Off-Nominal - 245 - Polar Bears and Penguins (with Jonathan Goff and Mike Loucks)

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Jonathan Goff, Director of Advanced Concepts at Gravitics, and Mike Loucks, CEO at SEE, to talk about where to put orbital depots, trajectories from there to the Moon and Mars, and to otherwise set the record straight on their papers after Anthony’s poorly-remembered-and-even-more-poorly-explained mention. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 245 - Polar Bears and Penguins (with Jonathan Goff and Mike Loucks) - YouTube AAS Paper Review: RAAN Agnostic 3-Burn Departure Methodology for Deep Space Missions from LEO Depots (Part 1 of 2) | Selenian Boondocks AAS Paper Review: Practical Methodologies For Low Delta-V Penalty, On-Time Departures To Arbitrary Interplanetary Destinations From A Medium-Inclination Low-Earth Orbit Depot | Selenian Boondocks An Updated Propellant Depot Taxonomy Part V: Human Spaceflight Fixed Depots (Low-Orbit) | Selenian Boondocks Follow Mike Mike Loucks (@Astrogator_Mike) / X Home - Space Exploration Engineering Follow Jon Jonathan A. Goff (@rocketrepreneur) / X Gravitics Follow Off-Nominal Subscribe to the show! - Off-Nominal Support the show, join the Discord Off-Nominal (@offnom) / Twitter Off-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Jake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Main Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘 Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Tee WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Hey, Jake, it's a quad box. We got ourselves a quad box. We talked our way into a quad box, is what we did. So it turns out. Have you ever done a box of five? A pent a box? No.

No. I think this is the most I can do. Yeah, yeah. It breaks all geometry after that, so we just shut it down. You can't do the Brady Bunch thing with like nine people or whatever? That's too much work. That's too much work for us. So instead, what we do,

Jake, is if you have ever poorly remembered and then even more poorly explained a technical paper and happen to know one of the people that wrote it and then get a text later, hey, we're going to come on and set the record straight on what the hell you're asking me about. That's how we end up with this show. So thanks for the text. It wasn't quite like that. Now, you called me the night of your podcast because you felt bad. You would quote the paper and didn't use my name and then you went to look it up and I hadn't actually listened to it yet and you said oh hey I found out you wrote your name was the first one on that paper not goffs I'm like oh okay I didn't even know you talked about it yet it took me another like week before I listened to it right so so and then you

accused me of calling you I'm like nah I didn't quite go down you know it's close enough it counts it counts I'm pretty excited about it because this is actually not the first time that we've had someone call us and be like, you said that my area of expertise very wrongly and I want to come on the show and do it right. And those are shows have always worked out really well. So I'm very excited to talk about. Those are the people from Spin Lunch Jake, right? No, they never call. Yeah, exactly. Did he call someone who was wrong on the internet? Exactly right. Did you ever have the Cosbosphere guys on? No, we're still working on that one. That's in an email chain somewhere.

Yeah, exactly. We got to go. We still got to go. Well, I told you, you got to go to the one in Oregon that has the spruce goose in it. You got to go see that one. That's amazing. You've been to that one, Jake, didn't you? No, I haven't done that one.

I haven't been, that's in Oregon. I've only done, like, in that area, Museum of Flight, obviously is where I've done a lot. But, yeah, not spruce goose. Well, hey, this is good. You both have been on MECO before, never been on. off nominal. It didn't realize you have. That's right. Jake, I think you might have met John at IAC in 2019. Because you and I talk, John, when we were there. And I feel like I didn't really go that far outside of Jake's reach. So it's possible that you ran into each other there. But he was my chaperone because I'm a foreigner.

I was the handler. Yeah. And Anthony, we've not met in person either. We want to run virtual. So I could be six foot eight or two foot one and you can't tell. I mean wow was that the was that the IAC where Voyager like came out of the out of stealth mode and announced they were buying Altius and probably yeah yeah you're walking around pretty bleary-eyed so that that's probably right you've been on it yeah give us so anyone out there that does not know Jonathan Goff please give us a give us a little rundown on where you've been because you're you're famed in certain space nerd circles on the internet but some people might not have encountered you yet sure So, yeah, so serial entrepreneur and space technologist currently running advanced concepts at Gravitics.

But before that, I was the founder and CEO at Altius Space Machines, ran it for 11 years, sold it to Voyager, ran their honor of its servicing portfolio for a year before leaving to join Gravitics. before that I was a co-founder with Dave Maston at Maston Space Systems I was I say co-founder and rocket plumber there at Maston and in parallel with all that someone was wrong on the internet back in 2006 and it got me to start a blog, Selenian Boondocks you know where I think half of my first dozen posts were just ripping into the stupidity about

in space refueling and multi-launch architectures under the ESAS study. So, yeah. Nice. Look how far we've come all these years later. That's right. Yeah, well, people are, I just realizing now, I'm realizing now, Mastin, eventually bought by Astrobotic, eventually bought by Voyager.

So everything that you are tasked with creating eventually makes its way to Voyager? Well, so far. Yeah. Yeah, no prediction. on that, right. And Mike's usually the guy that I refer to as, I ask somebody who knows about trajectories because you've flown everything ever,

some of which you cannot tell us about. And you have, hey, I should mention, you have a beautiful new website that one of the four people on this show were tasked with creating. So there you go, satee.com. The most expensive URL I will ever work on, and you will never sell. Well, I will.

There is a price. Yeah. And it's been stolen twice. I've had to resuscitate it twice from being stolen. I'll be the third. I had a guy in Iran steal at one time. And I think, I'm trying to remember where the other guy stole it from. But I had to get it back both times because they hacked the guys that were hosted on their site, took it over. And then I had to like get legal on them and get it back. That's wild. Well, that's a story. It is. Actually, the one, the guys that saved me the last time, Microsoft saved me. The guy had a bogus Microsoft email address that had my name on it. And I emailed Microsoft and said, hey, this guy's using my name to steal my domain. And they fixed it like within an hour. They shut down the site. I was shocked. I didn't think they would do anything or even respond. And they responded immediately and shut down the thing and not let me get it back. So it was a Microsoft for the win. That's incredible. That Seattle area sway that you've got. Bill Gates. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what it is.

Anyway, Jake, before we get going, did you bring anything fun over there? You got any fun treats? I just got a, I got a Petito today. So, IPA. Classic. Classic. Classic. Real simple today.

I brought another Italian wine. We're working on the Italian wines here. A suave. Nice white wine. I feel like I heard some rumors of an interesting cup or a mug or something down there, John. What you got? Are you drinking out of a particular vessel? just water bottle

I'm boring Arcadia space oh Arcadia that's what it was that way you got it I don't know which button makes you full screen but yeah

I try to go ahead John well they're out of Spain I got to meet them I got flown out to join a conference a small satellite conference in Spain this February

and so yeah they're a great company. Good propulsion shop doing like peroxide, proxide based in space propulsion. I'm looking at their site and that logo is suspiciously, suspiciously similar to other space logos. It's like very, very close to both the Omega logo. Oh, yeah. And then what's the...

It's almost firefly-ish. Almost firefly-ish. And then what's, I'm blanking on the name now. Our friend, Lars, down in Colorado. Agile? Yeah. Same, same A, right? Some similar.

Yeah. Are you saying there's a lack of creativity in the space logo marketplace? There might be. There might be, yeah. Yeah. It's got to be. Yeah. It's got to be.

I've got water in this bug. And I think, at least two of you have seen the mug before, but I actually have a beer here, but I'm not going to drink it because it'll kick my butt at this time of the day. But this is my favorite. This is, you guys know the Deschutes Brewery and Bend. I don't know if you've heard of this beer or not, but it's, and they have a brand called The Abyss, and this is the coconut one.

I love it. It's 14.3, though, and I am not drinking that at one o'clock. Jeez. I was going to say, God, it's not that a beer will kick your ass in the middle afternoon. It's a 14% beer at one o'clock. Yeah, this one looks at me. It's great, but it's got to be like after seven or I'm not drinking that bad way, but it's good. And I would be drinking it if it wasn't one in the afternoon out of my Artemis glass that I got from my buddy at Booz Island.

Kevin Post knows who he is. So I got my Artemis 2 glass there. I'd be drinking that, but right now we'll just do water out of the S&E flasker so that I can be functional after this. I've made that mistake, the double digit percent beer in the middle of the afternoon. No, no. It's just nap time after that. No, you're done. Especially if I haven't eaten anything yet today, and I would have drink that, I wouldn't last through the call.

So, yeah, yeah. But it's a good choice. And Ben is a cool place, and there's lots of neat beers down there. We have so many SEE friends in the chat. Oh, that's just Mike. That's not what I wanted. We got all the SE people in the chat. So, shot them out.

John, I don't know how much, you got dragged along to this. I don't know how much context you have for why the hell you got dragged along to this. So I saw your discussion about the paper Like it was in the context of You're looking at SpaceX's AI data center plan and like you know Could you leverage some of that for you know Propelent depots and putting them in like weirder orbits like

Sunsync and things like that yeah Okay because because Mike was somebody who changed my thinking on Starship architectures because another time where we had some phone call late at night on the East Coast when you were like, the way to think about it is not how many launches does it take to refuel a starship for a particular mission, but the way to think about it is always keeping a depot fueled up so that it's there when you need it. Yep. And so in that context, you know, the thing I was ruminating on was, is there a spot where SpaceX interests are co-located that are also useful to do

other things. And then I remembered, very particularly, I remembered this particular image in the context of, I think, insight going to Mars. And we were like, what? It's going from a polar orbit. And I remember this image was in my brain somewhere about like, oh yeah, it all just eventually points the same direction, no matter what particular orbit you're flying from. So that's how we ended up here. But how did you guys end up actually, like, whose idea was this paper? Who started this? I think... It was Kirk. I don't know.

It was the one who... Well... We got the idea from Kirk Sorensen. Yeah. Right. Yeah. John and I had met on the internet and then in person a bunch of times. I think I met John because of the blog that he just talked about reading the Selenian...

Writing the Selenian Boondocks. But we met and started talking and we worked together on several things. And then we were just talking trajectory stuff in the middle of night or whatever. And John knew about Kirk's paper and thought. you know, could we write a paper about that same thing. And so John Carricko and I and John Doff all got together and kind of thought, okay, let's just run the numbers on this and do some trajectories on it and really kind of put it to put together a paper that describes what this is. Because, you know, for the missions that we fly in space, little maneuvers that change inclinations and

stuff aren't that big of a deal. And John's like, yeah, we need to like, you know, make those more known about. So we thought if we published that and talk about it, we could. We could just say, look, this isn't that much delta V. And really, I think that the thought that we had was that the kind of delta V you'd spend to make, to change, you know, the direction of the, of your orbit to get onto the asymptote from a depot is the same kind or of the same order is what you pay when you choose your launch site. You know, some launch sites, you got to pay a little bit Delta B because they're higher north than, you know, than the equator. or whatever.

And nobody said some things about, oh, I'm not going to launch out of wallups because, you know, it's going to cost more. I mean, it'll cost a little bit more, but we deal with that,

with Delta Vee penalties all the time. And so we thought we ought to put numbers to what the penalties actually are. Yeah, let me give a little background because there's a little bit more to it. Because, um, like back in, when was the Augustine committee?

Was that 2009, 2010 somewhere in there? Yeah, 2010, I think it came out. There's been more things. been one Augustine committee, there's been like three, right? The one you're thinking of.

The latest one. Yeah, I remember one from the 80s, right? I mean, it's like after Challenger. Yep. The one Jeff Grayson was on. But yeah, so like one of their big recommendations they came out with was that, you know, propellant depots are at a tipping point where they could really enable, you know, some advanced in-space architectures that are a lot more affordable.

And this is something NASA should look at. And they also suggested it's like, yeah, launcher's a little bit bigger than what we have right now would be good, but you don't need to go to a big shuttle-derived heavy-lifted vehicle, you know, if depots worked out. And that kicked the Hornets Nest in D.C. And there were a lot of antibodies that came out at the time. Like I had a paper on propellup depots that I had presented with my friend Dallas Beanhoff, who was at Boeing at the time. We presented the paper on depots, and then when we went to submit the paper to actually get it published, they pulled his permission to publish it. You know, Depot became a four-letter word. You could get fired at ULA for using the word depot in public.

So it got really awesome. Oh, yeah, they absolutely were. Well, and then in the middle of all this, you know, they were going, like the Obama administration decided. that it's like, well, if you've got to do SLS, we have no money for a lander at this point. So, you know, the, shoot, I'm forgetting the name, the path, you know, where they wanted to go out to an asteroid. Flexible path, that's what it was. Yeah, the flexible path was sort of the, well, if I built a heavy lift launch vehicle and I don't have a lander to use it for lunar missions, what can I do with it while I'm scrounging up enough money to build a lander? And so when they're looking at these asteroid missions, you know, somebody from NASA Johnson,

who I think was a big fan of heavy lift vehicles, you know, wrote some papers saying, oh, you can't use depots for asteroid missions because even though you can launch a depot and it's orbital plane and you can time it so its orbital planes lined up for an asteroid mission for the first departure, you know, its plane's going to precess. And any future mission, you can't count on it being aligned. Got like a 15% chance of it working. And so this is a non-starter. And we looked at a bunch of different ideas.

I know I floated a few ideas to some friends that went and did a paper showing that it's like, oh, if you put a few depots in low Earth orbit, or if you have the one and after it's done, you know what your next mission is. So you lower its orbit or raise its orbit to change the processions so that it's in the right plane at the right time. So you could do some tricks like that. But those never really took off. And Mike and I were, you know, we're having this conversation about how to solve this problem.

And I stumbled on Kirk Sorensen's old paper where he's looking at, you know, using mixer tethers for like flinging payloads out. And he had these in equatorial orbit. And he was showing that it's like, A, you can fling it into something that's not equatorial orbit because if you're leaving Earth, it's on a hyperbolic trajectory

and you just need to have your orbit intersect with that locus of periapses. and you just have to have your tether oriented it the right way to fling it at the right point and you can go do these deep space missions. And so like Mike and I got thinking about it and you know, between us and Keriko, we started doing some of the simulation in math. And well, okay, I should say

they did most of the simulation in math. I'm not an SDK jockey or guru like they are. But guru is better than jockey. But yeah, so they came up with this. I got you. I'm not going to do it. You guys can do that. Yeah.

Anyway, it's like, you know, we had this idea and we tried to get a paper together for a couple of years. And finally, we just, we got to do it because, like, they're still making these stale arguments that we had solved the problem like three years earlier. And it's like, you know, arguing it's a stupid idea in Twitter. versus actually writing a paper and publishing it at a conference, you know, there's a difference. And so we went, you know, we finally knuckled down and said, okay, Altis is stable enough I can like write a paper, you know, with, you know, with C. And so we did the paper, presented it, did a follow-on paper.

And we started finding some really interesting stuff with it. But that was sort of the genesis is we wanted to prove those like, no, even if you only have one depot and even if you aren't trying to do creative stuff for moving it around, you can support missions to anywhere that you care about. And the penalty is a very modest amount, you know, like single digit percent differences in flight time and single digit percent differences in Delta V, and it's just not a big deal. Yeah. Well, and there was a thought that, you know, that we had, John and I had, John Carrico and I had,

just from missions that we'd worked on where you don't want the random move. And the trick for that is if you're trying, like, we spend a lot of time trying to think about how to get a lunar mission to come off of a GTO. And Space Isle finally did that. But we had talked about that for a long time. And one of the tricks is you get your RAM where you want it. And then you lock the RAN in by just raising the Apogee up. And so I thought, oh, well, we can certainly do that with the Depot.

We can, you know, if we know that we're going to need the RAN in some place, we don't kind of sit and wait for it. Or that's not going to hurt anything. We'll just wait until we get close enough to when we got to go. And we'll put the apogee up where we want it and time that. So when we get back, it's the right time that we can go. And then we started looking at that, you know, the whole idea, well, what if, what if the, you know, the inclination of your orbit isn't quite high enough? Because if you want to get a higher declination, so when you're leaving to go to an interplanetary destination, there's an asymptote that you've got to get on in heliocentric space.

And sometimes it's in the equator and sometimes it's up higher than the equator. And typically you think, oh, if I want to go to a high declination, I got to have a high inclination to do that. it turns out you can get there if you do a maneuver and your thing and your orbit inclination is high enough and we have thought about that and there's a classic picture that caracol likes to show me all the time from bait muller and white which is the the classic astrodynamics textbook that shows the the shape of the asymptote and the locus of points and all that kind of thing so we could just kind of see it from that way is that is that this is that one of these uh it's close yeah the one in the upper left there is is it really is inspired by I should have Bate Miller-Wight here and show it to you. It's in one of our papers. I show it, but it's a diagram and I have a figure

835 out of that book. Anyway, I'd go grab it and show it to you, but it's in my shelf and I have to go get it. But it is that. And that's a kind of close one for a low low perigy there. But the basic idea is that you can leave, you know, if your orbit intersects

that locus of points there, then you can get onto the, you know, you can hit leave, you put a maneuver there on that locus and get out onto the acetote and go to the planet. So I think that's the thing that caught my ear, right, that when we're talking about, in your mindset, Mike, of keep this depot always filled. And I think one thing that Jake and I talked about was if they're launching Starlink on starship, do they have extra propellant, they can go drop off at a depot. And then the combination of, well, these are in a Terminator Sunsynchronous orbit,

And you're saying you need to be leaving from a, you need to be leaving from a equal to or higher inclination than you want your declination. I'm like, well, this feels like a nice pairing of these two things. It is. And I mean, if you're in a higher inclination, I think in the paper we did, we use 51.5 because that was the ISS, you know, orbit. But, you know, that one was high enough to get most everything. Because even if you had something that was a little bit higher than that, then you could do the three burn deal and, you know, turn yourself at Apogee and get up there. But, you know, yeah, that was that was where we came up with that. We just looked at, like, in the second paper we did, there was a series,

there was like a blitz that we came up with, like try to hit all these planets, try to hit a bunch of asteroids at different declamations. Could we hit them all in the same time period? And we could. And there was, you know, there was dealt to be costing there, but it was like 100 meter per second or something like that. It wasn't, you know, anything killer that you couldn't tolerate. And sometimes you had, you know, if you had launched early, you had to sit there for a while

in Earth orbit and wait. but then you waited for your orbit to process to the right ran and then you just picked the apagy up and got some of the energy there and then you waited a little bit longer and came back and left so um it seemed like a straightforward thing and once we did it we're like the delta v cost you is is not very much i mean you can totally i think jake's getting stressed out how many times you two are saying just i feel like that's probably no no no it's probably like this is um no actually it's the opposite because i i am uh so i i i remember when insight launched, like I was, I was one of those people that was, like, confused. I was like, I've been told over and over that, like, if you want to go planetary, you have to, you know, launch roughly equatorily because you're trying to get to a heliocentric orbit and that's going to be, you know, roughly equitory. Like, that's what you do. That's how you always have done it. And there's a reason that we've chosen that. And then Insight launched and I was like very confused. And it's like,

oh, well, you know, it's kind of a light payload. It's sort of some extra margin to do this. And we can point it here. We can figure it out. And I know, you know, the more, that I learned about stuff since then, the more I kind of realized that anytime someone says like this can't be done from like an orbital, orbital trajectory like standpoint, it's usually built on some kind of assumption that that may or may not be true, right? Because there's so many, it's not like, oh, this rocket has X delta V and if it costs that much, you either can or can't do it. Like that's like a very binary state. But like depending on which launch site, which rocket, what your upper stage is, how much your payload is, where you're going,

when you're going, how long you can loiter, like all these factors go in to like expanding, you know, like there's exponential different kind of, you know, combinations there that you can do to put something together. And I feel like now I just don't trust anybody when they say that. It's like, well, okay, well, you said you can't make it there, but that's because you only want to buy this one rocket and that's, you know, that's your constraint. And that's fine for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Your spacecraft is too big and you have to go with that rocket. I think inside, you know, had some particular thing they wanted to, some geometry they wanted to get at Mars and that was unusual. And they had to fly a different trajectory to do it and they could do that out of Vanneberg.

But I don't remember exactly what their constraints were. But there was something about that there was a geometry that they liked that typically you didn't care about. And so, and they were lighter spacecraft. So they did that. But yeah, there's totally times when you would do it. But you do lose performance, but if you have a big vehicle and your spacecraft is small, who cares? Nothing else going on it. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's like, yeah, for most interplanetary missions, the declination is usually pretty low. And so, like, you can get to it out of a low inclination launch site. But it's usually the ones that had the high declination that we saw at least, you know, Mike can correct me on this, but because he's looked at orders of magnitude more than I have. But, you know, a lot of the near-Earth asteroids, like they'll have a very low delta V, but they'll have a high declination. You know, because, you know, the delta V to get there is relatively low, but it's like, oh, I've got to pop up out of the equatorial plane to do that. Like the small amount of C3 I need is going off in a weird direction. Right.

Yep. But I think when we did that blitzing in the paper, we looked at like, you know, some that were 75 degrees or something like that. And we could hit those off of the 51 degree inclination. But there are some of those. And the thing you have to remember, too, is that the declination is around the Earth. And you're talking about something that's, whether it's in or out of the ecliptic in the heliocentric space.

and the heliacentric space is bigger than the Earth Earth's the kind of thing. Helicilis space is big. Yeah, and so the declination is just the way to think about it is. Like, you know, once you've left Earth space and you zoomed way out and you're heading off, what's the vector that you're leaving, you know, that you're leaving relative to the Earth. You know, so that's what declination is really about. But, yeah, so it's like, you know, mostly neos that require the high declination. So, yeah.

Remember now, when you're talking about high declination, you're just talking about the declination that you have to leave the Earth with respect to the equator. And there are things, I mean, if you really want to get out of like the ecliptic plane, like Ulysses did, for example, you could go 90 degrees and that's not helping. It's just not enough. The Earth isn't, you know, the Earth isn't helping you there.

So like Ulysses had to go do a Jupiter flyby and stuff to get up over the top of the sun to do that. So, I mean, you could go, like I said, 90 degrees, and that's not doing much to your ecliptic inclination. So those things are geomatically not necessarily. Earth's going pretty fast. Yeah. Isn't it like 30 kilometers per second around the sun?

So it's like you've got a huge amount of, you already have that vector. So it's the vector component that you're adding to the vector. You go off where you want. It's just that, Jake. That's all it is. It's just that. You just fling it.

You just fling it up there, you know. Just shoot it. It's fine. Go up, do a thing. Fling it back. It's fine. We got it. I feel, it's funny, too, talking about that because I feel like playing Kerbal Space Program has, like, reinforced that belief.

Because, like, everyone who's played that game is like, oh, I'll just change my inclination. And then it's just, like, burn their tank dry and they've gone up four degrees. You're like, why does this cost so much fuel? And then it just teaches you, like, you must always go for the most optimal trajectory. Because if you don't, you will be punished in the court of space physics, you know. That's because we don't do any math when we play Kerbal. We just put some fuel tanks on. Yeah.

These guys do all math. But the math shows up, though, because you run out of fuel, so that's good. Someone's doing it. Yeah. Yeah, we say we should have done the math, but we never do. Right. But the math is getting done. You're just not calculating it yourself.

That's all right. The computer did it for me. That's it. All right. So where does this leave us with? I think, I don't know how many blog posts over the years I've read of yours, John, about like depot locations and different places that you can put them, different architectures that we could take for them.

I wonder how much thinking, we lost John. He doesn't want to talk about depots. He'll be back. It's fine. What I'm trying to get to with this theorization, because the graphics I keep pulling up in this, let me find your paper again in my stack of tabs, when I look at your,

I mean, maybe you can explain us what all these other lines are. Like, when I look at this, this graphic, for instance, right? Are those yellow lines orbits that you could be in to do the trajectory that you're showing? knowing that if I was in any of those yellow ones, since they intersect the white circle, that's where I can launch from out of that orbit?

Well, ignore the purple for a moment. And just look at the little dotted yellow guys around there. Those are all trajectories that are going off on the asymptote to whatever the destination here is here, which may be like Mars or whatever. But they're all going out in the same direction. And there's an asymptote line that runs right down the middle of this view. And they're all kind of circled around that. So you want to get on one of those.

And you can be in any of these, you know, any of these orientations. Now, the question is that circle that you got there isn't necessarily on the equator or on the pole. It's just some other place on the earth that, you know, that represents the direction of the asymptote. So you've got to get your parogy when you leave here on that circle of points or the locus of points there. So, you know, in the case where we have here, we've started off with that red orbit there, which is a 51 degree orbit. And so what we're showing here is really if we wanted to leave and get on one of those, get on the locus of points, we got to go through the middle of that thing with our orbit, through the middle of that circle, and then we've got to put our parogy on that line. So what we'll do here, what this is showing, and you can't see it all here, is you pump your apagy way up, you do a spin around, you, you know, you spin around the line of abscities there, the line between the apogy and parogy. You spin around that and then put your paragy on that locus of points.

Then when you come back, you do a burn there. And if you get the right energy, you're off on the asphotote to the other planet. And that's the visual here that you're shown. And that's, yeah, that's what's happening there. You see a big, you know, it looks like a right-hand turn in space, but it's, you're moving really slow. If you, you know, I think we, we baseline like maybe 400,000 kilometers, which is a little bit further than the moon.

But you go out there, you're not moving very fast. you do that out-of-play maneuver in the worst case there, and it's, you know, 80, 100 meters per second kind of stuff. It's not very big. So it's not very big compared to the other maneuvers that you have to do to leave the system. So, you know, you can do that kind of thing. And that's what we were trying to show there. In that particular case, that locus of points was a little bit higher than the inclination that we had for, I think, we were at 51 degrees. And I think that particular example maybe was 75 degrees.

So we had to do a little bit of spin in space in order to get up there. But that was the case where our declination wasn't as high, our inclination wasn't as high as the declination. And then you can also, the other thing that you do too, though, is once you get that apogee up as high as you're going, you've locked in the RAN, and so that isn't moving anymore. And so you do those kind of things too. And you're not stuck doing one rev in that orbit.

You can do two revs or three or whatever it is. So if you're waiting for your RAND, you know, someone launches you a month early, whatever, and you want your Rihanna process around and lower Earth orbit until it lines up

with where you want to go. Once it does that, you kick the apagy up, make a couple of loops, and then if you have to do one of those maneuvers, then you can do that. It's just that,

Jay. No big deal. Yep. One of the things I really liked about this approach, you know, in hindsight,

was you spend a little bit more time in the Earth-moon system, you know, before you've really committed to interplanetary. So, especially for,

like a crude vehicle, this gives you a couple of weeks to, you know, a couple days or a couple weeks to check things out. Make sure everything's fully operational. Nothing's acting squarely where you can still abort and it's relatively easy and safe to abort if it turns out the things aren't, you know, that there's something broken. Whereas, you know, if you're doing a traditional launch, it's like you're usually in a super low parking orbit, so you usually only are up there for, you you know, 30 minutes to a few hours before you commit. And then you're on an interplanetary trajectory. And a board at that point is no longer even really possible.

So it's like the crude mission in hindsight, it's like I'd almost rather always have to have a little bit of a phasing loop. You know, it's like I think it makes it more reliable. I mean, you do have more Van Allen belt passes. It does add a couple of days or weeks to the overall mission. But you can, you know, you can make sure that you're leaving. at the optimal point. So the amount of Delta V you save by leaving on the optimal point

probably more than makes up for the delta V. Yeah. Changes and phasing. And you get this chance to check things out where it's relatively safe and be sure that it's like, okay, we're ready to commit? We're ready to hit send on this bad boy? So this stuff, a lot of this is for focus on interplanetary asteroids. But how much overlap is this?

This is where I was getting, John, with you and like the blog post that you have about orbital depot locations. How much overlap is there in, because I'm as a layman that doesn't use the word just for this stuff because it sounds like really fucking hard. All I do is code software. It looks to me like, all right, from here I could get anywhere. That's how it reads, right?

If I can get to Mars from this spot, I guess I could get that anywhere else too. But is there actually overlap between going to the moon from these locations, just different orbits? Like, how much does this overlap with the work that you did, John, on depot locations? Yeah, well actually the Depot locations papers I wrote were after this So after we'd figured this out But I need to I need to actually go reread those

Because I don't remember all of what I said there But yeah It's the internet, just make it up again, that's fine Yeah Yeah I have an idea for a paper And I go look and it's like you idiot You wrote that 15 years ago man That's right

Yeah, but then there's other times where it's like, I swear I wrote the paper and I look, and it's like, no, I wrote a tweet. I did not write a whole paper. There's a difference. Yeah, we're not quite the same. But, yeah, no, so a lot of this is informed, yeah, it is informed by this architecture. So, yeah, going to the moon, the nice thing about the moon is that any orbit that you're in in Earth orbit is going to intersect with the moon's plane. So you're going to have a opportunity. And the nice thing is the direction that planes precessed

because of the equatorial bulge of the Earth is the opposite direction of the rotation of the moon around the Earth. And so it means it actually accelerates it. So like almost any orbit in low Earth orbit is going to have a lunar opportunity. I think it's on the order of like once every week to two weeks, you know, week to week and a half, something like that. So any depot is good for the moon.

Like literally any orbit is going to be fine for the moon. Just totally shattering the SLS launch calendar storyline here, Jake. Yeah, I don't think. Too many variables. No, be fair now because every launch vehicle is got their own little things, right? And so like when we did Laddie, we had a particular spot that we used, our argument of perigium, where we could put our apogee, was pretty much fixed. the performance of that rocket.

So for us to get the maximum mass out of that thing, we had to go when the moon was at a particular spot in the orbit. And so that, an SLS has a little bit of that going on to with what they're doing. Yeah, that's our big point is that the rocket's got way too many constraints. Right. And then they also have to come back and get to the Earth at the right time

and have the recovery vehicles there and all that fun stuff. So there's a lot of constraints on that because there's people. And, you know, lighting angles at landing and other stuff like that. So, I mean, a lot of those constraints start getting relaxed once you have more infrastructure. You know, if you're landing at a pad that has artificial lighting, so it's well lit, and it's got nav beacons so you don't even really need the lights because the thing's going to land within five centimeters of the center of the pad. And, you know, it's like you could probably afford landing whenever it works. and if you've got one or more, you know,

depots around the moon, like I'd probably put like two to three small depots in like a polar orbit around the moon. You know, then like, so there are a bunch of constraints that even though the plane lines up where you can get to the moon and you can get to the lunar orbit, it might not be the exactly right time. And if you're in a cramped little capsule

that has nowhere to go and you're hanging out there, you know, wearing your depends, because, you know, like the way astronauts used to do it, it's like. Or still do on certain missions. Yeah. Yeah. On certain missions. You don't want to be hanging out there for like a week or so for the lighting situation to be right for landing.

So it's like when you add all those constraints, it narrows it down a lot. But I do think as you add more infrastructure, it gives you more flexibility to do things. Yeah. And I guess the thing, Anthony, that you and I talked about, you know, I've seen forever since they started talking about HLS with SpaceX that, oh, you're going to have to do all these refueling things. And I'm like, okay, right now, if you think about right now, okay, we don't, we've not done any refueling and we don't have depos. And so, boy, that seems complicated. But in 1850, when you're going to drive your car, you're hypothesizing about driving your car across the country, well, how are you going to get all that gas?

And someone's going to have to do all these emissions out there to get the gas out there. And then what happens to me? I mean, I drove down to Seattle the other day, and I went by a gas station. There were these big tankers out there filling up. Wow, look what happened there. How many of those guys had to fill up in order for me to get where I was going? You don't think about that. It just happens.

And so now when you look at how many times does a Falcon 9 fly in a year, it's 130 or whatever it is. 160? If they put two or two or two, yeah, if they put a couple, three or four more or ten of those, and they took fuel up, no one's going to even notice that. That's just going to go up. And Starship starts flying, and they're just going to have a couple of launches every month that are going to take fuel up, and you're not going to think about it.

And then when you go up to launch, you're going to launch empty, and you're going to go up there and get that fuel and go to the moon with it. Or SpaceX is going to use it to do other things that you talked about, you know, servicing their data centers in space or whatever. They'll have a service vehicle that goes and rendezvous

with that and gets fuel out of it. But they're just going to solve that problem. I mean, it's a technical problem, and they're going to have to solve it and they'll have screw ups and things that fail. But eventually they'll solve it, and then they'll just start launching these things. And then you won't even think about it.

And, you know, it only seems weird now because nobody's done it yet. But, you know, when they start putting up 1,000 or whatever data centers or a million they're going to put up there and they're flying all these things and starships are flying, you're not going to think about it, if 10 of those have fuel on them or not. Jake, we've got our viral clip, dude. We're posting this for IPO day. This is going so viral.

Can you make it into the stock trader, Twitter feeds? If you like Wawa, you will love SpaceX. That's right. I should have taken a picture of that gas station thing and sent it to you. I thought about that pulling over to take the picture. It's like even in a pre-star ship world, you know, it's like you size a depot to be bigger than your biggest mission that you're going to fly by probably at least a factor of two or three and you top it up. You know, it's a logistics thing. You know, you have more propellant in there than you need for a single mission.

you know, so it's like you're completely buffering the users from the delivery source. Like when you go to the gas station, you don't care what form factor they deliver the gas in. You just care that it's the best price you can get. And that happens to be terrestrial. That's a big tanker truck drops it off. But like with the depot and Leo, the thing I always liked about it is whatever launch system gives you the best price, you know, whether that's ISRU, the sling tether flinging it off the moon, whether that's, you know, a starship launching, whether it's a mix of, hey, I want to buy a few from them, a few from Stoke, a few new

Glenn flights. But it's just, you know, there's people handle these sorts of logistics problems all the time everywhere else terrestrily. And they're just not a big deal once you've got the technology worked out, which we're not there yet. You know, it's like, you know, this at a space lock sat you know that's going to be flying in a few months it's like that's going to be the first real you know demo of this sort of capability um you know it's like SpaceX is going to do some demos soon you know so it's like we still you know do I expect that there's going to be a learning curve and teething pains on this absolutely I mean it's like look at the learning curve on starship man you know it's like they already have you know when they started flying starship falcon

nine's first stage is already regularly being recovered, reliably like clockwork. And they still have had all sorts of challenges and learning experiences. And it's like, they'll figure it out. And I expect it to be the same way within space or fueling that there's going to be things where, you know, in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there always is. You know, so we're going to learn some stuff along the way. And, you know, and yeah, you know,

it's like, I expect it to take, you know, a year or two of refueling at least, you know, if they're throwing everything at it to like iterate, you know, to get to the point where it's acting reliably and everything's ready to go. But once it is, it's going to be such a step change and people are going to look back and say, why the heck did we do it the other way? I just looked up. The first filling station was in 1888. And what I'm trying to think is like, if that was 1898, my life would be no percent different right now. We all argue a lot about what's a year, two, five, ten years late. But yeah, then you go and you look this up and you're like, it wouldn't really be that different in any way.

Right. So everybody out there that's watching, when you see a tanker truck at a gas station, I need you to take a picture and send that to Anthony. Let's just flood him with pictures of tanker trucks at gas station. I'm here for it. like that. There you go. That's right. Yep.

Wawa's only. Don't send me any sheets. Get out of here with everybody. Send me sheets. I'll send you some Pemex. How's that? All right. Oh, there we go.

International. That's even better. Yeah, yeah. Nothing like a nationalized oil company to get your, get your, get your that's right. You got to get some Canadian ones in there too, though, right? You got some friends in Canada who can do that for us. Yeah, I'll get some petrol Canada.

Yeah. There you go. That's right. Jeez. So, I mean, can we, I want to just ask specifically about the, the concept that Anthony was bringing up, which was, you know, staging these things from this potential Louisiana space port, right? Because we're, we're hypothesizing that, yes, it's like, it's like, it's like, a depot in like, you know, every, I don't know, 10 degrees and just have a ring of them around on these like sunsink, or I guess that's not all sunsync then, but on these polar orbits, right, you know, this kind of ring that's always available. And then no matter, you know, what time a day you want to launch, you're close to an orbit where you can just get up to a depot and go, right? Does that make sense then? Or what's the penalty, you know, Delta V penalty we're talking about for Moon if we're doing from, you know,

lunar or from a polar orbit? Yeah, I mean, it's mostly the delta V penalty of, you know, getting to orbit in the first place. You know, like if you look at, you know, a lot of medium class ones are the ones that have more of a feel for, but it's like, you know, you know, typically they're like, you know, 15 tons to like a mid-inclination, like an ISS-like, and then it drops off to like eight or nine once you get up to SunSync. So it's like less of your launch mass is going to turn into mass in the depot. But once again, if you're buying stuff from the depot, that just means the price tag on the, you know, price per gallon is going to be a little higher. Yeah.

So if you're going to the moon and you're going from like, you know, 92 or 90s. or whatever the sunsync inclination is, it's going to be a little bit more expensive when you get to the moon to slow down because you're not, you know, the moon's cranking along and you're coming in this way, right? So there's some delta be there. But it's, it's not 100 meters per second. It's, you know, it's 60, 70, 80, depending on what it is. Because you're not, and you don't always launch, when you launch the moon, you're almost never launching right into the lunar orbit plane because your launch site and all that doesn't line up. So you always got some amount out of there anyway. So you're already paying some amount out. And the worst case is that you're, you're 90 degrees out of the plane. And then it's, I looked at this last night actually thinking about this question. But it's about, I think I saw like 90, something around 90 meters per second. But you're spending, you know, 4,000 meters per second to get to the moon, you know, from lower orbit. So you can, you can swallow that. That's the thing, though, for people like Jake and I that it always, you know, like us on the outside are always like, plane changes, man.

Like, don't even, don't do anything that needs a plane change. Yeah. I'm like, well, yeah, but you're not having to do it. The plane change is fast. It's bad. Yeah. But plane change when you're going slow isn't so bad. And also, if you're doing it at the moon, the moon will do it for you.

The moon's doing a lot of that plane change. So when you're going out to the moon, don't get caught in this idea that, oh, you have to go from, you know, lower, be it Kennedy or whatever. Now, the Koreans can launch at 80 degrees or whatever it is. They have to get out of their sight with, and it's fine. If you're trying to get to the equator, if you're trying to go to geo, okay, now you've got to get back and get into the, equator and you've got to spend something, but you can have the moon do that for you, too. So let the gravity do it. So, I mean, so to answer the question, yeah, you could absolutely put a depot there.

I still think that more likely, you know, where depos are going to be is probably going to be at a lower inclination just because it's a, you know, if you put it in a super high inclination, then you can only get to the depot from things that can do a super high inclination. It's like, you know, yeah, if it's space, and they only care about SpaceX refueling there, then maybe it's moot. But my guess is that depots are more likely going to be in sort of the, call it, you know, 30 to 50-ish,

you know, plus or minus, you know, 28.5 to 51.6 degree range. You know, 51.6, where the ISS is at is nice because it's like there's a lot of other economic activity going on in that space. You know, mid-inclination satellites, you know, commercial Leo destinations, eventually, you know, and it's high enough inclination to hit any of the weird stuff you want

to be able to hit, but low enough inclination that it's not that painful to get from there to places like geo, to get from there, the moon. So, I mean, technically, there's a counter. Yes. There's a counter to that now, too, no. I just want to say it because I know that it's there, and I haven't looked into this, but our friend, Rand Simberg, thinks we ought to launch all over our fuel depots into the equatorial orbits. And so he's got a whole thing about that where he thinks that we're,

you know, pissing away savings if we don't do that, that we should launch everything into geo. And it's, it's an interesting thought. And I haven't thought through it enough to argue with him about it. But he's a smart guy. So it's an idea that we should look at. But of course, you've got to ship things down to Equator when you launch. And I think that's the counter to that is that. He's paid by big French gigana, sounds like. That's right. That's right. It's getting that sweet area space cache, I think. That's right.

We just call that area in space. We don't need to have it. Or the sea launch. Sea launch, right? You can imagine a platform of sea launch, you know, things along the equator. They're all launching off of that. I mean, I guess when I think about the polar depots,

like these are, I guess, not be public depots where there are fill up stations anyone can show up to. These are private stations that SpaceX would use specifically for their, you know, if they're going to moon with their landers or they're going to Mars with their landers. though that would be very useful for them, right? Yeah, I think it would only be useful for them relative to like a lower inclination one.

Like if there are real constraints from launching from lower inclination sites, I think that- My thing is how many starships they're going to launch to those low inclinations. That's my argument is that they're going to launch ungodly amounts of starships to this SSO destination for data centers.

Could they also then get used? out of that for their depot purposes. They could. And I think that's the real question is, are they going to put, are they going to put depos up there because they're going to be servicing the data centers and all that kind of stuff? And maybe they got, I mean, again, people keep saying they're an infrastructure company, and that's the truth.

And so they're going to have infrastructure to service those vehicles and, you know, take fuel to them or have something that goes around and does maintenance on them. And if they're just flying all their stuff up there, maybe that's where they put their depots. Now, nobody else will use them up there if they don't want to launch up there. But I think if you look at what they've put out there for their IPO, no one else is using a lot of space because they do all the space activity right now. Like that's the good thing about SpaceX and my concern for the space industry generally is that they are so far ahead and such an outlier that if they put a depot at 28 and a half degrees, who else is going to use that? It's be like a person once in a while and they would be using the ones elsewhere all the time.

Yeah, I mean But they are They are selling their data Their launches and their data centers To the other AI companies, right? So they're not above, you know, sell them to other people So they'll sell to Amazon and all that, right? So they'll loan them to use their stuff.

Yeah, one thing I would also say is Unless they're abandoning Starlink, which they won't, They're going to be launching most of those Want to be in mid-inclination like more in the, you know, 50-ish, you know, 50 to 55 degree range. So it's like, I think they're going to have a lot of traffic to both that and to Sunsync. Because Sunsync is great for data centers, but is horrible for comms, you know, because, you know, you spend most of your time over the polls and polar bears and penguins don't buy that much

broadband, you know? So it's like, so. And so it's like you want to spend more time over the mid-latitudes where all your customer bases, you know, for, for low latency comms and stuff. So they're going to have a lot of traffic in both. And frankly, I think I'm a bit of a skeptic on how much, you know, like when I hear them talk about, oh, yeah, we'll have 100 gigawatts of compute on orbit. You know, by 2030, I'm just like, yeah, right.

I'm sorry. I love SpaceX. I think they're an amazing company. I will eat a hat live on TV, you know, if they come even even a quarter of that by 20. We'll put you down on the show schedule. This is great. Yeah, exactly. And we know your track record with remembering things you said on the internet. You'll have no idea this is coming when we tell you. It's time to come eat the house. Yeah, that's right. I'm going to remember 2030. Yeah. Bad eating time. So there are creative ways to solve that one. I had a at a professor who bet somebody he would eat a nail if he was right about something. And he lost the bet. And so he went and took the

the nail, he dissolved it in an acid, neutralized it with a base, mixed it in with a bunch of fluid and drunk it over the next three weeks. And it's like, yeah, my iron was a little bit off the charts for a while, but I was fine. Peter Beck, though, he had to eat some of that hat. Yeah, he blended that. He blended this at, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if he actually swallowed it in the hat, but he at least, he gave it a shot. It was, yeah.

What was Elon going to do if Vulcan launched a national security payload by 2024? he was going to do something was it eat a hat also it's always eat a hat we got to come up at the new one yeah yeah I remember the line about unicorns dancing in the flame ducks you know

that's right that's right higher probability of that happening than them launching by that date yeah yeah that's right yeah nailed it again nailed it again yeah well I really

really hope to see you know you know, blue get things back together, you know, as quickly as they can. Like, I am a firm believer that an industry is not healthy unless you have at least a couple of competitors.

Yeah. And frankly, as somebody who buys launches, I want competitors because, competent, competent aggressive competitors, you know, because that's the only way that the savings that come from reuse are going to get passed on to us mere mortals. It's like, if you're not space,

It's like you're paying the retail price and it's like the only way the retail price comes down is if there's competition and they have to lower prices to maintain market share. Yeah, I was saying this to Jake that like the, you know, obviously with the IPO stuff, I've been talking to a lot of my non-space friends about SpaceX. And it's hard to get across the point that like no one is putting pressure on them in pretty much any department yet. Like there's it's rough out there. And I don't think I think that's bad for the space industry's health long term. I think having SpaceX be. the one company that's doing the thing is as unhealthy as it was when SpaceX was the one complaining about there being one company doing the space thing 15 years ago. That is as bad a situation as it was then. They're a nice, shiny, polished, you know, very nice looking monopoly, but, you know, I'm glad that there's a lot of other companies with shots on gold coming up. You know, I'm excited to see, you know, Rocket Lab and Firefly and Stoke and, you know, like in relativity, like, all of them have, you know, first launch attempts coming up in, like, the next, you know, year to year and a half. And it's like, I'm really hoping to see a few more of those make it to market.

I mean, you've been writing blog posts about small reusable launch vehicles for as long as I've been doing space things. So, yeah, probably longer than that too. Yeah. That's right. Well, I had some friends who'd been trying to pitch that since the late 60s. So, like, they have to be behind a couple of decades. Yeah. that's right

yeah that's fair solid do you want to plug anything that you're working on at gravitics is there any thing you want to

shout out yeah I feel like we haven't talked about gravitics a lot Jake no just chat

yeah so like a lot of this depot stuff ended up leading to the orbital carrier work I'm doing at gravitics so

you know the big inside I had when I oh thanks sweet almost like I paid you to do that or something

but the mic We'll get to that website in a second. Oh, there we go. There we go. Yeah, so the big insight we had is it's like, okay, we can do these interplanetary small sat launches from depots. And I realize it's like, oh, you could do defense launches to like rapidly respond to

threats in Leo, me, or geo wherever they come up with. If you have like a fully refueled like electron class upper stage in Leo, like it can get, you know, ESPA class response. satellite anywhere you want fast. And when I jump to Gravitics, it's like, oh, wait a second. We built big space station modules that are big enough that I could just stick a few

of those in there pre-fueled where I don't have to do a separate launch, rendezvous, dock, transfer propellant, and everything. I can just have them sitting there ready to go. And so the whole idea with carriers is you preposition a couple of these viper vehicles that are highly, you know, high-delta-V high-thrust,

you know, with rapid response Bonds payloads, could be DOD, could be civil. You know, you could use this for like search and rescue for a crew mission. You could use it for like rapid rendezvous missions with NEOs and lots of DOD applications. But you pre-launch these at a time when things are calm and they're ready to go so that when you need to go, like when you don't know where you're going or when you need to be there until like 10 seconds before you need to be heading out door, like that's sort of the solution. Yeah.

So, yeah. So anyway, that's a big thing. And that kind of came, you know, we did, we did some work with Richard French at Rocket Lab at one point to look at, in the series of papers that we did, where we did, oh, what if you refueled the rocket lab, you know, the electron second stage, what could you do? And we did some work with Richard on that and kind of showed, hey, if you had the second stage refueled in orbit, you could do these things. And then John took it another step and said, well, what if I had four or five? five of those in this big thing that, you know, that, that gravidics can can make and launch and, and they were already in orbit and they already had fuel. So kind of a sequence of things that we all kind of led back from that paper. Yeah. And so, you know, Mike helped,

Mike's company helped me do a lot of the orbital dynamics on, you know, really optimizing, where do we, you know, where are the orbits that are of military interest, you know, where should we put these carriers to, like, get you the max. amount of coverage with the minimum amount of upfront cost. How do we position them in a way to make it so that that rocket stage doesn't have to be too insane and is relatively balanced going to the different areas of interest? So we did a lot of that under a direct-to-phase 2 contract. We've got a strap-by project that we just started a couple months back, that we're actually

going to build and fly the Viper rocket stage that's used with orbital carriers. and we're also going to fly a Pathfinder carrier spacecraft. So I think of it, transporter class spacecraft, but it's going to fly all the avionics and similar propulsion system to what both Viper would use and our carriers and also get us something flying

so you can get some experiences on orbit operations. But yeah, both of those will be releasing more details on those as we get closer to launch and stuff but, you know, those are the things, you know, both in active development. And, you know, that's most of what I'm doing is, like, all the, all the weird stuff that's not the normal space station modules. Like, we're still doing those. I was going to say, things have changed since we checked in at Gravitics. Yeah, we didn't pivot away from civil space.

Civil space is still like a bit. Yeah. Yeah. A couple wars kick off and everyone's like, let's go, baby. We're going. I've been pushing on this one for three or four years. So it's not, you know, we're going to be launching missile like things out of, for launching rockets on orbit long before Golden Dome was the thing.

So, you know, it's, it's not like that. Oh, I myself am a bit of a Golden Dome expert, you know, like use the Spider-Man meme that every boy in their dog has these days. But, yeah, that's what we're up to. So working the civil space stuff, doing some work there with Axiom that we've talked about publicly and the defense space stuff with the carriers. And hopefully, you know, as a couple more details locked down, you know, the next, you know, this year, I'm hoping we can announce, like, who we're going to fly on that first, my permission, when we're going,

who we're launching on, like, all those sort of details as they get finalized. we'll hopefully have some cool updates periodically. Heck yeah. Mike, give us an SEEP plug because I frequently tell you guys of having flown most of the stuff that headed to the moon in the last like decade and a half for two decades. I think you mentioned when the Schmidt Sciences folks came out with their announcement a couple months back. The Zuli project there,

that's when we're working on working with our good friends at Astrobotic. They're going to launch later on this year, I hope. and the Oracle Lamb mission we're doing for AFRL Space Force. That'll be a fun one to do. And then there's lots of other things. All of our friends, I can't name them all. But if you watch our social media stuff,

at Sierra Space, we'll name the ones we can. I was going to say, you literally can't name them all. So that's good. I don't want to play favorites either. But a couple of launch projects that we've, like the ones that I mentioned that we're working on, those are neat. And the astrobotic, I mentioned for them to get a chance to take a shot on goal here and again as well.

I love when I miss quote shit on the internet, Jake. This is the stuff that comes out of the rafters when I get things wrong and then go, oh, I should have followed up on that precisely. So, yeah. Yep. Jake, we got, I don't know what we're doing next week because I'm on the road and we were going to pre-record a thing, but we're not. So, DVD, we may have a week off. I'm going to see.

I'm going to see if I can pull a rabbit out of my hat. But we'll see. Is there anything going on in the next few days here? Don't book work. time off work. Yeah. I like how little we talked about. I mean, we talked about the IPO, but Artemis 3.

Yeah. It's a whole thing. We'll crack into that at some point. Geez, yeah. Should we just re-record a show like later? I don't know. We'll see. Maybe.

Yeah. Actually, yes, probably. Good production meeting. Okay. All right. Well, Mike and John, thanks so much for hanging out with us. Always, I'm glad you finally made it to the Off-Nominable universe. It's been a long time coming.

Oh, absolutely. Thanks, guys. All right, y'all. See you later. Bye, folks. Bye. Cheers. Cheers.