Off-Nominal - 224 - Gotta Wear the Pants (with Eric Berger and Casey Handmer)

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Anthony is joined by Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica, and Casey Handmer, Founder of Terraform Industries, to talk about Eric’s visit to NASA HQ for a meeting on the Orion heat shield, the upcoming Artemis 2 mission, and Administrator Isaacman’s first few weeks.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 224 - Gotta Wear the Pants (with Eric Berger and Casey Handmer) - YouTubeIs Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight. - Ars TechnicaNASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbage – Casey Handmer's blogReid Wiseman on X: “Good morning, Moon. See you next month?”NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman on X: “Yesterday, I met with SpaceX and Blue Origin to understand the latest plans to accelerate NASA’s Artemis timeline. The capabilities these two partners are pioneering will be essential to returning NASA astronauts to the lunar surface, establishing an enduring presence, and…”Safety panel says NASA should have taken Starliner incident more seriously - Ars TechnicaFollow EricAuthor: Eric Berger - Ars TechnicaEric Berger (@SciGuySpace) / XReentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age | West Houston's Neighborhood BookshopFollow CaseyCasey HandmerCasey Handmer, PhD (@CJHandmer) / XTerraform IndustriesFollow 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

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, happy Thursday. It's a Jakeless episode. So what I thought I would do is try to have a fight between... Well, I know Eric's written more individual pieces about Orion, but I don't know who's written more words about Orion because... Damn, Casey, those are some long posts.

You make it up in aggregate on singular... How many Orion-specific posts have you had, Casey? Is that a small handful? Just one dedicated one. one, yeah. One dedicated one, but I would count some of those other. Yeah, I was going to say, I would count some of the other ones. It was just one post with 73,000 words. I didn't, it was about 12,000 words. I didn't really kick that log. Like, I quite deliberately excluded it from scope. I'm a busy guy until I was like, okay, fine. Because I was really hoping, like, Eric or maybe Keith Cowen and someone

would like come in and write, like, the definitive listical of all the stuff that's gone wrong, which is anyway, but if someone has to do it, I've done it. It's trauma processing in a way. Just get it out there and then you move on. Shocker, you weren't invited to NASA headquarters like Eric was a week and a half ago or whatever that, a week ago. A week ago. How long was that was that bullet? Yeah.

It was last week. It was a week ago today, right? Yeah, yeah, because Jared was popping in out of the meeting because they were going, trying to figure out what to do with crew 11. So, yeah. It's not like I've been at something useful to. I would be invited. It's not like I've been an Orion cheerleader, Anthony.

You have not. Yeah, as any browser of Reddit knows, you're not well-liked in the Orion circles, I would say. Yeah, I'm okay with that. I think it's a credit to Jared that he had Charlie Commodore and Eric Berger and a few other people in the room when he was going through this stuff. So even if, like, Charlie, you don't really agree with the outcome, you can at least see the process, you know, unfolding.

And boy, will we hear about that? Eric, did you bring a Texas beer today? What are you cracking into down there? I'm drinking water. I'm extremely important today. Are you all right? Are you worked together? I'm good.

It's just me and you until Casey comes back. Here he's back. He's back. Okay. We're doing great. It's a great. It's a great start. Such a strong start without Jake.

Maybe it's Casey's fault because look, now he's not even here. There he is. All right. You're running that Iranian Starlink or what? I switch back to Landline. Wow. Sorry about that. That's all right.

I hope you're drinking water too like Eric was. You are. Great. I'm drinking solo. I'm drinking a tone wood freshy. This is this is rocket fuel. This is a purified rocket fuel. Some would bring that to a conclusion.

congressional hearing about the importance of landing on the moon, you know? This is rocket fuel. Well, that's news to me. You can burn it in fluorine, but I don't think that NASA looks kindly on that as a oxidizer anymore. They start it off strong, Eric. Yes, man. I want to hear, before we get into the in the room vibes, which is where Casey was leaning into, what were the in the room vibes, I want to know, like, you know, how did this come about and how was it posed? because we got a lot of content in your article about this,

but I want to know what the stage setting was. This is a review that is actually, like there could be a decision to delay Artemis 2 out of, or this is a review for the spirit of openness of data. So I think before, so after Isaacman was nominated and before he was confirmed, he had a long time to think about a lot of different things at NASA, and one of them he was concerned about was the Orion Heat Shield.

And this was partly because just NASA's communication on this has been terrible. And like they never published the full IRT report sort of with all the, I mean, they've released a heavily redacted version. They didn't admit there was a problem, like a serious problem for more than a year and a half after Artemis won. And so I think he just wanted to put some clarity on this. And so he wanted to bring Charlie Carmarter in, who was a former NASA, former NASA, former NASA astronaut, shuttle astronaut, expert in heat shields, and had raised a lot of ruckus about this over the last 18 months. And sort of he had been essentially shut out of the process. And he had wanted some public transparency, so he was going to invite a couple of reporters in.

And that's why he asked me to go. And it's what was interesting is in December, I was contacted by another. former NASA astronaut, Danny Olivas, who had a really interesting story to tell. He had not spoken publicly before, but he actually had been brought in by Bob Cabana, who was then the associate administrator of NASA and Pam Melroy, to essentially, this was six months before the IRT was formed, to provide them with sort of some additional oversight of the work the technical teams were doing to understand why the heat shield, chunks of it had fallen off and so forth, the spolation and all of that.

And so Alevis was read in on all the technical stuff and was there the whole time, basically from the end of 2023 and sat in on all the IRT meetings. And he came to me and said, I have serious concerns about the heat shield. This was December. I was like, wow. And he said things like, you know, I would not fly on the vehicle, which is pretty damning coming from an astronaut. And so he, you know, I've spoken to him and Camarda both at length and I find him to be a lot more credible than Comarta. I think Charlie has an axe to grind. I think he feels,

he disputes this, but I'm pretty confident. He feels left out of the process and does not appreciate that up until the meeting in D.C. And so, so, Levis was kind of thinking about going public with this. And I said, well, you know, if you've got these concerns, you know, I think Jared is, Isaacman's going to be doing a review of this. And so maybe you want to talk to him first. And so I, that connected them. And so the meeting turned out to be me, Carmarda, Alevis, Micah Maidenberg from the Wall Street Journal was there, front of the show, I'm sure. And then some senior NASA officials, including Amit, Isaacman, Amika Chitra, the AA. Lori Glaves was there, Jackie Jester, the new chief of staff.

And then they had the experts from Houston who had done the work. And so it was like a three-and-a-half-hour meeting where they went through it. And I talked to Isaacman before and he said he had he had already sort of met with the Houston people and was pretty sure that he was going to accept their work. He had reviewed it and asked questions and just felt like felt confident in their data. And frankly, after their presentation, you know, not, spoiler, not engineer here, but I felt pretty good about it as well. And so it was just, it was, it was just pretty interesting to sort of see them go through all of that. And the vibe in the room was basically like Charlie Camarda brought along one of his experts with him. And like they were sort of peppering the Houston team with questions.

Some of them were in good faith. Some of them were not. In my opinion, I would say right next to Camarda. At times he would mutter under his breath, well, I've seen enough. And, you know, deep sighs and so forth with the data. But I just felt like it was a pretty powerful. positive experience. And it, you know, I think, I think what NASA did is botch sort of the public rollout of all this.

They had tried to cover up rather than sort of publicly share it. And, you know, I have talked, I have had pretty long conversations with crew members for Artemis II who have gone through this journey as well from the inside. And I think they initially had skepticism about the viability of the heat shield, but then they came through the process feeling very good about it. So, you know, I, again, like, you know, I'm not an expert in this by any means, but, you know, when NASA says, this is safe, I'm pretty much inclined to believe them. Where do we go from there? That's, well, I would just say, I just say, it's an absurd position to be in, and Casey did a great job. By the way, Casey, I had your article

on a tab on my laptop in NASA headquarters for all the world to see. So you were, you were represented at that meeting. But it's an absurd position to be in because this is a 20-year-old vehicle. And this is the heat shield we're left to fly with the first time we put humans on it, one that failed to some extent the previous time. And you changed it up 11 years ago. I mean, it's a massive failure in program management, in my opinion, that this is where we ended up after 21 years,

sort of with this cluged together, cluged together heat shield that probably is going to be good enough to fly and it's not going to be used on Artemis 3, it's only going to be used this one time, so we're not actually going to get any valuable data from it. I mean, it's just sort of emblematic, I think, of the whole Orion program.

Wouldn't you agree, Casey? He's on that Iranian Starlink, Eric. I think he's getting... Is that right? Is he in Iran? Packet loss. I think he might be. I don't know. Is he working for the mullahs over there? No, what's going on out there? It's California. You think you'd be fine. But we'll see when he gets back to us.

one aspect though that I'm curious about is exactly where you ended that is that this is going to be the only use of this thing and they are going to fly it anyway so in some senses this is like flying it to fly the mission and isn't that good though like if artemus two itself needs to happen it is not necessarily a it's not a dead end mission because it's obviously leading to artemus three but it's also it's not hooked to artemus three in the same way that some of, you know, you look back to the space race era, and those missions were so tied together.

If we did this mission successfully, we could do the spacewalk next time and we could do the rendezvous after that. Like, there was a sensible order, and they were tight in time together. This has no real lock on the Artemis 3 timeline at all. I don't know to get back to Casey whenever he connects on a real internet connection.

So to some extent, like, I kind of admire the fact that they're saying, yeah, we've got what makes us comfortable to go for this and do what is the coolest human spaceflight mission in our three lifetimes probably, right? Like we're, it's got to be. I think some of the shuttle flights are really cool, but free return trajectory on the moon beats them all out easily.

So I think it's one of those moments where if they made this kind of decision, you know, the fly crew on EM1 thing back in the day where there was real no, there was not really a benefit to be gained by doing that. It didn't jump the program forward in many ways, but it was kind of an interesting consideration. And so it fell on the side of we shouldn't do that because it's stupidly risky. In this case, if they decided, hey, the seat shield isn't reliable enough. I mean, how many years would it be until Artemis 3? Because it sounded like what you were saying is the plan would be take the Arter's 3 ship, pull that up to Artemis 2.

But that would take years to actually convert? It would take years. And you could not really, my understanding, because I asked this directly to Ammon, I said, look, if, you know, you did this with Starliner, right? You know, you said, look, there's a risk. We've got another option. And we're going to take the time and exercise that option and bring the crew back on Dragon. Because Artemis 2 is a free return trajectory, it doesn't have like the docking capability that Artemis 3 has. And that's apparently pretty different. And it just swapping the two capsules was not. a simple or an easy way to do it and bringing forward Artemis 3 and modifying

for Artemis 2 was already stacked to the rocket. I mean, I think it just I think first of all, if this decision would have been made, it should have been made two years ago. And it clearly wasn't. And so they're sort of making

the best of a bad situation. At the end of the day, though, I don't think the crew is in like significant danger. Yeah, right. So I think that's kind of where I'm landing is like, isn't this actually a decision that we would want them to make to fly this mission and have this mission happen, not only for the messaging behind it, but also just like getting past this is a big part of the Artemis program. Yeah, I think so.

We're not going to talk ourselves out of this, as much as all this three would love to. We are not going to talk ourselves out of this architecture. We have to fly our way out of it. So if this is good to go, then I can't do anything but support the decision to actually go and fly the thing and actually do the damn mission. I mean, it's, I think you can look at it. I think two things can be true. One, the fact that we ended up in this situation is truly a cluster. Yeah.

On the other hand, this is a reasonable path forward given the set of circumstances you find yourself in at the beginning of 2026. Yeah. Where are you at, Casey, on the vibes here, because we're heading into, while you were switching to your other alternate internets over there, we were saying this has to be, would you rank any space shuttle or other crude human spaceflight mission from non-US human spaceflight as well, above Artemis 2 in terms of coolest human spaceflight mission in your lifetime? That has flown yet up to this point in your lifetime.

Well, in terms of the profile, I think it's pretty exciting. It's very similar to what Dear Moon planned. It's not quite as cool as Apollo 8. Yeah. I think that, like, let's run the counterfactual where, like, the heat shield's perfect, right? somehow they managed to engineer that one part and it's just fine. It's never been a problem. It will never be a problem.

Is it still a good mission to fly? No. On cost basis alone, I don't think it's justifiable. Even if the spacecraft was perfect, it's still just insanely expensive. We somehow managed to spend more on the Orion capsule than we spent on the space shuttles. And it's less safe, which is, that's an achievement on both ends. Okay. And so the heat shielded in my view is still pretty iffy.

I basically agree with Charlie that the analysis that was, presented and reported on by Eric is the sort of thing that you would expect from NASA doing their best to kind of pull a number out of the air on the basis of zero tests. And I also agree that, like, you know, every now and then in life, one has to roll the dice. And if it comes up snake eyes, well, you're out. And it's kind of those sorts of odds we're talking about here, which I just don't think is justifiable in the context of this program. It doesn't actually get us materially closer. And there's a huge black swan risk if like any of a hundred different things go wrong. It's like, well, why did we bother doing that? What was that for? Right? That wasn't like, you know,

someone got sick on the space station and we had to cut a few corners in order to have a chance of getting them off, right? And it was the best we could do. It's like, well, you know, four people to take a joyride past the moon just so that, you know, I don't know, like it's, what's the alternative? What's the alternative that you would, that you would do, Casey, because, I mean, setting aside, let's say, let's say you come in as NASA administrator to have carte blanche. You do not have to worry about Congress, right? Which is obviously That's an impossible dream, but yes. Not an impossible dream.

But what would you do if you wanted a clean sheet program? Yeah, I mean, that's a fair question. And also I think one of the things that I admire about your reporting is, and I've always tried to embody in my writing as well, it's not, you know, it's one thing to complain, but you actually have to come up with a concrete suggestion as to what to do. What can you do now? And my view on this has been the same.

It's been consistent. It's been the case since before Senator Administrator became the Nassar administrator back in the day, which is every day we continue to pour $20 million on this gigantic thumpstifier is $20 million. The money is actually relatively cheap. We just like to print it. But it's the people who have to spend their lives on working this, right, that we're wasting, that we never get back, right? And we should have just allowed it to die under Obama in 2009. And we should have killed it every day since then.

And every day that we don't, we're just rolling the dice. on causing like a roughly 1% chance of like a horrendous problem, tragedies and, you know, gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair and so on, for basically no reason, right, just to be like, oh, you know, like if you wanted to do that profile, the Apollo 8 profile, you could literally strap someone in a Falcon Heavy right now for the Dragon capsule and, you know, as much additional stuff as SpaceX can get together in four weeks. And you could look at that thing, you say,

well, it's never flown that way before and the Falcon Heavy is not, human rated. But statistically speaking, all the parts in that have way more flight heritage and statistically higher chance of operating correctly than SLS plus Orion does have now and will ever have. So if all you need to do was high-five the moon, you could

just do it that way. I don't know that the Orion or this dragon has the heat shield capacity to come back from the moon. But anyway, so on that aside, I don't just, I well, I think people would debate that, but I'm not a technical expert. I don't think Iran does but anyway.

There you go. Zing. So I don't disagree. Like 2009, Obama tried to do the right thing. Like, like it was, they tried. And Congress shot them down. But, you know, it's 2026 now. And you have the hardware.

And you are going to get some learnings. And you do, I mean, at the end of the day, you do need to show credible progress toward a lunar program if you're going to get funding and public support for this. So, I mean, even sitting here today, you would not fly the mission. I don't think it's justifiable. Okay. What would you do?

Like, what would you do? If you said, but we want to have a lunar service program. Well, apparently it's been okay for this program to deliver zero. Like zero progress. It's like a number of decades. I am right to deliver zero progress for a couple more years. I can't. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've written, you know, Ryan has gone two decades without

actually flying a human into space, right? But like, we want to have a moon program. And the biggest justification for Orion and SLS, frankly, in the last five to seven years, is that it justifies Congress spending money on actually developing a moon program. Even though, and the way it was described to me brilliantly by a space policy guy in D.C. was it's a stupidity tax. Like, that's a tax NASA's paying, you know, several billion dollars a year to get the funding to actually have a credible deep space program.

credible as in has been has existed for a long time compared to the other initiatives that have been funded at NASA credible isn't it's actually happening like next month we're flying people out to the moon yeah that's that's that's the thing man like that's that's the thing i'm i'm smacked with more and more right there was this like read wiseman tweeted this morning like this good morning moon see you're next month i'm like that's fucking cool that's awesome right like you ever have those nights or the moon's up and you have a moment where you're like, oh shit, people went there one time. Right? Like sometimes it, we all know it.

We live with it. We look at the moon in our giant telescopes. It's great. We love the moon so much. And then every once in a while, I get smacked with that base level. Holy shit, one time people went there. That's the craziest thing I could possibly think of. To then be like, people have went there recently is awesome. And as much as, you know, there's

a lot of people to... Phil McAllister this week was talking about like he hates when people brings up China in in terms of space policy and positioning. But it's like, I don't know, you can't run from the geopolitical world that is in front of you right now, right? And if you talk to Congress people, their justification for the Artemis program is China.

Like, that is why there's actually an urgency now coming out of Congress behind this. So the geopolitics have always mattered. So, like, if you get an awesome picture of these astronauts with the moon, not that close by, not as close by as we'd probably want it, but pretty close by based on the photographic. angles that will be there, like, that may be worth the money that you're talking about there, Casey, that is that this particular mission costs, right? If you could, if you could spend that amount of money, how much money are we currently at on what one SLS-O-Rine mission? Is it $4 billion? What are we

at at the moment? 4.2 billion, if you could- That's just, yeah, mission aside, NASA could order For sure, whatever. I'm saying, mission aside, mission happens or not, right? NASA has a button that they can push that spends $4.2 million and they get a photo of four, three and a little bit of their astronauts. I'm taking credit for Jeremy Hanson. But you get photos of these astronauts flying around the moon in close proximity to the moon. Is that worth it from a political sense?

Like, will they get more funding in the future because that photo exists, regardless of how they flew there to take it? So if they pull it off, right, and all four of them get to walk up to the White House and shake President Trump's hand and wave and do it. Oh, he's getting sensitive. Massive, massive thing. This platform is check. Eric's been fine. Eric's been fine this whole time. So it's just the doubters out there, I guess.

Okay. Okay. I'm a long way away. That's the problem. But I think statistically speaking, there's basically zero chance that this mission completes without something going quite badly awry in a way that NASA might attempt to cover up.

But like, I feel like, how do you feel if your teenage son goes and does some insane stunt on a motorcycle and they technically survive, but they shouldn't have? You're like, it was still a stupid thing to do, even if it looked cool on YouTube. Right? It was just like, is it really, like, does the dignity and the authority,

of the United States stem from our ability to like pull off a squeaker like this once in a while. I don't really think so. I think that we're rich enough and smart enough to do it the right way. Is this really a squeaker? I mean, I mean, come on. Like, like Artemis I won was a success. Like the rocket for all of the arrows and slings I've thrown at it survived the hurricane and then launched, right, pretty, pretty flawlessly. It did some damage to the launch tower, but, you know, they were sort of learning from all that. And then the Orion spacecraft was put in, put through its paces on all these thrusting maneuvers over the course of three weeks. And it did really well.

And I'd had some issues which you outlined in your post, which, you know, are not, you know, to be minimized with power disruptions and things like that. But these were not like the astronauts on board would have been okay. And so they learned from all that. And then they, and it was a test flight to learn that stuff. And then they came back and they had some heat shield issues. Again, the astronauts would have been just fine. So I think they learned a lot from Artemis one.

And in many ways. In many ways, technically, that was a more... I'm sorry? What? Well, like, statistically speaking, you can give birth unhelp and, like, 95% of the time, you'll be fine. Yeah. Right. So, like, if you just talk to all your friends who've done homebirths or something, without a dollar, without a nurse, and you say, how did it go? Chances are, they'll be fine. Right. But, like, if you look across the, you know,

a population as a whole, you have to say, well, I'm kind of glad that we have maternity clinics and hospitals and stuff, because the 5% is, you know, that 5% chance or whatever is, is an enormous tax on a population. He's getting there to a whole different section of Reddit, Eric. We're breaking out into, we don't have, we don't have, Reddit right here. We don't have maternity clinics to get us to moon. Like, this has only been done one time, like with Saturn 5 and lunar modules. Yeah, and it was really dangerous.

It was really dangerous as well. It was. Absolutely. I mean, I talked to the guys who did it. Like they were, you know, some of them wanted to stop after Apollo 11 because in declare success and not take a chance of losing a crew. You know, I don't think there's a one in six chance of losing a crew on this mission. I was stunned.

You said you think there's like a zero percent chance that nothing goes wrong? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like the Orion capsule has hundreds of different systems in there. And as far as I can tell, they're doing a complete redesign for every single size. subsequent capsule. So like all the rules that applies to SpaceX about like, no, no, no, you're not allowed to switch configurations. You've got to fly, you know, the rocket and the capsule and this configuration multiple times in order to test it and then, and then, you know, don't,

don't change too much too quickly. It doesn't apply. If you're lucky running, running a, running, you can just change it. Like the battery system is completely new. The, the life support system is completely new. The heat shield is changing every, every other time. Like, so, so, so, so here's the crazy thing. Like, it's one thing to be like, okay, well, we think this capsule might not be quite as bad as Starliner. Okay. So we're going to launch it into low-loan orbit like Apollo 4 or whatever. And sorry, low-worth orbit. Right. And if something goes bad enough, we hammer the retro rockets and then and then hope we can pluck them out of the ocean. But no, instead, we're going to put four astronauts in this little capsule. We're going to launch them off to the moon. And like literally anything

goes wrong. Anything goes wrong with life support system. And they're dead. They're dead. Right. On 4K TV. We get a staging orbit or two. We get a couple orbits there. There's a 24 hour. That's actually the most. That's actually to be the most. It nearly killed concerning possibility, which is that something happens in the elliptical orbits and that they don't make it out to the moon. But then again, like, I don't know. I mean, stuff changing between hardware, I think, is expected, and I think we should all support because it means you're fixing shit that you realize is wrong. And yes, those other rules, Casey, of like stable configurations are ridiculous, and it's silly that that was ever put about. But I kind of think most of us saw through that

as flimsy requirements of like things shall never change. And it's like, I don't know, this is the first version of a thing. Like, do you really want to fly the first version of thing forever? Nobody does. No, but I mean, it's not like the, like, the Gemini program went from like kickoff to completion in five years, right? And see, this is, it bothers me because like, the whole, the whole story is like, oh, we spent infinite money and took infinite time to get it right.

And yet every single time anyone like, it merely walks up to and like gently pads the hardware like my pants did back in the day like something breaks and you're like i've been on sets here in l.A that are like better built than this this is it's it's kind of crazy right like where did all the money go this is this is what the chinese would call tofu dregs it's um you know and and um yeah i just i think it's a it's a difficult risk which which you know it's a difficult decision for jared to make as well because because if he was to say no absolutely not right then congress can can overrule it Right. And no matter what I'm still ending it.

That was what the conspiracy theorists thought when they learned that I was going to D.C. for this meeting. They thought I was going up there because Jared was going to cancel Orion and he wanted me there to report on it. So that's pretty funny. And look at you here. I'm sending this to the Reddit, man. You're out here swinging. You're going a bat for Orion today. I love it. I have to say Casey is pure evil because he's put me in a position of being here. Ryan. Hell yeah.

Look at what, yeah. Eric, Eric, act like I was not the one that texted Casey this week when two of our other guest ideas that we thought, oh, they might have something interesting on the Tori Bruno front

that no one can figure out. Eric, nobody can figure out the Tori Bruno story. We didn't get back to that. But yeah, no, I thought you two would be interesting together because you're both directionally oriented in the same direction,

which is you're motivated by, like, you two are angry about this because you care deeply about it and about seeing the development of space and pushing humanity forward. And I think a lot of times there are the people that encounter you on the internet that don't seem to understand

that that's the root motivation is that it's not like you want to go and write posts that dunk on these things because you hate them specifically. It's like because we want everything to be better in this direction. And I actually think that's kind of

where I'm falling on RMS too. That's like, we've had this battle for the same battle for 10, 15 years, like, we have to fly our way through it. And honestly, the most interesting aspect is the fact that the idea to accelerate the Artemis 3 lander, whatever you would say that that actually means, any way to accelerate the Artemis 3 landings is building additional momentum towards replacing the SLS Orion stack. Because any of those infrastructures instantly mean there's a way to do the thing that SLS Orion does as part of that architecture

that's coming. So we're not only seeing the actual flights happen that are flying us out of this, but that is putting then more pressure on the following ones, which unlock more of a capability that gets us out of the logjam that we all have been annoyed about for 10 years. That's why the decision in April 2021, in my opinion, to select Starship as the sole source of HLS Lunarlander Services was the most significant decision that NASA has made in a long, long time. whether people realized it or not at the time, that was clearly the end of the SLS era, and it was NASA betting its future on distributed launch and in-space refueling. And simply because, like, from that point forward, the path to the moon relied on a starship or starship-like vehicle to work.

That was historic, and that really, you know, and we'll see how quickly it happens, but the writing was clearly on the wall at that time. Yeah, I mean, that just kind of underscores. the futility of the SLS and Iran project, which is, here we are 20 years into the thing. And they're like, oh, we forgot the docking port. What does the docking port connect to, pray tell, or the lunar lander? And has that been budgeted or engineered or constructed? No. Well, do you think it might be important?

I guess. You think, oh, NASA, they couldn't possibly be this, like, disorganized. But, like, you can read it in the OIG reports yourself. Don't take my word for it. Go and read through the report. it's yourself and have a look and say like if I had a serious medical condition would I want these people managing my care? Hell no. If I like had a fender bender, would I want these people in charge of managing the shop where I was getting it fixed? No, absolutely not. Would I trust

these people to look over my kids for an hour or two while I sneak out for a dinner with my wife? Pretty borderline, quite frankly. And like that's that's a worry, right? These are the stewards of our national flagship program. So I would have a different opinion on that. I think. think I've interacted with... Because they've watched Derek's kids. I have wonderful in-laws. I've dealt with a lot of NASA engineers interacted with them.

And the vast majority of them are hardworking, honest, smart people. The reality is that the structure of NASA is completely forked. And the changing mandates and the congressional sort of meddling in programs and so forth, it's created an environment in which it's extremely difficult to actually get things done. And so while I am frustrated by the delays, by the choices and kind of how we ended up where we are, I don't really blame, I blame some

of them, but, but, you know, but it's like half, like Elon says it best, I think, when he talks about you have your doers and your checkers. And like, as SpaceX, it's like 95% doers and 5% checkers. At NASA, it's like 5% doers and 95% checkers. Something. I mean, that's crazy, but that's kind of how it works. And that's just, that's just an extraordinarily difficult environment to work in. And so it's going to be fascinating, I think, to see Isaacman, who, by the way, has a very clear-eyed sense of all of these problems and has seen it from the outside, has seen how SpaceX works, has an admiration for sort of how they get things done quickly and efficiently, and is going to be sort of the first administrator to really try to bring

that ethos into NASA, the extent possible. And so it's, you know, he may run up against the brick wall of bureaucracy, just like everyone else. But it's going to be fun to see if he can make some headway there. I think you're supposed to use the term deep state in that case. Well, he's trying to use... He's trying to use donuts to bring down the deep state. Yeah, and flights. He's taking people on flights. That actually is super important.

So just disclosure, Jared took me up once. But you took up Sean Duffy at Oshkosh, right? Yes. Like Sean Duffy, the guy who had the job that he wanted at that time, right? And he's like, hey, why don't you jump in the back and I'll take you for a flight in my MiG? You couldn't say no, but you just know it's going to be a horrible life experience. And it was.

Well, I mean, I think at that time, I don't think Jared was trying to take the job from Duffy when he took him up on that flight. I think he was trying to help him be successful. Oh, of course. No, I know. At the time, I was like, what's going on there? And I just understand now, Jared's love language is taking people flying in his jets. Yes. Right?

But at the same time, like, he's a little bit oblivious of the fact that, like, you don't have 20,000 hours in jet. So I mean, I went up, I went up three or four years ago, and I know exactly what you're saying, Casey, because that is not, that is not an environment that is, is, like, I had a good time. Don't get me wrong. But like, if he, if he, if he, if he, if he, if he was like, like, moderately frustrated with you, you, you, you would, the disclosure would be conveyed, I think. I think you would be like, okay, now I'm having a bad turn to be a little tighter. Yeah. Yeah, like seven and a half G's back and forth. It's the whole like, don't get on elevator with Steve Jobs. because you're either promoted to the top of the company or fired by the end of the elevator ride. And it's like, yeah, what's the G meter reading on your meeting with Jared when you're up with the plane? Yeah. No, but I think it's super important. I totally agree with you, Eric, that Jared has the measure of an organization.

And I would add that I've been a NASA engineer. So I've been one of these kind of people who's busily like just doing the best within an organization, a kind of bureaucratic structure, which has over time essentially calcified completely. but also as an entrepreneur, like at the end of the day, like if my product doesn't work well enough, then I don't raise money and I fire everyone, right? Game over. And this is the case for anyone in any part of our economy, which is like the private economy, right? Like there are no like just endless welfare kind of thing for you if you're not delivering value you're out. And Steve Jobs understood that. Neelan Musk understands that. And so I take a very consequentialist view of the

senior NASA staff because these are, you know, lifelong public servants and, and I agree with you. Like, they're smart and hardworking, they're motivated and so on. But that does not guarantee that they cannot fail, right? And I'm obsessed with this failure mode in organizations. I call it Dittemore's Law after the flight director of Columbia, because he was exactly in this situation.

It was his responsibility to keep him safe. And it was his reasoning and process that basically doomed the seven astronauts to die, to burn up and become atmosphere over Texas. And it can happen again. And it will happen again for as long as we say, well, at least the process was followed. At least we followed the process.

We went through the process. Technically, a few astronauts got burned up along the way, but we went through the process. And I think that's just bullshit, quite frankly. I think that actually we need to, especially if we're in this hard-nosed fight with China, we need to be extremely consequentialist about the outcomes. And somehow we kind of got to that point in the Second World War in like 1942, after a few missteps along the way. And we're going to get our asses standard to us over and over again in this new space race

until we basically say, well, either you succeed or you don't, and you measured against that. And at the end of the day, I don't care how any boxes get checked. You either succeed or you don't. So, you know, in one sense, then you ought to be happy that Orion is flying and Artemis II is happening because if there is a failure, you know, let's hope it's not catastrophic or life-threatening or, you know, obviously. but if there is a failure,

we're at least going to find out about it, and you could make a change on the architecture. You'd have to wonder how bad could the failure be that it would precipitate the necessary changes in terms of basically valuation of truth within an organization over appearances and yet not result in like, you know, death or this movement, right? I have a scenario.

I have a scenario I can sketch out for you, which is mission launches, we discover, a problem with eclos or something in that 24-hour staging time, and they come right home. They never made it out towards the moon. They've never tested the long duration aspects of it. There was an obvious problem with eclis. The investigation, the recovery, the development of new hardware, and then the subsequent flight of that, they're not going to do that all on the Artemis 3 mission, I would presume. There would be some interim thing that they would want to test that out before they actually go and fly a mission that is going to have a lander ready for it. So you sketch out the timeline

involved there. That's like eight years between that flight and when the next thing at the absolute earliest would be ready to have astronauts going to land on the moon. And that is an absolutely unbelievable amount of time with the direction right now of both Starship and now we can say this, and Blue Origin, who has picked it up a hell of a hell of a time here at the end of 2025 and we're cruising in 26 with like two really interesting aspects here. So the mere time that would be inserted into the SLS Orion stack is plenty of time for these accelerated Artemis 3 infrastructure to then overtake the capabilities that they would need to to fly a mission totally on their own. I'm still not convinced we have a really viable path to get astronauts to the moon and back

outside of Orion. I just don't know that Starship is the vehicle to do that in the next five years. This is Eric Berger, right? The Orion Defender, Starship Douder. This is Eric Berger, I called. I mean, I don't know. Like, you can do a lot of damage with 100 tons. I mean, or just Starship and Dragon. Like, throw a dragon in that, you know?

You could literally bolt like five dragons inside of Starship, you know, fairing. Shed one every three days. Just run out of snacks and go to the next one. Yeah. I don't know. That's actually, you know, I've written a handful of blog posts about this, But at the end of the day, the number one most important thing for going to the moon and doing anything useful there is just up mass. It's just how much material can you transport upwards?

How large allotments? How much per year? And how much will it cost? And just, as well, as well, is like dead on arrival before, like, they even put their pencils down on the initial design. It just could not possibly be helpful on that front. And this has been obvious to interview anyone involved since before I was even fully grown, right? And yet here we are. So I don't know, it's, it seems to me like a horrorist.

Because that's kind of what I'm like starliner. I think that's where Eric and I are coming from is that we're like, yeah, like, to some extent, ship has fucking sailed. We're dealt with these parts and how do we then approach this? And the way I think about it looking back is that I don't, I don't think we get to the April 2021 decision unless we were beyond actually flying a couple of pieces of hardware that were at least indicative of what we might see, right? You have to like kind of make it past these different moments in hardware development. And getting past Artemis II, does that let you

have different conversations than you could when the rocket's coming together and it's, you're six months away from rollout and you're trying to throw out, like, what are we going to do to accelerate this program? And it's like, I don't know, we're all distracted by trying to get this thing to the launch pad, whether you like it or hate it. But when you're beyond that and you've flown this mission and you have the result to deal with, whether that's a great success or some sort of interim failure that is going, that you have to decide a path forward on. That is the most useful moment. So like, you kind of mention this, Erica, that the fact that this is happening so early in Jared Isaacman's term as NASA administrator is the best thing we could possibly hope

for because they fly this and they have time to deal with it after rather than it happening at the end of a term and being like, all right, I guess, I guess the whole thing, the run-up to this was my term. It should be clarifying, hopefully in a good way, but obviously we're going to find out. Just go back to the April 2021 decision. There is a beautiful irony in that, in that Congress dug its own grave, right? Congress was the one Bill Nelson and KB. Hitchison to be specific, who in 2010 basically negotiated the SLS compromise where they were going to tell NASA to build this big rocket with space shuttle parts and then fund commercial crew. And then they threw billions of dollars at the rocket, ground systems, and Orion for a decade with absolutely zero return.

But then, you know, and so for years, people like me have been screaming, hey, idiots, you know, I understand you like the jobs that come with this program, but you've got to actually do something with it, right? And so, but they never actually spent money on payloads for years and years and years. And so finally, when they got around to doing the HLS, they really had to do it. They threw a little bit of money at it. And so that was not enough for a Lockheed Martin to build a Lunar Lander. It was not enough for Boeing to build a Lunarlander. Not enough for a Boeing or for a Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin team. It was not enough for Dynetics. And so at the end of the day, the only bid that NASA could afford was Starship. And so Congress basically, because of their

unwillingness to fund a beyond the rocket and spaceship program forced NASA to pick the program that was going to kill the rocket and spacecraft. I mean, there's a beautiful irony, I think, to that. And I'll never let them forget it. I think it was pretty overdetermined, quite frankly. Pretty what? Overdetermined. Yeah.

Whether or not Starship got the nod for HLS, I don't think it would have changed very much between now and then, like, they were going to build a starship anyway. Once you have a starship, you can, you know, you can hit a lot of nails of that hammer. They were, but they were, but putting that on the critical path was super important message that NASA sent to the entire community that we think the future. And I guess you had to be there like in the 2010s because, like, I mean, there were lots of people at NASA who thought we were flying SLS, Block 1B, SLS, Block 2, and just flying these into perpetuity and that's how we were doing our moon program and everything was going to be great.

And we're going to have this three-stage lunar lander that Gersten Meyer kept talking about, which looked kind of weird. Yeah. And like, it's like, and then NASA comes along in 2020 and pick Starship. And all of a sudden it's like, no, the future is actually, we're not going this way, we're going that way. And I think it's significant. I don't think anything was inevitable in 2021 before that. I mean, what was inevitable is that SpaceX was going to overtake the launch.

industry, how long it was going to take NASA to go along with them was not clear. Well, in many ways, they still haven't, right? You can look at the chart of, like, what the Artemis program plan is. And it's still like, and then we get the five legacy primes to, like, launch bits and pieces of an NRA space station to, like, you know, as a participation trophy for the Ryan. So it feels better about the fact that can never even get into low lunar orbit. And then Starship, which has the capacity to, like, launch all of that stuff just as decoration, is going to fly up there and pick up a couple astronauts,

put them on them in and bring them back again. I mean, come on, don't we want to see a picture of those starship docking with the lunar gateway? I mean, I really want to do that to do this big starship in the wee-dye-dye little gateway next to it. Life is so short, right? And so Elon's going about the algorithm all the time, right? But let's take it seriously.

Like, it's not just like, well, we want some like shiny bubbles to like, you know, put on the postcard. question all requirements, delete unnecessary parts and processes. Right. And the reality of the situation is all the requirements that have driven the adoption of like the Orion style capsule and the SLS style launcher are stupid. They're bad. It's not even controversial that they're bad.

Everyone agrees that they're bad. And they're led to a really, really bad rocket design that has not only cost us a lot of money, it's now about to risk for astronaut's lives, right? Because people have been going along with this charade for like 20 years. And then delete unnecessary parts and processes. We don't need any of this stuff. We've never needed it. And we don't need it now.

Yeah. And I agree. Like Lunar Gateway, come on. But I mean, like I, you raise a great point, Casey, about requirements. Because like there are people at NASA who are using those to strangle like fixed price programs. Right. So in, you know, in the early 2000s, Kathy leaders, you know, talked a lot about how she was really strict on requirements because you don't want to levy requirements on these companies. You want to let

them innovate. And if you give them too many requirements, it costs way too much and they can't, they can't succeed. And what we've seen with like LTV, CLDs is like requirement creep. And it's like killing these companies that are trying to to be what SpaceX was for crew transport in these other programs. And so, you know, it's been a major issue. I just feel like we've been treading water on that problem for years because I'm not sure Bill Nelson really understood it. Duffy obviously didn't have a clue. But Isaacman does, right? So hopefully, hopefully we'll see some change here. Because this is really like, if NASA is to play a significant role in human exploration into the middle of the 2020s, it has to change quickly. How do you see the timeline for Isaacman going? Like, he's,

in terms of when we might see some of that thinking, because I don't really think we get any of it, so we're out of the Artemis II campaign, right? We're way too close to it to be going out there, talking up big announcements in that way. And I even mean beyond the Artemis program, like, when does he weigh in on the Mars andampur return situation and what they're going to do about that?

When do they kind of weigh in on, are we doing this gateway thing or not? And is that stuff that we should think about the back half of the year? Like we get through Artemis II, we see what happens, we get some results. We do the whole trip to the White House, yada, yada. And then we start getting announcements or plans out of Isigman. I just don't know what to expect there, considering the timeline that he's dealing with. So I think they're looking at a lot of this stuff right now.

But I do think that much of the focus, obviously isn't Artemis 2, so it's potentially within three weeks from today or thereabouts. So one thing I think we can accept very soon as an announcement on the last. lunar terrain vehicle. Yeah. That's like too much late at this point. Yeah. Well, they're trying, they're trying to get two, right?

They don't want to pick just one. They're trying to find a pathway to have two because obviously one may fail. CLDs have to be coming soon and he's got to make a decision on whether he accepts the Duffy directive change back in August. I suspect that gets reverted, but we'll see. And then, but I do think, to answer your question, I think a lot of this stuff comes after Artemis II. because that's where all the public focus.

And that's where the administration is going to do. That's what the Trump administration is going to care about. Yeah. I think the president's going to be at the launch. It's going to be a whole chabang. I'll be back, Casey. How's your internet? What's your packet law sitting at these days?

You all right? He's not there anymore. Oh, for fuck sake. Oh, man. He's on Tidress Internet. Yeah. me at all we got you

I think you might be back try it again give it a shot hello you're good you're back that's the offdominal Jesus fucking Christ

I mean the show is called astronomical he's here or not he's in the shadow universe right now I think you're here Casey I think you are here yeah I don't know

it's it shows me looking like talking back to myself so well you're fine just go ahead just march through it for all it's false

the other platforms will tell you when things are not working and this one's like, you're probably fine, psych, you're not fine. He keeps slacking he cam, man. Can't catch a break today, you know. I'm about to have a post on his site about how garbage my streaming platform.

Anthony's streaming system is flaming garbage is going to be the post of his blog post. You can afford to spend stuff like this. Listen, we pay money for it. It's all right. It's all right.

I'm just intrigued by the Isaac bin Roadshow right now, uh, especially because the, the statements put out after certain visits to centers that were the center of like culture war drama when the Trump administration took over have been funny for me to read. Like the NASA Goddard, genuine flecting that was happening after that post. And I wonder that,

I don't know, they seem like cool looking events, but I don't know, like, how different is the feeling at those events to them, the tweet afterwards? I would be curious to find that out. I don't know.

I do think it's a very concerted problem. Go ahead, Casey. Okay, my impression from people I know at NASA is that when Jared was first nominated, they were kind of apprehensive as a lot of NASA public servants are not exactly Trump leaning, but that in the intervening kind of period

in the world, it'll be just great, please, Jared, and there's generally quite relieved to have leadership in place now. I would agree with that. And I would say that one thing Jared excels at is winning hearts and minds. He really is like a genuinely nice person and genuinely wants to do this job well. And so all administrators kind of do this tour, but the things like the donuts and stuff like that and paying for that and taking people on flights. I mean, that's just great optics.

The rubber will, where rubber will eventually meet the road, right, when you've got a budget and you've got to. to implement it, you've got to make difficult choices, and you tell people that, look, you can't have six meetings a day. You've got to do things differently. But I think he's doing a great job of winning hearts and minds. I think Casey made a great point that after a year of just, you know, disastrous interim leadership, massive employee cuts, uncertainty of a proposed draconian budget, you know, to come out of it with Congress sort of setting a business as usual budget and Jared coming in as sort of a new leader with a fresh vision and good people skills. I think it's going a long way to winning people over.

I think it's also a stroke of genius to put snap in there, taking photos of everything and putting it on the internet and on the various socials people to see. I think that NASA is an exceptionally charismatic agency and absolutely should be front and center as far as the public face of government processes in the United States. Yeah. Oh, yeah. My only criticism is apparently that I'm the only one that's not been up in a mig with him. So, you know.

I haven't been up in a mig. No, he broke his wig down. He promised me, but I got to go up in the Alphajet, which was still highly satisfactory. I'm not complaining. I'll tell you my story. I'll tell you my story. So I did go up in the mig. I don't know.

I sure if it was three, four years ago. But we went up and took off and got up and he started moving around and my stomach starts to get queasy. And I don't know. We had only pulled three. or four G's at this point. And then like some kind of light came on or something like that. And he was like, oh, I'm not sure exactly what he said. But like, well, we can't fly with this.

Gosh, darn it. No, he said, he said, we've got to go back because I can't, it's not safe to fly with whatever the issue was. And I was like, okay. And it kind of in the back of my mind, I was thinking, oh, thank God. Because I could tell I was going to get sick. And then like, and then we get back down on the ground. and he's like, we're going to get it fixed and we're going to go back up.

I was like, okay. So we went back up and he says all the crazy shit flying around and I get sick, of course. And it was just, but I agree. I was just like, that's not for everybody. Yeah, I used to fly small planes and stuff around. So I have an idea of whom my limits are and I thought, you know, I want to make sure I get the most out of this. So I took as much germamine as the packet would allow me before I went up.

And that did the job. And I had enough spares with me that a few other people who were there the same day were able to avail themselves at this miraculous chemical. But I never taken dramine before or since, but it did the job. Yeah. I landed after the first one. I said, man, I got to find some dramamine. I found some dramine, but I only get kicked in. I went out to the second time.

Very good. Eric Berger, not an astronaut candidate. What was your maximum altitude? Do you know? I have no idea with the altitude with the G's was like 6.5 or 7 or something like that. I don't know. I mean, it's the kind of thing where you got to wear the pants, right, that pressurize. Got to wear the pants.

You don't blackout. You're hicking your way through it. It's great. Yeah. But it was great. I mean, it was fun. I mean, and I think that that is a thoroughly great way to reward people at NASA. And, like, it's clear he was looking for ways to make NASA a fun place.

to work again. You know, he fully understands, like, the appeal of the commercial space industry where the money is great and you can work on stuff that actually goes to space in a reasonable period of time. So he was thinking about, like, trying to bring back the mission specialist program, like, from the 90s and the 80s, like, where people who worked on experiments at NASCAR could go fly on the shuttle. He's like, we shouldn't have four people flying dragon. We should have seven people. And let's, you know, anyway, he's, he's trying. But as Casey said, It's a bureaucracy for the capital B. He's going to have to offer a congressional seat if he wants the mission specialist program back.

He's going to have to mint a future administrator out of it. It's a difficult situation because, you know, as a NASA administrator, a political appointee, you know, you're kind of dealing with a permanent civil service. And there are limits to the extent to which you can kind of walk in and tear up an existing process. obviously. So it'll be very interesting to see where that goes and what happened the next. Obviously, NASA's working a lot of important things that, you know, the three of us and our five, you know, listeners are highly valued. So, yeah, it just, it's a difficult situation. I don't, I don't generally blame Congress as much as most people do, actually. I think that Congress is mostly indifferent. I think they're mostly worrying about other things.

and that NASA's is kind of this tiny side quest that we get really upset about. But they're like, huh, what? Oh, it was like a 15-minute stand-up four years ago, and now it's caused some problem. What a surprise. I blame the 10 people in Congress who are fighting for their parochial interests and not sort of pushing for some kind of national interest for NASA. I mean, I think it's – I look at it like – I see it's like the 20% White House,

30% NASA, and then 50% Congress, is where I would sort of fallpark to it. It's always fun. Yeah, I'm not to work up my percentage, my pie chart of blame. One percent's definitely going to be Eric Burr for his writing at Ars Teckica. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

What are you working on? Can you plug some stuff? Do you got any other cool things cooking? You know, just starting to spool up for trying to think about Artemis II coverage, what we can do that's a little different. I've always got stuff going on, but, you know, it's a Thursday afternoon and I'm a little cooked, so I can't think of anything super exciting. Isn't there a third book in a series that you're working on?

I'm working on a couple different books. Eventually, I'd like to write a Starship book to sort of close the SpaceX trilogy, but I think we're still kind of at the beginning of that story rather than the middle of the end. I don't really know where it's going. Casey, when do you think we're going to put humans on Mars? what year would you assign to that? Man, what a fucking... It probably depends to what extent

like doing the 5,000-terawatt AI supercluster becomes the side quest. I mean, yeah, absolutely. I think you've got to factor all that in. But like if like they really... Isn't it kind of bizarre that like... The determining factor on when humans get on Mars is whether or not Elon decides to focus on building

like a gigantic AI god first. Yeah. Like there's 330 million. He decided to buy Twitter or not first. That might have been really the cleavage moment there. I mean, in my lifetime, the only person... I don't regret that. In my lifetime, the only person is an incredible plan to put humans on Mars as Elon.

And I think that would be true the end of my life. Like, if he doesn't come along, it doesn't happen, period. A lot of stuff doesn't happen. It's kind of bizarre. A lot of stuff doesn't. It is bizarre. Like, why isn't that all these smart, well-resourced people with like literally 100 times the money and 100 times the people and stuff.

Can't seem to figure out how to do, you know, even a tenth of it. So one of the things I'm most excited about, especially in the context of the IPL, and this is one thing I'm working on, Anthony, is, so SpaceX has been this, and you would know this better than anyone in Casey, being in LA, had this extraordinary engine of innovation. So engineers come into the company, spend three years, five years, seven years, sort of learning the culture, vertical integration, and sort of they leave the company with great ideas on how to change the world. So they go out and found companies or they, you know, they, they work for new companies. And so there's like dozens and dozens of companies founded by

SpaceX, X employees. And now with the IPO, so many of them are going to be like multi, multi-millionaires. Like there's just going to be all this capital available to just sort of further their ideas and initiatives. And I just think that that's going to continue to be this engine of really powerful innovation. And you can trace it all back to SpaceX. It's crazy. A lot of them already are relatively wealthy.

Like the old time is the ones who you've interviewed for your books and stuff. And SpaceX does run tenders like every six months. So they're not meaningfully. No, no, I actually constrained. I recognize that. But I would think that, you know, the IPO, they're going to double or triple, like, their value. It's going to be pretty wild.

Yeah, it's interesting. I deal with the SpaceX diaspora quite a lot here. And it's actually, it's always surprising to me that, you know, people go into SpaceX and they come out like Buff Jeff Bezos, you know, just like incredibly strong engineers. They can do anything, right? But one of the things that seems to me to not necessarily be developed is like, necessarily like the independent vision or execution or something like that.

Like a good number of these guys and women as well will come out and say, oh, well, I never want to do that again. Or, well, they, I mean, I just know this because, like, lots of them come and talk to me and they say, what should I do next? And I'm like, I don't know. Do you have no ideas? Some of them obviously have ideas, and we've seen, you know, dozens of companies. But there's literally thousands and thousands of, of, of diaspora.

Maybe, I don't know. It's a funny thing. But, yeah, I mean, certainly having that capital floating around and getting reinvested in, you know, in your friends and your friends' companies and stuff is a really powerful force, a really important for us, not to kind of drift too much here into wealth tax discourse, but like, it's you know, like we should probably let

them cook. Well, before they go hire everybody, do you want to hire people? And would you like to plug that? Oh, yeah, this is my extremely well-designed website. I do know a guy who does websites if you need to talk to him. I can just get Claude to make me a nicer one if I really need to. I actually went out of my way to make it look

this bad. I believe. I like it. Yeah. So, for those of you don't know, I want to appreciate that. I think it is too. This is what the internet should have been. I spoke to Mark Andreessen once and I said the image tag was a mistake and he was forced to concede that that was correct.

Monospace, monospace website's the way to go. So this is my company. Terrify. 25 people in Burbank. We're hiring for building synthetic fuel plants. Why? Because we need to convert, you know, this drink here into fuel. And actually we're working on.

on rock refining as well. So converting basalt into constituent metals and a bunch of other things like that. So essentially solar power plus free rocks and air and water into primary materials, which is a very important problem if you're into Mars and space stuff as well. Absolutely. You would think there's a major crossover there. Well, I appreciate you both hanging out. We probably could have went for about four and a half hours, but we're all going to need dinner at some point. So we'll save that. We'll come back after the flight and talk about it. Yeah, do a review. Finally get to the bottom of what Tori Brunner's up to.

Yes, let's figure that out. No one will figure that out. But we'll save that. I thank you both. Jake's traveling with a very oddly, a very no-kids guy who lives in Mexico kind of vacation time here in the mid-January slot. But it's back next week.

I don't know who we have next week, but I'm sure there's some stuff going on. So talk to y'all then. See you later. Fine. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.