Off-Nominal - 244 - Helen from Everywhere (with Lindy Elkins-Tanton)

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Principal Investigator of Psyche, joins Jake and Anthony to talk about Leadership on big NASA missions in her new book Mission Ready. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 244 - Helen from Everywhere (with Lindy Elkins-Tanton) - YouTube Mission Ready by Lindy Elkins-Tanton | Hachette Book Group NASA’s Psyche Mission Aces Mars Flyby, Targets Metal-Rich Asteroid | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Psyche Mission Gallery - Images & Videos | Psyche Mission Psyche IRB (PDF) 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. Well, everybody, we're here for another show, and there's been some news this week, some large space news, and we're not going to talk about any of it today, because we have a much more important guest with us today. We have Lindy Elkins-Tonton from the principal investigator from the Psyche Mission.

So we're going to get some really interesting inside information, I think, today about managing a project like that. Welcome, Lindy. How you doing? Thanks an awful lot. I'm great. Thanks for having me on, you guys. We can't ignore the world, can we? Maybe we can.

There's time for that later. The news you're talking about, Jake, is Psyche flew by Mars? That's what you mean. That's the news. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.

So we'll get into some of these. Well, for some of us. Yeah. Yeah. Incredibly topical news situations today. So that's great. Lindy, before we start, did you bring a drink or anything fun to share with today? I totally did.

You know, sadly, it's 1 o'clock in the middle of the workday. So instead of champagne, which would normally be my choice, I have fabulous sparkling water, which I manufactured in my kitchen. And that's my favorite champagne substitute for midday podcasting. Yeah, exactly. It's artisanal, artisanal sparkling water. It's quite delicious. Is that one of those like fizzy bubble oil?

What's the brand name? There's like a soda stream that does that. Soda stream, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's us so we couldn't go SOTA stream. We bought one by Smeg because we like the color of the appliance. Yeah, I think you would get along with my mother-in-law. She buys appliances only on, only ones that manufacture teal blue. That's the only thing she'll buy it.

Oh my gosh. Okay. I guess you're like I'm more of a Celadon person, but like whatever. Yep. Okay. All right. All right. Anthony, what do you got?

I was looking up this appliance so I could get a vibe for it. But I've got another bottle of vernacha today, Jake. The summer go-to wine. Oh, check it out. San Jiminyano. An excellent place in Tuscanay to go hang out if you're ever there. It's great. Oh, my God.

How amazing. Does it have a little spritz? Is it one of those things that's almost being Evino Verde, but across the border? No. Just straight up nice, light wine. It's sweeter than I usually like white wine, but this one's particularly delicious. Yeah. but you didn't choose it for the label that's what you're saying that's not the choice

well no that's just the that's just san jiminiano it's a town i have a picture of those buildings i think as well that it's just beautiful yeah that's great so there you go what you got jake mead i did i know i did buy something specifically but by the way it looks and but it's not exactly the label because it's got this fun uh this is a lucky a lucky buddha enlightened beer it says Oh my God, that's so great. It says it's made in China and then imported by, I don't know, some Mexican company, but anyway, I have no idea what to expect with it, but I bought it because the bottle was funny looking. So here we go. So you're going to report back, right?

Yeah. I'll report back here. Let's say, yeah. It's a malt beer. It's good. It tastes like, what is that? Chinese-Mexican malt beer. Yeah.

It's like a, it's pretty. It's not that remark. I'll be honest. It's all about the vibe of that bottle in your hand. I don't know if it's enlightened, but it does, it does taste good. That's fine. I will just inject that there was a brewery in Phoenix that made a psyche beer. And I didn't have any left, or that would have been my choice for today. That would have been a good one. Yeah. Yeah. You drank all of the psyche beer through all the, the harrowing moments so far. This mission is that. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, that is totally what got us through. and now we're fresh out. So basically next emergency, we're out of luck. Yeah. It's over. It came over. Well, I mean, why don't we start with, why don't we start with that flyby, actually?

Maybe we just get a quick little update. First of all. No, no. Plug the book. And then we're done. Plug the book first. Plug the book. Yes.

Plug the book. There is. Nice. There is. There's my button. Mission ready. How to build teams that perform under pressure. This is kind of the end result of all of my learning.

so far from leading big teams in business academia and, of course, the psyche mission team with just a bunch of ideas about how we can improve ourselves on the team and the teams and also if you're a leader, how you can help out your team to do better when the chips are down when it's really important. So can you maybe start then with like, you know, so there's, I have a background in like corporate management and stuff and there's like there's a hundred books about how to be a good leader, right? And so I'm curious to know what you're, you know, why add, why add the 100 and for the 1, 1,000 one book, you know, to this? Like, what is unique about sort of these space missions that

made you think that there's more to add to this that I want to, I want to write another book about this? I'm curious to know where you came from on that. Yeah, well, I mean, I'll just start by saying that that I try to make the book super practical. It comes in three parts, one about what you can do within yourself, one you can, one part about what you can do networking your team. And then the third part what you can do is a leader in each one with five very specific ideas in it. So trying to make it really actionable. But the thing that got me going on this topic was comparing some of the meetings that I had, especially on the psyche team, with meetings that I was having everywhere else in my world,

you know, maybe at a startup where I was advising or at the university or someplace else. The meetings for psyche, particularly in this one stage of our team process, stood out to me, because everybody was in the room because their particular discipline was required. And it got rid of a lot of the status signaling, like the engineer gets to speak and everybody else is kind of secondary. The person who does the scheduling, like clearly not important in some of these status-conscious meetings. And the problem with that is the person who authentically knows something is wrong is the person

boots on the ground like doing that piece of work. So not the senior person who gets their information third-hand, fourth-hand, but the person is actually doing it. And if you can't hear their voice in your meeting because your meeting is too status conscious, among other reasons, you might not hear their voice, then you won't know what's wrong until it's too late to fix it. And so that's kind of the going in thing with this book and with what I think makes teams great is making it so that everybody brings their expertise and gets listened to. And then you can get the best news of all, which is bad news brought early enough to fix it. And that really contrasted with some of the other meetings in my world.

where you go into the meeting room and there's certain people who just self-fractionate to sit along the walls instead of at the table because they're not expecting their voices to be heard and usually don't get called on

that kind of behavior that doesn't lead to risk reduction. Yeah, we call that the, in the NASA media room, we call that the independent podcaster section where we sit against the wall and can't participate in the other things. And do you text among yourselves

snarky comments like other wall sitters and myself included too. Oh, yeah. We go look at them all. They look like they're doing work out there. Jeez, we're just here. Stadler and Waldorfing our way through this event. Oh, my God.

That's so funny. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, because it is, you know, I was thinking about this, reading this book and thinking about the problem. And it's, you know, our listeners are going to be familiar with a lot of these kind of large space projects and, you know, is one of them, but every one of these big planetary missions is along similar lines.

You know, in the headlines today, Mars sample return is maybe like a very topical example of a very large project, which seems to have gotten off the rails. And I'm reasonably confident leadership was a huge, huge factor in that. And, you know, these are important topics. And so I'm very interested to kind of like dig into that and see, you know, how you approach them like that. Because the, the challenge. is inherent with like a big NASA project. Like you've got these geographical locations that are very separate. You've got centers that are independently managed. Culture is different. Leaders are different. You've got contractors. So some of these teams that you're working with work for you. Some of them are

above you. Some of them are your customers. Some of them are you're the customers. There's all these different kind of like relationships that get managed. And I don't know. So I guess my question is like writing this book and taking those things in there. What are what are the things that are maybe not obvious to someone who's watching this from the sidelines. Like what makes that so hard? How do we tackle that? Yeah, yeah. Well, so first of all, you know, Mars sample return.

What a dream. And can I just say I would never claim to have been able to make it turn out differently had I been in leadership. I just want to make that clear that I'm not here going like I know all the answers. But right, it's really different on the inside of these megaprojects. And I think the whole concept of a megaproject is so interesting. something that's over a billion dollars, something that involves multiple teams, something that extends over decades.

Another example of a megaproject is the Olympics and ultra-tall skyscrapers, aircraft carriers, Hollywood super productions, these kinds of things are so complicated on the inside that if you haven't been in them, you can't imagine. And one of the really important things to remember is exactly what you just nailed, which is the leadership has responsibility without authority because almost everyone on the team does not report to them. Almost everyone on the team reports up inside some other management structure

of some other organization that has all its own priorities, probably not you. And so the number one, you know, like the first step to take, I think on a team is to try to get to know as many people personally as you can because that ends up being the secret, I think, to every human endeavor is actually, just knowing people personally. So now, like the three of us, we've got three diatic relationships now, like I know you and I know you and you know each other. And, you know, because we've even just

been talking in two dimensions face to face for a few minutes, there's a little bit more trust than there was before. And so you've got some subcontractor who's not delivering. And I've had people say to me, like, I'm not making this up. I asked them, well, have you been out to the sub and talk to them about their schedule? Have you visited? Have you figured out why they're not delivering. And they're like, no, no, no, I would never like get in their pants that way. I don't want to get in their business. I'm like, no, no, right away. Like, as soon as it slips, you got to start taking action. And the way to do it is to get personal. And so, you know, I had an example of that where an unbelievably important thing for the Psyche mission was just not getting delivered. And we

weren't getting answers on the phone. And we had kind of upped our meetings to weekly. And we hadn't quite hit daily yet, but it was not going well, not getting the answers. And so we just flew out and visited them in person, you know, so you've got to take like $1,000 or $2,000 or whatever it is and actually go to them. And it turned out the person who was in charge in that subcontractor who did not literally report up the line to us was not the person who'd originally signed the contract. So they were not personally invested. And for example, their bonus profile is probably not dependent on our project because our project kind of technically belonged to the previous person. So this person is looking forward to other things, and we're kind of an annoyance.

They would like to just get our contract off their books. And it turns out they didn't understand the difference between a launch into Earth orbit, which you could do practically any day of the year, and a planetary launch like ours, where you have maybe one chance in a year or one chance every 14 or 16 months. So they didn't think it was a big deal if they didn't deliver because we could just slip a few weeks or slip a few months. They literally didn't understand.

And we couldn't have figured that out if we hadn't sat down face-to-face and then actually put the fear of God in them to understand that they were personally endangering the entire mission and that NASA headquarters would be staring at them very closely. And that just couldn't have happened over Zoom. It had to happen in person. Yeah. I had this, I had a mentor earlier in my career who is still a good friend of mine. I look up to him a lot.

And he used to have this thing, he used to have this thing who always say, let's go for a walk, right? Because we worked in a big corporate office. That's it. You're trying to talk to somebody in their department on a different floor or whatever. and it's just like, oh, I'll pop up on an email. No, no, no, no, let's go for a walk. And we'd walk over there, go down the elevator, go to the next thing, sidle up to someone's desk and be like,

what's up? How's it going, right? Yeah, that's something I always used to think about, and I still carry that with me. And that sounds like what you're talking about. It's just a little more, a little scaled up. Exactly what I'm talking about. And also, I think it's a really good idea for everybody

who has responsibility, which frankly is everyone. Just like everyone is a leader. Not everyone manages other people, but every single person is a leader because a leader has a vision and a set of values, not necessarily people who report to them. I think every person has got to have some kind of escalation in mind already if things aren't turning out well. Like first there's the email, then there's the weekly meeting.

And if that's not working, then there's like, let's go for a walk. And then the next one I would suggest is let's have a meal together. I think there's something really fundamentally human about breaking bread that causes you to be much less likely to throw the other. the person under the bus, frankly. And so just pulling on all those threads that make us connected makes such a difference. Yeah. One thing that has been come a frequently referenced, I don't even know what word I would use

for a meme maybe on this particular show is something that came out of the IRB about the psyche slip, which was the Christmas party, the Christmas party of 2021. It's specifically called out the Christmas party of 2021. one. This was not necessarily in the book. I think there were parts of it that were touching on things that might have happened there, but we have been always mystified by this call. I have that, I can read the direct quote if you're not remembering the Christmas party. Yeah, you need to do this for me because I actually cannot remember this, which is bizarre because boy did I live that I. I was like maybe, listen, maybe you weren't at this part of the Christmas

party. I don't know. This is what, this is the answers we're seeking here on the show. So let me see. I want tanner hooks. There we go. Oh my God, but you look at this. Research has found that the kind of team isolation. Oh, so this was talking about the remote work of the COVID era. And it was like, yeah, the lockdown conditions contributed significantly to the questions of why Psyche and JPL leadership did not know the severity of the problems at GNC and V&V until it was too late to correct course. As an example, it is notable that team members exchange valuable project information at the Christmas party in 2021, the first time team members had been to face in over a year and a half. That's it. That's it. What are your recollections of the Christmas party in 2021? We need some stories.

I'm sorry to say I have no memories of that. I'm going to have to look in my calendar and see if that's one of the ones I was there. But I can attest, all right, so first of all, I doubt that a ton of your listeners or humans as a fraction of humans have been through the kind of IRB process that we went through on Psyche. I mean, the big guns, Tom Young and the entire, like, IRB cavalry came in. And so to set the scene, right, we had found out in a very, very shocking meeting that we were going to miss our launch and that there was no way around it. And after that happens, the first kind of counterintuitive thing that happens is you have to convince people that you're really going to miss your launch because people are like, no, no, no, we can still make it. We're going to work harder. There's no way.

Like we've been working seven days a week and missing the soccer games and our whole lives are pitted on the line to get to this launch. And then having to sit down and say to them, like, we are really not going to. going to make it. And then you have to go and convince headquarters that you're not going to make it because everybody wants you to make it. So that's pretty soul destroying. And then we get to do three things at once. We get to replan the entire mission. Like when can we launch next? How much will it cost to get there? What's our new schedule and budget? What are all the steps that have to happen? Then you have to keep the team going, which is incredibly hard because everybody's just devastated and exhausted. And so the answer is the answer for the team, which really cheers on a team like nothing

else does is you've been working your heart out. You failed. Now we're going to have another year of working just as hard. And at the end of six months, our IRB is going to report out on everything that they found, which incidentally we then have to spend all these six months like working very closely with the IRB, making everyone feel comfortable to tell the truth of their story, digging through all our numbers, telling them everything we ever knew, which is a full-time job. And at the end of that time, we'll have what's called a continuation cancellation review. And we'll end up at headquarters and we'll present for several hours. And then headquarters will literally vote in front of our eyes, continue or cancel.

And so the team's got to keep working as hard as they can knowing that in six months. Do they do one of the gladiator things too? Yeah. Yeah. And then there's a smoke signal and, you know, people cry. Yeah. So that was like a heck of a process right there. And really doing the post-mortem to try to figure out why didn't we know about.

these problems earlier. And COVID in the isolation of COVID was definitely part of it. And I'll tell you, there's not a mega project on this planet that had three months margin for we're closing down all operations for three months because of a pandemic. There's no margin for that. And then indeed, you lose all that passing in the hallway and talking to each other kind of thing. And I tried so hard personally to overcome that. You know, I've never lived in Pasadena. I've always been a commuter to the JPL part of the team. About half of our team is at JPL and the other half is at 25 other organizations all over the world. And so as soon as JPL opened up after COVID, I flew out there every other week until launch. And I think I've flown to JPL and spent time with the team

over 200 times in the last 15 years. And so it's a huge, it's a huge commitment to try to keep those communications going. And absolutely seeing people face to face is the way to do it. that was something that that that GNC situation too was there was you know a lot of the book about that particular issue not bubbling up to leadership levels um and i think it was so that christmas party was December 2021 it was April 22 when you had that meeting that we're not going to make it because of all these issues yeah that that issue of the the layers of things being escalated right it was it's almost like the the criticisms of the authoritarian system where you can only communicate good news up and you don't want to hear the bad news from below.

Exactly. It's a softer version of that where, you know, that's, I wonder now, this many years on, do you, do you think that's, that was truly something that if pandemic didn't happen, you were still in person, that that would have broken through because it was the side outlets? Or do you think there was something about the particular kind of issue it was, that was also making the communication hard about what exactly was going on internally? Yeah. I actually think it was something different than both of those things. I mean, I can't tell, I can't know if it wouldn't have happened. If the communication would have worked without COVID, I'm not sure.

Because the way that I saw that project, that problem, this is just for context for people who have not obsessively already read this book or the IRB report. There's a small part, which I'm sure is everyone has, I'm sure. We had a thousand people online for that IRB report out. Did you guys know that? A thousand people came to hear. So we were writing our own flight software from scratch, which was also something I did not want to have happen.

I felt like that was a very bad choice. And that's a complicated story right there. But there we are doing, and it's too late to go back. And there's a little part of the flight software called guidance, navigation and control, GN&C. And even if you know nothing about flight software, you know you're not going to launch about that. Like, that's important. And we had just a beautiful team, a small team, I don't know, six or eight people who were working on that. and none of them had really deep and profound knowledge of the area.

So part of the problem was they were relatively junior. And then the other part I really put down to culture, team culture. And I would say, and I talk about this in the book, that everything we can do, everything we do at work can be divided in two parts. One is like what we do, for example, typing lines of code. And the other one is how we do it, that is. What are our processes? How do we communicate?

you know, how are we organized, how do we work together? And it turns out how you do it is maybe even more important than what you're doing. And part of how we did it that we tried really hard to make happen on this team was just what we started talking about, this idea that the best news is bad news brought early. And we actually talk about that and just try to really normalize at every level of leadership that we don't just tolerate hearing bad news like we celebrate it, because that's the only way to make it possible for people to speak up. And, you know, human process, people, like we do all the tragedies and all the miracles and nothing is perfect.

And none of us is perfect every day and none of us gets it every day. And so I think we're about 80% successful with this message in our team. And we caught and saved problem after problem after problem, like gigantic problems. I've got a huge list of them. I call them the psyche Dirac Delta moments. And if you're familiar with the Dirac Delta math function, it's when everything spikes out of nowhere. And so solve so many. And this one, this one, the signal didn't come through.

And part of it was optimism and all the other good things about people. So the team was saying to their management, you know, we're not going to make it. And then their manager would say upward, like we're missing our metrics, but I think we're going to catch up. You know, and then the word would come up to us like, yeah, it's not quite where we want it to be, but we think it's going to make it. Right. So it's the telephone game. And one of the issues that we had, just to compound this, so here's, I think, a really topical question for us in spaceflight. How do you right-size the project with the organization?

Like, how deep a bench of expertise do you need to get done a particular space mission? And if a mission is too small for an organization, how do you ever get that organization to really give the A-Team when they're in trouble or even pay attention when they're just never going to be the most important thing? And so there are all this suite of questions like how you fight size. And one of the issues we had with the GNNC is that there were just a few people in the whole organization who'd actually written GNNC flight software before and taken it through the whole testing cycle and understood what that schedule had to look like. And none of them were on our team. And so nobody in the game of telephone had the authentic information for how much trouble we were in

until we began to realize that the information we were getting from the team wasn't accurate and they might be in worse trouble and oh my god they were suffering so we brought in a super ringer and she figured out what was going on and she saved our bacon and that was that shocker in April when she's like okay I need to sit down with you guys you're not going to make it um and uh that that was one of the worst phone calls I've gotten and uh yeah Friday night huh that that was like Friday night making dinner and having a glass of wine, speaking of which with my husband, cooking in the kitchen and the phone call comes in from, actually it was a text, starts with a text, Henry Stone, our fabulous project manager, you know, texting.

And it is never good news when Henry texts, like, that's not how he shares good news. And that was the bad news. Yeah. And I would just add as a last thought here is that I think one of the hardest things for me was watching the suffering that the GNNC team went through. This is an example where every single person on the whole team was working as hard and conscientiously as they possibly could to make us succeed and we failed. And that is a terrible feeling. And they felt responsible because they were the proximate cause.

They were the canary in the coal mine. They were like, you're not going to make it. And so they get brought up a lot, these people, when they were just heroes. And instead they were made to feel like failures. And I just want to set the record straight with you guys. they were heroes. They were doing everything they could and they pulled it out. They pulled it out in the end. Yikes. Yeah. I mean, I think this just highlights. Like it's just, we talk a lot about, you know, the, a recurring theme on the show is a lot about SpaceX, for example, being an outlier. They have this, this company that does all these amazing space things. And they seem to do it at a pace and a level of quality and a level of reliability that just doesn't seem to, like it just seems to be in a different league. And we're always a.

I'm asking like, why, why isn't there another company? Why isn't there three, four, five companies that are doing what SpaceX does? And I think what we're getting to it here is like, the technology is hard, but the people is a lot harder, right? And I think that's, oh, totally great. And I don't know how we solve that. It seems like a tricky, a tricky thing. It should be the part that we're best at because we've been having, you know, we've been solving interpersonal relationships much longer than we've been flying to space. Yeah, like every single one of us have literally been people all our lives. Like, we should be masters of this.

We should be good at it. Yeah, so what are your big lessons learned? Like, what are the people doing at SpaceX that other people are not doing elsewhere? I mean, if we figure it out, we'll end of this podcast, you know? Yeah, we're going to start another rocket company. It's weird, though, because you see different examples of organizations across the industry, both commercial, academia everywhere that are like, maybe it's this variable.

Maybe it's, you know, incentive-driven stuff. No, not quite that. Maybe it's, we all are overworked. No, it's not that. Maybe it's we only hire 21-year-old straight out of college. Nope, that didn't work either. Like, everyone's tried a variation of it,

but there has never been something that's clicked in the same way to the same scale. Maybe there has on smaller scale projects because we've certainly heard great stories of the very small team that pulled something amazing off. But it's that, it's that,

plus the scale that that has never clicked in any other part of the industry in the same way. Yeah. I mean, one thing that I see in SpaceX, and they were our launch provider, and I worked really close with them for years, is the unity of vision from the bottom to the top, like a total drive. And I think it's rare. It's rare in my experience, at least, to find a company where everyone working there is as driven as the leadership.

usually there's like a one is trying to influence the other to go in a little different direction. And this absolute just like focus on quality and time like just go, go, go, go, go. Combined with what I think they made a, I mean, I'm certainly not the first person to say this, obviously. But one of the really critical things I think they did was to bring a lot of stuff in house. Because convincing other people to have the same level of quality as what you want for your project is almost impossible. And that was a problem over and over again for us. And I worry about the American supply chain, the global one, for that matter, making people understand how important what they do is.

And also, frankly, creating some kind of consequences for government contractors who can't deliver. I just think there should be something that happens. Yeah. Well, another recurring theme here is that we should be harsher on those mission timelines. Not being fulfilled. We had a good conversation with Thomas Dubrookin once about we need to cancel more missions. That was a spicy one. Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. I've had so many great, I'd say I count Thomas as a good friend and co-supporter and he was just fabulous. He selected psyche. And so I had many conversations with him. And if there was ever something going on, I could totally get him on the phone. But we did have one epic moment where we had to go in and ask for some more money.

he told us that we made him want to throw up. I just thought, like, that's some fairly clear feedback. I think I got where he's going. Yeah, with that. That sounds like that. Yep. Yeah. I'm hearing it in his fantastic accent as well, and it's just making me way.

Exactly. It's very effective with the accent, even more effective. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He said a really smart thing, a piece of advice that I've really held on to for me, which is pertinent to this conversation entirely. And one of the few pieces of absolutely direct management advice he ever gave me, which was if someone has promised you something on a schedule and they miss it and they come with an excuse, listen to their excuse and send them back. And if they come in late another time, fire them.

That was, you know, which at the time I was like, wow, okay. And that sounds like I'm learning something. So good at engineering. I know. Yeah, that and deportation are like the things. So I mean, the more I thought about it, the more I got his point. Like if someone is unreliable, they're going to show you that. And you need to learn the lesson they are teaching you.

And I think that's fair. That's a fool me once rewarded, I guess, right? Yeah. Well, it's all. And it's something else we talk about. on missions that have had or companies that have had like major failures or something is that there are people that will be on your team that will feel like they're the cause of that thing and they will never let that happen again on any project that they work on and they are

like the best person to trust with that thing now and and there are others that that can't patch those holes in their own process or their team's process or whatever the case is and that's maybe that's what you're saying there on the the people that have that drive at SpaceX that are given those responsibilities. The ones that stay around are the ones that are like, well, I'm never doing that again. I now know, yada, yada, all this first principles interneering stuff that they're famous for. I'm going to implement that the next time I do this. So like, you know, how many other failure modes have reoccurred? Like, not that many. And I think that's a thing on Starship that concerns us all the most is that we have seen multiple recurrent failures

on Starship in a way that we have not with SpaceX prior to that. I just, that breaks my heart because I want to believe I really do. And I wonder if a part of that also is I've always had a tendency and maybe other people have in teams as well. I wonder if you guys have that if somebody is doing really well in parts of their job and really struggling in others,

my instinct is to help them get better at the parts they're struggling at. But another way to do it is let them do the parts they're good at and give the parts they're struggling at to someone who does those parts better. And I wonder if SpaceX does that too. in the in the retail industry we called that putting your aces in your places yeah

oh there you go yeah exactly exactly yeah and it's the opposite of failing upward which is another thing that happens a lot yeah yeah yeah or don't promote your best salesperson to manager because it's a different skill set exactly well I mean look at me look at everybody who's assigned to stern engineer suddenly in a leadership position where you know people ask me what does a PI do and you know I sign my name to NASA that if I know a reason that we're not going to hit our level one science requirements and our mission success criteria that I will put on the brakes. And that's nominally my job, but my real job is negotiation and strategy and budgeting and scheduling and team leadership. And none of those things are things that scientists or engineers are taught. So that's exactly the

same problem. Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting thing about PIs. It's a, it's a, it's a, It's a very strange job. When you step back and look at the guys, it's very weird, right? Like, it's a, it sounds hard. I don't know. I don't want to do it. I'm glad you doing. Yeah, I mean, I really waffle about the whole thing.

Like, this is the greatest privilege of my life to be able to do this. And I love the people I work with so much. Like, they feel so much like family. But I do kind of wonder if I knew then what I know now, I have signed up for this? And I'm not totally sure that I would have. It is the weirdest job in the world. And there is no such thing as success in the bag with these space missions. There is a gigantic possible downside where, and it could still happen to me, where if I make mistakes or the team fails for reasons that even have nothing to do with me, it could break my career permanently.

And so you're putting a lot on the line when you can't actually control that line. And that's, that's the hard thing. Yeah, and I imagine lots of people approach it really differently. Like I think a lot about, you know, Bruce Bannard, who's the principal investigator for Insight. And like Insight for him,

that's a mission that he has been like kind of silently working on for like 40 years. Like, you know, and so stepping into the principal investigator role for that is like so natural. Like the title and the boss is like, he doesn't really care because he's had his eye on the prize for that mission for so long

that he'll, it doesn't matter. You could ask him if he had to fight fires to get to do, and he'd do that. You know, like it feels like a very different thing. And then sometimes principal investigators, it's just like, it's the opportunity they get. And they're in some career and I'm looking for interesting science things. And then they get this mission and they go for it, right? And it's like, it's a different approach. And so I imagine that everyone kind of steps into that role.

They're also bespoke with those positions, right? Because the missions are bespoke. Everything. And then the roles, the team. Everything is so different about it that you really, you can't even like even bundle them all together. I totally agree. And just like giant shout out for Bruce, who's such a fine human being. And definitely, I've never seen him lose his cool. It must happen. But he went through just monstrous mountains and caverns in that journey. And he just kept out it. And I think it brings up another thing that is really different about these mega projects from regular endeavor. And that is the complexity and the length of it is usually broken into kind of a series of marathons. Like one marathon is, let's compete to win a mission. So you compete for three years with a team in the end of a couple hundred people trying so hard to win the opportunity

to build a spacecraft. And it feels like a gigantic endeavor, which it is. And you reach the finish line. The finish line is write a winning proposal. And then if you win, then you've got the next marathon, which is let's build this spacecraft. So for us, that's six years, another giant marathon and the goal is launch a working spacecraft, you know, and then you've got another marathon, which is let's cruise for 5.8 years to this asteroid, different team, different goal. And the thing I want to point out about this weird marathon after a marathon thing is that is that the success criteria like the finish line for each one of those marathons is not necessarily directly aligned with the actual goal of the whole project, which is to bring back the science.

So, for example, if you're going to use up all the possible resources in the universe to get that working spacecraft off the ground, even if it means stealing away the money that would allow you to do the science in the end, that's the incentive for the team. The incentive for the team is launch a working spacecraft and then like asterisk and leave enough that we can do science in the end. And so keeping each one of those marathons, like aligned with why the reason you're really doing it turns out to be a much bigger challenge than I think people realize going in. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, even just the time, like the temporal scale of that, you know, like I said, 14 years or whatever, it ends up being. So you launched in 2017. We were selected in 2017. We launched in 2023. Yeah. Right. And then your arrival 29. Is that roughly right? So yeah, that's right. That's right. So we're almost six years in Cruz. Yeah. Yeah. So the people that are going to be like, writing their thesis on on psyche data were maybe kids when you got that mission selected, right? Like you have to like, you have to, it's like a generational mission in a sense, right? And that that is another whole leadership constraint. Like you need to, you need to get the mission going and then deliver it and then hand off to other people, right? In a sense, like your

whole team has to be able to like in handoff mode always has to be at some point down the line, right? That's right. We actually talk about succession plans and it became more urgent. after we slipped because that lengthened the whole mission by several years. And so it actually changed. We had to do more succession planning than we thought we did before. I mean, you think about it, I just check the web. Right now, we're in mission day, 966. So that's 966 days after launch.

You know, that's not the 15 years before launch. And that's about as fast as these things can happen, as missions this complicated and this bespoke in today's. you know, climate. And so it's very much to all of our interest to figure out how to speed this up. I really appreciate that. And the comparison for me between working with JPL, which I have so much respect for, like those guys can do things that almost nobody else in the world can do. And they are unique in the United States. Like, it's an amazing team. But thousands and thousands of people. And then here I am up at Space Sciences Lab at Berkeley, where I'm just sitting right now.

And so 250 people specializing in missions of an order of magnitude smaller than psyche. And so that's that right sizing question. And that changes the whole schedule and it makes succession less of a thing, which is good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's like an exponential cost to lengthening those missions like that, right?

Because it's not just to do the same rate for longer, but you have these all extra kind of cost to go on top of that. That's right. I wonder if we can kind of jump off that and go to like a broader topic, which is, you know, I'm thinking about the new NASA administration. So we have Jareda Isaacman coming in and some of his themes. If I, you know, if you're picking up themes of his administration, there's a lot of leadership themes in there. There's a lot of talk about accountability, you know, NASA stepping in and saying, this is our

fault. We're going to own it. We're going to fix it. There's a lot of like getting your hands dirty. You know, like he's down there stepping through the rubble of this new Glenn rocket and working with Blue Oregon, trying to figure out, like, you know, what they're going to do. There's that getting your hands dirty part of it.

There's asking hard questions and challenging assumptions. All these, and I'm seeing these themes in your books, too. I'm curious to know your perspective on, like, you know, from an agency level. Like, are you seeing, is that a good strategy? Are there, are there, like, low-hanging fruit that are going to be tackling with that? Like, what's your perspective on the agency as a whole in that situation? Yeah, I have to say I'm really loving his messages. Like you say, they really align with my own philosophy.

I mean, one of the best things you can do to reduce risk, reduce cost, reduce schedule slips is own it when something is wrong and make it possible for other people to own it when something is wrong. Because the more you incentivize people to hide stuff, the worse all those problems are going to be. And so I think that him and the lesson that goes right along with that is that is that leadership is, got to live that. They've got to live those values. And he's doing it. And I really admire that. I think that's spectacular. Turning the ship is a slow process. And I mean, I've never seen anybody do it faster than he's doing it. He's really working on excellence. And I mean, it's a very scary time to be a scientist. But there are plenty of people who still understand that science is critical, frankly, for the future economy of our nation. You know, you kill. You

science and engineering now. The pain is felt by individual people now, but the economy doesn't feel it for another 10 years. And suddenly there's just so many fewer startups and no new patents and nobody's going to turn in and go, it was you back in 26 who made that decision. So that's very worrying. But I know there's still a lot of support for science. And maybe one thing that I think is important to disentangle from Isaacman's message of partnership with the private sector and get the private sector much more involved. I think that's great. I've got no problems with that, but I think people misconstrue that as the private sector is going to take on science. I've had very, very smart people say to me, well, won't Elon just do the science? Like,

why do you need NASA to pay for science? There's no economic incentive for the private sector to do science. So they create rockets that are the transport. You know, they create the instruments that get bought to do the science. But they don't actually pay to do. the science. There's no profit in that. The only people who do that are doing it as a hobby. Ironically, Jared Asickman was. Like, before this, he was doing that and he was like, I should maybe boost this Hubble Space Telescope.

It's somewhat ironic, but that was the example we would use. Yeah. I know. It's such a great example. And like, I pull on the same. Shmits are probably the Schmit Observatory, what's it called? I forget what they're, Eric Schmidt's situation. Yeah, Project Pearl and Schmidt Science.

And they're doing great stuff. but that is frank, that's like the equivalent of a hobby. It's a philanthropy. Yeah. They're doing it as a philanthropy. You know, and other people are doing it as a hobby or as a philanthropy, but it is not, it is not going to make the shareholders happy. That's not what's going to give you your quarterly return.

My next billion will be operating an observatory. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Our next income stream is going to be pictures of deep space. It's not in the SpaceX IPO plan. It's like data centers and space observatories. Those are the two things that will drive our two trillion dollars.

It's like an appendix X, you know? Yeah, and you're like historically, people say, well, what about Darwin? Well, you know, Darwin did science as a hobby. He was hired, and you guys probably know this, he was hired to accompany the captain of the Beagle, which was on a surveying journey to open up trade routes. And Darwin was brought along to be the gentleman companion of the depressive captain to keep the depressive captain working. And Darwin, it turned out, was super seasick

and just got on land every chance he could and then started discovering stuff. And so this, I mean, like I'm saying it in a silly way, but that's literally what happened. And so it's just a good reminder that science is a ride-along to commerce. And, you know, the metaphor is like the California gold rush. The people who are making the money

are the ones who are selling the mules and selling the pans and selling the pots, they're not the people usually who are going out there and getting the gold. And so that's kind of the metaphor. So we've got to remember that without a government backer, science doesn't happen. And without science, innovation entrepreneurship is really, really cut off at the knees. Yeah, it's a symbiotic relationship, right? Yeah.

How spoiler do we want to get here on the book? That's my take, by the way. I don't know how spoiler we want to get. Are we here for spoilers? Which is, I don't know if there is anything to spoil. I would like to just talk. I'd like to talk about the two Hellens and the two screws primarily are the things I would like to talk about. Yes.

Oh my God. The Helen story. I love so much. Give us like elevator pitch Helen story with the people that haven't read yet. They need to read the full thing. It's amazing. And then I would like to know if you've met either or both of the Hellens. Oh, damn it.

I have not met the Hellens. I'm really sorry to say, but this story is 100% true. and it has to do with losing the recipe. And this is something I hadn't really thought about very much before getting involved with the Psyche mission. And maybe you haven't thought about it. You guys, I'm sure, have thought about it. But broadly, maybe people haven't thought about

the unbelievable hiccups in human progress where we forget how to do stuff that we used to know how to do. It happens all the time. And you think about a time right now when maybe global population is about to turn over the top of the peak and start to decline, We don't get to pick where knowledge is lost. We don't get to pick where our fabric phrase.

And when we forget stuff, it's really hard to figure it out again. And so this happened to us on the project. We had a piece of our comm system where the vendor just couldn't tune it right. They kept failing to make it. And we kept having to pay them to try again because that's how a cost plus contract works. And finally, it was just like going back to the original lesson, like we showed up in person. And we finally learned what was really wrong, which was that the people who were there and no longer knew how to make the part, and that the only person who knew how to make it had

retired. And this was in the peak of COVID. So like even visiting these people, we were sort of endangering our own lives, but it was very important. And we convinced them to convince her to come back and make the part. Her name was Helen. And we managed to keep her safe, to the best of my knowledge, she did not get sick. She did our part. We're eternally grateful. Okay. Crisis a burden. And then like a little while later there's another part that we just can't make and um and we're going to the we put this time we put together a red team and we're just trying to tearing apart part the part and trying to figure out what's wrong and it turns out again the person who knew how to make the park had retired and they hadn't trained the next person and her name was also helen and i'm not making this up and so so my son and i

started good like this happened about five times on the project although only twice was at helen But since then, I shared the story and someone told me another story about another Helen, literally named Helen. I couldn't believe it. And so my son and I are Googling the name Helen, and it turns out the use of the name Helen peaked just after World War II. And so that's when these people were just, you know, going into school and learning how to be engineers. And so now all the super talented Helens are retiring. And so this is not a coincidence that they're all named Helen. A huge Hellen shortage.

So we decided that, I know. I know. So I have two lessons for you. one is if you can hire someone named Helen or someone not named Helen, hire the one named Helen. And then the other thing, like, my son and I made up this idea that there's a, there's a, a non-dimensional unit that we named the Helen, which is the least unit of technological knowledge, and that you can measure the complexity or your project in Helens. And so, I think you should start, you know, applying this to project that you work on.

We need to find one or both Helens and have them on this show, right? show for sure. Yeah. We need to start making like XKCD has got to make some graphs of the Helens of different projects. Maybe the shirt with the names and it's just Helen and Helen and Helen and Helen. Yes, that would be excellent. That would be excellent. Yep. And then like when you piled up so many Helen and Helen and Syche. I think maybe we should do that. Yeah. Is there a merch department we could talk to? Can we make some merch? We have a team of student artists as a part of the Psyche project. They turn over every year. And if you guys wanted to go talk to them, I bet you get some great Helen product out of it.

So in the book, can we do like a Helen of Troy thing, but a Helen of Psyche? Oh, totally. Totally. They'll be hitting a spacecraft with some sparkling water, I think, is what's going to happen. Yeah. So I guess the spoiler of the study is I had breakfast with the chief technology officer from Sony Corporation asking him how they solve this problem. And he told me the most amazing story that I write about in the book.

of a cliffhanger at least some of this we got a cliffing number all right second order business where do you think the two screws are there are two lost screws oh my god those screws you looked all around the spacecraft

you looked everywhere that it was you looked in the where the transport path that it took to get where it was when you found out there were lost screws where do you think the lost screws are are they on their way to the asteroid right now so I have an idea about these screws all right so so what happens is

you know we're getting close to launch and everyone's basically freaking out all the time about everything. And someone noticed one day that two screws were missing. And that's never okay. Like a loose screw in a spacecraft could basically ruin the entire mission. It's a really big deal. People became very obsessive about these screws. And as you say, as you imply, we never found them.

But it was so much easier in meetings to talk about two number eight screws than it was to talk about like some subroutine in the flight software that nobody really had a good grip on, but everybody could picture two screws rattling around inside some instrument. And so we talked about the screws an enormous amount of time. Here's my secret idea about where those screws are. The giant clean room at Jet Propulsion Laboratory where our spacecraft was assembled and where we did the electrical and magnetic compatibility testing

and a whole bunch of other things had originally been built to make nuclear rockets. It was never used for that. But the reason this is pertinent is because if you're going to make a nuclear rocket, you have a possibility of dropping horrible fuel on the floor where you're working on. And so the floor is a mesh. It's a metal mesh.

And so you can drop stuff through it. And if it drops through that floor, it then falls, I don't know, I'm going to make this up, 20 meters down to the actual floor because you want to get it away from the people, right? You want to get the dangerous stuff away from the people. And it falls onto a slanted concrete subfloor

and everything goes down into the corner. So my guess. That's crazy. I never knew that. That's unreal. That's number one, terrifying. Number two, awesome. Holy shit. I mean, this is not a secret because, I mean, they got permission to build this thing and everything. And the nuclear rockets were never made there. So nobody need freak out about this. That never happened. Jared Eisenman's trying to bring that back. A long time ago. Yeah, maybe it's time. We've got a facility. We've got a facility in our hands. But the thing is, the thing is that if you're working on that floor and you're building stuff, you can never do. drop anything because it's gone forever. And so that was a source of some frustration for some of

our engineers. So that's where I think our screws are. There's probably enough down there now to make a whole other spacecraft. We could get a free mission of it. There's probably somebody down there putting it together right now quietly in the corner of the subfloor. Yeah. That's really funny. That's a great theory. I thought Dr. Z stole him after you almost made him throw up. I was my theory. Yeah, actually that he was jingling something in his pocket at that moment, so that could be. He threw him down the floor the next time he was there for to not be traceable. He was so mad, so mad.

Wasn't there like another story? No, he's a force in nature. Yeah, the bolts shook loose in the vibe testing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was bad. Yeah, things that break on vibe. You guys must have covered this many times when on podcasts of yours that I happen not to have seen about the

unbelievable horrible things that happen with like not bolting your forgetting to bolt your satellite to the vibe table before you turn it on and stuff like that goes satellite that uh the photo of it tipped over comes up all the time in the discord absolutely oh my god i know i've been at a vibe table once at uh marada the valves company has that one of those five things actually that was the thing that your helen's story made me think of i visited marada valves and i like i met a guy who can tell visually with his own eyeballs if he's polished a poppet enough that goes in a valve. Like there's not a measurement for that. There's just this guy who lives in New Jersey's eyeballs that say, yep, that one is good to go out

the door. Like, that was in the helen's. My God, weirdly, his name is Helen. Yeah, his name Helen. It's crazy. I wouldn't expect that. Yeah, I'd expect that. Yeah, latch valves are a whole thing. We had a problem with our latch valve in flight. And I learned something about how the unbelievably high touch those things are. And I think, um, I think, um, I could be wrong about this, but I have been told that SpaceX has absolutely minimized their use of latch valves because of how fussy they are. The best valve is no valve, they say. That is absolutely 100th century. You got to write down all these aphorisms.

You got them. We'll transcribe it. Yeah, that's fine. We forget this immediately, any other cool things we've said. And then we come up with it later again. And we're like, didn't we say that once? And we're like, I think so. Check the transcripts.

Just take the credit. Take the credit every time. Abysmally burying the lead, Jake. this lady on this show with us flew a spacecraft by Mars mere days ago and so incredible photos and we have not talked about a single goddamn photo that came out of Mars. Amazing photos. Please tell us about this. This is not a photo. This is not a photo from Mars. But it's student art. Our students made this, isn't that great? I love it. Yeah. So I will just say, I think the most important thing I could say about this

is that the people who do navigation are geniuses. You know, they, had this ideal time and place in space that they wanted the spacecraft to pass by exactly a certain height above beautiful Mars. Look at that picture. Our spacecraft took that picture. It's as if we'd never seen Mars before. It was incredibly exciting. And they knew exactly the time they wanted the spacecraft to pass at exactly this height. And they hit it with a devious of less than one second. And we got exactly the delta V that we needed and exactly the plane change. We had to go three degrees out of the ecliptic plane in order to hit Psychev. and it's just perfect. We don't not need to do a correction. And so Jim Ball and the imager team at Arizona State University took these amazing pictures. And soon, you're going to see some time-lapse video of our flyby of Mars.

They're putting it together now. And we were able to confirm that the images work great. And we even got some magnetics data and some gamma-ray, some signal from actually the anti-coincidence shield of our gamma-ray spectrometer. and the whole thing was a big success. We totally know what that means. Absolutely.

Yeah, we're here with you on that. Just using the words, just using the words is good enough. I like it, yeah. We learned by immersion, but, yeah. Yeah, if you hear things enough, you come to understand them in your own way. So I would just say one thing about that. So there's basically an aluminum plate that wraps part way around the crystal that senses gamma rays for our gamma ray spectrometer. That's how we're going to get composition, a whole different story.

But the anti-coincidence shield stops gamma rays from coming from the back. But it turns out we can tell when energetic particles and things hit that anti-coincidence shield. And we've basically been using it to track space weather. We can measure gamma-ray bursts from other galaxies using our anti-coincidence shield. Turns out we can measure, I know, I know. We can measure different kinds of solar wind, coronal mass ejections, and stuff hitting the. And so we have had this weather station in space and we've been sharing the date on that. So that was also in operation as we go around Mars, super, super successful.

And we were watching the Doppler radio live on teams, so to speak. So the whole team is kind of dialed in. And our nav lead is annotating the data as it comes in on our screen, the Doppler radio, and just showing how we're absolutely hitting where we want to go. And he's such a lovely guy. And he kept saying, I'm so sorry, you guys, this is so boring. I have nothing else to say about this Doppler. And we're all just freaking out.

Like you guys are doing a miracle. We can't believe our spacecraft is doing this. And you keep singing, I have nothing else to say, this is so boring. And so we all watched and cheered as we did our Mars flyby. I know your audience, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's so funny because I, you know, I saw as everything started to get posted, it's like,

new images of Mars from an interesting angle and this out of the other. And I was like, all right, let's see. Let's see this. And then I was like, holy shit, these are freaking awesome. What did you think? They're amazing. They're like, just something about. I mean, that picture.

The altitude you were at. I mean, the Crescent, people were loving that, but the close-ups that I was showing, this one of the poll, there's something about the altitude you're at, the perspective difference after seeing years and years of high-rise photos. Just like a different view on it was really, really cool to see. Yeah.

Was there anything about these? Go ahead. Oh, go ahead. No, no. You're a charge of mission that just flew by fucking Mars. Please tell me. I have one piece of information I can give you, which I heard directly from.

Jim Bell. So in that picture, if you look near the middle bottom, there's one little white dot that's sitting there all by itself, that one right there. And it seems to be, we've confirmed it with other assets around Mars. They see it also. It seems to be a tiny pool of ice really far away from the cap. And nobody seems to know what it's doing out there. But I thought that was a really interesting little point on that picture. I was hoping you were going to say something better than that's Maven. That's where that ended up. Oh, poor Maven. Oh, my God. I know. I know. No, just, yeah, awesome imagery, I think, you know, are there things out of these, out of this imagery session that that are going into your planning when you do get to your primary target? Yeah, we learned really a lot about using the cameras and just absolutely confirming their ability to focus and to change what they're doing for.

fast and to go through all the different filter wheels. And so all of those things are going to be informing how we set up the image sequences at Psyche. And people kept asking me, like, what are you going to discover about Mars? And like, nothing. Everybody's studied the heck out of Mars. Like, there's not too much that we can bring to the table that hasn't been done. But what you said was actually, the one really interesting thing was that we're not sure that any other mission has ever photographed Mars from the angle that we did on approach with the sun basically behind it, shining through the atmosphere at the spacecraft as what's called a high phase angle. And so that's when we saw those amazing, just the crescent Mars.

And I don't know if you noticed, but the crescent on Mars, yeah, actually there was a further out one that was much lower res that actually, the very first one that was all pixelated is a really great one in case you have it. But instead of just like on a crescent moon, you just see a part of the crescent. But with this one, we saw light almost around the entire body of Mars. And it's because of light scattering through the atmosphere. And then if you look on the right hand side of that picture, there's a gap in the brightness of the crescent. And that gap is the north pole of Mars where the CO2 sublimiting or freezing out of the atmosphere takes the dust away.

And there's no dust to scatter the light. And it makes a gap in the in the Martian crescent. And I just thought that was super cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're looking for the picture. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm like, what's the highest resolution I can find of this thing? Yeah, there you go. low-rise version of it. See the right-hand side where there's a gap. That's because there's no dust there to scatter the light. That's, that's, that's, yeah. It's pretty cool.

It's amazing how the perspective matters so much, because, like, I can go on the JPL's website and download 10,000 photos of dirt on Mars from the rover and still, and yet I can look at these and be interested in it. You had Casey Hamer doing, like, simulations of what if I put this much, on the surface of Mars? What would fill up? And like high resolution, many things of it, yeah. Yeah, super fun. And so one of the things we've done on this mission, as I'm sure you know, is we wrote a pipeline so that our raw photos go right on the web, and we've got a raw photo

feed. So within a half hour of our receipt from the deep space network, they go on the web. And we've got a bunch of already a bunch of amateur photo processors who grab our raw images and make them into things, like even before our team has a chance to do. it. And they're really good. These people are super talented and it's really, really fun to see. But originally when we said we were going to do this, we got a little bit of pushback. People were worried like, but people are going to look at these things and they're going to, look, there's houses and dinosaur bones and smiling faces and stuff. And, you know, and my answer, exactly, that's my answer. That's my answer too. Like,

it doesn't matter if we edit or censor or process. If people want to see smiley faces and houses, they're going to see them no matter what. So the much more important thing is to say to the world space exploration is for everyone. This is free for everyone in the world to look at this data just at the same time we do. And that's why we do it. Preach. Yeah. All the craziest conspiracy theories came in moments when people weren't just releasing all the raw information at all times. So like it isn't necessarily an antidote for that thinking because there are definitely minds in the world that just want to go that direction every time. But you're better off just posting it all publicly. Just put it out there. I think so too. I mean, I mean the biggest rumor about

psyche's been out there for years and published hundreds and hundreds of times, which is that we're going to drag it back and make everyone on earth a billionaire, which just cracks me up. It's my fault. I'm the person who made the estimate of its value, but, you know, every thinking it is, it's my fault. I did that in a moment of weakness. Because after selection and after the announcement,

then what happens is you're on the phone with the press for like 10 hours until you reach some state of hysterical exhaustion and your neck is, cramped for me. I was talking on an actual phone. And PBS NewsHour says to me, well, if it's made a metal, you know, what could we get for it? And I was like, oh, that's a fun calculation. I think I'll do that right now. And brilliant idea. I mean, so the thing I always say about it is even if we had any technology to drag this thing back from 3AU, it would be such a bad day for Earth because we have no way to stop it and park it in orbit. It's just, it's not going to work in any way. not going to work. What you're going to do is just add up that number, call it an addressable market,

and then do an IPO really fast. Like do it right away. Oh my God. I could blow Astroforge out of the water. Okay. All right guys. We got to stop this right now. I got some work to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we went along. Thank you so much for hanging out with us a couple of extra minutes. Plug the book again. Where should people buy it? Where do you want them to buy it? What's the day? Oh my gosh. You can get it on Amazon. You can get it at Barnes & Noble. That's a great place to buy online. You can buy it directly from Hashet. You can get it on Audible.

And if you do read it and you like it, I would love for you to give it a review on one of those sites. That makes a huge difference to me. And if you have comments, I'd love to hear them because this is really heartfelt from me. And I want it to be useful. And so if you got any thoughts, send them along. I'm easily findable on the intratubes. Love it. And you'll come back when you get to the asteroid, please.

Yes. Oh my God. You guys are awesome. Until then. I see. I don't. My God. Almost a thousand days in flight and a long way to go. You guys are great.

I really appreciate what you do. And thank you for inviting me on. It was such a great conversation. Thank you. Yeah. We appreciate it. That was great. It works.

It works. Check it out. Oh, my share's in the way. My chair's in the way. Take, last week, I have a flipboard. I have a split flap display that occasionally shows. It only showed one name. which there's another name coming on next week.

Last week, or was it last week? Two weeks ago? I don't remember. I poorly explained, half poorly explained and half poorly remembered a paper from like a couple years ago about depot locations. It was last week. We're talking with Miles about where you might put a depot

if you want to do interesting things. I completely, I sort of and completely misremembered a paper by Mike Lauchs and John Goff and a couple others. Both of them are coming on the show next week to talk about where you might put a depot and where it would be useful and to entertain our ridiculous questions from people that barely understand this stuff.

I think it's gonna be fun because it's, I don't know, he just, behind the scenes, Mike Lauchs just texted me, me and John Gough are coming on the show. I was like, all right. Oh my God, that's so great. I can't complain. Oh, you got something to look forward to there.

I like badly cited them and they were like, we're going to come correct the record on that. So I'm like, all right. Oh, my God, that's so great. That is so great. I love that. Oh, my God. So that'll be a good time. What else, Jake? What else we got? All right.

Summer's here. I don't know. What's the story? We don't have anything else to plug. We got nothing. No, we got some plates that are spinning, but we'll have some good news soon. All right, y'all. Oh, interesting. All right. Thank you all so much. Thanks again for coming to join us. Yeah. Thanks so much for sharing your book and sharing your stories. and yeah, we look forward to talking to you again sometime.

Super appreciate you guys. Have a good day. Bye. All right. Bye, everyone. 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1,000, end of death.