Off-Nominal - 243 - Ducktricity (with Miles O’Brien)

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Miles O’Brien joins Jake and Anthony to talk about Starship Flight 12, the NASA Moon Base updates on LTVs and landers, and Miles’ trip to Antarctica. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 243 - Ducktricity (with Miles O’Brien) - YouTube NASA takes steps toward building Moon Base, including discussing a "perimeter" - Ars Technica SpaceX's Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight - Ars Technica Selenian Boondocks | Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen AAS Paper Review: RAAN Agnostic 3-Burn Departure Methodology for Deep Space Missions from LEO Depots (Part 1 of 2) | Selenian Boondocks AAS 18-447: RAAN-Agnostic 3-Burn Departure Methodology for Deep Space Missions from LEO Depots Follow Miles Miles O'Brien Productions - Miles O'Brien Miles Ahead | Miles O'Brien | Substack 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. Hello, hello, Jake. Hello. I thought I had something to say to you right off the top, but I don't. How's it going? Good. It's very chaotic at my house because we had a power outage like 45 minutes ago, a hour ago or so, and I wasn't sure if it was going to come back on for us.

And it did just in time. But then I was like scrambling. And I went in to me, I made a drink. I'm going to show you the second year. And I was like, I had the shaker. And just before, like, I was ready to pour, I dropped the shaker. and like there's so there's just like tequila all over my kitchen.

Have you cleaned it up or did you just yell? I dropped tequila. Some of it. Some of it. It's not done yet though. Anyway, I got here. I got here on time.

We're okay. Strong likelihood you'll either lose power or have to go clean up and it will just be me and thankfully Miles of Brian is hanging out with us. How's you go, Miles? You might have a drunk dog too. Who knows? Yeah, I might. Several drunk animals.

He's got a lot of animals. This is great. I did five days without power this past winter. in the blizzard. Whoa. And I will tell you, no BS. Can we say swear words on the show? Yeah.

You sure can. No bullshit. I had better weather in Antarctica. I came home to Cape Cod. I'm kidding you not. It was like 20 degrees and sunny there. I came home, five feet of snow, five days without power. It was crazy.

And, you know, I don't know. After all these years, why are we putting wires on sticks still? What the hell? Why is that? A thing. It's a great question. I don't know. It's a great, truly great question.

Yeah. I mean, your last guess, right, doing the, what's his name, Rush? The, the, um, star chaser guy. Why can't he do that here? Laser beam powered us. Oh, here we go. That'd be kind of cool. That's right?

Here we go. Now you're going to get us the space solar power people and they're going to, it's going to be a whole thing. So. That is a thing, you know. If you don't mind frying ducks that are flying through. Duck fricacy. That's the funniest.

visual I've ever had. I've never, it's like the Randy Johnson. You know. Yeah, Miles, you're running a little hot. Can you turn your game down like two dbs? Penguin poop in the chat. Very helpful.

Penguin poop in the chat. You're saying, hey, you're here on the internet with these guys. You get live audio feedback from people named penguin poop. So that's good. Can you hear me? How's that? Is that better? Yeah, you're good when you're not eating the mic.

Okay. All right, all right, penguin poop. That's enough of that. It's good. It's a hot start here, Jake. What do you got? Show us that drink. What do I got? Now we've lost miles. We've lost miles, but. It's a hot start.

Well, we'll get through this. Yeah. So obviously, I mentioned tequila. I just made a classic mark today and did the full, the full shabang. We're back. All right. Here's the real question. Are we live? We're live. We're so live. Yes. Yeah. This is how the sausage is made, people. All right, Jake, did you pour this into it? Is that the, that, that's the, tiny glass you're using today. Was that all that was left after you threw a bunch of it on your floor? Is that what happened? No, no. I saved it. But, you know. Okay. All right. Yeah.

Sure. Without doing a play by play, I recovered it. It was bad. Fair. Fair. I've got a similarly color drink. I've got some Vernacha today. My favorite of the summer wines. You guys are going deep. Yeah. I feel like a light way. San Jiminyano. What do you got? What do you got over there, Miles? Well, I'm on Cape Cod. So I have Cape Cod brewery. Look at that. And it's, and it's, It's summer. It's a hefenvassa, a hefenvassa, to which you say gazuntite, I guess. And it is, I'm going to open it. What the hell? But the one thing is, I will say this. In this part of the world, summer is actually spelled S-U-M-M-A-H, summer. The summer people are coming, right? And it starts Memorial Day, just like us here. Jake was confused by this last week. We talked about that.

it all goes to shit yeah anyway those sabah people well cheers jans this is a it's a great treat to be with you it's the fact that this is the first time you've been on the show is a real crime to be honest we can atone a total crime yeah got a lot to a lot to talk about where do we start jake i'm gonna give you the pick of the litter we got a we had a starship flight we had some moon-based updates to sort through i guess and what else well miles went to antarctica the time that he went to the south pole yeah yeah there's that Let's, why don't we dig into Artemis first? I think there's some juicy stuff there.

That feels the newsiest. I don't know. I don't know if that's a word, but it feels like we're stuck to chew on there. What did you guys think of the LTV Awards? Did they land the way you thought they would land? Or are you surprised about? Yeah. Listen, I think the overall conversation is excellent, right?

This has the imprimatur of Jared Isaacman, obviously. You know, creating devices and specs that are within reason, right? And, you know, maybe we don't need the robot arm on the buggy, right? And maybe it doesn't need to go quite as fast. You know, being reasonable about the specs for this is really nice to see, right? This is not a blank checkbook era. and I think, you know, what they're laying out there is you kind of go, oh, that actually makes sense. And, you know, I haven't seen a lot of that in recent years coming out of our favorite space agency.

So, you know, this is, you know, what do you think? I mean, listen, the fact that we're having a real discussion about a lunar outpost is fabulous, right? And you talk about a connection to Antarctica. It's like thinking about the moon as McMurdo or Amundsen Scott, as opposed to. to let's put a flag in, leave some footprints and go home. So I think that the scientific possibilities are tremendous, and it's just we're going to learn so many things about what it's like for human beings to be in space. So I think what they laid out overall looks good.

What do you guys think? Jake was shocked that the money was so cheap, right? Well, yeah, I mean. That was the one message you sent to me. This seems kind of low. Yeah, well, because I was trying to remember back, because we had lunar, outpost on the show not too long ago. And I, I credit me if I'm wrong, Anthony, but I think

the numbers he was bandying about were in the billion range. They had a B for sure. It was a number measured with a B. Yeah. And so I'm very curious to see like what they're how they're reacting. And they have to change their operations obviously.

And I'm also curious about because they were talking about one billion and they had that the full size rover and then they just get this award like not too long after that show. And it's like a totally different rover. So did they have that in their back pocket? Was that like an alternative to the bid? Or was that scrambled together? I don't really know how that kind of played out. But I think largely I agree, Miles, like getting it down scopes to an achievable first milestone is like a

much smarter way to know about it. So I think overall it's going to be positive. Yeah. And generally, historically, very on NASA, right? So I like this. I like this about it. And, you know, what do they do? Look at their design and just use every other part to save money. I don't know. Something like that. But, you know, it only has to last a year. I mean, the specs are reasonable.

And, you know, reasonable is a good thing when you're trying to do something like this. Because it isn't, you know, we don't have a, you know, we choose to go to the moon moment here, right? We're just trying to cobble out a scientific enterprise at a time when science is under siege everywhere else. definitely was not a we choose to go to the moon moment because that was the clunkyest event of the Isaacman era it just had felt so clunky to me they were anything that what happened there was super weird anything that was supposed to have like you know prominence in the event felt like very underplayed uh the major announcement was in the middle it was it was weird there was a weird recap of like last time that felt like previously on ignition and it was like the moon base plans

and then then we got into it the one thing on the money front i think it might be how we do because previously the LTV awards themselves had to arrange launch and landing, and that's been removed. This is just the contract for the rover, and then everything's going to fly on Blue Moon. And then the other aspect is, I don't know that we have a ton of detail yet, but I assume this is like the initial rover acquisition and some initial service, whereas the LTV contract previously was a, this is how much money is available for all the awards over time, which could have been a 10-year period of services. So it still might get to that, but it's, we're only actually talking about the thing that matters now, not like the, we've been awarded a contract that

could be worth three and a half billion dollars. It's just, you know, we're building this one rover. So, you know, this is, this is why you're so good at what you do, Anthony. You actually understand that crap. It's amazing. You know, you, you go deep into the budgets. You actually figure where the apples compared to the apples, I love that about you. Oh, I appreciate that. Especially when I just prefer this, which I don't know all the details yet on this, but here's my half-ass take with a wine in my hand. Boldly stated plaza be maintained. But, you know, I mean, it's too much mastery. Splitting of the launch and landing is the key part, though, because there are other people that have been annoyed at this for, on the clips side, which I do want to talk about clips a little bit.

But I know people that have worked in and around the lunar programs and have been continually annoyed that NASA isn't just bottom. launches to the moon and then manifesting whatever's available on them. That they have to, you have to bid a task order for both a lander and the way to get it to the moon was a thing that in the early days was causing a lot of turmoil internally. And these definitely would be contracts that would be way more inflated if they had to contain all that complexity. Now, we've put all the eggs in the blue moon basket. I hope that crane works out and the fact that we've rebranded a Griffin mission that NASA

previously wanted to pound into the lunar regaliff and is now like, moon base, What is that one? Moonbase 2? Is that Griffin? We're doing that now? So, yeah, congrats. You've removed the payload and been upgraded to a moon base mission, whatever the hell that means. Just like that. Boom. Boom. Go back. Yeah. Yeah. What does that mean when something is a moon base mission? Has anyone figured out? Is this, I'll know it when I see it? Moonbase 1, 2, and 3? None of these are about the moon base. Moonfall is more about the moon base, apparently. I guess. That moonfall thing is kind of interesting, huh?

Pretty cool. Honestly. Yeah. I don't know. Here's the question. What, you know, what is a reasonable timetable in your mind for all this? Because we still need, you know, a heavy lift operation here to make this all practical, right? Which kind of gets us into the Starship discussion, I guess? I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. Guess what didn't come up the other day? Heavy lift. No, there was no, there was zero Starship at all in that, in that presentation. There was a, there was a render on a slug. lied, I think. But, yeah. Did they mention it? I don't know. I don't know.

Wow. Were they worried about pumping the IPO or something or I don't know. I just think it's a, I think it's a, we've been, we've been talking about this idea, Jake, that, you know, blue moon sticks a landing and all the sudden, you know, ho ho, ho, oh, I've got the machine gun now is, is like the moment that that they're in. Like, they just got, they have a shitload of lunar landers coming up. Yeah. I, you know, you know, as a non-rocket scientist, just. looking at those two designs. I mean, I think, you know, it seems, seems what makes more sense on paper, right? I mean, wouldn't you agree? Both have crazy cranes. The one craned is an elevator

and the other one goes like over the top of the rover. It's like an excavator arm, I guess, which is kind of cool. Honestly, my sons are going to love that. It just looks like the center of gravity is a little more where it should be, right? I mean, maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe not. But the engines are so heavy. The center of gravity of those things is so messed up. Like it's not intuitive, right? It may not be what it looks like, right? Yeah, like watching the Falcon 9's land, the same thing.

Like, how do you keep it standing up? It's like, well, the center of gravity is about 10 inches off the ground. Like, it's like, it's just a giant hunk of steel at the bottom and a thin aluminum tube going up, right? So it's like, it's a very different situation. But no, but I do wonder, though. Yeah, I do wonder, like, thinking about what you're saying there, Anthony, is like, are we seeing now the drawbacks of the monolith design, right? Because like the starship is everything design is like has benefits like any other monolithic engineering endeavor, right? Like you kind of get everything for

one one idea, but if the idea is slow, everything is slow, right? Like the entire program is now kind of like behind schedule because they've had a couple hiccups and starts on the launches now, right? And maybe we're seeing the downstream effects of that. That's kind of a thought at least. Well, it seems to be a pace limiter at this point. If you hinge everything on that to say the least. The tall pole in the tent, as they often say, right? So I don't know. You know, I didn't, that last test, that was a mixed bag to say the least, right?

What was your take on it? FAA's take was it was a misapp. Not so good. I think I said mixed when I saw it, but yeah, it's. It feels worse a week on than it did. days after. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what I expected though. Like it is it is I thought it was interesting how much SpaceX talked up. Oh, this is a new vehicle like, because all right, roll the clock back 10 years. Okay. Right. And and let's get all the people

that were hot about oh, Falcon 9 Block 5 is not a whole new vehicle. We don't need to fly all these certification flights. And now SpaceX is like, we got a brand new vehicle here. And we're all like, it's the same thing though, isn't it? Like it's really the same thing. Like, we're We're back. Everything's reversed, you know. Yeah. But they did harp on that quite a bit. And I'm not saying that's not true because you look at the list of changes.

And you're like, goddamn, that is a different launch vehicle. That is a new. I mean, it comes off the pad hot compared to the other ones. The other ones were so slow. What was it like 45 extra tons of payload mass or some crazy number? Like it was wild. So it's awesome to see that because I know that was a concern that people had, which is, A, Starship isn't launching a lot of payload.

And I've always hand-wave that away because I'm like, it's the same that it's always been. They're not worried about that part yet. So they're not going to work on that part yet. But the fact that they can't... Why aren't you worried about payload? You're just going to wave your hands on that one a little bit? I totally am going to wave my hands.

They're absolutely going to figure it out. Like, they did enough math that, like, this is physically possible. Yes, because SpaceX only ever works on the next thing they need to. If they have their math that, like, yeah, this will work out in the long run, but the next thing we need to solve is this part. Well, where are they going to find the payload, Anthony? Seriously. It's in there.

It's the checks in the mail miles. it's fine. Take a few nuts and bolts out and... Yeah, but I mean, you look at how much they just trimmed

off this vehicle. It's crazy. Like... Yeah, it was like something like one ton per Raptor engine was removed in this design.

Like that's... That's ridiculous math. Right off the... Yeah, but we're going for 150 metric tons, aren't we? Yeah, but look at... I mean,

I'm just... I'm banking on... Well, I think it's down to 100 now. So... Oh, 100. Okay. Scale back a little bit. But...

But experience says... Experience says, they'll figure this part out. Like, this is the easy... Compared to all the things in Starship, that's the easier. Merlin doubled in thrust over its lifetime, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So you're okay on payload. What about how are you feeling about, you know, heat shield issues on ship? Heat shield looked great when it came back in. Look better. Yeah. Yeah.

Are we going to end up with a shuttle problem there, though, you know, with tiles falling off? Or do you think it'll be robust enough to, you know, kick the tires, light the fires and turn it around like a 737? I mean, that part feels a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But they've flown this thing a lot with missing heat shield tiles, and it comes back great every time.

Like, it doesn't look great every time, but it does make it back. Oh, you sounded like NASA now. The foam hits the tiles all the time. Comes back without tiles all the time. What's that? No, but they intentionally did it, you know, nine times or whatever. I am amazed. I will give them, this is the one biggest piece of credit I'll give SpaceX, is that me and everyone else,

I don't know a single person that agreed with SpaceX after they landed a single suborbital Starship and immediately said, we're good, we're moving on to the next part. I don't know anyone that was supportive of that. We all were like, just fly five more. Like, you got a while before anything else happens. They totally were right. Every time they get to that part of the flight, Starship looks great. So I can't retroactively, I give them A plus on that decision to just totally move on. I didn't expect to be in the same holding pattern. This is the part that feels worse for me a week on is that like as it set in that like, oh shit, they have to fly this flight again and it's going to take a month or two. That sucks. Yeah. Doesn't he on have friends with the FAA? I thought he was trying to grease the skids at the FAA. What happened there? Yeah. He fired everybody, unfortunately. So. Didn't he? Yeah. There's no one to sign the paperwork. No one to sign for it, really. It is wild, though, like 12 flights in and we're still not. going to orbit and delivering things, right?

And that is $15 billion. That is a significant investment, right? I would say that's way beyond what he predicted, right? What was the number initially? Single billions, wasn't it? Something, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

How many flights before Falcon was delivering payload? It's like it was pretty quick. Yeah, I mean, depends if you think of wheel of cheese as payload, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But two or three. If not one, it depends on how you score it. I mean, shit, dude, the blue moon might land on the moon before starship's orbital. Still, we still are in that spot that that is a plausibility.

Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't bet against that one. The moon probably will be on the moon before starship's orbit. Yeah, no, I think you got, you're on to something there. That's crazy. You tell me that five years ago, I'm like, you're nuts. You're totally nuts. Yeah.

You're insane. Yeah. that sucks. I mean, but it's also good progress. Like this was a new vehicle. It looked great. The engine looked great.

The heat show looked great. The pad looks awesome. Once pad looks awesome. Yeah. So like there is progress, but we also still are in a holding pattern about the next part of the flights. And that's the part that hurts worse. Yeah. So they do a redo and then what?

What happens after that, you think? Orbit. You think they'll get, that'll be the next one, it'll be an orbital flight? No, I think the next one's going to be. exactly this flight again. Even with the booster not being caught. The one after they do the redo. One after that is probably booster catch, ship orbit.

Yeah, they got to get to that soon. I feel like the skipping the Indian Ocean going all the way around and bringing the thing back to Texas feels like an important milestone that I might have been taking for granted and we're still not close to it. And I'm a little, I don't know. That's what I'm worried about, I think. That one feels a little strange still. Like, why haven't we got there yet, you know?

I have a crazy Starship theory to roll out in about 20 minutes on that, Jake, on launch site and reentry type stuff. Oh, really? I got a whole thing. We can do it now if you want. Yeah, laid out us. All right. There's this, you know, they're buying land in Louisiana. And that's a thing that came out recently was that Starship or SpaceX is buying land in the Louisiana area for a polar launch site for Starship.

I don't know if that part came out, but for a polar launch site of Starship, that's where they would fly polar. You got about 1,000 kilometers over the Gulf that you can fly before you hit land so that they got the right amount of room. Is that the minimum of the FAA minimum of 1,000 kilometers of fetch over the ocean? I don't know if they have an actual stated minimum, but looking at every other place, that's about what you need before it's comfortable for. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, anyway, I never knew that number. Thank you.

I learned another thing from you. There you go. You can Google Maps. First, the budget's now this. Yeah. I forget what was the time we were doing that, Jake? We were doing distance math on that at some point. Well, we're trying to see if it was going to hit me. So. Well, that. Yes, that. That's not what I was thinking of. Yeah. You're going to get some debris out of this. The Suns-Saint orbit's going to go safely to the west. Yeah, it's going to go over the espest. So we'll be okay. All right. I've got, this is, that's turned into a longer theory than I remembered that it was. But there's three. different components here. One is that they're getting this new launch site area. If you look at where they might de-orbit ships from and try to catch them, that place

actually looks to be the best if you're talking about launching to Sun-Syncretus orbit or polar orbit at all, right? You launch south, if you wait half a day, you could be coming back up the Gulf and then fly over all water. You don't really have any overland re-entry there, where you do

with Texas, you do with Florida. You could fly instead of what they're planning now, which is fly over land, overshoot the launch site, and then come back to the launch site with powered propulsion, you would undershoot the launch site or the landing site and then push to the launch mount. So that works out well. Another thing is a blog post that I've been desperately trying to find that I believe John Goff wrote like eight years ago, and I need to find this. It's somewhere on their Selenium boot docks.

I'll try to put a link in the show notes. but it was about orbital depots, propellant depots. And it was, I think this came about, he was writing a lot about where you might put orbital propellant depots to be useful. And it was around the same time that Mars Insight launched, and where did it launch from, Jake? From California, yeah.

From California, polar launch for a Mars mission, which everyone was like, what the hell? And it turns out that when you're flying not to Earth orbit, you could launch from anywhere as long as you're point in the right direction when you do your boost, right? So I'm putting these two things together and I'm like, they want to fly an absolute shitload of data centers to polar orbits. They need a polar orbit launch site. We sort of have this working theorem on this show where any flight of Starlink or orbital data centers, any propellant left over would go and refuel a depot. What if they did the John Goff thing and had like

eight different orbital depot planes in polar orbit that you could fly to and then refill that depot. You have eight different planes. So every couple of hours on a polar launch, you could reach one of the depots, right? You just got to wait. You don't have to wait a whole day to come around again. Or honestly, for mid-inclination, like if you look at the ISS launch windows, those are very few and far between. Probably got one per day. This, you've got one every couple of hours in the southerly direction and you're also synced up with an easy catch location. And it's also not that bad for if you're doing propellant reloading, you kind of minimize the losses that you get going to polar orbit because your biggest loss is the payload loss that you get going up to orbit. But if you're

getting refilled when you're in orbit, all orbits to some extent, if you can really manage it, are the same. So you could launch to the moon out of there. You could launch to Mars out of there. and it is the most frequent location that Starship might be launching. So I kind of feel like everything's polar. Or bipolar, depending on who you are. But help me, guys, guys.

Anthony, you know budgets and math, we've established that in this program. Have you done a back of the napkin about these data centers in orbit? Honestly, the amount. He's going to be so magic when I tell him I'm hand-waving the amount of mass, the amount of upmass, the, you know, the fact that the, the, the, the, the fact that the, uh, the chips fail

frequently and you've got to keep servicing all that, that all the issues associated with, you know, cooling something like this. Does it, do you really think it makes sense? Unfortunately, I do. We got there. I was a, I was a huge skeptic at first and I got there. Yeah, I want to hear it. Tell me, tell us, Jake. Hit us with the theory. Okay. The, the long, and if this is just really, I was. To your audience, if it's boring to them. I think this was a discord take. So. Yeah.

Well, we talked a little bit about it in the last show, but I'll give you the shortest version. So from like a, you know, the first principles approach, there's more sunlight in space. And that's always going to be true. Right. Right. So then really what you have to do is they have to look down on like your inputs, right? And if you're building data centers on the ground, your inputs are real estate and construction services for people to make the thing and, you know, any kind of legal bureaucracy regulation permits, all the kind of, like,

you know, red tape you have to cut through. Those are your inputs there, right? And then your inputs on the space side are rockets and satellites, right? And think about which, which of those groups you want to be in control of, or which ones you can be in control of, right? And so if you're, if you're building data centers on the ground, you are always going to be a consumer. You have to go out and buy a data center. If you're building them in space, you're building the factory that makes the data center. And you can spit them out at whatever rate you want. And no one stands in your way. If you can bring down launch costs and you can bring down satellite costs, all those things are in your control, you can close the business case. Whereas on the real estate side, all those prices are going

up and they're out of your control. So it's like in the long, the long view of things, eventually data centers will make more sense in space, even if they don't today. So what does a launch, what is the, you know, what's the cost per kilogram that makes this business case work? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what that number is. Is it a Starship? If it works, is napkin math, there's no napkins. There's no napkins. But the point, the point being, though, is like, it depends on you controlling the whole supply chain, right? So if you control the rocket and you control the satellite manufacturer, you're outputting data centers at a controllable rate and all the costs you're control.

and all your IP, you're vertically integrated. It's beautiful. All vertically integrated. There's no NIMBY in space. Not yet. Well, there is, but. Yeah. What are you going to?

Go ahead and stop me, right? Just try. Just try. I can see why they get there. I don't know if it, like, the one thing that stands out to me is like, you know, the IPO documents had like, they had that addressable market number. And it was like, a little bit of this from space, a little bit of this from and they had all those little things.

And then it was like this giant block at the end that was like, 90% of the addressable market, they just called it enterprise applications and didn't really go down to what that actually meant. I'm going to like, okay, well, what is that? Let's talk a little more about what this number means, because if that doesn't pan out, none of this makes any sense. That's a big hand wave. Yeah, yeah. It's a choose your own adventure because anyone reads it. It goes, oh yeah, of course, like the enterprise applications that I think of when you say that. Oh, not what you think of. Yeah. Interesting. Wow. I don't know. I'm still a skeptic. I need to, Maybe I should listen to your, or watch your Discord, or where is it?

Where do I find that? I think you should, honestly, best way to believe this is just become a software developer like Jake and I. And then experience this in real time as it makes your job much easier and much better. You're seeing it unfold before your very eyes. And being like, oh, I would pay a lot of money to continue to do this. Exactly. That's a cheat sheet to like buying any of this. Yeah.

Yeah. So. Anyway. So yeah. I have this ridiculous polar orbit theory. So I like the theory. That's interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. I like you from Mars. The moon, maybe. I need to talk to some smarter people about that because the polar orbit locks you into like, I can only go in like that direction, you know, once per.

Well, at least SLS has like this going on. And so like you only need like a little bit of a plane change to like go to anywhere. No, because they still have all those other constraints. It gives them one, exactly one time to go. Yes. Luckily, they never have to meet.

You're thinking KSP style, Jake, where you can just go around again and then try it next time. Well, as long as we're doing skepticism moments, what about fuel depots? Are you guys in the skeptical department on that? Or have you worked out the napkin on that as well? As a marketable service or as a part of a system like Starship? As a part of a system like Starship. Yeah, let's start with that. I think for Starship seems to work.

Yeah. It's going to work. Really? My mind was changed when somebody called me a couple of months ago and was like, you're thinking about it wrong. Don't think about how many flights it takes to refill a Starship to do an HLS landing. Just think about the fact that they will keep a depot always filled up and then use it when they need to.

And I'm like, oh, so if Starship flights are half Starlink's, half data centers, and half propellant to a depot and they keep it always topped up and whenever they need it, they can go dip into it. Then it doesn't, it's probably incalculable how many starship flights it took to fill up the HLS to then take it to the moon because it's just noise amongst all the other starship stuff that's going on. I see. I see what you say.

Hmm. Hmm. It's almost like you could almost do the argument on the ground too, right? Like how could you possibly launch SLS? You know how much, how many trucks a fuel is going to take to fill it up? It's like, well, yeah. but they fill up a thing ahead of time and it's there and when the red goat, right? That's a good example.

So what about the boil off, though? You don't think that's a, that's a solvable thing? Man, you keep asking us about the questions that Jake and I have filed under things such as radiation in space where we go, I don't know, other people will figure that out. I think we literally have an episode called Boyloff Truther, don't we have that? We do. Oh my God. We can't tell. I mean, honestly, honestly, Miles, like, we are, we are, none of our opinions on this, I speak for Jake and this are, are firmly held beliefs. They're just currently where we're not worried about things. And so if somebody brings us a incredible argument for like,

no, you should be deathly serious about this and this is a major problem. We're, we're here for it. The only one we're there for is the physics of spin launch making no sense in, in the world. I think that's the only one we feel very strongly about, that that is an absolutely insane idea. Otherwise, I think we're open, but we're not necessarily worried about them because we just don't have enough. Everybody has their own opinion about it. And then neither side seems to have sufficient amount of data to really prove it. So we're like, I guess. And we have like many examples where like two very smart, trustable, dependable engineering people have told us opposite answers. And you're like, well, nobody knows. But like a mission will happen that forces

an answer. Like we're, oh, we'll find that one out. You know, when we're faced with it. Because these other things are not stopping. Yeah. Which are these things? If you were to rank these questions, Miles, what are the ones you're most worried about? I, I, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, like, you guys, I got to start thinking about the way you were, you are, maybe. That's, it just, you know, when I consider the

boil off, when you consider the, you know, the potential for, you know, these are volatile compounds that are being transferred in space, that's, you know, it's, you know, and the sheer number of launches required to keep that depot topped off. And this is a ship that still hasn't demonstrated even orbit yet. So it's hard to imagine it, but give it a few years. Maybe it'll all seem like no problem. I don't know. A more fun question will be, what will happen when the first orbital depotes in space?

Yeah. Jesus Christ, Jake. Right? That is going to happen. You can bet on that. A big tank full of methane and oxygen. Liquid methane, liquid oxygen. And what's the temperature delta in any given orbit?

You know, 300 degrees or so, right? I mean, that's going to be very interesting to figure out how to make that thermos work, right? How has this not been a plotline on For All Mankind yet? It should have absolutely been one of the season two or three points. brings down the Starlink's and data center, the whole network all on one go. Just, just, oh my God.

That's apocalyptic. You better call the Writers Guild right now and protect that idea. It's good. It's a good one. Let's all be, we'll do that. Let's get right on there. We'll protect that storyline.

Could be big. Listen, you are, of the three of us, one of us gets the others on TV sometimes. So, it's just your department, man. They've called you back a little bit, right? Yeah.

I'm worried I'm taking your, uh, your, your, your, your, your, no, no, no, no, it's okay. It's really okay. There's plenty. That's the thing about CNN. It's always on. It's always true. That's definitely a thing about it. That was the design goal, yeah.

It was kind of the thing. May he rest in peace. Ted, Ted saw that vision. Yeah. Vision. Man, Jake, you depressed me, man. I haven't even thought about that. The whole depot explosion thing.

The depot explosion. That's terrifying. God, I guess, I'm a Debbie Downer. Yeah, of course it will. Of course it will. Everything SpaceX has ever made is blown up at least once. Right.

Has a Starlink? Has a Starlink? Yeah, I guess it has. Shit. I think so. Is that right? Is that a true fact? I think the Starlink failures are a little higher than we know, right?

Aren't they? Aren't they failing faster? I don't know about blowing up. Man. But they fail at a pretty high rate. Dragon, falcons, starship. Are you guys? buying the stock. Are you going to buy the stock? I will not be. No. It's going to be a wild IPO day.

But it's not because it's SpaceX. It's because I don't buy IPOs and I don't buy individual stocks anymore. That's the reason. Right. So it'll, it'll get burned to my, my, uh, my, uh, my, uh, my, my, uh, my, my, uh, my, M. P 500 ETF at some point. Yeah. It's going to be crazy. It doesn't feel, uh, yeah, kind of seems a little nuts to me, but I think he's cashing out. Just, I don't know. How much, how much. I'm doing what he has. I don't know. Doing what? He doesn't know what to do with that?

I don't know. I just don't, you know, once you get to a certain amount of money, do you really need a trillion-dollar pay package? Really? What does that get? How many more Gulf streams can you own? How many more houses? You see a lot of headlines. At a certain amount of money, the only thing you can buy is companies.

Right. Yeah. You may as well own the one you like. It doesn't. Yeah, I guess. I just don't. I don't understand the mindset. But that's why I'm poor.

I mean, one day. a trillion dollars won't be that much money. Pretty soon. There's a lot of money. I think about this all the time. Someday we'll all be rich. We'll all be trillionaires. Relatively, right?

I mean, roll the clock back when you were a kid, right? How much did anything cost? Now you say that amount of money and you're like, that's ridiculous. That's like, how much did going to the movies cost when you were growing up, Miles? It was like a buck or less. Yeah. Movie tickets now are 15 to 25 times that. So, like, we're not that many multiples away from a trillion dollars feeling like a million dollars,

because a million dollars used to feel like an insurmountable amount of money, and now a billion dollars feels like that to a lot of people. Which is my, this is my root problem with billionaires should be a legal thing. It's like, how often do we adjust that number is the biggest question I need people to answer for me? inflation adjusted billionaire limit. Yeah, because a billion used to be absolutely crazy. Now, if you own one really good company, you're going to be a billionaire. Right. So I can't figure that at math.

Not a dime. But I think the Elon thing, the trillion dollar pay package, it's like, to some extent Elon's personality is like, that's kind of just fun to say that. Another thing is staying in the headlines has never been a bad thing for him. And a third is like, what else is he going to do to get entertainment in his life? He's got a lot of entertainment kicking around. But isn't one of the criteria for getting the trillion dollars, he has to have a million people living on Mars?

Isn't that right? Yeah. Is that one? Yeah. So no problem. I mean, if you're filling out that paperwork and Elon says, I want this in there, you go like, all right, yeah, sure, whatever. You just cede that battle to win the one that you care about. Yeah.

Not dying on that hill. A million people on Mars. Yeah. Wow. At least they still care about Mars. That was an open question. Seems, yeah. Do they?

I guess, right? Yeah. Yeah. Anthony, you just said that the thing in the pay package didn't matter and wasn't real. So do they actually care about it? Yeah. I should have said that they remember that Mars exists, I guess is what I should have said. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway. I think, you know, focusing on the moon and an outpost is, you know, taking aside all this stuff we've gone through. I think it's really exciting, you know, this is something that would have been nice to do in 1973, right? Yeah. What's skylaboration? Yeah, yeah. Spireagny's like, yeah.

Cap Weinberger. That was the guy. He was the one who went after Apollo 18, 19, and 20, you know, turned them into lawn ornaments, you know. Oh, we put them inside now. That we still enjoy to this day. Yeah. Speaking of a good movie, I always thought a good movie would be

asteroid coming to the planet, you know, that part. But the space program had kind of fallen by the wayside, and they didn't have a way to stop it. And so they had to get all the retired Apollo guys into the green ficker in Houston and stack up one of the Saturn V's sitting in Huntsville or Houston and launch it to save the world. That'd be a good one, right? I mean, in, in, copyright, copyright. What was the movie? Moonfall was the movie, right? That's where they did that with the shuttle. they had like pull it out of the California Space Center.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, they kind of rift of my idea. Yeah. I like the Apollo one better because we can get Chuck back. Get Chuck out of here. Chuck. Chuck at the problem. We'll solve it.

Yeah. Just a little bit. Jeez. So. Oh, with Jake, we had a bit to do that I didn't think about at all. The Artemis 3 crew. You were going to, you wanted to call your shot on who will be on it. Do you have names?

Yeah. Who do you think? I have selected a crew. Yeah. And we're going to see, I'm going to see what percentage out of, out of four, how many do I get right?

That's my idea. But I don't know, do you want to, do you guys want to take some cracks first? No, you do yours because I'm going to do this live. You do yours. I'm going to do it live.

Okay. I don't know. I don't know. Okay. So, yeah, I didn't really know enough either. It was actually fun going through the active astronaut core

and like learning about them. So that was kind of a, so you should do this, as I'm saying, You should do this experiment. I should get it right now. I have a general idea. I'm going to do it right now.

All right, go. Okay, so my design strategy here was to, like, this mission is a nuts and bolts mission. It's like we're going to Leo. It's not far. It's not hard. We're going to be like testing space suits, testing landers. Like this is a, like this is a work and mission. This is not a, this is not a play mission.

This is not a, oh my God, look at the pretty moon picks. snow moon joy in this mission right this is like a working a working mission so i was looking for people who had good like experience like lots of experience i think is like a winner here and lots of spacewalk experience i think is a winner here and just kind of like a diversified like palette of different perspectives on you know testing out new stuff that was my design strategy and picking this um i went i i'm almost I really wanted to pick Mike Finky as like the commander. But I don't know about that injury, man.

I don't know. I don't know. They haven't really. I don't really. I know yet. So I think he's, he might be off the list here. So for, for commander,

I went, he's a good guy. That's too bad. He'd be a good choice. I think he would have been. But I went down and I got to group 18. There's a guy named Stephen Bowen. You know,

Stephen Bowen? No. This astronaut? He's got like, 10 spacewalks under his belt. He is. Let's pull up the, let's pull up the old, yeah, the old resume here. Ten spacewalks, 65 hours of EVA time. All right. Captain in the Navy. Good leadership, flown on a shuttle, flown on dragon. Feels like a well-rounded, experienced kind of guy, 226 days in space. Looked like a good one. I'm picking him for CDR. That's my guess.

Man, he could have been back in the right stuff days, right? He's got it. that, right? Yeah, you could have been. Look at that. Right. That's the one thing going through the active astronaut core. You're like, what kind of different people do you have here? It's like everyone in them is just a military engineer.

Like this is like, what's your claim of fame? Well, I test flew jets. And you're like, okay, all right. We know how it goes. Yeah. Not too many poets. No, no, no, no. Pilot, I'm going for Nicole Mann.

I think that she's got. a good stretch of experience there as well. Kind of the same idea, right? It's like good EVA experience. I think flying on Dragon is going to be a clutch pilot job. I think having that experience as like a new SpaceX command system is going to help you with the lander, right? I think that's going to be a valuable experience to go across there. Right.

And she's about lots of time and space as well. It's a bold thing that you're banking, they go in the lander, which is definitely up for debate. general, just in general, I mean, working with SpaceX and working with their team, and like, that's just going to be an important crossover. I think that'll work, right? Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. So far, your rationale is good. Yeah. Then for MS 1 and 2, so I got Woody Hoberg, who's a newer astronaut, and he's like a programmer and like kind of a tinkery engineer-looking guy. Got a, you know, like a little bit of, a little bit of space flight experience. I'm double-checking now. Yeah, he's got some time and space, flown on dragon. But it feels like

a really good kind of like problem-solver kind of guy to have. So that's what I'm going that one. And then the last one I'm doing Andre Douglas, who was backup crew for Artemis 2. And I feel like it would be ashamed to waste all the training that we did for Artemis 2. And he's brand new. So there's like your rookie, right? You have a rookie coming up the the ropes with it too. So that's my crew selection, Artemis 3. Not bad. We'll see in a couple weeks how close I get. All right. Do we, you know, monetize this in some way? How many do I get right? Tell me how many I get right. There's how you're playing on this guest. If you get them all right, what should, you should get something. So I have one

piece of feedback change. An incentive flight from Jared Isaac. Yeah. Miner. Yeah. Yeah, an incentive flight, yeah. Let me fly you on a less cool thing to celebrate. That'd be fun, though. I would definitely like to watch you take an incentive flight. I don't think you're allowed, though. You're a foreign nat. Yeah, yeah.

The one problem you have, Jake, is that you are forsaking the one rule, which is that someone in leadership at the astronaut office often assigns themselves to the mission. Now the quagmire here is that Scott Tingle is not an active astronaut anymore, I think, right? Is he on this list? I don't think he's on this list. I don't think he is, no. No.

So the assistant to, which is actually the title, Assistant to the chief of the astronaut office, is Randy Bresnick, who has still been hanging around as an active astronaut. Yeah. I almost picked Breznik. He could do a, you know, Dick Cheney. That was a tight one. That was a tight one. Dick himself, right? That's what I mean.

I think that could be the guy. Yeah. They call his number. Well, you also have to factor in this dynamic, though. Not picking yourself for Artemis 3 might mean Artemis 4 is available. Right. I think strategically you might want that. But, you know, the time frame for Artemis 4 right now, yeah.

We're not getting any younger, right? That's true. If you had to pick a year. for, you know, Artemis 4 and a lander, what would you say? Or a decade even. I'm 50-50 if it's this decade. Yeah. I don't think it's this decade.

I don't think so. Well, it depends. When do you think the decade changes over, Jake? Are you a zero-based or a one-based? You're a zero-based decade? 2030 January 1st. You're a Y-2K guy or not, you know? The Millennium actually begins.

I know who I won, right? you know, technically. Yeah, is what's your answer, 20, 30. January 1st, 2030 is the start of the new decade. Okay. Then I think, hmm, 2026. Oh, so I will mention this, too. There was a, what is our current working thesis

that the landings are in 2028 is the last thing that have been stated by NASA? Yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah, within the confines of the, a Trump presidency. Right. Not coincidentally. Right. I did notice, though, in this event, there was a little bit of wiggle room added where

when they did previously on ignition, the phases that they showed, they said phase one was now to the first human landing and then phase two was whatever else it was. And phase three was the habitation thing. And phase one stretched now to 2029. So I felt like it was a little... It's already slipped. Yeah, a little bit of a soft line. indicate, yeah, that they were hoping.

They were hoping Trump was asleep during that portion of it, right? Which is a good bet. Good bet. Especially with how clunky that event went. That's right. I don't know. 2030 sounds both, I don't know. It sounds a little soon, to be honest.

It's like the over-under for me, you know? Could be. Yeah. Could be. I remember under could be October, 29, right? Well, so how much visibility do you guys have on blue origin and where they are right now. They're tough.

It's really hard to know what they're up to, right? The fact that the lander went to all the sudden fall when it seemed not a terrible bet that it would have flown pretty soon. And then another launch jumped it on New Glenn. Now they're flying an Amazon batch. And this dropped back to the fall. And at least it got its moon-based classification. So that's fun.

It's become moon-based one. Yeah, that's I wonder why. What is it? Because it made it through environmental testing. So what is it that is delaying it now? You never know with those guys. They're tough.

Tell us. Tell us, people. You're out there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, when I was on Miko with you, you know, whenever that was last year or something. And I was complaining that, you know, in my day, back in my day, when we were covering the shuttle program. You know, there was.

When movies were a dollar. Yeah. I would ride my horse to the Kennedy Space Center to cover the missions. In those days, you know, we had a reasonable amount of visibility in the program, you know, and we could, you know, ask and get permission to poke around the orbiter, go to the VAB, just see things. And now we got none of that anymore. Nothing. You know, it's like watching.

A double-edged sword of commercial space. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, it's commercial. But in the end, taxpayers are paying a big piece of this, right? And it seems like a little more visibility should go along with that. When I was on the NASA Advisory Council, I was briefly had, you know, during the Charlie Bolden era, I was on the NASA Advisory Council, you know, sort of advising them on, you know, media and communications. And I, that was early days. And I kept telling them they've got to bake into the contract with Elon.

that, you know, some visibility into the process, you know, live access to launches, you know, all the things that he has ended up controlling with his own people and his own feed. And limiting access, you know, reporters really can't get in there generally. And I think that's wrong. I mean, we as taxpayers should be outraged, but there's so much other stuff to, there's, there's such a fire hose of stuff to be outraged at. It just doesn't great, right? It just doesn't make the cut on the list.

It just doesn't, right? Space is like that anyway, right? But especially now. I mean, I don't know. You guys don't care that much, maybe. Because you guys, you can figure it out. You care deeply, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I'm a big supporter of like the idea of there's value in having a public space program and the more public and better. So, you know, the costs, I get it. I know why we went there, but I do lament the loss of, of, because like, I, I always say it's the incentives, right? Like the public space program is for us, and the private one sometimes looks like it might be, but it isn't, right? Like that's, that'll always be true. It'll never, ever, it'll never be different than that.

So, yeah. It's by their grace that we get to see anything that we see, right? SpaceX would not exist had it not been for tax paying money from NASA. We can, you know, that's obvious, right? So it seems like there should have been some guarantee. of some level of visibility along with that deal. But, you know, the fact that we're just kind of guessing at things kind of stinks, right? We should know.

We should. Yeah, to some extent, the Isaac Minera seems to have started with this, like, truth and openness, momentum about it. Yeah. But the thing I felt at the time, and I still kind of do, is that that was easy when it was being truthful and open about the things that happened before you. And it gets a lot harder when it's the things that are happening under you. And that's going to be the real rubric. You clam up. Yeah.

Right. That's going to be the real rubric. Like, yeah. The first sign was how quick did they tweet a photo of the Orion Heat Shield? That was pretty quick. They tweeted it one from when it was underwater. That was very quick. Like that was about the first photo we could have gotten out of that.

So that was a good sign. Yeah. But like also, that's because the heat shield look good. Like if it looked like shit, how quick would we have found out about it? Hard to say, right? Hard to say. Yeah. And that one never know.

That's like a shared responsibility, right? Like, I know that Isaac and he made the call to like not cancel it, but he never made the decision to go forward with the ATU heat shield as it was. Like that was a previous administration decision and he just didn't undo it, right? So there's a little bit of a difference there. Like you can kind of play it both ways. If it looks great, you take the picture and do the victory lap. And if it looks bad, you go, well, if these bozos in the last administration had this and that, you know. He has no qualms about saying the word.

the previous administration, to be honest. That's been a phrase that has been said more in the Isaac Ben era than any other era at NASA. Yeah. Well, it is a contrast. There's no question. Generationally, if nothing else, right? Yeah. The one question I have from this event that happened was, are all clips missions, moon-based missions?

Or are moon-based missions all-clips missions, but not all-clips missions are moon-based missions? I don't have a rubric for this yet. What makes a moon base mission? Because it just felt like they just rebranded some shit. Get into the budgets and figure this out. Where's the money coming from? I think they rebranded some shit to be like, we have three moon base missions happening in the next two years.

And it's like, well, one, you rip the payload away from. One, it wasn't even your call that this mission existed, and you just threw a $6 million payload on it and called an eclipse mission. And the other one was a thing awarded several years ago and is going nowhere close to where you're going to put the moon base. So what about this is a moon base mission? This is like when they just took Artemis and stamped it on everything. We're like, yeah, Clips is Artemis.

Yeah. But that's the other question. When you call it a Moonbase mission, does it go under Carlos's department? Or does the Clips guy still run that? Are you accusing NASA of marketing? Are you? I'm shocked that there's gambling in this establishment. I'm shocked.

I can't say it's a bad thing. But it also just... Yeah, and then the one not named Moonbase, Moonfall, they're like, by the way, we're going to establish a perimeter on the lunar surface with these things that JPL's flying. That was wild. A little wild little segue. Well, that'll keep the Chinese away, won't it? I'm sure. I'm sure they would have no problem being like, oh, no, we just, we actually took some regolith from elsewhere. We placed it in this spot on the moon. So now technically, this is our keepout zone.

That's our regularity. They're going to construct new craters on the moon. Yikes. that's some wild stuff they're saying what how many square miles were they talking about? It was like a big footprint, right?

It was. If we were better prepared, we would have had the actual numbers in front of us. Yeah, it's a big footprint, but I mean, so... Very large. With the finest moon you ever get. We're here at Moonbase. We love Moonbase.

Some people say it's the best moon base. The Chinese trying to do it. couldn't. You've got to bring a Trump these days. Couldn't do it? Yeah. No, no, it's, it's, you know, it would be a, what do they call it, a sphere of not influence or whatever it is? You can, you know.

Keep out. Yeah. Safety zone. Keep out zone. It's the no trespassing zone. And I guess the question I have is, you know, the moon is a pretty big place. Is it really going to be, will there be a conflict over, oh, God, I really like that crater. You know, that's my crater.

I really going to, is that what it's going to come to? It could, right? I don't know. North America is a big place. So that's another question. Will the Chinese be there by the time we get there? Almost guaranteed? What do you think? This is another one of those where it's like, I don't worry about it because I have no idea. They could be like imminently launching a fully functional mission or they could be mired in engineering problems and not be looking at this for 2036. I would believe both stories if someone with, any monochial intelligence told me that. So the Chinese are like blue origin. We have no idea. Yeah, yeah. It's all opaque to those.

The fact that Isaacman was out there saying, they're flying to the moon next year was, which is the thing that I think people surmised, but have no data on, and then he's just out there like 2027, crude lunar expedition from China. Is it going to be Artemis 2? Is it going to be Apollo 8?

What do we think? Orbit? They go in orbit? They go on orbit? They go and fly by. It would make sense to do Apollo 8, right? They might fly both and tell us about which one went better. That might be their style.

That's right. There you go. You'll only hear about the one that succeeded, yeah. Yeah, it's like the old Soviet days, right? Interesting. All right. So it's good stuff. Miles, what are you working on lately?

What should, where are you at these days? We didn't even talk about Antarctica. We totally failed our mission to talk about it. Give us a little rundown on you went to Antarctica. What should people go read and watch from that? So, you know, as you may know, I always wanted to go to space to report from space. And there's a long story there. The short story is that Columbia ended that dream.

And we were going to announce it like, you know, 10 days after the landing should have happened. So I spent so much of my journalistic career thinking that would be like the ultimate journalistic experience. But in the end, going to the Thwait's glacier, the quote-unquote doomsday glacier, journalistically was amazing because as much fun as it would be for me to be floating around in the space station and trying to relate the excitement of space,

that glacier is of great consequence to the entire planet. And being there and seeing scientists trying to understand how quickly it's melting and why and could we forecast when it's going to collapse was the thrill of a lifetime. I will say two months on an icebreaker, I didn't, you know, when I said, I really want to go to an article,

It turned out to be two months on an icebreaker, Korean icebreaker. I was a little concerned that that would be a little longer than I like. But the honest to goodness truth is, gentlemen, whatever you may say about the great Elon Musk, his Starlink product is a game changer. Had I not had Starlink, I wouldn't have gone because I was able to report live on top of that glacier. It was amazing. It was amazing. Yeah.

It is life-changing. many people. Have you all been? No, I would love to do that. Yeah, that's a bucket list trip for me too. I wanted to do almost the exact same thing. I wanted to go and like do a summer there and walk around with scientists and pick up like meteorites and, you know, I don't know. Oh, God, that's a fun trip. Yeah, go to Allen Hills, do all that. That's supposed to be amazing trip. That's very remote. Eat rations and make podcasts. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. But now, you know, the truth is nothing's off the grid anymore. We put the Starlink up on top of the ship and we had, we had like 60 up.

I mean, I'd do worse in a holiday inn in Cleveland. I don't have 60 up right now, so. I know. I mean, it was like amazing. He was the only user. Yeah. No one else's owner. That's true.

It helps, right? He had a satellite all to himself. That's true. My own Starlink. My very own. So it was amazing. And it was a thrill. And if you get a chance, Anthony, thank you for putting the substack out there.

If you want to read about the adventure. And I'm doing, I'm actually doing a series for PBS right now where I'm calling Resolve to Solve. It's 10 half-hour episodes, which will be glommed into five, one hours on PBS, starting in August after Nova. And my elevator pitch is it's Anthony Bourdain meets Sir David Attenborough. Get to know the scientist, understand the problem they're trying to solve. and then get into the science and try to introduce people to science and scientists, which, you know,

has been overlooked by the media over the years. I don't know if you could have said a sentence more relevant to my interests. You might like this. You might actually like this series. Hell yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if either of my children ended up with a slight British accent from David Attenborough, the amount of planet Earth and blue planet and whatever else BBC puts out that we watch.

Well, you're raising your kids. kid's right. One of which is named Miles. So there you go. Whoa. Yeah. Smart kid. Smart parent. Anyway, this has been fantastic. And I, you know, I'm day drinking with you guys. I love this. I know. Out on the cape. Out of the cape. Sama. Drinking summer right here. Great stuff. Yeah, you got to hang out with us more often. We always have a great time. I am, anytime. This is fun. Should I do my thing, Jake? Next time I come, I'll know the astronaut office and all the people in there. It's a whole new generation.

Does this thing work yet? Play the game. Let's see if my thing works, Jake. I got to see if it works. I don't know. I don't see any flippy flippies. I know. I push the button.

I don't know if it's hooked up still. It worked last week, didn't it? What is it? There we go. I got a flip, a split flap display that sometimes shows our current guests. Let's see. That worked. It takes so long.

I think it didn't have the latest data because I'm pretty sure we have a June 11th one, but it says mystery. This is like being in an airport in 1964 waiting for your plate to come down, right? Or the Philadelphia train station just not that long ago. It was great. 30th Street Station used to have a huge one and they took it out for some reason. Oh, they did because that one. That's one of the coolest stations. Made famous by that movie Witness.

That's true. Remember that scene? Oh my God, that's good. Anyway. Anyway. But yeah, that's a great station. Back in the day when we built, you know, public infrastructure with some care and attention. No one would ever credit Philadelphia with having good public infrastructure.

So thank you for that. It's never, almost never been. We were the last subway system on Earth, I believe, that used actual coin tokens to get through a turn style. So don't think too hard about that. do have a subway. Anyway, Jake, next week, you know more about this than I do. Yeah, Lindy Elkins-Toniton is coming on to talk about her new book, Mission Ready. So she's the principal investigator for the Psyche mission.

So I'm sure we'll talk about, like her book's about managing big projects. And so I feel like this really came out at a good time talking about like, how can JPL do missions better? You know, is a very topical question right now. So I'm really excited to talk about. this. Yeah. I'm going to watch that one. I was going to put that in my Kindle.

Have you read it? I just started. So I'm not super deep. Yeah, let me know. Well, good. Awesome stuff. Well, thanks for hanging out with us, Miles. Jens.

I don't think you have anything else like. I don't think you have anything else unless you want to come and vote on your favorite crew to be Artemis 3 in our Discord at Offnom.com. So support the show, hang out with some cool people. get in on the insane levels of space prediction betting. Without spending money. Surely this can be monetized. All right, y'all.

We'll talk to you next week. Bye. Bye. Pleasure. Thank you so much. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, into death.