guess at least it's not small launch. Yeah, you know, small launch, very healthy market. It's not one ton, yeah.

Right. Yeah, you know, a couple times. Makes you wonder, like, and because like, as we've seen with all these kind of rockets, say, well, maybe that's not a right thing to say. But as we've seen with Falcon 9, the engines get better over time, right? Like, didn't Falcon virtually double its payload capacity? Oh, more than that, yeah. Triple it?

Yeah, like, so. If three to seven tons becomes nine to 21 tons later. All right. Now we're talking, right. That's the point. So, yeah. But you're right. It is just cool and they're doing an interesting thing.

And I think there's a, there's a, because SpaceX figured out Falcon 9 so well, there's an easy assumption to make that, well, obviously they thought of Starship. So Starship is the right architecture for all things ever. And I just appreciate that, like, where it probably is. They probably did a lot of good thinking.

They have the best people working there. But also, that's really early in our history of spaceflight to say like, oh, yes, we found the ultimate architecture. Yeah. So I'm glad that anyone else is doing something that could be a viable route. Yeah,

I'm sure someone said the same thing when a steam engine lay down on the tracks. And we went, this is it. We figured it out. Can't get more powerful than that. Yeah, yeah. We'll never have to transport anything differently ever again. So,

there is something too about the if I'm comparing the two right because we're talking the class of full actual reusability or even just upper stage reusability let's just cap it at that because you can quibble on the edges the things that the stoke architecture is good at

or supports better are the things that are the most weird for me to consider in Starship for instance like Starship launching to GTR right? Single launch, putting something up into geosynchronous transfer orbits. So it's a hugely elliptical orbit that they're launching the upper stage into to release the payload. There has been theorization out there, theorizing, is that a word? And I think even some talk from SpaceX about

how they would support that. I don't know if they talked about the fact that they would support it. I don't know if they've talked about the technical solution to that. Yeah. But at least from what, You and I have heard, at least in one conversation I remember, is that, like, launching a GTO and then sort of arrow breaking your way down is a solution they might try with Starship. It just feels like a weird fit, or even Starship launching things interplanetary. So you're sending the whole Starship out there to fly, you know, you're getting to escape velocity, and then you're burning it all off to get back. So those things, though, I mean, the escape one's probably a bad idea for Stoke, because then you're flying your heat shield out there, too. but something like a highly elliptical orbit or launching to an orbit

that's just barely not escaping Earth orbit, right? But then you're set up for like a regular old heat shield and you're not doing the same things that Starship is in the same way and lugging along as much mass with you and I think there's just some interesting differences there in the way that you think about how they would operate

a certain mission that I haven't gotten my head around on the Starship side yet. I mean, on that topic, I still believe pretty strongly that Starship will end up with a third stage of some kind. So I think that's just inevitable. A little kick stage, Star kick. Yeah, something. I mean, maybe they just, you know, either maybe they buy impulse stuff to start and then develop their own thing.

I don't know or what they do. But it just makes sense. Because like, especially if you're like, if they need this many refuelings to like go to the moon, like GTO or GEO at least is like not that much less delta V than a lunar transfer. you know so like they're going to need refuelings to like really do the full mass so it's like okay we'll have to get like a small thing and then it's like oh it's i don't know it just it's interesting you're probably right that it's just impulse and that's why the team that went to make impulse was like well space this isn't building this part of the tech tree we'll go build that thing because we know that like i don't know i could imagine the origin story that they won't tell you is that

like there were a bunch of arguments over pizza and beer late night about the fact that space like should or should not build this thing and they should or should not support this architecture and then it's like I screw it I'm leaving but also I'm going to go through this other thing that I know they're not going to work on yeah exactly now we need the carbon fiber team to do that too yeah I'm still a little bit mistaken the one thing I do like I still am a little bit intrigued by if I had one critique on stoke I think I asked them this when they were on the show is like why didn't they start with the upper stage launched on other people's vehicles I'm always interested in that.

I think Furnical integration, maybe. Was like a thing that they had. Vertical integration. Yeah, but my issue is that the upper stage is this wild approach to things that we haven't seen before, right? With the air spike and the heat shield and whatnot. And like, what if you did get that wrong? And now you've built the whole architecture underneath that.

But then again, that's what we all said about Starship back in the day. Remember mini Starship on Falcon Heavy that that was a thing for like, 10 minutes. Yeah. I mean, the exact same thing was said about reusing the rocket period, right?

Yeah. Are you telling me I'm antiquated dinosaur about this? I'm just saying you've got to unleash your inner capitalist and trust a founder and take a risk, yeah.

Sure. Should we do a future rocket's tier list? Ooh, that's a good one. Yeah, we should. Projections. A vibes-based future rocket tier list. It's like a fantasy football kind of projections show. Offseason fantasy football.

And then we save the file and put it on a server somewhere for like 15 years. And then we come back to it and be like, how do we do? What if we did a rocket fantasy draft every year? We have to exclude Falcon 9, but then we draft the other launch vehicles. And we come up with some scoring system based on how much. Yeah, it's a game. breaker, right? But like, then we come up with some other, yeah, it's like whoever wins the first

pick. But we could do it. Someone could think of a, think of everybody out there. Think of some scoring mechanisms. Is it like payload, a number of launches? You get like some points for number of launches, some points for payload launched. Could you break up? Like could Falcon have been broken up to like Starlink and not Starlink has two,

two rockets? Oh, it's, what if we just exclude Starlink? Or that, yeah. Because I think if you exclude Starlink, it's fairly, it matches. it matches fairly well with the others. Does it? Yeah. Just the number of launches. I mean, you look at the payload list.

It's like every once in a while they have a non-star link launch. That would be interesting. That would be interesting. All right. I'm going to think about that. Yeah. I'm going to make, I'm going to make Chad GPD work on our game in the meantime.

Figure out. Rocket fantasy graph. Fantasy League. Orbital rocket. Yeah. Gakey bit. Yeah. Orbital.

I'm going to put a lot of adjectives on that. How would we get points and score the matches annually? That would be funny, though, because then it's very similar. Like, oh, you know, anomaly with this launch vehicle. Like, that's your, you got like an IR. That's your injury. Yeah. this is great i think we don't i drafted ovechkin and the goddamn broke his ankle like what the

i don't know this could be kind of funny this could be kind of funny hopefully there's enough rockets because it's kind of like okay so here's the scoring category okay i i pick falcon vulcan electron and then i pick electron and then you pick uh what's even out to that All right, so here's the scoring categories is successful orbital launch plus 10 points, partial success slash orbit not achieved plus five points. I don't know about that. Failure vehicle lost minus five. Reflight of a booster plus three. Payload to new orbit type plus four. Crew launch plus 10. Reentry landing success, two points and first launch of a new vehicle plus five points. I don't know, there's something here, Jake. I'm pretty sure we've got a friend in Discord who makes a fake fantasy baseball thing that maybe we could bully him

into making us a fake fantasy rocket launch game. I suppose we could probably make it ourselves too. We could. I think between the two of you, there may be the know-how to build an application. Yeah, so much time available for that, Jake. It's crazy. Okay, that was a dumb little side journey.

All right. Yeah. New idea. Well, you would lose money on your fantasy league for how much your rockets cost, such as Vulcan, that is flying two missions for $428 million. I don't know. Is that really that high, though, for a DoD mission? I mean, we don't know, right? It could be direct-to-geo.

It could be the first beefy Vulcan that flies. Chonk Vulcan. That's a lot, though. It's a lot of money. Yeah. 214, unless it's 300 million and 100 million. It could be, it could be. Which I feel like it's more likely that it's that than equally.

It's hard to do those ones though, just because all the extra weird services, like, what did the, because the SpaceX got the other five, or that what it was? Yeah. What was their average cost? $121 million. $121. Yeah. Okay. Oh no, that was the last time.

143 this time. Yeah. So. Are those all Falcon 9s or is there? No, it's all all Falcon Heavy, isn't it? I thought it was, was it all Falcon Heavy? Like four or five or?

Yeah, it was a lot. Four of the five. Yeah. How do you feel about that as a Falcon Heavy hater? Noted skeptic, Jake Robbins. I'm not a skeptic of Alken heavy. I think it's overrated. There's a difference. I continually have to have that battle. It's a great rocket. It's just, it came in way less useful that everyone said it was going to be.

That's my point. Did we, we grouped that with Falcon 9 on the tier list? I think so. Yeah. But if we didn't, what would you have put it? A? Would you have dropped it a notch from Falcon 9? Hmm. Because this is a new rating. So my. underrated take is irrelevant uh it would be probably like a probably a b a it drops two levels wait wait well no s is the top right a eighth here i'd probably i'd put it in a somewhere a but a to b somewhere in there it gets a little muddy in that area like a lot of a lot of disgruntlement around what we put in the yeah wasn't new glen in a b tier to be that we put it as well yeah so like putting falcon heavy a new glen in the same row doesn't quite feel right

but also putting Falcon Heavy up with like Soyuz and shuttle. I don't know. So I don't know. Maybe it's like a a minus. We'll see. Okay. We'll put that in next time. We're going to do an update to that fairly soon.

Yeah. We'll do it. Yeah. We have plans. All right. So you're unmoved by 200 million to launch. I mean, it's a little high. But again, it's hard to make the judgments.

Inflation. Well, because everyone was comparing it to like, oh, Delta 4 heavy was that price. And it's like, well, no, it was more than that, like significantly more than that. And that was like 10 to 20 years ago. So, you know, it's this is actually like a pretty good. This is still a cost savings, you know, like it's coming in. It's just not being Falcon, which surprises zero people on the planet. How much was, Delta IV Heavy was like 300 million?

I feel like 350 was like kind of the, in my brain, that was the running, the running price for 40 Heavy. inflation adjusted, it'd be like $470 today. So yeah, it's a lot more. Yeah. I mean, I remember a day when there was a directive at SpaceX that they would never sell a Falcon 9 for more than $100 million just because. So we're, we're, those are, they all remember that they like money. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. But, you know. I don't know. But hey, there's another new Glenn out there. There is. How do you feel about this attempt? I mean, I'm excited because it's going to be the only Mars mission that we get to see this decade, I feel like. So that's kind of nice.

Wait a minute. Perseverance was July of 2020, right? So we had that. Are you one of those people counting it as like, oh, but 2021 is the decade? Well, however you want to measure it, there is going to be a roughly 10-year spot. where Escapade is the Mars mission, okay? I have some disgruntlement about the way that this whole Escapade launch window is talked about.

Yeah, it's very weird, right? Because I think they're hiding the ball in this. They're like, New Glenn can uniquely launch this thing, or we figured out what to do with Escapade to launch this not tied to a launch window. When they're launching it, if it's outside of a transfer window, they launch it to a parking orbit where it waits for a transfer window. It's not like launching directly to Mars.

If they go outside, right now I think they're in a, they would transfer right away. But like, the whole idea of like, we could extend for a while, had them launching to some sort of transfer orbit orbit and waiting up there. Like a transfer orbit around Earth or a transfer orbit around the moon? I don't remember which, but it was like, the way it's framed is that like we have such a giant rocket that we can just shoot it to Mars. at any moment. When everybody who's played kerbal is like,

no, you can't. That's not how that works. Well, you can. It just costs an extraordinary amount of fuel. And if they have a payload small, you might be able to pull it off. It gives you a lot more. See, that's what we all say,

and that's what they make you think, but it's not. Yeah. It isn't that, no. So I'm a little disgruntled about it. How do they park it, though? Like, what propulsion are they going to hang on to for a while? Let me look.

Yeah. Let's run this down. I had something I was linking to it at some point. Hold on. Because it's not like, like they're going to put this hydrogen upper stage into Earth orbit for three months? Let me find it. Right?

Is it upper stage hydrogen on New Glenn? So the idea was to launch it in, if they were to launch in August, they would have launched it into a parking orbit until October when Escapade would have done TMI itself. this was like the last launch window when they were talking about it. So I think right is right now are they actually lined up and if they miss it then they will not be. I don't remember. I got to find this link before next time. I'll come with the receipts, I promise.

Yeah, maybe it was more about photon itself, right? Because that's got the rocket lab thing on it too. So maybe that was doing the... I think it's this one. Yeah. I'll find the link. And if you're mad at me, email me and I'll send you the link. Oh, here we go.

It's going to L2. That's what it is. That's what it is. I found it. Okay. Okay, L2. I found it. That's a little better.

I found it. Is it? All right, that's what I want to discuss. Is it better? Okay. Yeah, because you can spend the delta V now to go to L2. So you can burn the hydrogen, which is going to expire. And then from there, you have probably a little bit of kick to get out of there.

So a photon might be able to handle that just fine. right? It's a little better than Earth orbit, you're saying. Oh, yeah. You don't be deep in Earth's gravity well without the New Glenn stage, right? Correct. I would like to you to compare, not that. I would like you to compare, hey, we are able to support bizarre launch windows and what we mean is launching L2, not just waiting around on Earth until we can launch it directly. That's nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this was, we can launch virtually any day this year because they're going to L2 and then when it's time they would leave L2 and then fling out the Mars and arrive mid-2020 the same time if they took a direct trajectory launching when the next window opens in late

2026 so they they launch now go to L2 and wait there and then swing by Earth again to which is cool it's a cool mission I just think the the positioning of it is absolute bullshit that like we've extended the long they make it sound like it's unique to New Gleng because our giant thing, and you do the deep voice when you are making shit up, and we've extended the launch window well beyond what other people will be able. It's like, I could launch any goddamn thing to L2 if you gave me a rocket. Like, that's not a new thing. You didn't figure that out.

Yeah. I think the only logic is Escapade won't get canceled if we launch it to L2. Historically, this would have been accurate. Like, it's out there. It's waiting to fly. They can't cancel us now because we've launched. We're into like the operational phase. We're not in the, you know, they can't put us in a warehouse and tell us.

sorry you missed the bus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's defensible. Yeah, that's kind of baloney. But this, all right, here we go. Here's the other part that makes me in. The same approach could be used for other Mars missions. Can we launch to Mars when the planets are not aligned?

Escapade is paving the way for that. You launch into a parking orbit. You can do anything from a parking orbit? Can I launch to the ISS when I'm not aligned? Yeah, I'll just launch to orbit and wait a while to phase into it. But that's not like, it's not different. I don't know why I'm mad about this, to be honest. It's reasonable.

It's reasonable. Yeah. They make it sound like their power. through the pork chop plot. You know, like, ah, we're, instead of going to the good part, we're blasting through wherever. We're shooting right directly.

We go straight Star Wars style, straight line to Mars, you know, and that's not what it is. Yeah, right through. So, I don't know. All right, I'm with you. Yeah, you got me.

Okay. You're right. That's bad. Again, I think it's cool, but just say it on its own merits, right? It's been. Yeah, don't, don't. I think that's probably what annoys me about,

though, is that it is cool, but talk about it about like, it's cool that we go to L2 and we can do stuff from there. Don't make it sound like you've come up with some absolutely novel

way to launch to Mars outside of launch windows. This is why they picked us. No. Yeah. All right, so if I could propose that, sure.

They picked you because you gave them a very good deal on your brand new untrustable walk ride. Well, hey, the launch part worked really well. It was just the landing.

That was bad. Yeah. we didn't know that though that's true no no they were ready to put it on the first one too so yeah um are you excited about escapade where's your uh you're you got you're you're your mars guy where's your excitement meter at i am it's a good it's a good mission um it's not gonna get the headlines that like other ones did like it's it's not a it's not gonna return us a bunch of like cool pretty pictures the way the reconnaissance reporter does like it's more of like a maven style emission. Like it's going to be a lot of like solar wind and on and atmospheric electrons and all that

kind of stuff. So that the data is not as juicy. Like it's important. It's just not as it's not like Hollywood stuff. Right. So, uh, it's going to go under the radar. No one's going to talk about it. But there'll be some banger talks at a conference in a couple of years for sure. Yeah. I think we should put this on the show list. We should get it. I think we have an escapade hookup, right? I do. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So. Yeah, I could do that. I like the mission name. It's a good mission name.

Escapade. Is it backernamed? I think so, right? Yeah, something. Some terrible thing. Can you remember? No. No?

No, don't look it up. You got to guess. You already. Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer. Too many ends in there. Escape? Yeah. Escape and plasma acceleration and dynamics explorer?

what's the escape referred to? Atmospheric escape, isn't it? It's not like solar wind blowing the electrons out of the atmosphere into space? That is what it says. Yeah, explain atmospheric escape. So they just left the word atmospheric out of the acronym. Yeah, they want to call it aescapade.

Aescapade. That would have been a cooler name, like with a little With a diphthong, yeah What's the little What's that ligature called? The AE thing? Yeah, ligature, not a diphthong. What's the...

What is that one called? I don't know what it's called. Isn't there a specific name for that one? Probably. Probably all of names, right? Yeah. An AE legature also known as Ash? Ash.

Ash. Whatever. I don't know. You think that it's going to stick the landing? New glances. No, no, I don't think so. All right. I mean, I don't have any insight.

It's just odds are, no, I feel like it's more likely that it won't than if they will. Yeah. And they want to reuse this booster to fly Blue Moon very soon. Love, love the optimism. They're saying like Blue Moon. early 2026 would be their thing, right? Hey, didn't you have a prediction about this? This year, right?

Was that your prediction? Yeah, I think I'm, I think it was, they will throw something at the moon this year. Yeah, let me pull it to predictions document. Because I think it was, I think it was initial flight of New Glenn. And then I said, mission one in January, escalated May, and then blue moon in October. so I'm

shifted one mission away. Right. Yeah. You said it flies maybe twice, so you're doing pretty good on this. Look at that. Yep, yep, yep. Pretty good.

If the blue moon thing happens in early 2026, that would be pretty badass. It's pretty good. That's a pretty ambitious target. Yeah. Yeah. Flying that close to Artemis 2 is a good, that's a good vibe.

you know and it also like I don't know why I'm so obsessed with like the the possible like ironic victory that like Blue Origin could could achieve here with this you know it's just that because they're all for just for years as long as we've been doing this it's just been like just constant bitching about Blue Origin and how they never do anything and then like it beats Starship to orbit and now that's the one dude that's the one and it's going to beat the damn thing to the moon. possibly and like all like all these like just like standard debate topics and arguments just evaporate like overnight and it's just I don't even particularly care. It's just very funny to me and it's just fun to watch. Yeah. If you work at Blue Origin, we should have said this last week on the show when we had two people who worked at Blue Origin on the show. But the rallying cry internally to like blue moon to the lunar surface before Starship to orbit has to be the thing that you get behind. Like the entire company should be orienting. around that goal, even if it's, even if this is the capture the flag thing from commercial

crew, which it was like, you know, I mean, you could say like, you know, schedule pressure and whatnot, but that was a, that was a good manifestation of the desire to be first to a very important thing. And there is value in being first. And it doesn't mean you should be like risky about it, but there is an actual value to being the one that did the thing. And, you know, you go you take you take eric burger's article about blue moon being the the skeleton key to like beating china the lunar surface which is effectively the point and you say we landed on the moon before starship got to orbit let alone refueled let alone to you know all that that is the infographic come to light that's the that's the SORA AI prompt of like that infographic to real life is it's 2026 starship hasn't been to orbit yet we've put four four foot pads on the moon. That would be with new glen irony.

The ultimate irony is if the infographic comes true. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, can you imagine? I mean, I don't think we ever said they were just blatantly wrong with some of the things in the infographic. It was just a terrible idea to go about it that way. Yeah.

Well, and then also their architecture ended up having a bunch of refueling anyway, so it's like, right, true. Yeah. Yeah, it would be. it'd be wild man it'd be something to see so I'm rooting for that just purely on the narrative value of that I think it's just fun it's more fun if that happens I think yeah you're probably right yeah there's a there's a single single actor doing all the cool stuff right now thing that I think you and I are both ready to not be the case because yeah it's not healthy in the long term like

we broke the monopoly to have monopoly was never the good scenario here? No. Let's start society over, but I want to be the one with unequal wealth. And that's not, to be clear,

that's not SpaceX's fault, right? That's not, it's not their fault that they're in that situation. Nobody else rose to the occasion. They're just that much of an outlier that they had as a situation.

And no one has come close to matching that. But yeah, Blue Moon touching down in and around the time when Artemis 2 flies is, that's something you go into those congressional hearings and you're like, look at the photos, man. there was US astronauts around or circling past the moon, you know, whatever.

Maria Cantwell was like, I told you so. The Maria Cantwell victory lap on that one. Yeah. It would be something. Yeah. Jeez. If that happens, we should have her on the show. We should.

We should anyway. But that would be interesting. What do you think would be worse off nominal content? An astronaut or current astronaut, active astronaut, or current senator? Yeah. Ooh. I think the astronaut would be worse. I think so too.

Yeah. And the reason to make it clear, we love you astronauts. I think there's at least a few that listen to one or some of our shows. So we love you. But you're not allowed to say interesting. stuff on these shows. You already know what you're going to say. If they get spicy, they get fired.

So, of course, they don't say anything interesting. Whereas if a senator gets spicy, they get headlines. When a senator says it's reelected. Yeah. All right. We've determined. The incentive structures is not there for astronaut and off nominal. Not the right. All right.

If you're a staffer listening to this and you have a connection to a senator you think would be a good candidate for this show. I'm still the guy out here that wants to get Mike Pence on this show. And I don't know. One day I'm going to tell you, I finally figured it out. And he's coming on. And we'll see if you appear on the show with me or not. That's how that's going to work.

Let's see if I show up. I'm on the fence on that one, man. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that one. So we'll see. It would be. That's an interesting scenario to decide whether you want to show up for or not. Because there's a lot of this or that's in there, right?

If he came, could we play the vice presidential song? Like he did when he came out on the stage. I don't know. Are we legally allowed to if he's not the vice president? I'm sure that song's like public domain, right? That was the funniest thing when you did not know that like they get theme songs. This is that IAC 2019 opening ceremony. Mike Pence comes out to speak and Jake looks at me.

He's like, what the hell am I listening to? Like, what is this pompous going on? I was like, that's what happens when he comes in a room. they play this little fanfare. And they bring the podium and the backdrops. No matter where he's speaking from, it always looks the same. They bring a set with him.

Yeah. She's. What a weird thing, man. What a weird thing. We'll see if you come on that show. All right. I think there would be some, there's some content there.

Oh, definitely some content. Yeah. This also lands differently with his history of the last several years than when he was the act of vice president and that was a different story. I think there might be some different political undertones now as him being the guy that did the thing on January 6th and then ousted from

any and all relations to the current administration. Yeah. That's different. Yeah. It'd be a tough one. Oh, real quick. Lightning round on three-eye Atlas, interstellar visitors. Avi Loeb telling us always that it's aliens, Jake. I don't know why we still listen to that guy. What is the point? I know. I wish you would go away. This is why tenure is a bad idea in some cases. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Because he still, like, has legitimate positions in places, right? I mean, I think he's just like a guy with an impressive body of work who's earned his place to say whatever he wants. And it turns out that that's some weird shit. Yeah. I don't know. It's a, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what you say about it. but yeah it's it's tough man like do you think he legitimately thinks it or it's the one thing that he gets notoriety for saying gets reelected for saying it right yeah yeah same exact as your center did yeah uh i don't know dude here's how old is aviobobe old like he's not 50 no 80s oh 63 okay he's

He reads 80s to me when I read him and text. I was, yeah, I was to say if he's 80, this is a different conversation. But I don't know, 63. That's my dad's age. And your dad also thinks this is aliens or? No, but I mean, at my parents' age, they start saying weird shit. Oh, dude, my dad texts me like the Avivode shit, right? He'll like send me like a compelling Instagram video about it.

And I'm like, it's not that. I swear. Compelling Instagram video. Yeah. He sent me this great SORA with it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you weren't listening to the pre-show, Offnob.com slash Discord,

you could get my SORA videos. It's some good content, Jake. I don't know. I don't know what to say about Abilob. It's tough because it's like, in, like, there's so many,

like, red flags on even, like, touching the story, right? Because it's like, okay, like old powerful white guy says,

crazy thing. Okay, the real step back on that. And it's just like, oh, and he's Israel. Oh, shit. Okay.

At Harvard. Yeah. And he's a East Coast Elite and it's aliens and it's like, this is like a Venn diagram of everything that is impossible to talk about with any kind of reason. Like it's like what's your opinion, Abbey Loeb? I don't want to have one, frankly. I just don't want it to be in any way engaged with this. Do you think, you don't think, all right, do you think if you don't have Mike Pence on the show, do you think you could have him on this show and talk to him in the way that you so. greatly did the Mars 1 guy back in the day on Wii Martians?

And trap him? Yeah, I don't know. Not trap him. Just be like, listen, man, right now you're not talking to anybody that you're talking to when you get in those headlines about it. You think it's aliens. Is this actual, like, what's going on here? You really do think this is aliens? Do you think we can have that conversation amongst several thousand space nerds? No, it's, he's always the guy. Yeah. All right. No. And I don't know enough about this. Like, it's not a, What is there to know? It's a rock that came from another place and everyone's going to say it's aliens.

That's the story. Right. But presumably he has some kind of scientific evidence that he thinks is correct to back up. Like he's a scientist, right, at the end of the day. So he's going to be approaching this as a scientist, whether his, you know, his foundational understanding of this is flawed or not. He's still going to be approaching it. You look at it and it's like, it's outgassing weird.

And it's like, because it's a. third one we've seen. Like we don't, this is not, we have, there's not been the, it's been, this podcast is older than the thing as we've just discussed.

So. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's, there's not much to say about it. No. No.

Not aliens. Boring. Boring. Might be aliens. We just don't know. Probably not aliens. Best version is if it was like, aliens hurling comets at us.

Like they don't have a way to fly here, but they can redirects. direct comets and they're like zipping them past us. So it's not aliens, but it is aliens. It's just fancy because they're interstellar and that that sample size is low. But at the end of the day, we've seen thousands of rocks in space and none of them have been aliens. So like that sample size is pretty high. Pretty high. Like I just, I don't know. My take on these rocks is much like my take on the internet. It's like we've always been this dumb. We're now just able to access everyone being this dumb all the time. And it's like these rocks have always been flying past us.

so we just are now noticing them. We're like, oh, shit, what was that? So. Yeah. Yeah. All right. There you have it. We really...

Abby Loeb takes. That's it, man. He'll never come on this show anymore. And apparently I'm making a spin-off podcast of difficult conversations about space that Jake won't do with me. First guest, Mike Pence, second guest, Abby Loeb. Yeah. I'll put it on Rumble or something.

You have time. My dad will be the one listener. Live streaming on... Truth Social. What's the space is called on Truth Social? Do they have them? Do they have them on Macedon? Isn't it just a Macedon instance?

I have no idea. I thought it was Massadon instance. Brutal. That's the worst news I've had all day. All right. I'm going to start hitting these buttons, Jake, because I don't have my hardware things to do. We don't know what we're doing next week yet.

Do we know? No, I don't think we do. It's going to get a little dodgy because we've got some guests moving around. We've got some time off for you and some time off for me and we're pre-recording some stuff

and it's going to get a little weird, but we'll figure out. We have plans to bridge the gap. So that's it. All right, y'all. Bye. Bye, everyone.