Off-Nominal - 225 - Industry Watcher (with Jeff Foust)

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Jeff Foust of SpaceNews to catch up on the news: Artemis II on the pad, Blue Origin’s upcoming first reuse of a New Glenn first stage, TeraWave, and more.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 225 - Industry Watcher (with Jeff Foust) - YouTubeBlue Origin on X: “New Glenn’s third mission, NG-3, will send @AST_SpaceMobile’s next generation Block 2 BlueBird satellites to low Earth orbit, NET late February.”Blue Origin to reuse New Glenn booster on next launch - SpaceNewsBlue Origin flies first New Shepard mission of 2026 - SpaceNewsBlue Origin plans bespoke high-speed Starlink rival - SpaceNewsSLS/Orion rolls to pad for Artemis 2 - SpaceNewsRocket Lab suffers Neutron testing setback - SpaceNewsFollow JeffJeff Foust (@jeff_foust) / XJeff Foust, Author at 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

TOS and go for main engine, start. Hello, everybody. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to, we're going to do space news rundown today. There's a lot of space news, Anthony. Space comma, space, space, space, space character news, lowercase, cross the board. Don't sue us. Jeff's lawyers. No. Yeah, well, I mean, who's better to do space news with than the King of Space News himself, Jeff? So, Jeff, welcome to the show. Welcome back.

Hey, hey, great to you back. It's been a while. Yeah, it has been well. We do this with every guest, but this is the part of the show where we say, I can't believe it's been so long. We should have been better at that. And next time, it will be a much shorter interval. And then we'll see how it goes. And then two years will pass.

And be like, like, holy shit. We haven't talked to Jeff in a long time. But we'll. They're busy working, Jake. And we are. Yeah, they are. That's the funniest part of those. We make it sound like our schedule, they're just so busy.

And it's like, no, it's actually, it probably would have been just fine. Jeff, do you ever calculate how many miles do you travel in a year for space things? I don't. I probably should and it might be like depressing or something, but it's like not. I was going to say competitive with some astronauts that have flown that year. Yes, we'll go depressing instead. You know, I sort of focus on things like, you know, I'm not going to get enough Southwest flights in to get to A-list so I can get like a decent seat. Although with the new seat assignments now, I don't know how that's going to work.

So, you know. If we cracked into our opinions on Southwest, it would go a while. It would go a long way. Yeah. You bring anything back to you from vacation? Do you bring some Guatemalan drinks? I did. I did.

Thank you for asking. Thank you for asking, yes. So I went to, so Jeff, I was just in Guatemala for our vacation, which is if you miss the pre-show, if you're not in our disco, and you missed the pre-show, I gave it a 10-minute A-plus-plus review of Guatemala as a vacation spot. So I recommend it. One Mike Fink thumbs up. Also what we talked about in the pre-show is theorizing what happened to Crew 11.

But yeah, on the last day, we went to like a traditional chocolate factory where the indigenous people of Guatemala make chocolate and stuff. And they have this stuff, which was on the shelf, which I had to get. So this is chocolate rum. Is that handwritten on that label? Handwritten. That's how you know this is the good stuff. And actually you can tell... The best chocolate.

You see that? Yeah. When you got sediment in the booze, that's how you know you're getting into some serious stuff. So what is that? What is in there? It's rum. With chocolate? And then, yeah, chocolate.

Chocolate rum? I'm going to try it. I'm just going to give it a shot like straight up. I never knew this is an item. There we go. Chocolate rum. That's pretty good. That's like light boozy hot chocolate.

I was going to ask how close to hot chocolate in ratio this is. Well, and that's what I, that's what I sampled it at the place you sampled to. They give you a little bit of hot chocolate and then they put the rum in it and then you have it. And it was fantastic. So, but even straight, this is good. I'm liking this. So that's,

there's no, that's just rum and just chocolate? This is like an alcoholic's hot chocolate. Is that what this is? Yes. But there's no milk in it. So it's like, That's what I mean.

It's like traditional, technically that's traditional hot chocolate because, you know, they didn't really have milk products before the Spanish got there, right? So this is now they would have had it, kind of. We'll go with that. Yeah. That's a very funny item. Cheers. Yeah.

You're going to get into making that at home. That's great. I've got a, the last, I dug out the last of the double blizzard beards that I have because, as long as Jeff's not traveling, he and I are dead. center on this storm and it's a I think it's a shootout of who's going to get more snow if this goes north or south has have you've been following uh that the meteorologist twitter this week anyone there's been a lot of drama in the models I mean yeah I mean I follow since I'm in the DC area I follow capital weather gang which is at the Washington post they do some uh pretty detailed

modeling and I it looks like we're in the five to 10 inch range right now because some of it storm will change over to sleet but further north it's going to be more. So I went to the grocery store earlier today and they were already in full panic buying mode. You know, people getting their bread, their milk, their toilet paper, which apparently are the three essentials for a snowstorm for some reason.

Yeah, I was just wanted to make sure that, you know, I've got enough chips and salsa for the weekend for the games and beer or so. Get some hot shock. chocolate and rum. You've got to get that. Yeah, I got time tomorrow maybe to go do that. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to go to run to the Guatemalan import store. Do you have anything fun that you're drinking right now from the supermarket hall, Jeff?

Or are you still working? Are you on the clock? Yeah, well, I'm still working, but, you know, I couldn't find a good space beer. So I found one that sort of summarizes the times we live in right now, which is the giant flaming zombie polar bear. That's just the name of it. Is there one drawn on it? Or is it just named that? It is. Oh, he's on, I see. He's on the backside there.

Giant, flaming, polar bear. Hell yeah. This is from Atlas Brew Works, which is in D.C., so local beer. Pretty strong stuff. And since I've got work to do, I'll probably not kind of drink a lot of it because it could get a little interesting later on. But I think, you know, if nothing else,

giant flaming zombie polar bears sort of summarizes the state of our times right now. Maybe that's what we're fighting about over Greenland. Yeah, it's... Man, I've been clear on this show that I support acquiring Greenland, but boy, has that whole story been a weird, a weird follow.

Where are we starting, Jake? You were prepping the list when I ran to get my drink right before we went live. So what did you pick? It's the first thing. We got to, this is more of a lightning round than I think we're prepared for. We'll see, we'll see. I was doing with Jeff that we never really plan the time allotment in the show very well.

So we'll see how we go. But I think we should start with with Blue Origin because I think there is quite a lot of stories happening there like independently. And I don't know. I'm kind of pretty impressed with Blue Origin lately. They've been like one story after the other bucking my expectation. and I don't know what to think about it. So I'm really excited to see what Jeff has to say about it. But we've got New Glenn is heading out for another launch with a refurbished booster.

Like right away, they're going to fly that thing, apparently. We've got, we haven't really had a lot of time to talk about Tori Bruno. I don't know if you did last week, Anthony, but you and I haven't talked too much about it. We got Terra Wave. I don't know, where do you want to start on that? Where's that list do you want to do? Let's make Jeff pick the most impactful one of those stories. All right.

What's the most important? All right. Well, let me just start with the first there with New Glenn, because they did announce today. Their next launch is going to be next month with an AST-Space mobile satellite. The key thing about it is that they're going to use the same booster that they flew on NG2 in November on NG3. When I talked with Dave Limp shortly after the NG2 launch in November,

He said they were leaning, they were thinking it was possible that they could turn around and refurbish that booster for NG3. He also said, well, we've got more boosters in the factory as well, so we'll see what happens. But it's clear that they think they're ready to turn that around, which is vital for the business plan for New Glenn to be able to reuse that booster. They've talked about being able to fly at least 25 times. So being able to turn it around fairly quickly the first time through, you know, on a matter of four months or less, is a big deal. So I think that's important. If they're really talking about increasing the flight rate,

they've got to get the boost of refurbishment and turnaround perfected. And that's a big step in that direction. Yeah. Okay. I have a couple probing questions and I want to get your read on. this Jeff. So first of all, I know there was like, at some point we knew there was like four boosters

like in the assembly line, right? Like, you know, in various states of construction. That was like right before the first launch. And then there was something that happened with one of them got damaged. So we were kind of down to like three. Is the fast and immediate turnaround of this booster intentional or is it like

we got to do this because something broke and we're not quite ready to fly a new one yet? What do you think? What's your re- reuse versus planned? Yeah, I don't have enough insight into the new Glenn production process to be able to say exactly where they are with the other boosters other than what Dave Lent said back in November about having more boosters in production. But one way or another, they have to be able to demonstrate refurbishment and reuse. And the sooner you can do that, the better.

incorporate those lessons learned into future launches to be able to shorten that turnaround time and get to a point where you can start flying these monthly or even more frequently than that. I feel like I remember that the reporting being that they were planning on doing a reused booster with Blue Moon, which obviously has now slipped the launcher to down the manifest. But the idea of using it, of reusing one that quick was floated at least sometime last year. Yeah, yeah, that was, yeah, that's what they were saying back in November. And at that time, they were talking about the next launch, potentially being of the Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander. It's clear that, you know, that lander is still several months away from launch.

You know, they put it on a boat and shipping it off to Houston for a thermal vacuum chamber testing. So, you know, that's going to take a while. I'll bring it back, getting ready to go. it's still a few months off. So they've got clearly other customers like AST that are that are eager to fly. And so they'll jump ahead. And Blue Origin can get some more flight experience for new glen in the process. Love it.

The other question I have is more, it's a less mean question. So I have this theory that the New Shepherd program is underrated. and I think because I think people like to write it off because it's like it's not an orbital rocket and so like it's not it's not in the orbital club so it's like just like a toy thing that we do on the side and you know it's for it's for tourism whatever but you know they had they just launched this morning right that was ns 38 38 i think yeah okay so 38 launches of new shepherd under their belts is a reasonably good track record of experience for reflying rockets and I wonder how much of that translated to new Glenn to be able to go, okay, we got the first one back, just a couple months to check it out and we feel good. We're ready to go. Are we seeing the seeds, like, are we seeing the, not the seeds, are we sowing the seeds of the New Shepherd program in New Glenn right now, right? Is that, I kind of wonder if that's happening here and that's going to be a story that kind of flies under the radar. Yeah, I think, you know, some of the technology and certainly some of the operation

lessons from New Shepherd can be applied to New Glenn. Now, clearly New Glenn, now clearly New Glenn's a much larger vehicle, different engines, the details of the refurbishment process obviously are going to be different for that than they are for New Shepherd. But, you know, obviously they have built up a lot of experience in learning how to land boosters and reuse them with New Shepherd, and that can only help with New Glenn. Even just knowing what to look for when you get it back to the hangar, right? Like, oh, well, New Shepherd, this is our checklist. Operational.

20 of these in. And they've also talked about increasing the New Shepard flight rate. Their senior vice president for New Shepard, Phil Joyce, said in a conference in Australia in September that, you know, they're looking to add additional vehicles over the next couple of years, moving to as much as a weekly flight cadence, which would be, you know, a pretty remarkable step up from right now, which is a little less than one per month. They're looking at potentially flying from other facilities rather than West Texas for the vehicle.

So I think they wouldn't do that if they didn't see a business opportunity there. If they're flying New Shepard solely to get the technology and operations experience and in the process, you know, human space flight experience and flying people, you wouldn't spend that effort to try and crank up the flight rate. So I think they see an opportunity there. How profitable an opportunity is, it's hard to say because they don't disclose pricing, any details like that. So is this still a loss leader or is this something that they think that they can become a profitable entity over time? Yeah.

I have a suspicion that's still not making money, but I don't know if that matters too much. Like this is the space world. A lot of stuff doesn't make a lot of money for a very long time. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think if they stopped New Shepherd now, I think they still would have gotten tremendous amount of value out of it. Simply with both the technology and the flight experience from doing that. The fact that they keep flying it suggests that, you know,

it's not just that they're learning more. It's that they see, I think, some potential business opportunity if they can crank up the flight rate. I also like to voice support for maybe doing it, even if there isn't business sense. If it's just a cool thing that Jeff Bezos wants to see in the world, you're here for that also. Like, rich dudes used to build libraries and museums

and wild stuff that people could admire and whatnot. And I'm like, if this is like a space version of one of those, then why not? Let's see what happens. Yeah, except as we learned last year, not everyone admires these flights. So it's not quite the same as building a museum. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a, I don't know. I go back and forth on whether that's a space problem or a billionaire problem. We could probably talk all year about that. Yeah, these days, though, space and billionaires are awfully intertwined. So it's difficult to celebrate the two. A difficult Venn diagram. Yeah.

Yeah. So, okay, cool. I'm excited. I'm excited to see this fly. Can we get there? This is all, I'll transition us soon, but Artemis 2 or New Glenn 3, which you think flies first. Ooh. This is a prediction that came up one of our listeners in the Discord and I really like it.

Yeah, no, no, that's a good one because they're talking about, I think, no earlier than late February for New Glenn 3 and the first Artemis 2 launch window is early February. The people I talk... The 12 is kind of eating. Right. A lot of the people I talk to aren't particularly confident about an Artemis 2 launch in February. And you mentioned crew 12 wanting to move up is an issue. But, I mean, they still haven't done the wet dress rehearsal. And that may not happen until early February.

And that does not give them a lot of time to transition from the wet dress to an actual launch attempt. Now, when we were down there at KSC, for the rollout over the weekend. One of the things you're asking about is, well, how long does it take between a wet dress and a launch attempt, assuming the wet dress rehearsal is perfect? There are no problems at all. Everything worked exactly as you planned.

And they're like, oh, well, we need a few days to review the data, but we can just sort of like think the words of one official roll and go into a launch attempt. Now, I think what we'll find out is there will be something that comes up during the wet dress. I mean, something always does. We saw with Artemis 1, they went through wet dress rehearsals, and they still had problems with the launch attempts later on.

They've said that they've corrected those issues. Doesn't mean new issues will come up. Something may happen there. I think the attitude they're taken is that they're going to go full speed ahead on an Artemis 2 launch attempt in February until they can't, until something technically comes up or until they realize the schedule, just doesn't allow it, and then they start running into conflicts with trying to move up crew 12, which despite people saying at NASA that these are completely separate and independent,

they're not because there are some shared resources. They're shared resources at the Cape. They're shared resources with the Tidre satellite network or spacecraft communications. There is even the, as known as Detachment 3, the rescue forces. They would have to be positioned in different locations for Artemis 2 and Crew 12 because they fly different trajectories. So if you're trying to put them close together, they have to decide where they put their forces. And that becomes an issue. So I think something will come up and they'll say, you know, we're going to slip Artemis 2 until the March window.

But I think until then, they are going to go full speed ahead just in case everything does go well. they don't want to throw away a launch opportunity if they don't have to. And the fact that they can do two different windows on the same rollout this time around is important. They said only two, right? If they don't make March, they would have to roll back to... That's what it sounds like from the briefings last week, that they are able to do the servicing. But we can do servicing out of the pad now. So why do they have to roll back?

Well, if we get more... What's the thing? Well, you know, if we had more time for those press conferences to ask more questions, maybe we can dig into those details. No one's been needling more than you on Twitter. Well, you know, that was a pretty universal feeling in the briefing room there. That, you know, we had half an hour of introductory remarks, including things not related to the rollout and launch. Yes, they're going to do great science and Artemis, too.

That's great. Talked about it in September. don't need to spend time talking about it in a rollout press conference. Especially when they had a hard stop, they had people needing to go to other briefings, and they couldn't extend it. So you get squeezed, you don't get a lot of questions in.

And then I think this gets into actually sort of a broader issue is that, you know, Arndes II is a very historic mission. This is the first time since 1972 we're sending people beyond Earth orbit, to at least the vicinity of the moon. and NASA has been sort of almost underplaying this. I mean, there was a big set of briefings in September about the mission.

Then there really wasn't much since then. Now, there were six weeks where they couldn't say anything, there was a government shutdown. But even after they came back from the shutdown, there wasn't a lot of discussion about the preparations for the mission. They went through that whole countdown rehearsal inside the VAB in December, and they basically, you know, day or two later put out a statement describing the rehearsal and all that, but they didn't do anything discussion ahead of time or anything like that. And, you know, even after that, up until the rollout, there wasn't a lot of information coming out. And it seems, you know, it's almost strange that, you know, if you want the public to be aware of this,

you've got to be willing to talk about it, you know, and start sharing some more information. And Administrator Isaacan has said, talked a lot about openness and transparency. Well, that means, you know, sharing some more information, being more open about the preparations. You look at ISS every weekday. They put out a long blog post talking about, you know, astronaut, you know, Chris Williams did this experiment and that experiment. And then he, you know, discussed maintenance with the cosmos and all that. All certain very rich detail. Probably, you know, I sort of skimmed through it just to make sure there wasn't anything that,

sort of pops to my mind, but that I think yesterday they put out a blog post about Artem's two preparations, which was the first thing since the rollout, and they hadn't been doing things like that in the days beforehand. I mean, there's no reason why at this point they should not be doing these daily updates like that, saying, here's what we've done in the last 24 hours, getting the vehicle ready, here's what's coming up, you know, here's the plans for, for wet dress rehearsal and and you know also that that sort of thing that's that's an easy relatively speaking thing to do to keep people in the loop and it's it's they've been really slow to do that and I don't really understand why and I think it's a it's a missed opportunity because the public in general is not

really aware that we are potentially weeks away from sending humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. And then when people complain, well, why isn't the public talking about this? Why, you know, why isn't this all over the news? Well, NASA, you got to be, you know, sharing some more information about what's going on and, you know, helping people get the public excited about this. It's really, it's really interesting because you're right, like, it should be, there should be, like, a president can take victory laps on this kind of thing, right? And we would expect this one to do that a lot. And so I would, I would think there would be more about talking that. But I almost wonder if they're all a little bit burned from Artemis I because like a lot of

things were kind of embarrassing about that flight in a way, right? Like the whole thing about the batteries and like whether they were going to last. And even before that, it was like, well, we stacked the boosters too early and then we had to wait a year and a half and now they're not certified. And then, and so it's like, all these questions like, are you taking too long? Are you taking too long and now the hydrogen filled up and you got to roll back and then is there a cracks on the thing and then okay now the nuts are loose we got to send a team out to the pad and then the Orion battery broke so we got to like delay a year and a half to do something out and then we're going to just fly it fine and it's like there's all those kind of things like the launch window calendars they published

got just scrutinized like crazy you know like we're all counting the days between the green squares on the thing and and trying to figure out how to do that and then they had the final launch attempt and Kamala Harris flew in and then they scrubbed and she had to leave and then they did it later. And like, you know, there's like all these like kind of weird little impressive memory by the way. Like I forgot a half of that shit, dude. But this is what I mean though, right? Like do you think that all those kind of things just sort of taught them like, we got to just be a little more reserved and because we're just not ready to face that kind of media scrutiny? And not to say that the media did a bad job there.

I think that's exactly what everyone should have been doing. But if if that's the rocket you have, you have. you got to work with it, maybe you feel a little scared about that, right? That's a comms issue more. I think, like, I don't know, Jeff, if you want to stop writing, you could probably go be the comms person for this, because just your mere statement of, we're going to go hard for a launch attempt

until we find out that we can't make it. Like, that's all you need to keep saying about it, right? Like, if stuff comes up, we're trying really hard, there's a lot of moving parts as a complex system, you can, you can, comms your way around that, or at least just be honest about it is the best policy. Like, if we learned anything in the last five or six years, It's like, just tell everyone everything you know at all times, and I bet that will work out better than trying to inception the public into thinking what you want them to think about the program.

And also, I don't know if this is too mean, but the associate administrator of comms at NASA used to work at Blue Origin. And I wonder how much these, because all of what you're saying there, Jeff, is like, that's the way Blue Origin and SpaceX and Rocket Lab would communicate about a launch campaign, not like a good organization that has a top down, just send all the info out to the public at all times. directive. So they are operating much more in the way of let's be strategic about what we're going to communicate when we're going to communicate it. Yeah. I, you know, I think, you know, the thing here is that if you're going to err on the site of oversharing, you know, you know, provide too much information. I say like, no, no, don't, we don't need to know the serial numbers of the bolts. That's, that's, you know, we're good there. But, you know, get to get to that point. There are some sites on the internet that like that, though, Jeff. Yeah. I'm sure, I'm sure.

I'm sure some people are keeping tabs on that. But, you know, you mentioned, you know, the launch windows. It wasn't until earlier this month. They actually published the launch windows for, you know, February, March, and April. And they sort of stop. We know that there's a window that opens like April 30th because that dates highlighted on the calendar. So we assume it goes into May, but they stopped the end of April. So. But, you know, it wasn't until earlier this month that they actually published that.

You know, remember with Artemis 1, we had these detailed calendars. Yeah, going off for a long time. So, you know, I just think that there's an opportunity for the agency to provide more information and help get people interested. Just another anecdote. I was at a reception earlier this week. The Washington Office of Jackson, the Japanese Space Agency had a new year's reception. You come in, you know, you hear about what's going on with the Japanese Space Program. and then they have a nice reception that they organized

with the Japan America Society. So you bring in space people who come in for the Jackson reception, but then you bring in people who are involved with the society, interested in Japan, but don't know anything necessarily about space. And so sitting the table with a couple of people, and then a couple of the people from the Japan Society come over. You know, we start talking with them. You know, they're not space people.

They work like an international development. And then Artemis comes up, and they get these puzzled looks on their faces. And it's like, you know, we're going to send people to the moon in as soon as a few weeks. And they didn't know. You know, so I'm filling out my phone. I'm showing them, here's the rocket they're going to be on. They rolled it out over the weekend and look at the tiny people there for the scale and talking about that.

You know, and they were learning about it and it hasn't really penetrated the public consciousness yet. And I think another thing is if they do it in February, they're going to be competing with the Super Bowl and the Olympics and not seeing that's a reason not to do it but I'm I'm there drinking man I'm saying don't do it don't do it one of the launch windows is the night like an hour after the Super Bowl ends do not launch it on that day cancel that attempt no one that's ridiculous everyone's drunk everyone turned the TV off an hour ago yeah yeah were you concerned about the Eagles aren't it are going to be in the Super Bowl so I'm so I'm so relieved that they're not to be honest We didn't, yeah.

Jeez, yeah. So it's really, I agree, you know, I think the outreach aspect, though, of that, like, should be, I think it's in the same way that it's stupid to try to hide behind, like, the complexity of the mission. I think it's also stupid to act like it would be a dumb decision to avoid dates because of public interest. Like, there's nothing about this launch attempt in February that changes the schedule for Artemis 3. So don't fly it on a day where you're not going to get the attention. because the most useful aspect of Artemis 2 is the fact that this is a, aside from it being a really fucking cool mission where we're sending humans to the moon again, like, that's awesome. That is

truly awesome. Opinions aside about the program, everybody stop with the pitchforks, like, we know you hate us, the less, we know you hate Orion, whatever. It is really cool that there are humans flying to the moon. And that is a very useful thing geopolitically if we're in this era of like, like, take for instance, if a long March 10 lift it off tomorrow and, China flew astronauts by the moon, the geopolitical influence that that would have alone, other people would say, yeah, that's a huge deal. That's a really big deal. They can have these pictures. We're going to have those photos in a couple of months, and Jake's going to get an astronaut from his home country flying by the moon in a couple of months. That's a really

awesome thing that that alone may be worth $4.5 billion. If you could order it on Amazon, a picture of your astronauts by the moon, that might be geopolitically worth $4.5 billion because that's what that mission costs. And maybe the photo alone is worth that. And then the fact that people don't know about it is kind of crazy. But I also wonder, do you think that's how us in the 60s felt about Apollo? Or was it all consuming? Yeah.

I mean, one of the things you have to remember about Apollo is that we sort of, you know, have this backward-looking perspective that we thought, you know, like everyone was totally consumed and interested and supportive of it. and you go back and you look at the opinion polls, and there wasn't a majority of people who supported Apollo until after the Apollo 11 landing. And then it dropped back down again. And there's a lot more competing for people's attention.

So maybe when we get within a few days of launch, and the publicity machine really turns up, we'll see a lot more public interest in this, and we'll see a lot more people interested. you know, you mentioned Canada. I saw a post on Twitter from the Canadian Space Agency just this afternoon. They're setting up watch parties across Canada to watch the Artemis II launch. And there's like instructions on how to set up a watch party in your town to watch it.

And they include like, now be clear there could be multiple attempts before they actually launch and all that, you know, sort of cautionary notes. But there's like, you know, here's how he set it up. There's like an initial list of watch parties at museums across the country and things like that. So, you know, they're thinking about how to get, you know, people excited about this. Not saying that NASA needs to organize watch parties across the country, but, you know, I think it's... Maybe Isaac would buy us donuts for them. He could find some donuts for the parties.

Oh, you could, you know, 300 million donuts. Are you catching a Canadian vibe, Jake? Are you, are your Canadian social network pumped about this? You haven't talked about them. I see now. I mean, I will admit that my Canadian social network is pretty small. And it's mostly like my mom and my brother and stuff. So like, you know, but there's not a lot, there's not a lot of cropping up right now.

Yeah. As it's funny, there's like, there's a pretty like crazy Apollo 8 parallel with where we had like a little bit of a turbulent year in current affairs and then like is Artemis too going to save us? I don't know. We'll see. Will this be the flight to save? I bet you'll still have an embargo, a travel embargo in the U.S. after we fly your astronaut around the moon. I might. We'll see. We'll see. So it's been it's been a little, it's been a weird time. Have you said thank you once, Jake, for this ride you're getting at the moon? You got to deliver first, all right, buddy. I got to deliver first.

Um, yeah, uh, Pam pickup. Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting. It's, you know, it is not a, it is not a time in Canada to be really excited about American activity. So it's, it's, it's going to be an interesting thing to see how this, this works out. Because it's like related, but not, you know, it's like that same, the same old space story, international space story all the time on the ground. You guys are at war with the Russians that up in space. You're shaking hands and having drinks, right? So it's very strange. You don't think there'll be a rousing speech by your PM? Well, we just got that this week and it was not that. Not rousing in your favor, I don't think. So we'll see. I wonder how Greenland will look from near the moon. From the moon, yeah.

Very small, I think. Do we know, I know they said the other day, like, the moon will look like a basketball at arm's length. Do we know, have we even gotten like precise altitudes on this thing? I think they haven't given specific numbers because the trajectory varies from day to day. Yeah. But even the high Earth orbit. Do we know like that 24-hour staging orbit?

Do we know how high that is? I haven't been able to find it. Yeah. If anyone knows it's you, Jeff. If it's not top of one for you, we don't know it. I'm confident enough to say that. Yeah. I'd have to look for some reason, the apogy of like 70,000 kilometers comes to me.

mind. So, but I don't, I don't remember the specifics, but double geo. That's a pretty cool spot to hang out. Hopefully that's not all they hang out in. That's my biggest fear with Artemis too is that it flies and they come back after that initial orbit and then because something's weird with the eclipse. Like that's the apocalyptic scenario for the program, I think, is that it resets the clock on actually doing a lunar flyby. You would have made all this. noise and then didn't do the lunar flyby. And then it's not like the space age where you have a flight coming up in two months or whatever, right? The next one's far. It's far away. Right. So that's that's a rough scenario. Oh, and that's and that kind of plays to the point

I was trying to make, right? Like there's they they got burned on mistakes on the last flight from a comms perspective and there's a lot of opportunity for mistakes on this one. and the mistakes are worse and more, you know, more impactful. And so you think like the second TLI happens, then the comms machine turns on? Maybe. I don't know, but it's just like, we'll be at the moon in two days. I don't agree with it, but I can see how you get there. Like if you're, if you're a conservative communications team, like, I can see, I can see, I can see. Oh, no, it's doing that thing again.

it's doing that thing Jake where it repeats your audio over and over again you log off and come back this happened once I don't even know if I have another shot about it just happened once mid laugh though and it repeated like he'll logger gone it'll still be doing it

it's the whole thing he's gone into Max Headroom mode there yeah right geez let's see did it work no it's still doing it you got to whatever you did last time reboot and then come back I can see it's still doing it. I'll see in a minute.

I think the flight rate of SLS Orion actually really hurts this case, though, because if Jake's theory is right that, like, they feel burned by the way that this went the first time around, and that's why they're acting this way, they would be acting different if that next flight wasn't so far away. If this was like, listen, we're going for this flight by the moon, but it's a complex system. We don't know if everything's going to work. but if your next one's not three years away, you would be more willing to be out in the open and say, like, this one might not go,

but we've got all the, look at all these core stages we have in production, right? But we're years away from the next flight anyway. So it does raise the stakes, and it raises, I don't know, I feel like that's an awkward moment. Because if Apollo 8, I mean, all these different missions, like had different things go wrong, right? And NASA was able to say, yeah,

but this next one that we're doing very shortly. Right. I mean, you had the ability to, started there for a second, had the ability to fly every few months with the Apollo program. And you don't have that with this program. And you also have this now official presidential goal of getting humans back on the surface of the moon in 2028. That seems like a stretch right now,

given where we are on the state of lander development. you know, maybe they can pull something out of their hats in terms of trying to come up with some sort of accelerated path. But if Artemis II isn't fully successful, it makes it really hard to get Artemis 3 and in 2028, no matter where you are with landers or with a spacesuit development. And yet it comes down to the same Achilles heel that we've talked about for how many years, right? That the flight rate is too low and that's going to harm the program. And it really does put them, Jake, my thesis is that the, the, the, the, the, the, fear of getting it wrong or of kind of being left out in the open the way that you're saying is because if something minor even happened and it changed the flight trajectory, the next flight is so many

years away that the recovery path is not clear. And I don't know. And that's the most, so I had this theory, Jeff. I don't know if I ever unveiled this on a show that you were on, but I had this theory that the best thing that could have happened for human spaceflight was something was wrong with the James Webb Space Telescope and we had to go save it. And that would inspire like a whole branch of rescue missions that would be really interesting. And the most chaotic thing that could happen to the Artemis program's schedule would be flight flies. They get, you know, they come back after the initial Earth orbit and we're right back on the ground safely. But we have this situation where it's like, okay, we didn't achieve the lunar flyby. We're years away from the next thing.

The political capital that has been spent on let's speed up the Artemis three landers is still there to be used, floated by somebody who is not the NASA administrator now, that is such a weird mix of stuff that I have no idea what would come out the other end of it. But quite frankly, if this all went well and they do fly by the moon and they land back here on Earth, like, then what? How do you foresee? Because Isaacman's got decisions to make in front of him, right? What are they, what are they going to do with the Artemis 3 acceleration thing? The big beautiful bill inserted all this money for the gateway and Artis 4 and 5. So hands are tied a little bit on that congressionally, but we all kind of know that, like, there are decisions and announcements to be made

after, and I don't think any that happens before they get back on Artemis 2. So, and he's got like a year to really have an effect on NASA before we get into presidential elections again. Yeah. So do you have any thoughts on like what kind of tactician level stuff Isaacman might be thinking about with regards to the Artemis manifest overall? Yeah, that's a really good question because when he was at the rollout, you know, I asked him what he was doing in terms of the studies, the acceleration plans for the lunar landers,

because he had mentioned a few days earlier that he had met with both Blue Origin and SpaceX about their plans. No one's really discussed any details about what those plans are. You know, we get little bits of details here and there about you know, mixing together different types of blue moon landers or doing different things with Starship or things like that. We don't have a lot of details about it. You know, one of the interesting, he didn't really answer the question head on and maybe he couldn't because he's still weighing what's going on. But, you know, he's talking about, well, we need to see, you know, Starship flying

frequently and New Glenn flying frequently because those are going to be the vehicles that are going be used for those programs. And obviously right now, neither of them is flying particularly frequently. You know, we're just seeing New Glens start to scale up. And, you know, this is the year of starship, just like last year is the year of starship

and 2024 is the year of starship and that. It's Bluetooth all over again. Yeah. So it's, it's, you know, I think he and the team there are still trying to figure out what is sort of the art of the possible in terms of what you can do, given that you now have a presidential mandate to land people on the moon by 2028.

And he's got, he knows he knows his time NASA is limited to that he would not likely stay on after the end of the current administration. So, you know, he knows that he's got a focus to accelerate on this. but exactly what that looks and then what is sort of the reaction in Congress to try and shake things out particularly if it involved making major changes to the existing program of record

that might concern some members. I think it's probably easier to move around things with HLS with Blue Origin and SpaceX than it is try and move around SLS and Orion and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. I don't envy Isaacman in the fact that he's in the hardest part of the Artemis

life cycle for like management and communication. Like the fun part is at the beginning when you get to like announce that you're doing something cool and like hand out contracts and like show all these renders. And then like it's really fun at the end when you actually land and like get to like celebrate it. But this part in the middle, which is like, you know, actually do it is the worst part to be the boss. And so I don't envy him having to try and figure that out and actually trying to comp or something in this very short.

grid. That's the craziest part about this cadence, right? His tenureship will be like less than the time between two SLS launches. It's going to be pretty tough to impact that a lot, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, in some respects, you know, he's been given a, you know, an SLS that is complete and, you know, it flew on Artemis one well. So that part of the development is all right. Now it's the the issue of now how frequently can you build these? Can you get up to a yearly cadence? Orion is something similar other than we're just now testing flying it with people and we've got to redo the heat shield and things like that.

But a lot of the development is behind it. But it's things, he's in the heart now, though, of what exactly does it look like to land humans on the moon? Because we thought the previous administration had solved that by selecting SpaceX and then selecting glue origin for the landers, but now we're finding that, well, maybe it's not going to be what those companies had proposed and were selected to do. It's going to be maybe something different, you know, some odd variant of what they originally proposed, simply because it turns out it's going to take a lot longer than they said it would, just like it took a lot longer for pretty much every element of Artemis to get to this point. And so now that's the

challenge he faces is how do you address that and how do you rebuild the human landing system program midstream? The way I focus on it is that the signal you get from Congress between the big beautiful bill in the summer and then the budget that hits now is that they're in for the regular way that this has been talked about for years, right? Gateway is unmovable. SLS-Riner immovable. So my take that I've had for years is we're never going to talk or politic our way out of this. The only way out of this manifest if you don't like it is to fly your way out of it and to fly the hardware that shows you the exit ramp. And I find that the most interesting aspect is that Sean Duffy goes out and announces this whole, we're going to

accelerate the program, right? So you have an interim administrator that's like politically angling and doesn't really care about NASA, as reported. I don't know, him personally, so whatever. But you also at the same time have a politically vulnerable SpaceX through all the Elon Musk stuff, and everything else that went on last year. And what you're given is political capital to go make decisions about how to accelerate the roadmap. And those of us that are in the industry that kind of know, like,

there's not really any accelerating to be done here with all the other hardware that has to happen. But that does give you some leverage to make certain judgment calls on, like, you can have NASA backing for a weird and different branch of hardware development than you would have had otherwise. And all of those things,

anything that accelerates the Artemis 3 landing is developing an infrastructure that could fly your way out of SLS Orion sooner. So like any of the interesting stuff with Starship that might be proposed, any of the stuff with more or different kinds of blue moon landers and getting additional funds to bring those about sooner, that is hastening the end of the SLS Orion Gateway days

because you're building momentum towards something that could fly more frequently and land on the moon. And if you do that, if you have something that can land on the moon and can do it frequently, the last piece to fall is like Congress having FOMO that other people are capable of going to land on the moon and we don't have a NASA logo on that and we don't have a thing we can tout in our district. So that's the, to me, that's the inciting factor that breaks the political backing of all the stuff that Congress throws their weight behind is is momentum in the other direction. And this whole Artemis 3 acceleration program is good cover to just inject additional energy or

resources or both into that direction. So I think that's Isaac Min's, like, that's what he has at his fingertips, is the political cover because of that messaging to make some decisions on the hardware side that end up at a different future than it is forecasted to be five, ten years from now as expected. You know, I think that the key is to see whatever this acceleration plan comes out. Is it just a cluge to be able to, you know, put together hardware just to get, you know, boots on the moon in 2028? Or is something that really is extensible to something maybe you're talking about, something that does become the primary architecture? You know, if you listen to Isaacman, you know, he's talking about, you know, we're, he's looking to a future where there's going to be an Artemis 100.

but he's not expecting that to be anything like the current architecture, that there will be other vehicles that come online and that do replace SLS and Orion at some point. So he's looking for really a sustained future of lunar exploration, but trying to find where is that transition point between Artemis 2 and Artemis 100, where you make that shift to a different, presumably more commercial architecture.

I guess we'll have to see. In some ways, I feel bad that Artemis II is all I want to talk about. But in other ways, I think Jeff's right. I kind of think it might be all we should talk about between now and when it launches. It's such a big deal. Yeah. Reprogram all of our content. I find all the other news uninteresting, to be honest.

Like, I'm unmotivated. I don't know, Terra Wave. The only thing interesting to me is that Blue Origin announced it on Amazon. That's weird. Is that weird? It's a little weird in that, I mean, you have Bezos competing against Bezos to some degree.

Bezos Spider-Man's meme? Somebody did give us that in the chat. Yeah. But I think one of the key differences is that Amazon Leo, a big focus of that is a consumer market. So competing a lot with Starlink there. TerraWave is really focused at enterprise and government customers, people that aren't looking for a nice little, you know,

phase ray antenna to get them, you know, 200 megabits per second so they can stream Netflix. They're looking for people who want, you know, terabytes per second for their data centers. To serve Netflix. Yeah. Right. To serve Netflix to all those people. Exactly. So it is a different market. So there probably will be some overlap. because I know Amazon had marketed what was then called Project Kuiper.

They had a Kuiper government services business unit that was marketing it to the government. So there may be some overlap there with what Blue Origin is doing with TerraWave. But, I mean, it's been just over 24 hours since Blue Origin announced TerraWave. When it came out, my first thought was, well, whose spectrum are they using? I went and checked the FCC data. They had just filed their application with the FCC when they put that release out. So it was the very top of the list of submissions in their database when that came out. So it's literally just the start of the process.

Yeah, yeah. I think I'm less confused by the Blue Origin Amazon thing than everyone else is. I know that it's really easy to kind of imagine it's like both companies are just like Jeff Bezos in a in a company box right like it's like that's what they are and so why would he do them but like that's not what they are there's separate companies and one of them's publicly traded and like does he even have is he still on the board of the directors like he doesn't he's not the CEO of Amazon anymore I don't think he's not the CEO he's still the largest one of the largest shareholders so but

But even being the largest, like I think his stake is single digit percentages, isn't it? Like, I guess it's pretty far down there, right? He's the executive chair of the board at Amazon. Yeah, it's not like he owns the controlling stake, but he owns a significant stake nonetheless. So, I mean, so there, and then you have, you know, of course, Amazon Leo satellites getting launched on New Glenn. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess, I mean, like, I recognize that they're not. not completely separate companies. Like I'm not, I'm not that naive, but, you know, the, the, the fact that

one is publicly traded and has its own CEO and its own shareholders and has to answer to those responsibilities, like I'm, I know that if Jeff Bezos calls someone on the board, they're going to, they're going to take his call and he'll have significant influence and whatever, right? And he's got whatever actual voting shares he has. But at the end of the day, the Amazon board has to be responsible to all of the Amazon shareholders. And Jeff as a CEO of, or not the CEO of the owner of Blue Origin, has to be responsible to the shareholders of the origin, which is, whatever, mostly himself and whatever else. But, you know, like they, he may want to just have a separate revenue stream that is

his. And I don't see this as strange as, as that, right? Even if it's competing because it's like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not as perturbed by it as others, I guess. I think I just flared in my brain, which one would be. focused on consumer and which one would be focused on business? Yeah, that's fair.

But that's because I put Amazon Leo more towards the AWS side than Echo. Right? Like, if you think of it more of an Echo service, then I'm like, all right, yeah, it's like a consumer, they're into consumer services. Yeah, I, you know, Amazon Leo, I would much more see as a consumer service simply because Amazon's record dealing with millions and millions of customers. So, you know, signing up some of them for our broadband service is no big deal. Yeah.

All right. Well, we'll see. I'm really curious to see what those satellites look like. And, yeah, the spectrum will be interesting to watch too because that seems like an important keystone to this whole operation. It's a real estate game. Yeah. All right. Well, we did pretty good, Anthony, on the old list of topics here. Is there anything else you want to knock off?

What's the lightning round topic? Artemis 2, man. I'm like, I think I should only talk about Artemis 2 between now and when they fly. All right. My biggest bummer is that, per Jeff's snide remark that the Eagles did not make it to the Super Bowl, although I will remind him that the Washington commanders were in the NFC championship last year and totally sucked this year. I don't even know if you're a commander's fan.

I'm not. So it doesn't bother me. I mean, yeah. Yeah, I'm a nationals fan. And so it's pretty desperate right now. Nothing? Oh, capital. So hockey.

What's your football interest? Zero, zero interest? No. I grew up in the Midwest, so I was a Chiefs fan. So, you're just disappointed. I was going to go chiefs or bears. Either way, disappointed. So, yeah, so, you know, growing up, they weren't good at all.

And then, you know, then they had this good run here and sort of fell apart this season. It fell apart on the Super Bowl last year. You can say it. Anyway, my biggest disappointment is that Christina Cook, also an Eagles fan. And I was hoping we would get some good birds content near the moon. But she's probably also depressed like I am. Oh. Bummer.

Bummer. Sorry, man. That's it. Yeah. Jeff, plug some stuff. What are you working on? You're in my inbox every morning. Right.

Yeah, what do you got? Right. So, I mean, you know, come to spacenews.com. We, you know, myself and my colleague, Sandra and Jason, Deborah, and others, you know, filling up the site with lots of news about the, everything's going on in space as much as we can. So, you know, we do our weekday. newsletter first up that's sort of the summary of the news that we do and others do so you can you can also subscribe you know help help make sure i keep getting paid that's helpful i reluctantly signed up for the paywall uh content uh when it came out i was i was grumpy

about it for about a week jeff i'm not going to lie and then i said well it's worth it so i bought it okay well good i'm you know good happy happy happy subscribe, we should start doing some testimonials here and, and maybe get, uh, get a testimonial. Wait one second before you, before you ask us for that. Because we have, we have, we have some follow up we need to do here, Jake, on this neutron story, right? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh, I'm trying to find the section of this, of this article that we, it's that tweet right there in the middle. So that's what we're, yeah. This is one of us, Jeff. This is space pet O is one of us. Uh-huh. And, and, and I think,

was, do you remember when you were first on this show, I told you about how one time I had a dream that you had to cite us, but you cited us as a fan blog and it broke my heart? Right. Yeah, I remember you. And then I was scared of you because of that. I think Pat said he was noted as an observer, industry observer. What was it? What was the reference? Industry Watcher. I think it's right above the tweet. The paragraph right above. Is that the one? Yeah, right there. The disclosure followed observations earlier January, by industry watchers. So we've been giving Pat shit

for being an industry watcher in the fan blog type attribution that was applied here. And then we felt compelled to bring it up that, that, I don't know, what did Pat one out of this? Did he want to be called out by name, Jake? I don't know.

Should we try to get an edit in Space News? He's doing good. He's doing pretty good. He's in the chat now, so you can take it up with him. Yeah. He's out there hawking that. Halkin that Neutron test article, which is no longer. Which is no longer. Right.

Well, no longer one piece. No. Now in multiple pieces. It's probably not that far from you, though, Jeff. You could be an industry watcher if you cared to. Yeah, I could drive up, it's probably about a hour or so away from me, depending on traffic. And, you know, go out there and take pictures, see where the tank shows up. Yeah, closer than wallups.

Probably more activity. all right well we'll see if we can get a industry watcher on the show and maybe we can we can delve into the neutron disaster we'll see how that goes stay tuned yeah well yeah well i guess we'll find out in the earnings call just how much of a hit that is to to rocket lab and neutron so they probably were more like Oh, thank God. We have a reason to say that we're delayed more than we have said previously. I don't know. Does this feel equivalent to the starship rupture, the Anna-Cortez disaster that happened out there that made them scrap the whole carbon fiber plan? Yeah. I don't think that this is going to be something they're going to be like, oh, we should do stainless steel instead. Wouldn't that be funny, though?

Yeah. I'd be furious. if that happened. It would be really funny, though. Yeah, well, I guess, I guess now, you know, tanks are the issue now, you know, what we saw with the Starship test earlier and this. So it used to be valves. Fells are off the hook.

It's tanks now, so. I guess to your point, but saying it's still, maybe not the route they should go. They're like, we're going to aluminum. Well, thanks for hanging out, Jeff. You're the best. I hope I see you in real life soon because we live not that far away from each other and I should come down for a conference or something in DC so I'll make it.

Yeah. You came down to the interview the head of the space force. She didn't stop by to say hi. It was a tight timeline. It was busy. It was busy. I should have, what I realized after was that I should have parked and taken the metro in as I was whatever, what's the highway that goes like past NASA HQ?

that one that Oh yeah 95 yeah I was sitting on that I was like I should have parked at the metro stop an hour earlier just ridden that in but I didn't

yeah that was fun though the Pentagon is a weird place it's a underwhelming interior design I would say yeah they could do some work in there but it's like somewhere between a mall

and a school you know yeah you get you know you got the food court you know get the the mall food court vibes there. Yeah. But there's a jewelry store.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. That was weird. What do you mean? Yeah. This is what I didn't realize. I didn't realize it. I should have known this, but it is like, it is a military base shaped like a building, right? Where I was like, yeah, it's the Pentagon. But no, it operates like a base.

So they have base stores there, which also includes a jewelry store and a clothing store. And I just thought that was so weird. it's not what my mental image was. So, I don't know. Anyway, I'll come visit you next time. All right. All right, thanks, y'all. We'll see you next week.

Bye. Thanks everyone, yep. One, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.