Off-Nominal - 218 - How Many Boeing 737s Tall

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Jake and Anthony watch the ESCAPADE launch on New Glenn, and catch up on some other news.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 218 - How Many Boeing 737s Tall - YouTubeReplay: New Glenn Mission NG-2 Webcast - YouTubeNew Glenn launches NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars mission, lands booster - SpaceNewsWhat would a “simplified” Starship plan for the Moon actually look like? - Ars TechnicaIn a stunning comeback, Jared Isaacman is renominated to lead NASA - Ars TechnicaNASA is kind of a mess: Here are the top priorities for a new administrator - Ars TechnicaChina continues assessment of Shenzhou-20 crew return after suspected debris strike - SpaceNewsFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Jake, we are doing it live, man. Here we are. We sure are, yeah, yeah. Discord is normally where we do the pre-show. This is the time that we hang out with our anomalies in Discord. And Discord is off nominal today. They are, they're not.

They're not having a good day. Yeah, and neither is New Glenn so far, just holding on the pads, which is what we thought we'd be doing in the pre-show. So we said, you know what? just take it as a sign that we should just be streamers and just hang out on the internet for an unknown amount of time. So here we are. That's the day.

That's the day, man. You know, it's like mid-afternoon drinks on a weekday. This is life. That is, in fact, the job that we've created for ourselves. We've won. We figured it out. Yeah. So we might watch some Escapade launch.

I got a handful of topics. You got anything? Do you bring anything to the show? Anything you want to call out? As maybe we'll get to in an hour and 20 minutes that we're going to chill. Yes. Let me just pull up my list here. I had a couple topics.

Well, we have a, I think this is the first time we've talked since the official renomination of Jared Isaacman. Correct. So we can go through that. Government's open. That's maybe something there, but I don't know. That might be just a quick drive-by. I drive by.

There's some stuff. We've got some stuff we talk about. Yeah. Excellent. Okay. We got some lunar lander stuff to talk maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I'd love that you're not even commenting on Shenzhou 20 stuck up at Tianan. And that, I guess.

Yeah. Okay. Like they starliner harder than Starliner. But if it's a space debris event, if it's a space debris event, it's not harder than Starliner. That's an external force. Yeah. I mean, if we could track down that it was from like their weather satellite they shot down. Maybe it's not an external force.

But yeah, we got, I got some takes on that. I would like to roll out there. Project Kuiper rebrand? What do you think? Amazon Leo. Yeah. Yeah, we should talk about that. Rocket Lab finally admitting they're not launching Neutron this year.

Finally. Finally. All right. So we got a lot. Good thing we're going live for an hour and 20 minutes. And maybe at some point, theoretically in 10 minutes, Snooen's lifting off. So we're going to do our best icarus and fly as close to the sun as possible

and see if we get DMCA takedown the week after naming an episode about a DMCA takedown. So that would be good if that happened. So if we end up making this the shortest live stream ever, you'll know why. Yeah. Yeah. What are you drinking? We were going to go live and then you were like, hold on, I got to make a thing. Did you make a big fancy drink?

Yeah, yeah. I just got a, I had some fancy mezcal left over for this. week. So I just made a nice little mescalite. Look at that. Tahin on the rim. Look at you. Shook it up properly in the shaker with the... Heck yeah. Did one of these.

Oh, you did a very performative drink shaking? Yeah. I did the two-hander. Mm-hmm. I'm sure the other individuals in your house were loving the display. They always do. It's good. I got a tone wood freshie. This is a delicious beer. not from the Pennsylvania side.

It's from the New Jersey side. You got to start the changeover now. You've got to rep New Jersey beer. I've had a tone wood on the show before, I think. Yeah. Let me go on a short rant about New Jersey. I guess now that we're having a new governor, maybe I can get some change instilled here in the state.

New Jersey breweries are the dumbest rules. New Jersey loves protectionism. I'll say that. We've got stupid rules about car dealerships. We've got, they still pump gas here, and I think has Oregon moved on from that at this point? And we're the only ones left? Well, Mexico, too. Okay, you have attendance down there as well?

The whole country. Yeah. And then, what was I ranting about? Oh, the brewery situation. You can't have food at a brewery in New Jersey. So they have to have, like, food trucks pull up, or you have to be next to a place that has food. It feels so archaic. Can you go to a regular restaurant and get a beer, though?

Oh, yeah, we're not like full-blown weirdos, but... So is the legal difference, like, there's brewing equipment on site? That's the difference? Not even, because there's a, there's like a chain that actually I think is now bankrupt, Iron Hill Brewery. I'm realizing they have brewery equipment in the restaurant. I wonder if they don't sell that beer they brew there at the restaurant, and they're finding some...

Is it performative brewing equipment? I think it might be. In that case, now that I've never realized, I never put these two and two together. I don't know. It's, it's, uh, yeah, protectionism and jug handles. Shout out jug handles. The two things New Jersey loves. I mean, I can make a little bit more of a list, but, um, yeah, it's dumb.

New Jersey brewers are dumb. We'll never do an off-nominal meetup at a New Jersey brewery. On that topic, I'm, uh, in the process of scheduling a off-nominal meetup in the Philadelphia region again. So, it's been too long. If you're in the area, if you are a mid-Atlantic dad of the Discord, if you're somebody who wants to hang out, just hit me up. Be like, I don't know, should we do this pre-holidays? Should we do this in January when everyone's bored? Super Bowl parade.

Just hit me up, you know? Think about it. What's the occasion? You just want to get together? You miss people? Yeah, I just miss the people that, you know. Having had COVID in a while. Actually, I think that has rolled through the family recently.

So, yeah, you just want to get, you know, it's the winter. You might as well just get a bunch of colds. I'll probably be patient zero considering I have two children. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. All-Star Week 2026. Not a bad point. Not a bad point.

Big times in Philadelphia coming up, Jake. I don't know if you know about this. Is 250th anniversary of, I mean, watch it on the Eagles thing. We're seven and two, but it's rough times on the Eagles front. 250th anniversary of your country? of the country and also the World Cup is coming to town and also the MLB All-Star Games coming to town. So Philadelphia is going to be wild. Sporty place. It's a good place. It's a good spot to have a new jersey. Well, I was going to say it's a good spot to not have sold a

house for so many months in the city that you can now probably Airbnb for a ridiculous amount of money over the course of a month. So check back on that in August. All right. Anyway. All right. We got five minutes to New Glenn launching. Do you want, do you have any, do you want to derisively laugh at the delay that happened this week of New Glenn, which was delayed for space weather? For space weather reasons, yeah. Can we talk about this?

Because we've had a lot of rants about the launch here. Yeah, well, I was kind of expecting New Glenn to, through sheer force of will and the power of its incredible stage, to just launch around that. I mean, it seems to be able to launch around Mars windows. so I don't know why space weather is any different, frankly. Just fly outside of the Van Allen belts. Yeah. Just punch through it.

The funny thing is I had some snarky tweet about this, as you do. Maybe that's a redundant sentence. And I got at least a few people responding with a very sciencey answer. Like, well, actually, right? I got well, actually. Instead of just realizing the point I'm making, which is how ironic that a launch got delayed because they didn't want the satellites exposed to the CME, but they're going to sit in an orbit around L2 for a full year,

just getting whatever the sun will throw at it. Now, like, the well, actually, it's when the CME comes through the Van Allen belts and it's supercharged everything and blah, blah, blah, right? Like, I get it. There's probably a reason, but also that's ridiculous. That's a hilarious thing that they've went out of their way to talk about. Yeah. Extra ironic just because this is a mission designed to study that kind of stuff.

Like, if you can't appreciate all the irony, literally a heliophysics. Yeah, yeah, if you cannot appreciate the levels of irony, I don't know what to tell you. That's a really funny. It's so, honestly, Jake, this has a little bit, it has enough, this launch delay has enough of a spirit of whimsy. I might put it on the off-nominee list. I think it's fair. I think it's going on the nomination. Solar weather mission that gets delayed for solar weather, even though it's going to sit in a solar-facing orbit for a full year.

amazing so yeah i don't know i guess i got to get whatever view we're going to watch this launch and going and because we're live early in which i was going to set this up during the pre-show welcome to anthony fiddles with e-cam to yeah for those of you who are are not familiar with the the off nominal pre-show much of the time has spent troubleshooting technical problems like any good launch you're getting a real taste of what it's like to be a premium off nominal subscriber. You get to sit here with us and watch us fumble around with technology and we realize that we're not 25 anymore and we don't really know how to do this very well.

So I don't have to say like that. Yeah. Should I just do this big one? Or do you think this gets us taken down? Should I flip? Should I do a different? Yeah. Maybe maybe do the flippy.

Maybe we have that in the lower corner. Because Anthony, we are the show. So let's just put that in the bottom corner and we'll pay attention to it if it's a flip back to that when it's something really cool looking but let me let me get a different scene going um how do i do that though let's see see look at this yeah getting old look at this you want it in the bottom corner you want like a which button do you know what i'll do this i will oh it's asking for my password let's go okay duplicate current scene there you go i had i had a very like old person moment in that vein because I was um we did a road trip last weekend and I wanted to make sure that I

had my car emergency kit up to snuff because you know we drive around in a developing country and I just want to be a little bit more prepared than you might otherwise be can you give me an insight into what that kit includes well so I wanted to make sure that I was like fully ready to change a tire if I needed to right and so most of the stuff's already included in the car like you get like a tire iron and a jack and all that kind of stuff right but i was like you know what like um i'm in my 40s now and it kind of hurts to kneel down on the road so i got some knee pads and put them in there and some gloves so i didn't have to get my hands dirty and hurt my fingers on the on the thing and you know so that's my old person moment for the knee pads i thought about knee pads since trying to play

like knee hockey when i was 10 you know what i mean yeah so add overlay the overlay button when you need it. Is that the button? Show overlays. Show switcher. Where's the button I'm looking for, Jake? Is that the one? No, that's not the button.

Oh, man, the stream is doing an off-nominal beach scene there. You missed it. Well, I missed it because you're demanding. Oh, here's the button I'm looking for. New screen share overlay. Oh, look at that. Hey. Look at that.

How do you want this, though? You want it right over top of us? No, can you put us back to side by side and put it in the corner? A little inset? Okay, that's different. Just put it over your face. Let's do that.

The less important side. Jesus. Screen overlay. Let's do that. Screen overlay. New screen share. Boink. Look at that.

Should I put it right in the middle of us? Sure. Here I'll put it down. How's this? Oh, there we go. There we go. Find the midpoint. How's that?

Oh, man. You were like 20 seconds ahead of me. got to refresh this. You got to do the 2x thing, right? Yeah. You know what? I'm just going to close it actually and I'll just watch it there and then there's no surprises. I think if I'm not going to do the sound because I assume people are also watching this. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're not, launches in about 10 seconds. So if you want to, if you want to T minus 10. So if you're watching this on replay, where I just said T minus 10 is where you should put it. And then you'll be in real time with our comedy. There you go. You've done that, right?

Oh, yeah. Let's do big screen for actual liftoff. Hey, look at that. Whoa, it's going. That's doing it. I would grab your arm right now if we were in person. It's doing the thing. Give me your arm.

You clutch my chest, yeah. Grab your arm. Man, mock diamonds. There goes. Yeah. Age of methane will be remembered for mock diamonds. There's so much yelling on this stream. That's an unbelievable amount.

Yeah. You don't have the audio? up, you should turn up a little bit. No, that's okay. I just like the dulcet sound of your voice. Real talk. There's a, there's a very starshipian vibe to the shape of New Glenn when you have it on a long distance shot like that. You know? There's like a there's like the, what's that term where all animals evolve into crabs, carcinization or something like that? It's like the same thing. I think Carson adjacent is something about cancer, isn't it? No, it is. It's like car carcassin. That sounds like a thing that would appear in the labels of California products.

You know what I mean? It sounds like cancer, but it is, yeah, carcinization is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan. Okay. You said all things. You said all animals like that we're on the path to being crabs. You told us that we were going to spend time being internet dentists today, and that has to come with a little bit of misinformation to be authentic.

That's a good point. That's a solid point. Yep, you're not wrong. But yeah, so you know, everything's kind of turning into like a Starshipian. That's, it's one of everything's turning into SpaceX, honestly, because it's happening to Falcon 9, too, right? There's like. Yeah. Everything's everything's, everyone's reinventing Falcon 9.

Honestly, launch streams, the design of this launch stream. Same deal. Yeah, totally. You know my take about space websites. It's, it's, it's, although the one thing where, where New Glen or Blue Origin still messing it up is all this goddamn imperial units. Like, what I don't know how it's. high that is like Jesus. That is a really weird decision.

Thousands of feet like come on man, unless you're a pilot, it doesn't mean anything. Like that's it. I know like one altitude in feet, 30,000 feet because it's where the goddamn 737 flies or whatever, right? So in the way that we do like units of football fields and dishwashers, this is units of commercial air travel? How many Boeing 737s tall is this right now?

We're coming up on four here. How many cruising altitudes are we at? What do you think? that? Is that a personal Jeff Bezos decision? That's an interesting question. Jeff, if you're watching, and I know that that's what you have to do right now, please let us know why you decided to allow this to happen. Because whether it's your decision or not, Jeff, the buck stops with you. That's right. How does this not piss you off, Jeff? As a space, a spaceman that you are. Yeah. If you finally come on this show, like we've DMed you several times,

that's the one question you're going to get asked from us. That's critical of what you're doing. I assume there will be no other critical takes of us, Jake, other than he decision to use U.S. units here. Yeah, there we go. She shouted my Twitter handle out on the live stream, so I'm going to use that audio clip. Fucking marketing worked.

Marine engine cutoff. It's going well. Marine engine. Good launch here. Yeah, looks hot. Looks spicy. I don't know what's going on there. 346,219 feet or whatever goddamn thing it is.

Oh, they switch to miles. We're in miles now, Anthony. Obviously, once you make it up to the Carmen line, you switch to miles. Yes, because everyone knows the definition of the Carmen line by feet. That is a weird decision, dude. And like now it's like, What's orbital speed? I don't know.

It just says miles per hour. I'll just, I'll have to just believe them when they tell me. Also, everything being six digits is so weird. That's pretty weird. I didn't notice that until now. That's so odd. Because stage one is never going to make it to five.

That's a bizarre decision. This is, we have opinions, is my other Twitter handle that I need to make. Oh, wow. Okay. Good coverage of this. I'm liking this. I was almost on the topic of New Glenn,

the first launch attempt that they had, I was almost incredibly jealous of my mom who was flying back from Florida on Sunday because she was taking off at the right time that she would have seen this from the air heading north. And then the air traffic control mayhem hit and she sat in the airport

until almost 11 at night. And I was no longer... Almost until the second flight attempt, yeah. Yeah, it was almost... Yeah, that's exactly right. Do you think they're going to stick this, Jake? What do you think? It's looking good.

Man, if they stuck this landing, poof, it's on, baby. I'm getting pumped if they stick this thing. You know, the only horse I have in this game is watching the uncomfortable space fact narrative just play out in real time. Like, I'm just, I just want to. Yeah, I mean, if they land this and this flight,

is this clean, man? I guess SpaceX has already beat them to catch and reuse the first stage though, right? So they can't win that one. They can't win that one. A couple times they did that. Now, it's the moon lander and Mars mission that get me. But then it's all, I don't know. It's annoying because Hera flew by Mars and this is going to L2.

So like, and it's a purlative battle. Neither one. Neither of them won. Yeah, yeah. Live streams though, man, Jesus Christ, this is so much text in the bottom. There's so many unnecessary zeros here. Oh, we switch back to feet.

We're below the Carmen line. You're under the Carmen line. That's the rule. Now, hold on a second. Do they do that on the two Shepard broadcasts? I don't think so. Maybe they will. Maybe the next one we watch.

I haven't watched one in several launches, so maybe they do now. They push a software update to live stream software. If kilometers greater than 100, then units equals miles. Dude. Brilliant. That is absolutely brilliant because that is the logic. That's unbelievable.

If kilometers greater than 100 miles, else feet. In the software, like, they have to refer to the existing altitude. So is the data coming in starting as miles and they go, divide by, divide. by 1.6 if that is greater than 100 than 200. The stupidest magic numbers of all time.

Look at this view. What's going on here, man? Where are they shooting this from? Another boat? Is the plane out? Does anyone know in the chat? If the plane is out today, is the WP 57?

Probably not out. I bet that's not back yet. I know we got the signature from the president, but when does the government... I was going to say, when does everyone come back to work, like, officially? if they didn't quit. They probably quit.

I mean, this is pretty looking, man. And we're still live? Has anyone in the chat right now? Are we still live? We didn't get taken down? Just double checking? I see that we've got people hanging out. We need a wellness check on ourselves.

Have we been a shadow band? Yeah, all right. We got some BR spies chatting it up. That's good. Jake, this is getting close, man. Looking spicy. I mean, they didn't make it to this part last time, right? No, it blew up on the other engine launch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or never relit? No, didn't it like... Did it explode? It didn't a reentry thing? I thought it was reentry. Right, so the burn that already happened. Here we go, Land and Burn.

Oh, shit, dude. I think they're going to stick it. Land and burn ignition. I think this is happening, Jake. That looks good. Oh, man. Three engines through the clouds. Are we going to lose it?

Come on. Ooh, got some audio coming through, too, Jake. You gonna go watch that back. I see a lot of water. I don't see a boat yet. It looks like a lot of water. Oh, there's a boat. I see a boat.

I see landing legs. Oh, shit. A drone view off the boat. Holy crap. Oh, come on. Don't do that. You should have had Starlink on this. Should have used Amazon Leo.

Oh. Buffering. That's the best view of all time. Oh, shit. They did it. Oh, man. Yes. Oh, baby.

It's on. Bro. It's on as hell. That looks soft. Man, so many good angles with terrible latency. I hope we get actual video. Oh, yeah. Oh, God, those landing legs look so tiny.

Perfect. Bullseye. Like dead middle. Dead middle. Oh, yeah. What was that? What just, what happened there? A little bit of sparky.

I don't know. Something flew off one of the landing feet. Sparky bit. Oh, yeah. that was pretty good. Jacqueline, man. Finally got one. I love the flag guy.

Oh, there's two. There's two flag people. Hell yeah. We got ourselves another first stage back. I have a hot take. Give me a hot take. Okay. Do you remember when there was all the Lunarlander legal shenanigans and then, you know,

Maria Cantwell stepped in and like got that legislation that said you got up, you got a book blue. And everyone's like, Oh, yeah. Is it a net good? Did everyone, like, did the second contract, like,

ramp everyone's effort up? Do you think that's what helped New Glenn? Also, very funny comment in the chat for Patrick, that Bezos had a remote champagne bottle pop. Yeah. And just to confirm that he's never coming on the show, there's a statue of his mom on the front of this boat.

Doing the mermaids thing. On the master. He's going to unfollow us on Twitter now. Anyway, so wait, you're saying that... I'm musing. I'm not saying. I'm musing. I'm asking the question.

We play with thoughts on this show. Let's do it. Well, sometimes, you know, governments intervene. And we're always like, but sometimes, maybe it's for the better. Like, I was saying, like, did this, you know, did that, did that contract rile up SpaceX?

And then did SpaceX get around that? Rile up blue or blue origin or some combination of it. You know, they're like, we're in the game now. We got the contract. It's, let's go time. Boom, new CEO. Let's rock and roll. Like, we're doing this now, right?

If it wasn't almost Thanksgiving, 2025, I would agree with your take. But this is, like, this has been a long year. for Newklin. And a successful year, arguably a better year than for Starship, but a long year. Like, this is, I don't know if they got riled.

Okay, all right. I don't know. That's fair. That's fair counter. Although, like, the other thing I can't figure out is why there are so many BE4s piling up at the ULA factory.

There are like 800 B.E4s at this factory. There's 30. there's 30 30's a lot like 15 Vulcans when do they're going to be 15 volts when do you think the last engine in that set will fly

look I think 2030 they're going to they're going to watch they're going to hockey stick next year we promise I don't know I think there's

I think the blue moon side is riled separate I don't think New Glenn really had any I think I believe your storyline but about blue moon people.

Because now I think they have a good path towards we can... I don't know, I guess it depends on what the blue moon that's about the fly looks like. Yeah. Because assuming this doesn't tip over on the way home, they get this booster back. They want to use this booster to fly blue moon.

If that's like a really good spaceship and also sticks to landing, then I'm buying your storyline. I'm provisionally buying your storyline, I guess, now that I'm talking myself into it. Okay. This is good, man. It's a good mission right there.

It's a win. It's a win for blue, but also a win for everyone because, like, I don't know. I'm even just thinking like, Elon's watching this. And he's thinking something. Something's going through his head. Fucking finally, probably what he's saying. Maybe. Maybe.

Yeah. Maybe he's like, whatever. It doesn't matter. This is like already, this is just big falcon. We're like 10 generations. Like, whatever you think. whatever, but he's thinking something. He's watching it and he's thinking something.

Yeah, it matters for sure. I just wonder what it's going to do, you know? We've been saying for so long that we need a good competitor. Yeah, we do. This feels like a day that moves us closer to that. Yeah, though, I'm arguably like, I think the more interesting aspect that New Glenn is pushing on is the non-commercial side of the SpaceX endeavors.

like the lunar stuff, the commercial space station side of things, stuff that isn't just launching communication satellites up or Kuiper satellites or whatever, right? The impetus that it provides, like if this didn't happen and Blue Moon wasn't flying in quarter one, I don't think SpaceX feels any threat by the we're going to open up the contract to Artemis 3. but the fact that this is flying now sticking the landing and blue moon's coming up in like three or four months, I think that they have to respond to that. Yeah. But like does this change the commercial launch industry?

Probably not. No. Not yet. They'd have to get their flight right up and their price pretty far down. And I don't know if they're there yet. That's the, this is your, this is your, the time between flight two and three matters. Well, here we go. Let's do that.

Yeah, this is it. Also, Jake, this was a $20 million. the launch. So how much came out of the pockets of everyone else? I don't know. Price $20 million. Cost $1.7 billion.

It's a development flight. I guess they separated the vehicles, but they're not showing us that. I don't know. Do we have an altitude? How many furlongs? Less than 100 miles. So that is a V-Leo orbit. But no wonder they were, this would explain actually why they, did we know this is where it was deploying? Because if this is where they were always going to deploy, then it makes sense that they delayed for space weather.

Because remember the time that an entire train of Starlings got sunk by a geomagnosed thing. Something is funny about this. I don't know. What orbit are they in? I have some questions. I can't read the numbers on the screen. How high are they right now? That's not the one I wanted.

99 miles, Jesus Christ. Screen, just us. 99 miles. 60 kilometers? Less than 17,000 miles an hour. Good question in the chat, though. Is that ground speed or is that? Orbital speed?

It's probably ground speed because of how stupid the rest of this live stream stuff is. Right. Yeah, probably. And the altitude is above mean C level of Washington State or something crazy. Oh, separation should be at, so what was that? SICO 1 they were cheering about. Separation should be at 33 minutes, PR spies.

I hope that's what your username is, by the way, BR spies. That's how I read in my head. Is it, do you bake? Are you BRS pies? That's a question I have for you. Oh, GS second burn. Okay. Second burn is still happening.

I thought they said something about separation. and I did not know what they said. All my questions are answered. B are spees. Spees. Spees. Unexper. Oh, no.

That, oh, I can't do that. Ruined. Jake, can we continue our conversation there for a second and talk about our boy Eric Burger with the, what would a simplified starship HLS system look like? Yes. Let's talk about this. We can definitely talk. talk about that.

So he, Eric Berger, noted journalist, wrote this article, what would a simplified starship plan for the moon actually look like, right? And this was, the thing I find most interesting, which is what does SpaceX do to respond to the Artemis 3 recompete thing? Have you spent any time thinking about this? Not this article in particular, but just, like, how would you tweak the starship methodology if you had to? Not a lot because I don't actually don't think there's a lot of options. I mean, I think Eric's got it covered pretty well there, right? Because he's talking about like you got to get rid of refueling and reuse,

which are the two hardest parts about that. So if you're just like expending a bunch of starships, then like you have to fly fewer of them to do the refueling. You don't have to worry about, you know, like it's, everything gets so much easier if you do that. It gets more expensive, but it gets easier. And so that's like the only thing I've really pondered because I refuse to entertain the dragon nonsense. So, okay, that's somewhat partially offensive to me for reasons. So here's the thing, but the dragon, the dragon aspect to talk about what Jake's saying is part of this article is

about what if SpaceX uses expendable tankers to increase the amount of propellant that they can transfer to the depot because you don't have to fly the heat shield and the fins and whatnot and you don't have to save propellant for landing. So you can transfer more up, cut the amount of flights down. Then the other side was SpaceX doing this without SLS Orion by flying, you know, there's a chain of events that have to happen, but effectively flying a dragon up to meet HLS in orbit, then flying that to the moon, flying back, taking dragon back home. the only reason I think that one is in the cards is because SpaceX is

personally offended by this whole maneuver by NASA so the best FU card that they could throw back at them is the way to simplify this is cut your shit out of this so I don't know that at a functional mission planning level it is simpler but it is a thing that okay actually here's one here's one reason that I think it's not in this article that I would like to state um

Eric mentions the fact that this flying dragging up the HLS would remove the need to go to NRHO, the near rectilinear halo orbit, which that requirement brings a long loiter time to Starship. It has to be there for three months because of how Orion launches.

The other aspect though, Jake, is if you take SLS Orion out of this manifest or out of this mission plan, an enormous amount of the calendar opens up to you. Because NRHO limits you to certain launch windows, and SLS

because of its mechanisms, limits you to an even fewer number of launch windows. So the crossover between NRHO and SLS is like a ridiculous calendar. It's got awful. I did an entire podcast on this, yeah. So if you're flying dragon up to HLS, guess what your launch window is? Yeah.

Any launch window. Because then you just fly. As the moon should be, yeah. Yeah, you just fly from orbit to the moon. You don't even have to stop in lunar orbit if you don't want to. You could just put yourself on an impact trajectory. The worst delay you should have should be one, cost of one orbit of time should be like 90 minutes. That's the, that is the absolute worst

like inefficiency you should have on a lunar transport. Yeah. So I do think that simplifies it though. I think I think you're underselling the simplification. Well, let me, simplifying the mission to beat the Chinese to the lunar surface, you also got to look at the calendar side of it. Yes. Technically, from a technical standpoint, it is a much better. If you, Any solution that removes SLS and Orion from the equation is a technically superior solution. Let's just be clear about that. You could present Starliner takes it up to Starship and it's a technically more feasible solution.

Okay. Only star named things. Yeah. And that may be a more politically feasible one because Boeing is to have a piece still. Like let's, we should talk about that. That would be incredible. What do you do with the Boeing Starliner missions that you're not using on the ISS? Fly them on Starship Aeselets is an incredible.

incredible theory. Oh my God. That is checkmate, bitches. Like, that's an amazing move. Holy shit, Jake.

But I have two big problems with the dragon thing, though. So one, like I said, it is politically non-starter, I think. I just think there's no, there's no way anyone entertains that. Even with the threat of China,

the threat of, of being. Red China, Jake. Being second to second. So, And the other thing is I just I don't I don't love the idea of investing a single dollar in what is virtually a dead end technology of Dragon like because it's going to need a little bit of work to work you know like it you got to do something with it's got to have whatever new software

new docking stuff I don't know but it needs some some kind of work and I'm just like that is wasted money and I just like I don't care enough about beating China that any of this makes any sense to me. Like I just, that is such a waste of time. It is like for all the wrong reasons for me. And I'm just like, sorry, you got to, you got to really win me over. Like any any new change to this plan needs to just be like better in the long run for everything. Otherwise, like, this is what we got. And until you guys can wean yourselves off of that SLS contract, then that's what's there. Okay, a separate topic from the dragon aspect is the tanker and depot thing.

And I think I was almost here in my head, but shout out to the person who may or may not want to be named about this, you know who you are, who helped me fully embrace this thinking, is how many launches does it take to get HLS fully fueled to go to the moon? Don't worry about it. because the idea is once you start flying a depot, SpaceX is always going to keep it topped up. And they're just going to, they're not going to launch a thing and launch exactly as much fuel as they need for that thing. They're just going to keep a fully fueled gas station.

Build the infrastructure. Yeah. And just at any moment, there's a starship taking fuel up to the depot. So like, that's a good point. It's not launch HLS, check it out,

then fuel a depot and dock the depot. It's just continue, make the number one job of, of Starship is make sure that Depot always has a full tank of gas. And then, and I, I, I, I am coming around to embracing that idea of like, you don't, you literally don't think about it. And it might be incalculable. How many, how many Starship launches does it take to fly HLS to the room?

I have no idea. All I know is there's a fully filled Depot at all times for me. I'm laughing because there's like a super niche discussion here that you can't have with me because you're not playing that stupid video game factorial that I am still obsessed with. Okay. Play it out for those that listen. I know a massive amount of our audience likes that game. Yeah. If you're a factorial player, you will recognize this strategy because it's, there's, there's a assembly, you know, assembly supply chain you have to build with stuff that spoils. And so the stuff like rots on the, on the conveyor belts. And so you have to like be fast at it.

And it gets really difficult because all your strategies of like trying to store stuff up just like falls apart because the stuff just turns into mush like and whatever. And so eventually you realize that you just produce, you overproduce more. than you need and you just flow it and at the end of the belt you just burn what you don't use and that way there's just always stuff going and you never have to worry about it's spoiling because it's there and you just grab it when you need it and the stuff that gets wasted it's fine don't worry about it it just it's a river not a not a supply cache right it's just always there so yeah yeah um update from the chat i was wondering if this is what it was they weld the legs to the drone ship they have charges that do it shut up that's cool so no octo

auto welding, that's really cool. Weld on contact. But how does it... I got questions about that, because it could land 10 centimeters to the left. So are the welders on the legs? I think they're on the legs, is the point, yeah.

I thought that's what was happening, because if you... I can stroll this back while we're waiting for... Oh, they're about to do SICO too, I guess, Jake. I should throw the stream back up in case. What happens. Let's do that, and then we'll... Then we'll do the other thing.

Seco. All right. We're getting called out. Who's getting called out? Us. For what? All our, enamoring about whatever stupid stuff

when this burns. Who's calling us out? Oh, in our private chat. Oh, we are? In the Discord, we're getting called out. For what? What did we say that was so dumb? Nothing.

We're just talking over a second bird. Whatever. That's why you go watch the stream on your own. Keep that running. That's your job. Keep your other stream. the show. I'm not getting

DMC take down for SICO 2. Come on. We're going to have two DMC take down episode titles in a row. DMCA takedown for... No, no, no.

Our title is definitely if KM greater than 100 than Miles else feet. If Miles times 1.612 or whatever greater than 100. Oh, this answers it. They got a patent for it.

I stopped thinking about Blue Origin patents seven years ago or whatever that was. I don't want to think about that anymore. What was I going to pull up right before this? I was going to pull something up. Landing leg auto welder. No, that wasn't. Oh, I was going to scroll back in time to see that part of the, of the, yeah, there we go.

Watch the explosions that happen off the tips of the feet, Jake. Looks fairly awesome. Right here. It was somewhere around here. Yeah, it'll happen. It'll happen. There it is. Bam- Bam. Yeah, that's cool.

I mean, I guess all you need is like a little spike of electricity, right? Was it just on three of them? Kind of looked like it was just on the... Yeah, it wasn't all of them, right? Like it was the front, right, front left, and probably one on the back? Yeah, maybe. That's cool. All right, so it won't fall over.

Well, if it worked, right? We don't know for sure that it worked. Yeah. Could be a shitty auto welder, yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Good stuff. Loving this.

Okay. So you're, how are you doing about adopting this thinking of don't worry about how many launches? I'm 100% on board. Yeah. You instantly won me over. Yeah. And it was this one text the other night that I was like, oh yeah. I got it.

I get it. And then they just increase the amount of depots they need depending on it. They just scale that up too. Yeah. And then something else in that. article now made sense there was a a quote from a it was attributed to a senior SpaceX source who said you don't yet understand how many Starship launches will happen so that combined with don't worry about it just always have a fuel depot whereas the resting state of Falcon 9 is

launched Starlink's the resting state of Starship is just keep launching fuel like one of these is going a day if we've got a payload fly the payload if we don't fly fuel maybe that's the system you know what I wonder okay here's a there's an open question let us let us let us muse let's do some math without any numbers because they're not those people um I'm gonna pull up chat T and say that and you can no it's not gonna know either is a starlink is a starship starlink launch okay volume limited or mass limited I'm gonna guess volume well maybe that Caleb would know this is interesting if if it is volume limited, does every Starlink launch deploy the payload and then whip over to the

depot and unload whatever margin it has and then come home? That sounds accurate. And I was thinking about saying that when we were talking about the fuel. But, um, I mean, keep some for landing, but, you know, if it's enough, you, you know, you send up your initial tankers to fill it up, fill up your depot, and then you have boil off. you have to deal with. Does the Starlink launches have enough if they drop off 3% of their fuel, everyone to just keep that thing topped off, right?

That's an interesting question. I think you might be right, dude. It's both. So the resting state is both launch Starlink's and fuel. The only problem is the planes are probably not going to line up, right? Well, if you're John Goff, you have one in every plane. I would put a link in the show notes. Well, you can have a deep one every plane.

plane, but where is HLS going to go? It's not going to go to every plane, right? So it's going to go to the one that gets you to the moon. But actually, like, maybe that is the same as the Starlink plane. Yeah, if you have enough. If you do the Insight thing, right? Insight went to a polar. You're going to the poles in the moon anyway.

You're going to NRHO. Did we just crack it? I think we got it. I think we're on it deep in this internet denizen stream. apparently per chat tp t bt elon has tweeted that it is volume limited um right all right so my guess was correct so or rather Elon agrees with my guess that doesn't mean it's correct well some may wrap an article around that and some may not yeah yeah so we're saying about misinformation.

You were going to say a senior SpaceX source. A senior SpaceX source. What did you used to refer to Elon as as your? Yes. Chief Engineer of SpaceX. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was that like a full year where you didn't say the name Elon Musk just to see if anyone have noticed.

I called him Chief Engineer of Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX. That's what I call him. Which is an uncomfy space fact because it is very true. He is the chief engineer self-titled and she runs the company. Great point. Great point. All right. We've got New Glenn doing its thing, Escapade doing its thing.

Last time we checked, you were not that into the Escapade mission. Like you were fine with it, but wasn't exciting you as a Mars man? No, it excites me as a Mars man. But my point was that it's, It's not going to get a lot of headlines because it's not very flashy. Because it doesn't send back close up 4K pictures of rocks on the surface, you know? Or life, yeah. Yeah, it's not going to find life.

So I think my quote was you're not going to hear a lot about it. But in a few years, there's going to be a banger talk at LPSC from Robillus on the finding. It's going to be great. If it still exists, geez, man. If it doesn't get blown out of the sky by solar winds. I mean, LPSC. Oh, yeah, or that. Isn't that?

A little bit dodgy these days? In rogue LPSC. Yeah. Which has to move. Oh my God. That joke makes sense to four people, dude. There's no way people remember that. It has to get moved to some sanctuary city somewhere.

We'll see. Oh, my God. If they don't deport the head of LPSC for ICE as an arrest her. Incredible. Yeah. It looks like these escapators, are out of there. They've completed their separation, Jake.

There's an empty payload adapter. And there's some blue test payload on this too. That was something I learned. Was it a Viasat thing or something? What was it? Or Viasat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Viasat.

Yeah. All right. Good stuff. Good stuff. They used the wrong land and ocean color in their globe. I was looking at that, where is this? I thought that was Spain.

I thought that was Spain, that little, when it was super zoomed in. I was like, oh, that thing in the bottom right must be Spain, you know? And then it was the area between Madagascar and Africa. What's that called? That's got to have a name. The area between Madagascar and that. Oh, what's this little Roomba thing? Checking on the welds?

Does that have a tail? It does like a dinosaur? I think it's maybe a cable. A boat bot. A boat bot. What's it doing? They're probably talking about it right now. We need some sort of horrible R-Spacex name for this.

It's got to be like Goober Boy or some stupid. It's going to be named after Bezos' dad, I think. It's mini-jacklin. Jackie. Jacquelineita. Oh, look, it's doing stuff. Look at this thing. This is awesome.

It feels like battle bots, dude. Like, just about to have a buzzsaw that, like, cuts into something else. Oh, man. This is a silly show we're doing today. I love this. It's good. I love this, man. I got to upgrade that Amazon Leo base station there.

That's for sure. I mean, I got a ton of content for Marine Engine Cut Off today. So I'm feeling good about that. You did. You did get a lot of Marine Engine cutoff. All right. So, Genjo 20, dude. what's happening on this?

Have you followed this storyline at all with Tyeongg? Barely, but... As much as possible with the amount of info we get out of Tyeonggong. Space debris hits this thing. They can't come home? Yep. It seems like they're going to send home. I mean, this was this, which Soyuz was this?

What? Remember there was like... Which Soyuz? Remember there was a Soyuz. There was a progress that had a leak and then a Soyuz that had a leak and they said it was space to bring, even though it was the same leak as the other one. It was definitely not space to bring. Right, right, right. But then they sent one home uncrewed and sent the other one up.

Let's see. Someone will remember. Stranded. Stranded. Astronauts stranded. In this case, though, like it's more accurate than the last time. Slightly more accurate. Yeah.

Soyous. MS something or other. This was three years ago. Oh my God, that was three years ago. MS-22 was the one that was leaking. Do you remember this? I remember, yeah, I don't remember the numbers, but yes, I remember that happening.

I thought there's a video of it somewhere, but... So here's the thing with Tyeongg that I've mystified, and maybe this story will shed more light. if you follow along, I do another little podcast for the paid Miko people called Headlines in which I talk about all the things going on in space and I like to have a little ISS update

and a little Tunggong update when I can. And every EVA that they've done at Tunggong has been adding orbital debris shielding to the space station. Like every single one. That's all they do. It's been tens of it, right? Which made me like, did they launch it

without the shielding? Or yeah, did they do? Did they characterize their orbit after the case? And even they were like, oh, this is a rough, a rough spot for the space station. So they've just continued to add. Yeah. I don't know. It just, I've, and it's been a thing I've joked about on the show.

I was like, did they launch this half built and then put the shielding on afterwards? And now I'm like, are these unrelated? These can't be unrelated. It's a real. Oh, man. I'm just thinking of the, um, why can I think of the name now? now. Oh, you're going to kill me. The Saturn space station. Skylab. Skylab. Yeah. There's too many star. We've been live an hour. So this is usually what we're dropping at the

show. Star Skylink lab blur liner. Um, I can't keep them all up your, your chart. Dude, you're the one that made a Venn diagram. I know, right. I made that because I'm getting old. Uh, no. So that would have been a real move for them adding the, adding outside bits after. after the fact I'm just I'm kind of intrigued by this so we have to assume that it either hit the parachutes

or they think it impacted the heat shield yeah right because if it was if it depressurized they would have a problem on the station unless they've sealed off the hatch and didn't tell us

which maybe they did anyway I don't know but they didn't immediately kick this thing off the space station they are like planning to return this and then launch so they have The good thing is they had the next vehicle available.

This is their system. They always have the next crew vehicle waiting when the first crew launches. So they do have a good backup. Crew that's been up there a while on Shenjo. So the Shenjo 20 crew is going to launch or going to return on the Shenjo 21 spacecraft. And then they would launch an uncrewed Shenjo 22 spacecraft for the Shenjo 21 crew. Right. Yeah.

You send up a spare. Yeah. and the only limiting thing is if they have the Shenjo 23 spacecraft ready in time to launch the 22 because they want to have that. They want to have a backup. Yeah. I don't know.

I'm just very curious. I mean, the problem is we'll never hear any of this detail, but the fact that they've done so many EVAs about the breeze shielding and then they've got an issue where spacecraft comes back and it's not in an entirely different orbit than the ISS. You know, it's, it's, similar altitude. Yeah, different inclination.

I wonder if there's... But why would that... This is 386 by 391, right? Or is that... Yeah. According to the... 41 degree inclination. The 2013 blockbuster at gravity,

they're pretty close to each other, so... Just a fire hydrant away, or a fire extinguisher away. Didn't she fly on a fire extinguisher? Yeah. That's where the Martian got the idea for the little... You just point the fire extinguisher at the station you were at and put your back to the station you want to be at.

Space travel's never been to see. Boom. I hated that movie so much, Jake. We've talked about this, right? Looked good, though. Beautiful. But have we talked about this? I'm sure we have.

There's a zero percent chance that in 200 and whatever 18 episodes, we have not discussed the 2013 Nearly 10 years of friendship starring Sandra Bullock. A movie I hate so much, I bring it up all the time that we haven't talked about it in almost 10 years. You're right. When we talk almost exclusively about space.

We've probably talked about, have we talked about this? Well, probably in our shitty movie episode that we did. Yeah, there's no way to capture episodes. I hated that movie so much that everyone knew it at the time that I got gifted that movie on iTunes from people that I worked with. And I was like, that's a good troll. That's very good.

So it's in my, to this day, it's in my like purchased movies history, you know. So that's annoying. All right, that's our Shenjo 20 take. Let me scroll through these browser tabs. We've got some other stuff going on. What take is there? It's like, yep, it's China. No, I just want to know about this debris.

Like, why have they done so much debris shielding? And then, you know, it's crazy. Maybe, maybe your theory about, about them getting stuck in low Earth orbit's not going to come true because the thing's going to get blasted in a space. Oh, they're going to bail on it? Yeah. Yeah. I still feel like, so I don't know, I'm very confused about the readiness and timeline of the Chinese lunar program.

Are they going to do both at once? Well, I don't know. I mean, they can. Like, we always talk about that with NASA. They're like, well, are they going to do the moon program and also a space station and also a gateway and also where they can't you have to pick one. It's a it's a, you know, a zero sum budget. You get one thing, NASA. And that's just the way it's always been and the way it's always going to be because we're broke and we ain't got any money left over for your shenanigans.

Like that's always how we talk about it. But it's like, dude, a large economy like the United States or China can absolutely do. few programs at once. They just need to decide that they want to. You're right. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean,

you guys just invented a golden dome program that is like 20 NASA's and just pull out your assholes. So like, yes, China can do it. All right. If they want. Speaking of what NASA should do,

Jared Eisenman is back, baby. He's back. Didn't, I was, I will, uh, We like to be honest on this show.

I will come on and I'm going to go one shot. I was wrong. I didn't believe any of this. I did not believe any of this was ever come to come to fruition. I have totally wrong and I'm happy to be wrong. So there you have it, Jake. You got a hat nearby you can eat? Yeah, let me go.

I got an agile space hat behind me. I can eat that. Do you have a Shift 4 hat you can eat? There, somebody clipped this. Jeez. Yeah, I thought this was no way this was happening. Tis a fickle thing, your executive branch these days. Shifting sands.

Props to Isaacman, man. Yeah, he, yeah. This reinforces my, you know, during the first trumpet, man, you remember when they were out of like a big beef with Amazon? I can't remember what it was about. Tariffs, probably. First one was probably like Jedi or something, right? Like cloud computing thing.

maybe yeah but anyway there were him and you know trump and basil were having a fight and i always laughed at it because you know because trauma can be like oh i'm going to this to you they do this to you and jeff basil can be like i will be here i was here before you i'll be here while you're in the white house and i'll be here after you're dead because i'm not in elected position like do whatever you got to do man and i will outlast you like 100% every time you and i feel like we're seeing a little bit of that with uh isaic man playing the long game even a political position. He just knows. It's like, look, man, I'm just going to keep doing my thing and consistency. There has been some reporting in the non-space press that he's, that he is,

like I theorize at one point, tighter with the J.D. Vance crew, like the younger crew at the White House, right? So. Makes sense. Yeah. Maybe he does have this theory that, like, well, if it, if he won the next time, maybe I could just keep being NASA admin. Yeah, it could be. I just find it so unlikely right now that I would believe that it will be another 20 years before we have like another two-term president in the country. Yeah, that's probably a pretty good prediction. Yeah. Like just boom, boom, boom, back and forth. Is there a calci prediction on that? Probably, but I don't do calci odds that are that far away. I like doing quick like things I know are going to happen or not. Yeah. I only like, I only take a sure deal. Yeah, I don't have that much of a

problem, Jake. bet a couple of bucks on the Thursday and football game tonight, but I don't have that problem that I'm betting like, will SpaceX land humans by 2035 on Mars? I'm like, you just want to float the interest on my $4 that I'm going to bet on this thing between now and that. Yeah. No, but I mean, I, so I

understand if Jared is saying like, let me angle for being the NASA administrator for 10 years, but I also at the same time just look around and I'm like, I don't think anyone's going to win back-to-back elections for several more elections. But he could get six years.

You think, why? Are you invalidating my theory because it might be a Trump and then J.D. Vance win? Is that we're saying? Sure. Yeah, it could be. See, I just find that also unlikely. I don't know. You think you think back-to-back same parties on the-huh?

Yeah, I think we're like in an era where it's just going to be back, back, back and forth, back and forth. Yeah, it could be. And then everyone's like, oh, well, he's so liked across the political spectrum, maybe they'll keep him on. I'm like, that's some unity ticket bullshit thinking that we'll never go to pass. What if Joe Lieberman ran with whoever the hell, who was like the last person that was theorized as unity ticket? I don't know. Who was the Joe, anyone in the chat? Who was the Joe Lieberman Unity ticket with?

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if he gets confirmed before the years up, that is a better situation than I thought he was going to be forced into. Yeah. Because he could be there in time to do the next budget. Yeah. But your theory of whether he's planning for two or six or ten years,

though I don't know if it's even like it even matters like I think I think he he has to be the kind of person that thinks bigger than that he's like he's got to hedge his bets he's going to be like here's what's going to happen I'll either win two or four or six or ten or whatever all of those outcomes are good for me no matter when I leave this role I will be well positioned to execute whatever space vision I have at that time because I will have NASA I will be at forever having my byline former NASA administrator Jared Isaacman and CEO of Isaac in space is landing the first private mission on the moon or whatever stupid thing it's going to be. He'll be able to do it. It's a win, win, win, win. Stop saying it's stupid. There's

a very likely chance that this man commissions the first podcast live from space and it's us. So that's not out of the cards yet, man. So pump the brakes on that. We burnt our Bezos connection on this show. Let's not burn Isaac. I'm trying to give him a compliment. I'm trying to say that this guy has played it very well and he's going to be well positioned. Yeah, I think my, the only the only pushback I give you is that like is the NASA administrative role as valuable in that case as it has been. I think historically

it was but I don't know he's How many boards is Jim Brydenstein on? Like the guy is so many that you forgot how to pronounce his name I guess. What did I say? Brydenstein. He can be Steen. He's uh, I think we're

on the outs with him anyway and so you know, screw it. Steen. Breedensteen. Yeah. Breden Bredenstein Bredenstyn. Bredenstin.

Yeah, but he's different, man. I'm just saying that that just gets you in the door. It gets you into so many doors. You could just call up Lockheed Martin and be like, oh, Jared Eisenman calling and he wants to have a meeting. But I think he was already like that.

That's the thing. You might have been, I don't know, but this helps. Yeah. As we've seen, with this class of people, it's never enough. Right. Yeah. I don't know, man. I think it would be really cool.

I'm just curious I'm curious like you know if you were given if he has he should operate like he's got two years right whatever he gets in

just figure you've got two years what things do you think prioritizing that versus like a four year term is different what can you make stick in those two years what things do you want to teach the organization what and the biggest thing

that I'm seeing Jake is that no matter what right you can have and everyone does that listen to show. I know we've got a huge diversity of political thought on this. But the situation that he's rolling into

is that you've lost a quarter of NASA and you have the same budget. And I know there's a lot of costs that aren't just people, but losing a quarter of NASA and getting your budget slapped by a quarter, at least was math that tracked. Like, all right, you know,

maybe we have to drop a couple of buildings of rent because people are less expensive than rent in certain areas or whatever, but what do you do, given that your people cost has gone down by that much and your budget is where it is, how do you prioritize that? That's easy. That's easy. That's just, you just give up more contracts. Like that's, that is, and that's what they want, right? They want to move stuff to private industry. So if you've lost

a quarter of your people. But that should be cheaper. That should be cheaper because of the overhead numbers on these things. But you can do more. You can do more. Yeah. So you book more, more flights of the ISS. You book more space stations. You book more and you just have a lot of people build them. And that's how it goes, right? I mean, NASA has always... What other stuff can you make stick? And to be clear, like, what percentage of NASA's budget do you think was actual NASA on-staff employees? It's not 100%.

That's the part I can never figure out, dude. It's probably not 50%. But how much money does the Orion program get a year and how much makes it to Lockheed and what happens with the amount that doesn't? That's the thing I can never figure out. And no one's really ever been able to explain to any of us. this thing got delayed five years and we're flying the same damn mission next time and what happened with the $5 billion in between?

It just goes to contractors, man. Just like they contract and subcontract and subcontract like NASA actually doesn't have I don't think. In the grand scheme of things like you don't look at $20 billion ago they have $20 billion of staff. They do not. I have a ton of short term employees.

Sometimes they directly contract it. We're going to hire these 100 people to go. The flight controllers are contract. Whatever. Everyone's contract, man. It's like it's wild. So the gig economy hit NASA hard, you know? Yeah.

Well, it always has, right? Well, it made sense because they were, they were, they were not, you know, they're not part of furloughs and whatnot. So. Yeah. I'm kind of see if there's like some easy numbers that I can like search on this. What does chat GPT say? Look at that. A number of full time. It was only a couple thousand.

Tens, low tens. No, I just mean like, you know, if NASA, a, uh, employees a thousand people how many of them are employees and how many them are contractors or whatever right and i think i think it's like two to one three to one maybe four to one like it's a pretty high number right because so because you're saying when these articles are out there saying four thousand people left that's like 20 to 25 percent of the agency you're saying the the real workforce maybe 16 but yeah because they hire so many i got you yeah i got you so i i actually doesn't change the numbers that much it just looks good on a bill

If you're a hawk, a budget hawk, it looks good in a bill. Huh. That's weird, man. I don't know. What are you most interested to see how he handles as the NASA administrator? I mean, the perennial, can you do anything with SLS or Ryan? It's always kind of an interesting one. How do you feel about the nuclear propulsion thing?

I like that. I think that is that is somewhere that NASA should have always been playing in. And I'm happy to see more of that. Because that's just, that's like not one of those things that, you know, there's not going to be some nuclear propulsion startup. It's just not going to happen.

Like it's not any, any investor where the salts can even tell you like, it's a regentory trap, get out. Like it's just, right. Just don't even, don't even do it.

So like, you'll never ever see innovation in that space in the private sector. So I think that is a. And it's the perfect project to shift the SLS focus too for those centers. Yes. He's aiming it at those centers. It helps. And then as Marshall, like, you know, that's just, just meat for them. So that's good. So I fully support that.

Yeah. I think I'm more questioning of like the utility of getting the nuclear propulsion deployed in a mission. And I think I see it more as a really good play politically and management wise. Well, but like, who cares? Like it, one of two things happen. Like you develop a great propulsion that works awesome and you use it and do a bunch of stuff with it. Or you find out that, hey, new good. actually isn't that good. And now we can move on to other things. And the private industry doesn't have to waste their time with it, right? Right. Like, those are both, that's what NASA's for. And maybe even better, Jake, is that it takes 20 years to get to the point where you would use it.

And by then, you've got an infrastructure in place in which it actually helps a lot. Maybe. It shouldn't be the gating element for the first mission out of the gate to get to Mars. But like, once you got it, yeah, it sounds awesome. Yeah. So I love it. More nuclear propulsion, please. What else?

Commercial space stations, what you would think he's going to do on that? I think we're going to see, I feel like the congressional decisions on that have not changed, like the desire to spend a ton of money on some ISS replacement. It's just not there. And so I think we're going to see, you may put some effort into it, but it's going to be all just like, here's some sprinkles for you, private companies. If you do all the work, we will give you a couple contracts. Yeah.

So what we can afford and it's all on you. You know the way I would do that, Jake? How would you do that? I would zero the budget. I would totally zero the budget. Completely. Yeah. Maybe that'll happen.

I mean, Vass doesn't need it. No. I would take a bet that they figured out in the next two years. And guess what? If not, then you've lost $350 million of funding over the next two years. And then you just go to the next year and say, actually, we did need that thing. You know? I don't know.

It seems unimportant to me. It seems unimportant to NASA and Congress as well. Yep. Yeah. What about meetings? Do you how you feel about his management of meetings? As a former manager yourself, Jake. Dude, our Discord was like, we spent a lot of time talking about this.

And I'm just like, oh my God. Like, it just doesn't, it doesn't matter yet. Like, you just, this is not, this is my advice to everyone. do not get excited about this decision. Do not be really happy about it and do not be really mad about it. Neither one of those is useful time for you because look, like the guys run a lot of large organizations or at least has a lot of experience running large organizations. Maybe he's just one.

He probably had a lot of meetings. He knows how they worked. He has some ideas. He implements them. Just move on. Like look at the outcome. You got to just decide. At the end of this tenure, we're all not going to look back.

at the Isaac Min administration and go, well, this was really good and I know exactly why. Or this rent way off the rail that I know exactly why. No one's ever going to look back at the meeting thing. Yeah, but okay, Jake, listen, if there's one thing this podcast can lobby for, which somewhat likely he may not have listened occasionally, one thing we need to lobby for with our noted history is that you cannot cancel the Christmas parties. That is where extremely relevant information is swapped about missions. It's the only reason that we knew Psyche was doing its thing. Yeah.

Keep the Christmas parties. Specifically the Christmas parties. Look at the independent review. It was not a holiday party. It was just a Christmas party. I've seen people make this argument, though, just like, oh, yeah, if he gets rid of the meetings, and there's not going to be enough cross-pollination between the teens. And I was like, dude, like, if that happens, then he'll either deal with it and change

or he won't, and he'll be a bad administrator. But, like, we just don't know yet. Like we just shocking take from the guy who at least one person in the live chat right now saw you send an email this week that said this sounds like a meeting that could have been an email.

Can you just email us? Yeah, look, there are good meetings and there are bad meetings. And I have some experience too. I feel like I can spot them when they're bad. I'm sure Jared can too. I would vote you as the meetings are at NASA. If you had to appoint a meeting czar,

I would totally appoint you. Every meeting has to be a request permission for me and I. I will decide if it's good or not. Yeah. Dude, honestly. Send me an email at meetings at Offnom.com. And I will, I will, I'll, meetings good or bad as a service.

You can email me. I think we should be the meetings are for NASA under the Isaacman administration. We're available for a very low consulting fee of, on some number of bitcoins. We get that from Vast, though. That's more of a Vast today. There's no money in Congress, but there's lots of Bitcoin money. administration so we can we can get it that way I don't think it's Bitcoin though I think it's the other

kinds Trump dollars or yeah stupid it's not pennies anymore though I don't know if you saw that Jake truth coin yeah last penny minted in Philadelphia yeah if I finally got over that eh we don't have any loonies um oh shit there was one other thing I just thought of something else I was going to tell you

what was it I think we made our last penny in 2010 2012 something like that that's a long time ago. I remembered what it was. Thank you for stalling. There is one thing that I'm absolutely incredibly pumped that Jared Eisenman

is back for. That is me personally lobbying to fix the goddamn media credentialing guidelines. I will be having a personal conversation with Jared Eisenman about this. I don't know. I haven't scheduled it yet. He doesn't know how I'm going to pull it off.

I guarantee you I will. You got to keep the amount of people in the meeting low if you wanted to work. Super low. one to one. The last time, Jake, I had a one-to-one meeting was with the guy in charge of the media accreditation policy under the Biden White House, in which I got his point, but we were both just, like, yelling points at each other. It wasn't contentious. We were just, we were excited about it. You told you to pound sand is what you're saying. No, I think he was, the take was like, what do you

want me to do? And I, my take was a bunch of things that I could list. What do you want me to do, man? I'm just the government. it was it was a it was a definite conversation that it was it was funny because we weren't not mad at each other we were just having it out about this media accreditation policy that existed at NASA and how I think we should draw lines and how they think should draw lines and I bet that Jared Eisenman's NASA will be open to at least scrubbing the dumb parts there's a few sentences I have very targeted sentences in this policy that I would like to take out so check back in two to three years.

I'll see how many credentials we get. I'm going to make a note in our calendar on episode 327. We're going to have a follow-up. We're meetings good and has the policy changed? We're meetings good and did yours go well? We're meetings good, specifically yours. I love it, man. I love it.

Uh, quick check in on new Glenn. Did we get any updates there? What's happening on the mission? The stream is over. Everything went well. All right. All right. Well, Jake.

We're off to L2. To Mars, eventually. Um, let's see. I'm looking at our calendar, Jake. I think we've got some fun weeks ahead of us, but I don't know what. All I know is we've got a show next week. And then we've got a Thanksgiving off. Yeah.

And we have a few shows and then the off nominees. Which we have, bless our hearts, we have started talking about. It's November. It's not December 19th and we're like, hey, should we plan this episode? I don't know. Who should be on it? I don't know. Let's go.

We've sent some emails. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. You got anything to plug? You got any thoughts right now, Jake? Plug and plug and plug. No, not really.

I got a plug. Hey, you should listen to the managing cutoff show I did this week. Everybody out there talks about... This is your AI show? Yeah, everyone talks about autonomy, autonomy, autonomous this, autonomous that. But nobody tells you an actual thing that they're using it for. And I stumbled into a collection of people that are working on actual things.

And I made them do a show about autonomy without just being buzzword central. So many of them are just like, it's like a regular satellite, but it's got a chatbot. It's smart. Yeah, it's got a catalog. You can ask it what to eat for lunch. What should I downlink? Oh, sandwich. Wow.

Yeah. Or just saying on the edge. It's computing on the edge. Edge computing. Now, we did talk about the edge in the show, but we actually talked about legitimate examples. You talked about the YouTube guitarist? That's more of a this show kind of thing.

Yeah, a little bit. It's crazy. man. Check it out. It's good. It was episode, what episode was it? 315. A fellow Italian, a Paizan, someone from Nvidia, someone from Redwire. Great listen. When does Off Nominal surpass Miko an episode count? That depends how good I do it, Miko. There's no way I'm going to keep up. It'll overtake eventually because I'm like every 10-ish days on Miko. Yeah, you slip the week more than this one does. Yeah, you know, keep the signal the noise high.

But some weeks I do four, you know? That's fair. That's fair. So, yeah. Someone please make a chart of episode number and release date on a graph so we can see the trend lines and send it to meetings at offnom.com. Oh, what a good request. All right, y'all.

It's a long show, man. We did it. This was an excellent, excellent edition. We were internet, internet designant. Zins for a bit. Jesus Christ. A couple of freshies in me and a nice launch.

You almost said denigrits, which is also true. That's true. A bunch of D-Gens, me and you. Hey, shout out to all the Blue Origin people out there. I know you're out there. I know you listen. Yeah.

Foken nailed it. I'm pumped. I've been a long time Blue Origin Homer, Jake. I was criticized heavily in my early podcasting career for being too hopeful about Blue Origin. And they were right, but also at some point, I will be right. And I think that turning point is around now.

So, there we go. The arm of justice curves towards, what's the expression? I don't think that's the one we should use in this case, but I think, you know, on an infinite time scale. It's more of the... Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Jeff, for the criticism, but also, why are you using feet in your broadcast? Yeah, get that sorted.

Get over yourself. Come on. Have a meeting about it. Give your balls a tug, man. Do it. Come on. Jeez. All right.

Bye. I'm out on that one. One, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.