Off-Nominal - 242 - Jared Propulsion Laboratory

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Jake and Anthony kick around the SpaceX IPO filing, upcoming first flight of Starship V3, and reorganization at NASA. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 242 - Jared Propulsion Laboratory - YouTube A Message From Administrator Jared Isaacman - NASA NASA Announces Realignment to Accelerate Mission Delivery - NASA NASA to Compete Contract for Jet Propulsion Laboratory Management - NASA Famously secret about its finances, SpaceX opens its books for the first time - Ars Technica Jack Kuhr on X: “Alright, I pulled 24 tidbits from SpaceX's S-1. Here they are, ranked” Follow Off-Nominal Subscribe to the show! - Off-Nominal Support the show, join the Discord Off-Nominal (@offnom) / Twitter Off-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Jake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Main Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘 Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Tee WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hey, it's Friday, Jake. What's up, buddy? How you doing, man? Well, it's a national holiday here in the state of New Jersey. It's Friday Memorial Day weekend, Jake. That's a national holiday in the state of New Jersey? That's exactly right.

Yes, it is. Explain what that means, because besides the funny joke of calling a state thing national. But what is that what is that mean? What culturally makes this relevant? This is the start of summer. The short towns open back up. We usually head to the beach. It's almost always cold and rainy, which it definitely is this year.

And we do it anyway because we're just sickos like that. Yeah. I mean, Canada is the same thing with Victoria Day. It's like, that's when. When's that? Another month? We just had it on Monday. Okay.

No, we just had it on Monday. This is like upset for seasonality. No, but it's even funnier because like middle of May in, in Canada, like depending on where you are, like, still not summer at all. Yeah, absolutely. I've gone camping on May long weekend in Alberta, and I've gone camping that weekend to celebrate the start of summer and been snowed out. So yeah, we have to.

Well, there's 95 here on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, and then it plummeted. And now it's freezing. And yet, here we are. It's the summer. Here we are. So we got a Canadian team making their way through the NHL playoffs once again, storming over the Carolina Hurricanes. I didn't mean to make that a term Carolina Hurricanes to me in a public face.

Fair enough. Yeah, yeah. No, I dropped off the, once my boys are out. No need to watch it anymore. To be fair, you never started watching them, even when your boys were in it, you said once they get to the second round, you would watch. I usually skip the first round. This is true. This is true.

Yeah. Well, good thing there's a light week of space news to cover. just a few things going on this week. Just every financial detail you ever could care about with SpaceX plus a starship launch. A lot of SpaceX reading this week. Yes. I'm not even near done reading everything I want to read yet either.

Well, we'll sample. We'll do a little sampling of the tidbits out of the paperwork. I agree. What you got? You bring some mead? Is this a mead day? I did. It is, yeah.

What are we got? Cassini Bouchet. It's a very nice color. Look at that. Great color. Best name to color match so far. Yeah, I like that. A Saturnian color there. Yeah. Did you know that when you named it? No. Wow. No, I admit. Just a big confidence swing. I mean, I knew it's going to be darker. It's a boucher, but yeah. All right. Nice. What do you got? I've got a, because of the national holiday, a summer love. I had one two weeks ago, but that's the right time for it. Now it's actually summer, so it's not sacrilege to drink it.

Exactly. Yeah. Yep. That's how it works here. All right. Favorite tidbit out of, you want to start SpaceX first? There's some NASA reorg stuff. That's so up your alley.

So if you want to start there, I'm fine with that as well. I feel like both these are up my alley. It's like, wow. It's like legally required. honesty in a financial document or a corporate restructuring. And it's like, yeah, this is ops, baby. Let's do it. Let's go.

That's true. You do always love the paperwork that gets filed with the public space companies. Like the Virgin Galactic ones, you always eat those up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I've told this story before, but like when I was like first getting into the, you know, learning the skills of investment and starting to like build like a portfolio

doing stuff. The first time I ever looked at stocks, I started like opening up their, you know, there are 10Ks and there are 10 Qs and reading all those things. And I was always struck by the risk section, right? And one of the ones I always remember reading was Netflix. I was like, oh, Netflix sounds like an up and coming company. Let's sound like a good investment. Let's read the document and find out what's going on. And like their risk section scared the hell out of me. Because like it, you know, they have to like legally write down like all the things that were worried about, but they could make this business sync. And there were so many like, like super scary stuff.

Like our entire business depends on the internet. If the internet goes down, we're fucked, right? Like, you know, there's like nothing we can do about that. That's completely outside of our control.

If the internet has gone, we're gone, period. And like, just like things like that that they would kind of call out. So that's like the first thing. I opened this document. It's the first place I went.

Where's the next? I want to read them. Now that I'd say like the, uh, largely the SpaceX list, it's like not that scary. And so, I mean, that's the benefit of the vertical integration that they've got going on, right? Where it's just like, this is a risk, but it's in our control.

This is a risk, but it's in our control. This is a, you know, if Starship doesn't work, we're in trouble, but we are in control of whether Starship works or not in a sense, right? So, like, it wasn't all that scary, but the last one is very funny. So if you want to talk my very tip bit, my favorite tidbit, the very last risk is like. All right, I'm scrolling. It says something, I'll paraphrase it. It was like, Elon Musk is the first.

founder, the CTO, the CEO, the chairman of the board, the ultimate controller, the overlord emperor of this company, he has control over everything. And that will limit your ability as a shareholder to have any influence us over anyway. That was like the last tip. I almost died reading it. It was so explicit. Like, you have no power here. I don't care how much money you get us. So that's what I'm going to, that's what I'm going to bed laughing about tonight. God, this paper, this is so... It's an enormous document, but it's so enormous. Upon completion of this offering, is that the one?

That's the one, yeah, yeah. Us and screen. This one? Is this us? Are we here? Do we make it? Yeah, upon completion of this offering, Mr. Musk will serve as our chief executive officer, chief technical officer, and chairman of our board, and control the election of our directors, and our dual class structure concentrates voting control with Mr. Musk and other holders of our Class B common stock. This will limit or preclude your ability

to influence corporate matters and the election of our directors. Yeah. Yeah. Enjoy the ride. Yeah, basically. I thought that was really funny. I laughed when I read that. What about you?

I was, I am, I am buoyed by the anthropic details within here, in which it is $15 billion per year that they're selling compute to Anthropic. that is one Starship development per year and solidifies the fact that amongst the X revenue numbers

solidifies the fact that I am I guess I'm taking my hopes and transforming them into beliefs about a company internally that they rightfully see their future in the AI front being the infrastructure and that they will redouble the efforts to just be the infrastructure company.

That is the most important themes number one. one, two, and three of this entire thing right now. It's like reading through this, yeah, this became really clear to me the, like the, it's a, okay, I'll say the cliche where it is a first principles approach, right? Like this is basically like, this looks at the AI, you know, bubble and it's like, that's fine, let it pop. Because when it does and it consolidates down to the core players, they are all going to be our customers.

Like, you know, right at the end of the day. It's like, yeah, who cares if it's open AI or anthropic, whoever wins, we're selling on the compute. Funny too, because it's the, you know, on my two worlds here, my Apple nerd half and my space nerd half and those oversecked. Oversect. Sure. They intersect and overlap. That's oversecked. That's a word.

In my work life where I am doing all of those things, right? That is the continuum I exist along. And then you have the two arguments where Apple is, oh, they're sitting out this whole AI spend cycle because they're just going to buy whoever the best model and producer of that is. And SpaceX on the extreme other end of we'll just sell our compute to whoever's needs it. So SpaceX and Apple at these two ends of like, I'll just buy from whoever, I'll just sell to whoever, brawl in the middle, spend all that money in the middle, but we're buying the effects, we're selling you the pickaxes or whatever the phrases

from the gold rush era. But it really is true because every company in the space is looking to orbital data centers. SpaceX is absolutely the clear leader on building those out. So just focus on that. Stop worrying about trying to sell people

Grock and X and all that. Just who, like if this is cynically, right, the people that's like, oh, a SpaceX is bailing out the bad rabbit hole that Elon Musk fell down when buying X. It's like, maybe so, but, you know, I think, think there is an actual product there to sell compute to these other people who want to buy all

of it. If it's available, they'll buy it. Spacex is the best one at making that available on an orbital, you know, asset. And they already have some on Earth. So like, why not? Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Reading, reading through these like details and stuff, it, I got to the point, the part of the document where I started talking about, you know, Twitter and the Gronka's models and stuff. And I was reading, I'm like, this stuff doesn't matter. Like, this stuff. this is the least important part of this document. Like, I don't give a shit if GROC is fact-checking my Twitter reply. Like, it just, that's irrelevant.

Like, I don't care how good that service is. I don't care how many X premium members that's generated. Like, it's just, that is relevant. That is a shadow of, of the important things in this, in this whole business plan. Like, it just doesn't matter. So I do about launch as well. Launch seems fairly insignificant in that, in that stack of things as well. So that one's really funny because.

I was thinking two things about that. So one, yes, like launch is in a sense irrelevant to this, but also clutch, right? Like it's, it occupies this weird space

where it is both not the story and the story. Yeah. So that is kind of interesting. But the, the other thing I was thinking about was like, you know, we've been following SpaceX for a long time and we've always thought of them as a space company.

and there's always been talk of like, I wish I could invest in SpaceX, I wish I could invest. One day will the IPO and I'll be able to buy shares of my favorite space company. And like now that it's finally happened and arrived, it's like they're not really a space company anymore. Like they're not. And I don't mean that like derisively. I just mean like the rockets are just, it's the cost to doing business now. That's the thing they got to have.

Shipping. Shipping fees. Yeah. It's like saying a shipping company is a train company. They're not a train company. They have a bunch of trains, and that's how they do business, but they're a shipping company. Right. They have services.

And, you know, is Mariska boat company or a shipping company? Yeah, are you buying the UPS stock because of the planes? Yeah, yeah. I just love those brown boxes driving around my roads. Yeah, they're a brown truck company. Yeah, they're a truck company. So it's like, it's just kind of funny you to think about, like, now that we've finally got to this point where we can buy stock in SpaceX.

And it's just like, yeah, they're, They're a different company now. It's very interesting. One thing I find really interesting is that the Starlink numbers, as they are now, right, that revenue was $11 billion or something like that, the growth potential of Starlink as a way to downlink all of the Orbital Data Center compute is a huge area that they're going to grow alongside the Orbital Data Center thing itself. I don't think those are two separate.

storylines. Yeah. I haven't quite... It might be a separate thing, but they will brand it as Starlink. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I haven't quite thought that one through that the Starlink data center integration. There's no way they're going to buy it from TerraWave, Blue Origins thing. No, no, of course not.

It's not going to be an Amazon Leo or AWS thing. More what I mean, though, is like, I don't know how big a role that plays in the business case. Like obviously it's required in a sense, but like I just don't know. Like if they, imagine Starlink didn't exist and they had to buy a Terra Wave. Like, I don't know how much of a difference that would make to the business case is what I'm trying to say. Like, no, I just think it's it's just they are a clear leader in it and it is a thing that everyone launching their own data centers, if they're also building out a massive, a, you know, layer to transmit all that back to Earth and a ground station and cross links and.

All the things they already developed for Starlink would also then get rolled up into the amount that a company would need to spend if StarCloud or something wants to build that out on their own, right? They're going to have to build out much of that same layer. And those, that's in the same layer that these other companies are trying to serve through their networks. So. Yeah. It's the, the vertical integration thing is like proving to be not just a benefit, but a requirement for them to even go down this road. Right. Yeah.

It's just that they have all this. And that's the only reason it's possible. Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. It's very, very interesting. Starship numbers were kind of what everyone expected. Like, yeah, it seems like the amount they were going to have spent on Starship.

Yeah, there wasn't really, like, almost none of the numbers were surprising to me. They all just, yep, that's like we are our vague notions of like, this is profitable, this isn't. This is a money pit. This is not like, it all kind of made sense like when it came out. it's funny after all these years of people going I don't know I wonder what it's like and it's like that was pretty much as reported the tidbits that had come out over the years yeah yeah Caleb nailed it we didn't need anything else I meant to go back and look at like what the quiltsy numbers were over time I'm sure they're I'm sure they're out there running the

I'm sure they're doing their own internal analyses right now to see where they went wrong where they went right yeah the 10 million terminals per year that that that that they're capacity as for Starlink was crazy. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure that was a number that we had heard at some point, but it just hit me as like, oh, wow, that's a lot. That's a lot of terminals. Yeah. I did think the, um, the terminal manufacturing costs were lower than I thought they would be historically, too.

I didn't get to that part. What was the numbers? It declined 59% since 2022. And I think people in 22, 23 were like, they were about $600 or something. At the beginning, it was, wow, these things, you know, we're losing a thousand dollars every time one of these goes out the door, $2,000 every time they go out the door. And yeah, they got a handle on that eventually. Yeah. Which could have been a, I mean, that could be a massive, massive killer. Yeah, it could be. For sure. Then all of a sudden, you're pumping out 10 million in a year, and you just, yeah. So this past week, I had Neil Conjure from K2 Space on Miko. and I had them on to talk about them in reference to the orbital data center stuff.

And it's interesting that one of the threads we got on was the scale that space is getting to now will bend the cost curve on building space-specific hardware in a way that we haven't before, where there was never enough scale to justify the expense on things built for space and then sold on Earth. It was always, things built on Earth just applied to space because that's where the economies of scale were. And that the orbital data center era is flipping that on its head because we need that much hardware in space. And that reframe my thinking of like this 10 years of us being somewhere along that gradient. And what were, what is the most terminals ever built previous to Starlink for a single communications network on Earth? Like, it's nowhere, probably nowhere.

near the amount they're building per year. What is the direct TV satellite dish max rate? When did that rate? How many were there in production? Yeah, like what were that? I don't know. For one thing.

How are you going to look up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the, yeah, hopefully, hopefully that's what it is, right? Hopefully this, you know, this era that we've been podcasting through these last 10 years was like dropping the first zero off launch costs, almost. And then what we're kind of seeing is,

like, yeah, it's not quite, but, you know, it's getting there. But I think what we're really seeing is like one zero is not enough, right? And if we want to see the space exploration of our dreams, that second zero is got us, we guess aren't working on the second zero, right? So that's like, that's something to think about it is if this is actually there. It could be, could be. I don't know yet. But the launch thing is still crazy that there's no, like no one's putting pressure.

Like, Falcon 9 is going to get turned off before anyone put pressure on Falcon 9 prices. I know, that's crazy. They're laughing themselves. It's pretty weird. I've always used the equivalence of Apple Kill on the iPod by introducing the iPhone and no one having touched the iPod's preeminence in the industry. And the Falcon 9 is that exact same story. Like, I guess, I don't know, like, if Neutron really does start fly,

buying soon and they also start selling a lot of launches in the same way. They're starting around some contracts, presumably similarly priced as Falcon 9. But I don't know, it's going to be so similarly priced that again, no one puts pressure on them? Like, yeah, I don't know. It's, it's definitely, it's definitely weird to think about, well, it's not, it's hard to understand. It's hard to understand what the bottlenecks are because it's like, you know, if Neutron comes online, is there going to be a bunch of customers that are going to enable them to reach a cadence the way Falcon has? That's an open question, right? Like they're built for Constellation, but what are these Constellation customers? And are they in any way going to be Starlink sized? I don't

know, right? So that's like the first question. And then if they do, and we had that competition how much more is that going to drive the prices down? Like, are we going to see, you know, if you can buy a Falcon today for whatever it is, 80 million bucks or something, and neutron comes online, is that going to drop to 60? Like, is that all we're going to get?

Or is it going to go down? Yeah. Like, is it going to go right down to cost. No, chance. Why would they do that? Right? And then you're...

Honestly, I think they might still hold it where it is for a couple of years. Like, the... Yeah, I mean... Neutron getting up the flight rate is going to take a while, too. Yeah. That's a good... But the competition, right? So, theoretically, like, if SpaceX

feels threatened and they're starting to lose customers to Neutron, they will lower the price. They have so much runway on that, right? Like, why wouldn't they? And they could even do it preemptively just to like, you know, put a death knell. I just like kill it in the womb, right? Yeah, we're selling it for $20 million now. We'll make $5 million a pop. Great Rocket Neutron.

You're never going to have a customer. Like, goodbye. Right. Okay. I would first believe that SpaceX would stop selling launch services to the industry before I believe that. Like, we've just went over how insignificant launch revenue is for SpaceX. All of this other stuff is, like, why sell launches to other people is another thought I had reading through this paperwork. That could be. Yeah. Out of the goodness in their heart,

they allow some of their manifest to go to the rest of the industry. Why? So, yeah, because if you're talking about opportunity cost, that is now, if you believe everything in this business plan, opportunity cost of selling a falcon is now way too high. Yeah, it's a billion dollars per launch that you could have launched data centers and it's serving with you. This absolutely insane addressable market number, which is like, that's the one trillion or something. Yeah. I love addressable markets.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'll sell anything to anyone. So my addressable market is $80,000. It's all the money on earth because I will sell anything to anyone, including up to and including my organs, you know? Like, sure. Yeah, yeah. But the chart on that is even funnier.

I don't know if you looked at the chart on that with how they break down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it had like a whole bunch of sensible numbers and then and then there's 26 trillion. 23 trillion is enterprise application. So they're just like these are all our rockets and satellite. You and I are buying tokens for coding. I believe that, dude. Like I'm like, I'm a significant part of that graph.

Yeah, but like it's 23 trillion is a lot. So I don't know how many software developers there are in the world, but if you divide that number by all software developers, it's still a really big yearly spend, you know? So this may be laughed. But regardless, if they believe that number internally, that means that they are going to be looking at their rockets with the same lens. They're going to be having that opportunity cost and being like,

sorry, like the price for Falcon just went up, you know, because it's in demand now. You have to outbid us for what we're going to do. We can do so much better with our launches than you can that we would rather have that launch. I actually am coming around to believing this, that like, you know, everyone's talking about,

oh, Starship isn't going to launch customer payloads until 2028, 29. I'm like, it might be deep into the 2030s, man, because like not only does NASA want to use them for a bunch, and those are missions that SpaceX wants to fly because they are human spaceflight and there's a lot of prestige and whatnot. But other than that, like, why sell a launch out to the market? Yeah.

Well, basically what's happening is that, you know, so they figured out supply side and rocket supply went up, which means price went down, and we saw that a little bit with Falcon, right? And now this new use case come in that made demand go 10x, and that increased supply is nowhere near enough to address the price discrepancy there. And so now launch costs go up, right? Because the only way they continue selling commercial launches is if they truly do reach the, from where we sit now, outlandish sounding numbers of Starship, the thousand a year or whatever, right? Like once they get there, then sure, they are going to use 800 a year and fly 200 for someone else.

But in the era where they're flying 30 starships a year, I think they're going to use them all. Yeah, they could. easily. They're flying 100 a year. They could use them all. I mean, they're flying 160 Falcon 9s, and they're almost using them all. Like, they're already not really doing that. For the little piddly starlings, yeah.

Yeah. So I truly, reading this paperwork, truly do not see the motivation for continuing to sell launch services. And that's kind of what I mean is like now that we have SpaceX available to purchase at our fingertips, it's not a space company anymore, right? They're just, they're selling something else that happens. to take place in space. They need to use their own, yeah.

Yeah, and honestly, like, this is the thing, right? They're using their own competitive advantage, which is, we have a better rocket than everybody. We're just going to fly it. They don't have to sell that, like, it's not monopolistic to just only use your own vehicle. You're by essence saying, I'm not a monopoly on launch services. You can't buy it. I'm flying it myself. Yeah, yeah.

It's wild, man. this, I feel like this snuck up on me, like this change. Really? Yeah. Hmm. In hindsight, it makes more sense, but like, I just feel like I was not fully prepared for this underlying change. Yeah.

It's just like, and so quickly, too, it's just like, one day we were all still like figuring out, what is Starship going to do to launch costs? And then now it's like, not even an important question. Like, it just doesn't matter. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's,

well, I think I started having these feelings when you look at the distribution of what Falcon was launching per year and that they hit like the 20 commercial launches and it was just 20 launches. And it just, that just stayed. And then Starlink's were all on top of that. And the commercial launch segment for Falcon 9 was just, is what it was.

I don't know Honestly like You're gonna love this one Like why fly these falcon heavy missions Why sell six Falcon Heavy's to NASA every three years And fly like these very You know they are again prestigious and stuff And I think I struggle with

You're obviously doing all this other stuff Why do you care about You know these one-off weirdo things That are honestly huge threats now To your being a public company You're gonna fly a one- billion dollar spice satellite or liking this podcast right now like i've been trying to cancel that fucking rocket Gwen's like no turn that off i'm just convincing myself that they should never

fly a launch for anyone else ever yeah that would be the craziest timeline because then what like what is the rest of the space industry do i guess cash in on those NASA missions ULA is like, Alice is back, baby. Let's go. Yeah, I mean, the document does say, in fairness, that they expect the space launch costs or revenue to go up. So we'll see. It says a lot of things in this document.

It does say a lot of things. I guess the question is whether that growth is, like, in any way meaningful, right? Because if it's just like going up 3, 4% a year, then it doesn't matter. right, but. The only time they might launch for someone else is we have a flight where we're taking a lot of propellant up to our depot. If you would like to hitch a ride and send one ton up to this mid-inclination orbit,

then we'll kick you out the door on the way up. But even then that, like, just purely from an economic perspective, that costs money still, right? Like if the, you have workforce that needs to manage those customers. and do the integration and sales and paperwork and all that nonsense, you could just not spend that money and redirect that talent to hire ROI, right? The only strong case I could make for maintaining it is to completely stifle everyone else's capability to achieve a similar level of self-sufficiency.

By presenting, like, they're taking a huge chunk out of the commercial launching. market, which by definition limits the capability for other companies to achieve similar success because they are able to stifle the potential there. So like, if you remove Falcon 9 and Starship from the launch market, right, there are 20 to 50 more launches a year for commercial payloads that would hypothetically get accumulated by Neutron or New Glenn, probably. And the more they fly, the more that they're bringing their cost. down and the more that they're iterating themselves to be equal to SpaceX in terms of having

their own internal launch costs that are $15 million. And that is that right there is the biggest competitive advantage. But like if you if you take our we're being very optimistic here on this podcast, but like let's extend that optimism even further. Like if you're SpaceX, so what? Okay, Neutron, have your 25 launches a year and enjoy your amazing margins and take the No, no. But then. But then what? But then, like, you know, that risk is only going to be a risk if rocket lab can first

develop a rocket as good as Falcon 9 and then develop a constellation as good as Starlink and then develop a orbital compute, I think, as good as whatever SpaceX is going to build, right? 20 years of road map. Okay, try. Have fun. Yeah, we'll see, right? You know, like the credibility there is much, much lower.

Yeah. It was one thing. It's always been hard just to beat Falcon just on rockets. Like, you can't beat space arts on rockets today. And they're already, like, moving on to step three from that now, right? And so. Yeah, they're down the tech tree. They're not matter that much.

Yeah. We're in the Iron Age. You're still puttsing around in the early part of the tech tree and sieve. And someone's rolling up with archers. They're talking about, or whatever's after archers. I don't remember. It's been a while since I played. Arches is early.

I know. Don't send us emails. Adam. They're talking about, you know, like chip manufacture integration here. They're like light years ahead of Rocket Lab being a scary competitor. Now, because it all depends on this. We're going to get some emails. I'm going to get, yeah, I'm going to get death threats.

But the this all depends on this like, Adels. You're going to be in the chat again. Oh, Jake's, this is this. Spatwick Shill. Peter Baxter File libel chart. Yeah. Well, okay, let's be critical for a second. So this all does depend on this, this like total addressable market being in any way sane, which it isn't.

But the vertical integration is a two-sided coin, right? So one, you get remarkable efficiency and productivity. But two, your entire business is coupled, right? And so if, like, if orbital compute collapses, this whole company is in trouble, not just the, not just X.com, right? Like, it's a, it's a, it's a ripple effect there. So that is something to consider. I'm pretty confident that computers will remain important to the world. But it's not just, it's not just remaining important, right? It's being remaining important to the scale that SpaceX is selling in this document.

I'm buying that. I'm buying. Computer numbers never make sense. cents 20 years later. But like whatever, what if this 28.5 trillion addressable market is actually only 8 billion or 8 trillion? Like, you know, what if it's one third to the size, which is like an enormous number still and could be a very profitable business?

Like, what if it's, what if it's only one third to size, right? Does there, if you cascade that math all the way down the chart, does all this stuff still make sense? I don't know. I haven't done that math. But that's a question, right? Yeah, I don't need this document to tell me that I'm a believer in SpaceX scaling things. the potential for humanity to continue wanting more computers and more power.

It's like two things we've always wanted. More power, more computers. I mean, always, we've only had computers for a little bit. But in the time where we've had computers, we've always wanted more of them. Yes. You can never have enough. Right. Well, we'll find out soon, I guess.

How many shares are you going to buy them in this lunch? 27 trillion dollars worth. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. What percent of your portfolio are you addressing to SpaceX? That's the good part about us being not journalists. Do you think that this is going to, I'm curious about your take on how this stock will act compared to the other space stocks. Compared to other space stocks.

It's like, moon mission, moon mission, moon mission. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, okay, you want, so here's some stock tips for all of our listeners. Nice. Yeah, this is good. Early on, early on, you could probably make a little bit of bank on SpaceX failures because I bet you the stock is going to overreact to any kind of anomaly. Yeah. Like, they're going to launch 200 rockets a year and the stock price is not going to jump 5% on a successful launch.

This is not going to do that. Right. But then they're going to have one Merlin engine blow and it'll drop 3% on stock. By the dip. stock opens the next day. Buy the dip. You could probably make some big, some bank on that. I think it'll take, it'll take like two or three anomalies for the market figures that out and they stop doing it. But if you want some early cash, I think that's the way to do it. We're going to have an off nominal extract, ETF and it's just going to only buy launch failure

dips. Dude, you probably do pretty well. I'm not going to go vibe code that stock trading bot and do it that way. I think we should do this legitimately. We should, we should get an ETF together, where we're yeah I have another business idea for you to throw at you in 10 minutes but for now let's do this

off nominal ETF where we only buy SpaceX launch failure dips I mean the Starship ones are going to be spectacular the dip after you know like they've rained debris on small island nation plummet

yeah but do you think that'll it'll react like that or do you think we're because of what we're just talking about this is going to be more in the realm of a tech stock I think it'll go, that benefit will go away after a few failures, but I think at first it will. I think at first it will. It's very in the, it's very public, right? That's like, yeah.

You know, Apple doesn't have that problem. Apple doesn't like somewhere on a tech bench when they're like working on the next chip and it like overheats and fries on the tech bench. And they're like, oh shit, I've got to go back to the drawing board. Nobody knows about it. Like no, it never ever makes a news until way later, right? People know these days than used to, but yeah. It's more of a hot story. Whereas like our rocket is like live streamed on the internet and like enormous explosion

you've ever even conceived in your life. You know, it's like such a visible thing. But you and I know, get on Cal She for this, man. Like you and I know this. We can. My making money days on Cal Sheield's like shit is over. That's the, they stopped doing Starship launches on Cal She. I think I was making too much money on it.

They learn. And I think the SpaceX launches are going to do the same thing for the stock. It'll take a couple. But yeah. It's going to be interesting to watch. What's the disclaimer? This is not financial advice. I don't think we need to say that because you just loudly stated that it is, in fact,

financial advice. Yeah. I mean, the Artemis stuff is going to be nuts. Like any given Starship launch, I think less so, but. which is funny because like I don't think the Lockheed Martin price went up when Orion did good no it's totally irrelevant but yeah well we also have the Elon factor right where it's just like Elon stocks just do not behave in any kind of sane way so who knows what's going to go on

with that right but yeah I don't know do you think this like sucks a much of energy out of other space stocks people going to be moving their money do we see like a big dip I don't No, that's a great question. Intuitive. I don't know, man. Should you buy that dip too? I don't know about the intuitive one, but Rocket Lab's done well lately, right?

Where's my hashtag people at in the chat? I don't think they're here today. They only come when we have an executive on the show and then they give a shit in the chat. Otherwise, they don't notice us. They've had a, they've had a 135 a share. So they're, yeah, I mean, their charts pretty wild. They used to be in the single digits.

and now they're up to the 135 level. Yeah. Yeah, if you dropped a couple tens of thousands of dollars and then early on, you could be doing pretty well right now. Yeah. Not so for Virgin Galactic. Not so.

No. Not so. Different stock. Yeah. They've got some spacecraft almost put together, Jake. That's what I read. Yeah. That's what I read on a paper.

Yeah. On a paper. What do you mean? That's what I read in a PowerPoint presentation. Oh, I got it. I think it was an earnings call. I mean, earnings calls. Like, earnings calls is crazy.

Yeah. Well, we've said this before. Like, man, there's going to be an insufferable side to win SpaceX goes private, or goes public. What are all these star base YouTubers are going to do now, right? They're going to have like, okay, welcome to the. live stream of the earnings call. Oh my God, dude. I didn't even think of that. Tim, where you are, buddy? Are you going to live stream there? No, he's having a rough day on the internet. Don't pick him out. He's not enjoying the internet today. Uh, yeah, shit, that's crazy.

Yeah. Let's do one the first time. There's going to be, let's live stream the first one. We're also guilty of this, but you know how there's like the whole like armchair engineering thing that happens alongside SpaceX where everyone's like got everyone has a very informed, really important opinion about what they should do. The downcomer and the Zipzanger should actually connect over to the load weightlifter. This is actually brilliant. Let me tell you about how I read a paper and I'm going to regurgitate.

Anyway, so we're going to have that now for financial people. It's like you've never seen a corporate merger like this before. It's going to be that. It's going to be that. So that'll be fun. Can't wait. Wow. Thankfully, most of it will happen on X.com. SpaceX is posted

videos on YouTube again so I have the Twitter reply under the earnings call Grock is this true oh my god

oh no Jake this is the most depressing part of my week this is I haven't considered this yeah

yeah it's gonna be fun does Elon's on the earnings calls for Tesla or what or is he not never listen

to one yeah I don't know if what a what a two person crew to answer that question. Anyone in the chat know, does Elon do the earnings calls on Tesla for Tesla? I feel like he doesn't have time, but maybe he does.

Every earnings call is going to be like the multi-planetary civilization talk over and over again, the same boring one. Oh, can we talk about this real quick? We love our boy Dan Hewitt. The least excited person ever to announce a crude Mars fly-by mission. Did you watch the stream last night? did not know. Okay.

I was, I'm really glad it's scrub because I was like, they, I have my lawyer had. Oh, you were like not home. Yeah, like literally like an appointment right at the launch time. And I was like, I'm going to miss this all driving there and back. Like, it's going to be brutal. Yeah, a tune of From 2 fame called, it was a pre-recorded video or something. He was somewhere in the South Atlantic and was announcing that he is going to be the first passenger on the crude Mars flyby mission. on Starship.

Classic one of these, like, annoyingly far out announcements from SpaceX. So maybe it was a hat tip to the audience where Dan Hewitt just could not get excited about this. It's so low energy. And it was so calmly stated that I was totally thrown off. Did it have the feel of like all the ISS commentary, you know, where it's just like, hey, here's the astronaut. It's going to be going over to.

the cupola and taking pictures. ISS-AsM-R you just did for us. I think you could be a popular streamer with that content, Jake. Yeah. Yikes. All right. Let's hit your real passion, Jake. Tell me about this corporate rearrangement that's happening at NASA.

Restructuring, restructuring. Yeah, I don't know. I think I'm positive about this because, well, okay, so the first thing that happened this week was there was, I'll tell you how I got here, my brain, but there was more information about the advisory communities being abolished, right? So the NASA, they're just, they're turf and them all. And it reminded me of what we talked about with the forest fire approach to manage it, right? where it's just like, let's just burn everything down and then hope good stuff grows back, right?

Which is like, it's a strategy. I know, I can understand how you get there. But like I've never quite liked it because it feels like leadership abdication, you know, because it feels like I don't know how to fix this problem. And so I'm just going to destroy everything and make it from scratch. Let the answers come to me. I know how to do that. And that's easier.

And so it feels kind of like a little bit of a cop-up. The software developer who's definitely done that before. Yes, yes, I have. But that's a good point though. Refactoring is harder than Greenfield, man. It's just like it just is. And so this felt like not that. This felt like outcome driven.

It feels like thoughtful. There's not like an enormous layoff comes to this. It's just like I'm putting the right people in the right places and moving things around and consolidating things and removing layers. And I don't know. I'm hopeful for it. We don't only have the detail.

Like, it's hard to, like, have a judgment about it because it's like, okay, well, you know, what, what data did Jared Isman have in front of him to say that these two directors should be one director? I don't know. I don't know what that data was. I think that data was plain logic of the human spaceflight directorate should be one human space flight directorate. And the research one should be research one.

That was the most sensible thing I could have pot. possibly read in that statement. And it's like, you know, okay, so there, this is, this is in his skill set. Like, I, you know, there's certain things I won't trust about an asset administrator ever, but like, I'm pretty confident that Jared Isingman has a core competency of managing large workforces. Like, I just, I'm comfortable with that objectively, you know. And so I'm happy to just kind of go, he probably knows what he's doing.

And I'm excited for a little change to how this is all laid out. we'll see if it works sometimes it doesn't but like I feel good about it at least like he's he's he's he's seeing a problem and he's acting on it and that feels like healthy to me so these are the stories that I just like I'm like I this is I guess an important story to talk about and to put the update out there about but like this story isn't for me like I don't I don't I don't care like I do I care for the people that I know that work there but like I don't have any ability to be like, I guess your email chains are smaller now. Like, I don't know. You tell me. Is it good? Show me the outcomes. I don't know. Does it, is this like, I think the printer's on

the wrong floor. It should actually be on the third floor of the office because that's halfway between everyone that print stuff out can get there quicker and that will make us tend. I don't know. Like, that's is like your internal thing. So there's, well, yes. There's two, two things. Let me think. There's three things. There's a list of things. Indeterminous list of things. There's three points in the storyline that I feel like you can narrow in on. The first one is that the associate administrators now skip the, the associate administrator. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

They report right into the NASDA admin. That feels like an impactful change. So I think that's something to kind of watch to see if that does anything there. That's the probably smallest one. second one was this whole concept of the funding for centers. So I guess in the past is UBI for field centers is what this is. Yeah, basically. Universal Basic Kingdom for field centers.

So I guess it was pretty cutthroat before, right, that all your funding comes from projects. And so if you don't win the project, you don't get the money. And now they're taking some of that pressure off, which I don't know, that sounds healthy. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds healthy because I would say that center. competition has not always been productive. I feel like it's been pretty mean and destructive. So that's kind of good to see.

And then the third one, which was technically a different headline, but they're going to compete the JPL contract. I want to talk about it because I think we should throw our hat in the ring, Jake. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this one is,

first of all, just wild that this could even be a possibility. I mean, it has always been Caltech just like, that's a pretty big culture shift. If that happens, that will be a thing that we will be. It's a milestone moment, I think, for the history. Can you break this down for me? Because I need to understand, like, how this would actually impact JPL itself. Like, are the leaders of JPL still JPL?

Or are they Caltech and they would go away and all new leaders would come in? This is what I have to figure out because I'm pretty sure. Okay, so talk workforce first. pretty sure that JPL employees are Caltech employees. Someone jump in and correct me if I'm wrong. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that that would change things. Like they may, if they lose that contract, they'll just get reassigned.

And then, hey, some other university just happens to have the exact same job position open and there you go. So you kind of move over, right? So that would be, I'm sure the workforce would change it. But what I don't understand though is like facilities. Are those Caltech buildings or are those NASA buildings? that Caltech operates. I don't know the answer to that. And I've never had to look it up for because I'd never thought this would ever happen. So I don't know because you can theoretically

move the whole operation somewhere else, right? But then you lose the workforce, mostly. So yeah, that feels like a very, very expensive thing that would make the cost savings of the contract change probably not pay off for a very long time. So yeah, I don't know. if they were going to rename this bad thing too. JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When's the last time they've done anything with a jet? Kind of realizing this. The last time Caltech was put in charge of it.

It's like a rebrands in order. It could be. Could be. The Jared Propulsion Center. Oh, man. The Jared Propulsion Laboratory. This is the only one that feels. feels like doing it to do it.

This feels like doing it to put some pressure on. Yeah. I wonder if that was like an outcome where it's just, this is like, this is, it could be like just shitty negotiation where it's just like your contract's up or competing it. What's your price going down by, you know? Exactly.

Exactly. And then Caltech goes, all right, we'll knock a couple hundred mill off the top of that. Or just like, put some, put some stuff down on the record for like, what is this, what is this, how is this run? What does this cost? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Could be. Yeah. That might be the best outcome, honestly.

Like, you get a little bit of a bit of a bit of a super deal from Caltech. You get some clarity. You get some numbers on the record. And you get a good public wrist slapping for JPL after their debacle with Marsa sample return. Right. And, you know, grab the cage a little bit. Yeah. Just, hey, we're watching. You know, maybe that's the outcome. I'd be fine with that, honestly. Dude, I feel like we turned a corner here for not you in particular, but like the reception to this announcement, probably because Jared's letter prefaced it with like, no one's getting fired, no center's getting canceled. But this seems to have hit and being received a lot differently and more openly than any other talk in this department for a long time. Now, maybe that's because the naysayers have all quit in the last two years and no one's left that would disagree. right yeah maybe that's it uh but it you know it feels very in keeping with the the takes that

isigman has had all along he remains an outlier in terms of the way that he can manage an organization and communicate changes and seems to have the right vision in front of him i don't know he's yeah we're just we're we're all waiting to figure out where's the first stumbling block but no one could find it on this guy yeah well That's what I said kind of at the beginning, right? It's that this feels very thoughtful and outcome-oriented. Like, you can draw a really clear line to between like the things he says he wants to accomplish and the actions that he's doing there, right?

Like, they're consistent. And so it's hard to say, oh, this is a bad idea because, you know, you told me this, but what he did was that. Like, if those are different, then it's, like, really easy to criticize. Right. And I think the advisory council stuff is that. Like, you know, Iskman has always presented. himself to me at least as like someone who cares about the evidence and wants to hear correct

opinions and wants to like take data and action it and like you know make changes that make things better and an advisor council is that right that's like an outside independent group that's saying here's what we're worried about and then they pass that information to the administrator and then they go and make changes right to do it so like eliminating all of those feels not quite in line with what he said and that strikes me more like it's coming down I don't I don't know if I've read a single thing out of an advisory panel in my career as this, in this position where I've been like, that's not something I heard two years ago. Really? Yes.

I feel like, I feel like when those. Every ASAP report is like, yeah, we know. I've never felt like that. But hang on though. Hang on. So there's like there's stuff that does come up in those reports every time that we go, yeah, it's the same old, whatever. You know, they're not listening. They're not sending emails or whatever.

or stupid thing it is. That does happen. But that's also kind of good to know that there's a problem and we know about it and it's public. The administration isn't fixing it, right? So I think that is important information. But also, like, there's been some pretty critical stuff out of these that we have latched onto over the years.

Like all that Starliner stuff, like we got a lot of inside information from those advisory council stuff. And that's a problem with NASA that wasn't fixed. the advisory panel being the one that surfaced that. Right. But now we know it was NASA's fault and not something else, right? Like, it's a transparency. There's a democratic transparency issue here.

Because if that advisory council didn't exist, NASA could have just buried that it was their fault. And we had never known about it. They did bury it. They still did. They got caught. Until sort of. It's still like this guy.

It was like, hey, we're going to go back out in front of the podium and talk about it. And we talked a lot about the Artemis II Shield, right? A lot of that came out of the advisory stuff where we got to see all the inside information. And think of everything that Jared Eisenman had to do to address that to a level of confidence that we were happy with. He had to make changes and have the meeting and invite Eric Berger to the room in Washington to hear the people talk. We got all of that because of advisory council stuff, right? Man, you're standing for the ASAP. I love it.

That's good, Jake. I like it. All right. And you can't give me some bullshit line about how this is like. like, or this is like bureaucratic bloat. They're not in the command structure. They're just an advisory council. You can ignore it. We've seen them ignore it a hundred times. Like it does not slow NASA down in any way other than to provide information that the public does deserve to know. So I think that like this and I, I bet he'll never say it publicly, but I would

believe that Isaac Min is probably believe some of what I just said there. And this feels more like a, this feels more like a coming down from the White House, not from the NASA headquarters, right? Because they're, you know, if it's, this is a group that is whose job it is to criticize the government. And we all know that this administration is not really, not really a fuel on that one. Maybe that's why I don't like them because I'm like, that's my job. Take of my jobs away. Yeah, okay, there's my, there's my advisory council blurb, but. Nice. All right. Yeah.

I'm willing to, I'm willing to force fire ASAP and try again. Okay, okay. I would like to, if, if forest firing ASAPE, and is coupled with a new stance on NASA openness from the get-go, I'm willing to give that a shot. And that's the Isaacman. That is not very American of you to trust your federal government. No, it's not. But I, well, okay, so I think if we weren't in a position where the Isaacman mantra from day one, pretty much, has been, like, his first thing,

that I'm saying this was the start of the Isaacman administration was the Starliner press conference where he went out with Amit and they were like, here's the deal, because it was that and then it was the Artemis stuff within a month. So I think that was the beginning of the era. And so if this, if, if, removing ASAP and the others were done in an environment that that was absent the, I'm going to go out and tell the truth movement that's happening, then I would feel differently about it. But I think if we're in this moment where we're saying we're resetting the expectations of openness and transparency and we're committing to that, I'm kind of like, let's remove these. I would be open to, we're going to cancel these panels for five years and then they're going to start up again

once we have reestablished the muscle memory of telling the truth. Because I think the existence of it, Jake, kind of lets everybody go, eh, we won't talk about it. Maybe ASAP will come out with it at some point. And then it won't be NASA saying it. So it kind of shields, hides the ball a little bit. I do think there's some utility in like committing so hard to being the truth tellers that we're the ones that are going to go say the truth and we're in control of the narrative from day one because we're just talking about it. So like I don't know if you can do that with, I don't know, like I kind of want the hard reset of NASA's doing this now. So maybe I'm amenable to these are like sunset for until 2030 and then they start back up.

That's very optimistic of you. So in 2029, when President Kamala Harris has sworn in and she declares a extremely believable storyline. She's returning Charlie Bold into the job of NASA administrator. Do you still feel good about that advisory council not being there? I just, I feel like you need a, you need a like moment to put up or shut up. And if this is it, I don't know, I kind of just fun. I want a hard reset.

Be like, this is the way it is now. It's the only way that's going to work. Move forward. So. Yeah. Well, I hope you're right. I don't think I believe it, but I hope you're right. The sucky thing is that we won't really know for a while, right?

Like, we'll be able to go two years without any impact from this. Everything will feel flying in normal. And then Isaacman will leave and some other administration. will come in and then some other stuff is going to start, you know. And if it's wrong and it goes wrong, we're going to see those problems in the next or the administration after that, right? Like it's going to crop up as like, well, NASA hit this and NASA. I mean, Eric will have a lot to write about.

In the short term, in the short term, Isaacman will get a lot done. Let me tell you that much. Right. So it's like there's a little bit of a sell in the future for the present here. But hopefully. Maybe I'm just soothed by Eric Berger, the ASAP backstop. That is the guy. Well, he's not getting invited to that meeting anymore.

Let me tell you that much. Maybe not. Maybe not. Hey, shout out to industry watcher, Space Pad-O. Did you see this? We got another neutron situation out there. Another neutron sighting? Did you see this?

I did not see this, no. Big old crack in the tank. Oh, dear. Industry watcher, back at it. he's added again jac cracked all the way around he took this man took a photo from all four sides of this tank to make sure that that crack went all the way around 160 rewatcher 360 no scope right here 360 don't say that

oh man was aim was six a 360 no scope we'll never know good question Spawn killing Man, Friday off noms are weird, huh? They are weird, yeah. I'm ready to check out here, 2 o'clock, let's go. What do you think we got? A segment that will age like milk, Starship V3.

What's your take? A segment that will age like milk, yeah. I told you, I'm all in. I think this is it. We're going to see the SpaceX roar back. We're back? We're so back? it's going to be just like, oh my fucking guys, that's up.

Wow. Yeah. The live chat in our Discord, which you can participate in. If you join as a premium member at Offnob.com slash Discord. It's going to be all caps, baby. That's what we're going to see. All caps, live chat. All caps, no breaks.

Yeah. All caps. This is perfectly in line with our pre-show. We were talking about 90s references and like eight. And we're dropping all of the. The age references here. 360 no scope. Heck yeah.

All cap breaks. Love it. Yeah. What age are we? Man, I hope you're right. I hope that just happens. Like this is the moment we've been waiting for. I'd be thrilled.

They'll be thrilled too. It'll be like help the IPO. I'll be thrilled too because as we discussed in the pre-show, I was offering to fly down to Texas with my five-year-old who then found out that this flight does not include a tower catch and has now banned us from flying down for this flight and is saying, we're going only on the next flight dad. I'm not going watching this launch if they're not catching it on the tower. I can't say he's wrong, but I hope this flies today so that we're, I don't know, what do we think? Month, six weeks? How far out from the next? No idea. I'm told from a reliable source X.com

slash Elon Musk that a failure today, Jake, is only a one-month delay at worst of the starship plans. There's like, there's like 37 starships waiting in the wings or whatever there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Two weeks?

Two weeks. Two weeks. It was four to six for a while. It was, yeah. Six weeks was a new two weeks. Four to six weeks. All right, y'all. What do we got?

I think I have somebody book. next week, Jake, but I'm not confident enough to say it right now. Okay. Mystery guest. Mystery guest next week. It's not on the flippy board. You deployed the flippy board at the wrong time when we had no guess. Well, I can make it do some flipping if you want me to make it flip.

The flippie board is like the off nominal advisory council. It is calling out when we have our shit together and we're booked out and when we don't. Yeah. Here. Let's see if my thing's to work. Starship. It's a Starship, Starship. It's a Star Bay Starship, Starship. I just made it flick to the upcoming guests, but it didn't do anything. Oh, here we go. There's at least one on this board, Jake. Move out of the way so that it focuses. What do we got? You want to plug June 4th? Yeah, June 4th, we have Lindy Elkins Tatton coming on to talk about her new book. That's the principal investigator for the Psyche mission. Boom. That'll be sweet. Yeah. We're going to learn about whether JPL would benefit from being competed out. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't even look at those Mars picks today. We should have looked at the Mars pictures. Yeah, we should have. Yeah. Yeah. They were good. What did Stephen Clark's article say? A world we are familiar with, but unfamiliar views or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. There's some weird stuff. It was good. Much better than that. Much better. Yeah. Sorry, Stephen. Clearly, we know which one of us is a writer and which one of us isn't. So they should have sent a writer.

The headline, what the fuck is this? All right, y'all. Bye. Bye, everybody. Bye. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2,000. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, end of death.