Off-Nominal - 246 - Stock Tips

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

Jake catches Anthony up on the news he missed while on vacation, and also how expensive stage adapters have become. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 246 - Stock Tips - YouTube Did Rocket Lab's Suborbital Rocket Reach Orbit? SpaceX is now a public company valued for its AI potential, so what comes next? - Ars Technica 13 years and $500 million for a stage adapter? Report justifies NASA cancellations. - Ars Technica With Starfall, SpaceX eyes an edge in global cargo delivery from orbit - Ars Technica Ars Live: What's the latest in the aftermath of the New Glenn catastrophe? - Ars Technica 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, buddy. What's going on? Hey, man. Thanks for a very strangely timed show here because I'm almost all the way back to a normal schedule here in the household after being back in Switzerland for a week and a half. Almost unjet lagged. Honestly, I think jet lag is fake. I think it's a scam that doesn't actually exist. And I think...

That is some East Coast privilege right there. I think we're just, we're very good at managing it. We just, you know, I needed to give the children a day to like resettle into the house before they went back to school. So Thursday was out and Friday it is. So see me later for my takes about jet lag. We'll cover that next show, next week's pre-show. That's week's pre-show. Jet lag is not real. Today's were Switzerland reviews and Jake naming as many soccer players as he could name, which was three.

So, and that was Messi, Ronaldo, and David Beckham. Yeah, yeah. Do you know either of the other two's first names? No. Lionel? Lionel, Lionel. Yeah, close enough, yeah. All right.

Leonel. Leonel. Like Lionel Richie. Leonel Messi. How about Ronaldo? You got anything? He's kind of like Madonna, isn't it? You just like got the one name?

Only do you? I will tell you a Ronaldo story though. I visited where Ronaldo was from, which is a very remote island in Portugal. Well, I say in Portugal, part of Portugal, but not really in Portugal. Didn't catch his first name anywhere on the island. No, I saw the big bronze statue of them right on the pier. Oh, nice. Nice. I was just explaining to you how many U.S. soccer people we have from my area.

many Eagles fans on the U.S. soccer team. Go birds. Go birds. Brendan Harrison getting to start last night. Felicity coming back. He's from Hershey. Carly Lloyd on the broadcasts. I shopped in Whole Foods with her not that many weeks ago.

We've got a great little region of the country over here. It is the very, very quick World Cup question. But is the American team like the Canadian team or any really any like white developed immigrant-friendly country where all the players are just first generation from other countries? No, not here. Not here as much. Most of the young guys are like, you know, homegrown talent in many cases. Oh.

I always laugh because sometimes I catch like a cricket tournament or something. And it's like Team Canada really good. I'm like, really? We don't know anything about cricket. And they just all the players are just first generation Indian immigrants. Right. I'm like, oh, that's why we do. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So cool. Well, soccer knowledge. Soccer knowledge from Jake. That's what we're catching up on. I caught like a headline and a couple of tweets since I was away. And we haven't talked about anything in two weeks, including a SpaceX IPO and probably some related shenanigans.

So it felt like a good day to not schedule guests. Yes. And catch up on things. Yeah. So we usually need one of these. after a trip from one of us that we take, not only because we miss the news, but also because then we don't have to like plan something while one of you is traveling, right? One of us is traveling.

Yeah. It's nice. I have other people deal with our travel delays and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. Potentially make it back or not from a European heat wave of epic proportions. It was hot. I have a friend who's in Amsterdam and he's, you know, they're at like, whatever, 40 degrees Celsius right now and he's dying and he's talking about it.

I'm sending him the meme or the first time with a noose around his neck, right? Feel really good for all those Europeans right now, but they don't have air conditioning. So that's a, that's a dude, that's also hilarious to me. Because, you know, we're in Switzerland. There's all this precision engineering. Look at how amazing our cable cars are. And there were two things that were, this is more Switzerland reviews than you got in the first time.

Two things that were driving me crazy. Number one, there were like any, every time that we got on train, they would send different cars than the app said that they would send so we were lined up like oh this car has like a family area where like kids can go play on a thing would that'll be great for a two hour train that car not even part of the train didn't come at all

so never did they tell me which train cars actually would have train always arrived never did they tell me which the right train that would arrive that's interesting because you always hear about Swiss Swiss clocks being like the best engineer that's what I'm saying it was on time but it was not any of the details that mattered it was purely they were optimizing for just be on time

figure it out later. So it's like getting this thing that is obviously sent on this path where many people have large suitcases going to an airport have no area for luggage. Just a train was there and it was going the right direction. Get on, enjoy it. Whatever. Number two, precision engineering stops at understanding of coolant and refrigerants. Like this is not a, we're not going to get into this concept of refrigeration. We're not doing that. We can't do air conditioning anywhere. Yeah, probably not. So they'll get into it. They'll get into it. They'll get there. Yeah.

The one stock tip I have is buy stock and whoever makes mini splits and stuff. Like, it's just, they'll do great in the European market. Whoever's got the good European market. In window units. That's a very smart. That's a good stock tip. We always give good stock tips on the show. Great stock tips on this show.

Whoever sells whatever the new refrigerant is called that is in new air conditioners, A to whatever. That one. Who's the supplier? Who's the air lekeed of. refrigerants in Europe. Should we pause the show and find that out? We should probably get into that before we.

Yeah, obviously. We move markets on this show. We have to stop giving stock tests before we buy the stocks. We have to talk about it. We need to have a show up. We need to have a meeting after this. This is not doing this. Jeez.

All right. Well, there's that. So, what's up? Stocks. What'd you bring from your stocks of drinks? Mead? This is a meat show? Well,

too hot for me. I was working on this casually. This is a, World Cup edition Corona in here in Mexico, obviously, big deal down here. But what I had actually brought was this, Kalima Brewery, nice little lager. So, yeah. But I mean, I started early today, apparently. Yeah.

My wife's out of town. Oh, shit. And you bought a Switch. I bought a Nintendo and I wrapped up like a long-term client today. So like my summer just like opened up in the schedule. And I just got, I'm like ready to kick back. It's like Friday. I've merged in a bunch of PRs this morning.

I'm like, you know what? I can start early today. Nice. So you're going to just drink coronas and watch the work up and play Zelda all weekend? Is that the idea? Yeah. It's pretty good weekend. My plan is to go through every.

freaking Zelda, man. I'm going to do it all. It's going to take me like two years, I think, probably. Yeah, it's a long. That's a slog. A lot of power bracelets. I thought that it's funny. It shows how old I was. I'm like, yeah, I'll do all the Zelda. There's like seven, I think, you know? There's like 25, I think,

28. Just like an insane amount of Zelda games, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes. I've got more Italian white wine because I've had enough Swiss beers and whatnot hot cheese. got a little suave.

Delicious. Refreshing. Swave. Crisp. Nice. All right. Where are we starting? Where are we starting here?

Well, let's recap the IPO. There's not much there. We can knock this one off pretty fast, I think. I don't think we're going to knock this off fast. But let's go. You don't think so? You got takes? I'm here for the takes, man.

I have one main take, which is that we've won everybody we have won an achieved victory here in the space nerd community because I think this made people uncomfortable that like gen pop would be so accustomed to talking about SpaceX but it was hard not to watch that Friday and just have every channel be talking about Starship and Starlink and not be like we did it like we achieved cultural it was a civilization cultural victory, right? Like, we've done it.

We're still waiting for our checks, right? We're still waiting for our compensation checks. Yeah, us particularly, but it did feel like when you do cultural victory and SIV. Like, that was the moment. We took over every station. They were talking about, oh, they're going to catch the ship and do the thing. And, like, we had all these regular people talking about it. And I just found that, I feel like that should not be missed amongst this storyline.

I'm on like the, on reels and stuff. I get like algorithmic financial content periodically. It's something that I get, it's learned that I'm interested in. And like all the like finance like influencers are, you know, obviously talking about it like crazy. And it's super funny to see that because it's like,

you know, it's like algorithmic content. So it's like people really trying to like, I got to have a take so that I get picked up by the feed. And then so it's like, so just talking about space. I got to talk about just the craziest stuff. And it's really funny to see just how like,

like just. idea like what they're talking about. It's like, I looked at the SpaceX. They're not even profitable. This is a totally bad buy. I was like, oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, that's a major part of it's in of what's going on there. They, what, what I think the larger world is unprepared for is, is scoring SpaceX like a regular company. And when, when a lot of us have experienced the ride of SpaceX being not that at all, like, we, talk about all the time how much of an outlier they are in the industry. But people that don't know our industry look at it and say they are a space company. And then I will apply things I know

about other space companies to this. And it's like these are not at all the same thing. And then you complicate that with it being an AI company now, which Stokes. That's also the hard part. It's right. A lot of the space people are very anti-AI people. And then a lot of gen pop is just anti-Elon Musk and or anti-AI and-or-antyspace things. So there's a lot of countervailing narratives to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've talked plenty of times about being at this Venn diagram of like, both of these are very valuable and useful and are things that will exist in the world.

So I feel like you're scoring it wrong. There was a really great, there's this influencer in Australia that does a bunch of financial content that's pretty good. He's really funny. And he did a whole skit or that he does skits. like back and forth. I'm going to forget his name. Someone will figure it out, but he just gets back and forth himself and he was talking about this thing. And it was like, so I'm looking at your prospectus and it's just like, it's just pictures of planets and like, you know, like, there's just

like, apparently your old business case is a market that doesn't exist yet. And they're like, yep, do you want stocks? And it's like, yeah, I do. I was like, that is the most perfect way to capture it. Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, weird. I don't, it's going to be, it's so different than, I don't know, we always joke about when we have a Rocket Lab executive on and we get a different audience in the, in the YouTube live chat, then there's a lot of day trading that influences stuff in the other space, stock spaces, right? Like, now, now who, I guess it was Virgin Galactic at one point, but now it's like just Rocket Lab and who else are we day trading? Planet. Intuitive machines. Intuitive machines is

probably the one. But I don't think, I don't really see a lot of day trading on like black sky. Oh, red wire gets it. They do get it. We've got some red wire cash tag people in the chat before. But SpaceX is so big that I don't think it's going to be so infiltrated with that. Are we going to see like Rocket Lab stocks go up and down every time Elon makes a weird tweet now? Is that going to be a thing that? Probably. That's a bummer. you know, I'd be like, oh, I think our profit's going to be 17 trillion by the end of the year. And then SpaceX stock will go up and ever be like, oh, what's that going up for? Buy Rocket Lab 2.

Get it on this, right? All the bots. Yeah. What a ride. Yeah. You're right. You're right. I'll say you're right about the weirdness of it because like it's like a triple hit, right?

because like Elon is an X factor. Space are just, they're just weird stocks. The base stocks are just weird. Period. And then the AI makes them with that for sure. It's like,

what's going on here? Yeah. None of this makes any sense. Nothing is comfortable. And then the other two AI, IPOs that are going to happen, like, it's going to be a very strange year.

And SpaceX is wrapped up in that. There's like a couple of the weird narratives that catch on in the internet. and it's like, are these bots or not, I don't know, is like, well, the stock will obviously tank when all the insiders can sell their stakes. There's like that, but I'm like, do you think like people that have worked at SpaceX for long enough to have a significant amount of SpaceX stock think that this is the most valuable that SpaceX will ever be?

And they're going to sell all of their stake immediately when they can. I go back and forth on that because like you're right in that. I mean, if you're, if you're thinking about it logically, okay, let's, let's imagine I'm like a SpaceX insider. I'm like, I got like a double digit employee number or something and, you know, I got equity and whatever, been there 20 years. So like, you're right and that I shouldn't think about the past. Like the only thing that matters, I have some stock. Do I think it's going to go up? If I do, I keep it. If I don't, I sell it, right? Or I need the, I need the money from the thing to do a thing in my life. Like, go buy a house or do a thing or whatever. Like, I believe that. Yeah.

I believe that, but I don't think that means they're going to sell 100% of the SpaceX stock that they own. That's what a lot of these people are doing math. I'm like, everyone's going to sell the day the lockups expire. It's going to plummet. Like, that is never how any of this worked. I don't understand how like Quinn Shotwell still works there. Like if I was Quinn Shotwell, I've been gone like billions of dollars ago. Like, you know, I'd be on an island somewhere and we're like, I don't need to work anymore.

What am I doing here? This is insane. Like, you know, but like I don't have that brain, right? And it's also why you're not. Exactly. You're like that, so you're not that. You get both or none of them. That's how that goes, right?

Exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But, uh, yeah. There's that, there's the trillionaire narrative stuff too, which is like head spinning, right? I don't know. Like, there's a lot of bad logic applied to those storylines of like, this shouldn't exist.

I'm like, well, follow the through line on that. Uh, number two, it is, it is objectively incredibly. funny, how little Elon Musk personally buys. And so all of the stuff that people are like, you know, the ultra elite wealthy people with their mega yacht, I'm like, he, the Jared Eisenman line of like, find the picture of me on a mega yacht. I always think of because I'm like, you can't because he hasn't like, I don't know, like, SpaceX owns jets, but Elon like reportedly lives in a tiny house, right? Is that, I don't, I haven't ever seen reporting to say that that isn't true. He's never there. He's never home. He's working all the time.

If you don't sleep, do you really need to have somewhere to live? Like, I don't know. But at one point, he did have big fancy houses in L.A. Did he? I don't know. I don't follow that shit, so I don't have no idea. But I do find it funny that, like, he doesn't buy stuff. Like, people are like, you could never spend this money. I'm like, he literally

couldn't. He doesn't even know how to buy things that aren't companies. That's all he knows how to buy is companies. Yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah. Well. I think that's probably the full take.

That's the take. Yeah, that's the SpaceX take. Just largely, generally. Like, people that think this is as valuable as SpaceX will ever be, like, that it is a rug pull to IPO is immensely funny to me. Having, knowing what we've witnessed up close the last 10 years, it's like, I mean, hold it. It was all to this point. That's a crazy thought. You're correct.

Like, obviously, SpaceX's trajectories. up. The question is whether the valuation it has now matches the reality, right? Because if the valuation is at 200% what the actual value is and they grow, waste the size, then the valuation won't change, right? Like, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the you're talking about it. Yeah, but it's still weirder than that, because none of this math ever makes sense for any company. Like, never does. Yeah. And we just assign definitions that feel regular. Like, oh, well, obviously, 5x this and 2x that is what makes sense. I'm like, well, you just made that up. It used to not make sense. Yeah. You can still go look at Tesla stock and none.

of the math makes sense. Right. Like Tesla stock is still wrong. The math is still wrong. It's been wrong. The whole life of the company, right? It's like the price to earnings ratios like the 300 or something insane. Like, it's just wild. What it is. So, yeah. But that's what I mean. I'm not, I think people try to make hard math out of it. And I'm like, I divorce myself from that because I think a lot of those are like an acronym style mathematics we've applied because the reality is humans, have a system internally that value things. And that's like irrational across many facets of life, right?

Like home prices. Pretty irrational. Yeah. All stock market is irrational. Yeah. But then we're like, but it must, we must track this back to the actual rationality. And like that isn't, this isn't one of those fields that has, you know, so I don't know. So I do find that.

Yeah. I don't know, man. It will be interesting. I think we'll see some. some more clarity after the first earnings report, which I think is in August, because that will be, like there's been,

I was saying there's been a lot of, since the, the S-1 came out or whatever, I was telling you this, there's like, been a lot of pretty big deals announced, right? Yeah, there's like two million more Starlink subscribers

since the S-1 was published. That's like a 20% increase. There was like the Google deal. The Anthropic one was big, that was on the S-1. Oh, it was. It was, yeah. But the Google one was not.

And then, what else? There was something else, too. Anyway, but, you know, regular growth, we'll probably see another two million starling subscribers in that quarter, if that's what they're running at, right? Like, we could see that profitability change real fast with those deals, right? That Google deal is insane. It's like, yeah, just a casual billion every month. Like, are you kidding? For an asset they already have? A starship development per year in just selling computers to Google and it happened already. Yeah. Yeah. It's there.

I mean, that to me made me the most confident that they're on the right track because it's more of an Elon Musk company getting down to the things that they're really good at, which is the laws of physics and scale and not human factors. And there was one comment that Gwen Chowell made during her round of interviews that Friday morning that felt the most space sexy of any comment

I've ever heard, which was we're going to go develop our own chip fab and make our own chips because the people that we're trying to buy chips from don't believe us on the scale that we need. So we're going to, we have to go make our own. And I was like, oh my God. It's like the story we've heard like a hundred times. It's the origin story, right?

It's the actual origin story of like, oh, you don't need to buy a rocket. It's like, I guess I got to go make the rockets. Like, that's how they got here. And they still have that instinct. And what we've always said is, like, when SpaceX stops trying to eat its own market and its own expertise and its own, like, area of dominance, that's when we get concerned when they just start doing the thing that they're used to. And I'm like, oh, they still got that. They still got that instinct. Dude, man, SpaceX making chips is actually like, I feel like we don't talk about that enough.

Like, that is a wild. It's all I'm thinking about. It's crazy. That's a wild future. Yeah. Yeah. Think of the political support they could get for that, right? Oh, huge.

Yeah. Even just also being good at it. Like, I feel like Jensen Wong at one point said, I had a long conversation with Elon Musk that clarified a decision I needed to make about how our new chip architecture worked out. Like, if that's true, that's like a crazy thing to openly state, number one, as a company that's as large as Nvidia is. Number two, yeah, I mean, so that's why my math, if you want not stock tips, my math is, SpaceX having this massive head start on everyone in the industry, and no one really is good at catching up yet, is wild for many different aspects, both launch, which isn't really a factor. I mean, I argued they shouldn't sell launches to anyone else. But like, Starlink Domus...

I'm still thinking about that day every day by the way. I'm just like, oh, my God. It's constantly correct. Now we got this news, the transporters. Like, yeah, we're not selling anything after 2028. I'm like, oh, fuck, it's happening. We're going to be so right on that and still not get paid for that take. Still not going to get compensated, yeah. But the scale of Starlink that I think, here's one aspect of Starlink that I think, again, to, sorry, I'm banging my microphone. I'm getting too animated.

Spent too much time of Europe. I'm back to talking about my hands. I, when we look at like how Gen Pop is assessing SpaceX, right? They look at Starlink as you buying Starlink and talking to me on this right now. And less so, all of the enterprise stuff, all of the airline deals. And I think one aspect that is hugely valuable for the future is all of the space to ground communication stuff. Like, that is a service that they are going to be operating, making use of everything that everyone's talking about, orbital data centers in space. A lot of that is going to be sent through Starlink to the ground.

That is a huge market that nobody knows how to do the math on. because it's not consumer math, but is indeniable because of the scale they have achieved with Starlink. And then you factor in them doing their own chip fabs and putting them in their own...

They could be AWS plus an Invedia competitor plus Dominate Launch plus Starlink. That's a ridiculous stack of stuff. That is all complimentary and they sell each of those components to anyone that would be a competitor with any of them.

That's crazy. That's a crazy stack. Yeah. not stock tips, but by the air conditioning coolant people from Europe. By the dip. Yeah. There we go. Okay.

Got that out of the way. We did have something to say about that's basic stock. What else happened? Anything of note that I should know? There's a OIG report. Yeah, we can. We can talk about the OIG report. It's pretty funny.

I feel like Isaac must be like, Oh yeah, baby. I told you so. I got it. Boom. Right. It nailed it. You know? Like what the timing for that to come out just after his ignition? We're like, I picked these four things to cancel. You know what he's like, by the way, those four things insanely expensive. Unbelievably how much money we're spending on it. I mean, we all knew this. There's nothing surprising.

Yeah. The stage after maybe. I don't think I was zeroed it on the stage it after so much, but it's not surprising. So, yeah, I don't know. Eisenman probably has got a big giant, I told you so complex this week. But other than that, I don't know what else is there. Makes me a little nervous for the other stage adapter that they've announced that they need for the non-ICPS missions on Artemis. Well, we just got to do the right contractor, I guess. Okay, sure.

Who was making it? Was it dynetics? That was the... Uh, yes. Yeah, what do we got here? Yikes, man. I'm going to hit this button. There we go.

Universal Stage adapter, NASA contracted with Dynetics in June 2017 to design test and build this piece of space like hardware made largely of composites. The adapter weighed 10,000 pounds-ish, whatever. Uh, 4.3 metric tons. The original contract awarded was $131 million, which NASA later added $9 million. at the time the program was canceled, the contract value had grown to $353 million, with a delivery date delayed to September 2028, and the Inspector General says it would cost $497 million and not be ready until May 2030.

Eric Burger's lying right after that's so good. To be clear, NASA was likely going to pay half a billion dollars for a relatively straightforward stage adapter. This doesn't have propulsion or anything like that on board. Also, for some unfathomal reasons, it was likely to take 13 years to build. The entire falcon line and heavy. That's an extension of the EUS altogether, right? That whole thing was just a complete poodgle. So, yeah.

Crazy. Okay. So that was not the story you wanted to cover. No, no. I wanted to ask you about reentry vehicles. Because I feel like this is starting to, I don't know, flash I'm important. You know what I mean? like there's been some like small startups and stuff,

some more on-orbit manufacturing, funding and things that have been kind of creeping in. And now SpaceX is like, oh, by the way, we've actually been working on this. It's top secret. Launched a thing. Landed a thing. Don't get to know anything about it. Probably brought back Zuma. Who knows?

I don't know. I love when Zuma comes up. There's some stuff going on there. And I don't know. I wouldn't see what it take was on that. I feel like I missed the Starfall. Like, I saw it happening and being talked about. And I think we'd seen one of the documents like a couple of weeks or months ago, right?

The FCC document or something? Yeah, yeah, there was. SpaceX said absolutely nothing about it. But, yeah, there were some other government documents pop up. But the analysis, like on the Faust article they talked about it, it's like, yeah, it's like a small thing. They launched it. They landed it. They didn't tell us, but that's the presumably thing.

But if for being so small, it's strange that they had to do a drone ship landing instead of a return to launch site. So there's something else going on in there. I don't know if it's like it had an extra payload in there or it's bigger than they're telling us it is or it's made of pure tungsten. There's some mystery there. Or maybe it maybe it had to go really far. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Can you hear the ice cream man right now?

I can. Yeah, super loud. It's good. That's bad for operational security here. It reminds me of the. ice cream man that used to be in my neighborhood in Philly that would also sell drugs if you knew what to ask for. That was hilarious ice cream man. Very funny.

I am so thrown off by Starfall. Yeah. Because there's different varieties of reentry vehicles. There is the, like, when you're listening, who are you thinking of when you're saying there's a thing going on? Because I'm thinking of a lot of new capsules, like, ISS return cargo things. Yeah, Varda. Yep. I guess Rocket Lab has that as well because they built one of the initial Varda ones.

What's the, is it outpost or something, has it? You should know that. Yes. You should be aware of that. Not different than lunar outpost. This is just outpost. Yeah. And then like just broadly in the on-orbit manufacturing space, you also have like vast and redwire, right?

Yeah. So they're all a little bit different in configuration. This one is like a ULA style expandable heat shield thing, I guess, the outpost one. But I'm thinking of a lot of, there's a lot of like ISS return cargo things too, right? There's exploration company has that platform Nix, which is more for like pressurized cargo. But you're right that there's stuff going on and hard to discern what of these things are hypersonics. versus orbital manufacturing? Because.

Yeah, there's all the stuff about making the crystals and then bringing the crystals back and then growing the crystals and making all the money and then like medicine stuff. And I don't know, there's like a bunch of people from California selling us crystals once again. A bunch of like domains where I'm going to be the finance influencer being like,

you shouldn't buy this. It's not profitable. Yeah. What's the valuation of this? What's the valuation of the crystal company? Like, I don't know what's going on there. So it's a tough one for me. What I'm confused by with SpaceX is that do you remember Dragon Lab? Like this was a whole thing that existed once, which they were going to sell dragon vehicles to people to fly not to the ISS, but just as free flying missions to go do a thing

in orbit and return it. And nobody bought it. No one bought it. They never flew it. They barely advertised it. Never, literally never took advantage of it. Um, So is there, like, what has changed now? It's just that they can do it in this weird pancake-looking thing? This is what I'm saying. They didn't even put out pictures of this, right? We just have the visualization from that FCC thing. Some render, yeah.

This is like another boil-off truth or thing, man. Some people are telling me there's nothing there, and some people are telling me there's a whole business there, right? And this thing's even weirdly shaped? Like, why does it look like a heat shield hockey puck? That's like a... That can't be all it is. That's not a 70 degree, 70 degrees spherical.

That's a different, that's a different number. 90 degree? Yeah. I don't know. I just, there's some defense thing going. Is this the rocket cargo thing and it's not, they want to drop cargo somewhere, not just be starship? Here's what's interesting, right?

So it's like, SpaceX is getting in it. So that just changes your like math on like what's going on, right? So there's like, hey, the first question you asked is like, does this fit SpaceX's long-term ambitions or something? Like, is this part of the big plan? You're like, nah, I don't know, they got Dragon. They got Starship. Like, what do they need this little dinky thing for? So you're like, no.

Okay. So is it a secret military hypersonics thing for death delivery? Maybe. But like they also have Starship for that, right? And that feels like a better platform for some of this. I don't know. Depending on what you're like, I'm just collecting some checks for extra,

extra credit. I don't know. I don't know what it is. I don't know what's going on there, right? Is there some big commercial market that is not really a part of their plan, but they can get in on it and make a ton of money and that helps everything else? I don't know.

I can't figure it out. I can't either. It's confusing to me. Because I don't think, I think that commercial market is so tied up with the commercial space station market, which I'm more agree with NASA's take on it and less with the way that they went about it, just that there isn't, there isn't really much there yet. Yeah.

Well, but I've also heard that like, if you're in a, you know, if you're in a commercial space, you're trying to develop and innovate some fancy new R&D bleeding edge tech, like, try to deal with the ISS schedule is a nightmare. And it's just like, just killed. Like, if there was some service where you, like, you can throw something up in a couple months do a few loops, grow your crystals and bring it back and iterate, that's like that's a big boon for some of these companies. So I don't know.

I don't know if this opens up like a new market. It's like now suddenly possible. Yeah, or how many they could stack on a single vehicle made it such that the math worked out. I just, it's when you're looking at SpaceX and their market valuation of what they're going after, now all this stuff is just rounding errors on. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, like, this, this is like the SpaceX equivalent of the rocket lab. It's, you know, it's just a nights and weekends thing, you know, and it's like, I don't know, I don't know what.

Okay. Yeah, I'm confused by this. I'm flummoxed, honestly. All right. I was hoping you had clarity for me. No, let's work it. Let's work the other direction because I think, I think the secret military thing is the answer, is that this is not worth it to SpaceX if they're just looking at pharma companies. maybe buying this.

But it is worth it if the military said, would you do it for $600 million? And they're like, yeah, sure, that sounds great. We've reentered a lot of things. We can do it. We can do it for so little money that it's shocking to you. Cutthroat competition thing is like, we're just taking this contract so no one else gets the contract.

Right, right. Which is the only reason I think they still sell launches to other people is that their competitors don't have the opportunity to fly at the rate that SpaceX is. Yeah. They're stealing away. potential opportunity for them to... Guarding the moat.

Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, like you're... Yeah, probably. You're eating that from someone that would otherwise be working on it. But I do think, given their entire tech stack, like, can we make a heat shield that has a couple of thrusters

and a parachute system and makes it back through the atmosphere and do that all on modified dragon parts? Like, we could do that for no money. and make $500 million on it profit, that sounds awesome. They're just great. They're just great.

Not to wear us. Right. Yeah, we have all these old, all these old, heat shield test parts. So we did. That one, after Gwen canceled the dragon, we had some things left over and, you know,

and that's the funniest version of this, that it's like scratch and dent dragon stuff that they couldn't send back. It scratched a dog dragon on the side. Scar, Starfall, or whatever. It's all the same. The star branding, man, it's so, it's too much. Star pipe? Yeah, and Star Pipe's the worst.

You got to update your Vendigran. Yeah, I know I do. You have to dust that off. Oh, man. Is the star branding going to be the eye branding of SpaceX? Like someday they'll move on to something else, and then you'll know how. We'll keep Starship. All it was.

Yeah, Starship is still, I think, a bad name. So they'll drop it and they'll just be like, ship. Ship. X ship. Yeah. X pipe. The problem is with Starfall is that no one will answer that question. No, you're just up the creek.

Yeah. I think it's just military stuff. Getting that fat, golden dome paycheck. Assume Golden Dome. Yeah. Assume Golden Dome. and don't. Yeah. I mean, there's been a lot of that lately too, right? We had the, the, what was it? Did I, did I read that right that, like, Firefly launched something and then Rocket Lab shot it down? Is that basically what was going on with the? Was that what happened with that? There was like two back-to-back, like responsive launch things. I don't know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that what it called? Yeah. God, I wish Electron shot down an Asthma thing, though.

I want more of the Rocket Lab Astra stuff in my life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if that hypersonic stuff is, I don't get any of it. So it's like, it's just magic to me, mystery stuff. That's different. The shot of down one is different than the one that accidentally made orbit or something. Wasn't that going on too? Right, right, right, yeah.

Oh, and the great Rocket Lab press release. Hi, we have never accidentally. put something in orbit. Thank you. I didn't realize they put that out. All right. See, this is the stuff I was missing. I got to pull that up. They didn't say anything about the mission because they couldn't, but they just, like, just wanted to clarify.

It was a canary statement. Nothing we have put in orbit was by accident or whatever. It was like. Wait, I got to, where was this? It's like almost an off nominee that cut the thing was so funny. Where did they post this? Is this on Twitter? Intentional orbit.

it. See if I can find it. Did they make it a t-shirt yet? Did they just like provide this statement to somebody? Yeah, I don't know. I'm scrolling through their Twitter feed. Who's got it? Anyone got it in the chat, this thing?

Yeah, bring it up to us. Bring it up to us. I'm not going to be able to find it. Because that's a really funny. That's a really funny statement. Yeah, we'll find it. Someone will post it. We'll figure it out.

Damn, now I really want to see that, though. It's a haste mission. What's it called again? Good show content. Good show content. Hold on. I think I've got, I think I've made my way there. Rocket Lab has never provided Gizmodo with the following statement.

Rocket Lab has never placed any object into orbit unintentionally. It's like the end of the statement, right? That's the whole thing. Oh, I love that. Has anyone? That's a Jonathan McDowell question. Starflight 1. That's the only one I can think of.

Rocket Lab. Hey, there's a rocket that wouldn't land. Oh, shit. That's such a good movie. Oh, yeah. It's funny, man. It's a good statement. Yeah, because it's like, what do we tell them?

It's like, I think I would have just went with, we meant to do that. Rockalap providing the statement. We meant to do that. It's almost like the, remember when Zoom, I bring a Zoom again, when Zoom happened and it was like, oh, the stage adapter failed or whatever. And then like SpaceX had to come on and be like, we didn't make the space adapter. Yeah. Thank you.

Everybody was making statements around that. God, I wish we'll ever find out what happened there. Because something obviously did, right? I mean, there was like congressional meetings about it. that doesn't mean something happened that just means that people thought something happened to be cool. I don't know. It's also an interesting one

because that was like the last moment of spending that much money on one thing and then that has not come back. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all constellations. Big expensive one-off things has never really come back. And I think Zuma might have been, not that it happened and that ended.

It was already ending and that happened. But it is interesting that that was so closely correlated with the end. of that era. Yeah. That's a funny way to do it. Yeah. Good old Zuma.

Good old Zuma. What's up with the Isaacmanverse? Is there anything other any other things that happen? We got an update coming as right? There's a new they're doing another

a lunar base. Moon base update. Moonbase is now. Artemis 3 is a crew. Oh, we talked about that, I think, right? Yeah. Yeah. Moonbase is now Moonbase Pro. Moonbase Pro?

Is that what's going to be called? Moonbase freedom? I don't know what's going to be called. Who knows? I saw that Spatial Endeavors is up in the California Science Center. Yeah. I think they're opening in, they did a bunch of teaser shots, right? Yeah.

Just horrible teaser shots. But November, is that what I read or is it sooner? Oh, is that far away? It's this year, though. it's coming. This thing looks as awesome as promised. Yeah. Just wild.

I mean, that still looks like the rendering, because it looks fake. This is going to be sweet. Good stuff. Everybody that's listening. We're watching the video right now. I'm realizing a massive percentage of our audience is just listening to us instead of also watching, but we're watching a drone video of this center. I will say they built this. I thought they would.

Because when was I in L.A.? I mean, is that true? Like, wasn't it, like, pretty delayed for a right long time? Yeah, and they built this fast than I thought they would. I went there in May. Must have been, like, 2022? Because Will was pretty little, and we went to California Science Center, and Endeavor was still, it was almost,

they were almost taking it off display to start building this thing. And I saw the ground under construction for this. but the tank was still sitting outside and I was like, this is going to be years before they get anywhere close to this. But I thought it was going to be like eight years. And it was only, what are we looking at? Four years?

Sounds good. Cool idea. I like that we have one in like every configuration because you got Discovery sitting on the ground, Atlantis kind of in orbit, and endeavor in its launch stack. Good stuff. It is.

Try to steal this one, Texas. Texas I'm getting this back geez all right that's the review of the museum news

museum news continuing to scroll through the headlines here Jake what else you see that jumps out to you um one was just catching my eye

Aryan 6 is doing its thing there's the new version with the boosters that was good launched some Amazon Sats, right? At least someone did. That's good. What else he got?

What's going on with Vulcan? Is it coming back? What's going on there? And Starliner. That's like getting scheduled and then not. Okay, I have a question about Vulcan. We're talking about Transporter. SpaceX not booking any more CubeSats past 28 or whatever.

why is Vulcan not just building a stage adapter in doing this? Huh? Tell me more. What? Why doesn't ULA get into this business? If there's so much demand for it, like, SpaceX's like, oh, by the way, we're not going to book anymore. Everyone's panicking. What are we going to do? All this stuff.

Like, if you're ULA, why, it can't be that expensive to just, like, build a frame that can hold 40 cubesats. And then we got to have, you got to, you had to fly this goddamn rocket. Like, you need some customers here pretty soon, you know? There's like a chicken or egg thing going on here, right? Where they're not... This can't just be the Amazon satellite, the rocket.

Like, it needs to get some... Well, I think the Space Force would like to have a word with you. They're like, this could just be the Space Force rocket, and yet you can't. But the whole thing with Vulcan is like, we're going to not just be the Space Force rocket anymore. Like, we're going to have the Universal, we're going to compete, we're going to... Just be the Space Force rocket. just go be the Space Force rocket boring

boring I don't know I think I think it's fine like it's okay I think it was less okay this is you know my long running thesis

that it used to be less cool falcon heavy shenanigans but it used to not be okay to just be a defense company and now it's hip again because the world's crazy right and like people are actually doing war again

that isn't just the U.S. trying to take over Back on the menu. Yeah. But it's like other, that's my point. It's like other people doing war also means it's cooler to be a defense company now. And so the era where Vulcan was born was still in that prior era when it was like, whoops, the only war is the American imperialism wars. Now we're in a different era where it's like, just go build.

Like nobody gets mad at people that make fighter jets that they don't also sell them the commercial market. Just go build that. Go build that thing. whatever and don't be weird about it be honest about it be just say that it's what you're doing oh that for sure yes like be honest about it in some ways that's i'm glad that starfall isn't spun as like we're going to revolutionize the pharma market and like do all it's like no just say i can't talk about it you know it's fine yeah oh conspiracy theory are they not talking about it just now because they're a public company and they got to watch what they say?

No, absolutely not. I don't know. They were like tweeting right up to the minute they went live, which I think was also not allowed, right? Wasn't there supposed to be a pre-IPO quiet period? And they were like putting out 15 minute, 40-minute videos all the time on Twitter? I don't know. The SEC rules don't seem to be enforced in a meaningful way anymore.

So I don't know what the deal is. But, yeah. Is Vulcan coming back? All right. What's our odds right now on flies? I don't even know what the state of play is. Like, is flies before the end of the year, even a target? I just, I thought like they had, even if the implementation had some question marks, I felt

like for a bit there, ULA was like, no, man, we're going to make a go with this. We're going to like, we're going to try and be a real competitor. And they were like, yeah. I like money from the government. This is real nice. We can actually have a pretty easy job if we just fly anero satellite every eight months.

Right. Just be honest about it. It's fine. Starliner, same deal, right? Starliner and Vulcan are in the same boat right now where the anchor customer is like, having you around is valuable, but we're okay right now.

We have a reliable ride. So just take it. take whatever time you need to figure it out and then let me know how that shook out. But in the meantime, I'll just fly on SpaceX. It's the identical situation. And then like NASA bought enough dragon flights to, can you help me understand that story from a couple weeks ago? Did you dig into this one at all where they bought,

they bought more dragon flights with an option to cover all of the Starliner flights? That's how I read it. Is that how you read it? I didn't see that, but that sounds right. It was like. That sounds like an Isaacman move, yeah. Let me try to find it. It was in one of these, one of these, we got, we should talk about the ISS safe haven thing

too. I don't think we talked about that on the show, did we? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We should talk about that before it recurs as a off nominee. When did they buy this? Buy these other. There we go. Okay.

So we're keeping six-month ISS rotations. And I did see that. that's good news because that was a stupid plan. I thought this was the same time when we also bought more. This is just me scrolling around. Okay, so here we go. This was like a month ago.

We just never talked about it. NASA to add SpaceX missions. Here we go. Okay. Pull it up. Close that window. What's happening, Jake? I've lost control the computer.

Here we go. Awesome screen. Here we go. NASA to add missions. to SpaceX commercial crew contract. Thank you, Jeff Faust, for the reporting. A procurement filing, it announced its intent to add six post-certification missions

to SpaceX commercial crew contract. They would order three of them now, and then ordered the other three later. So from where we're at, adding three is all the dragons they need with the option for three more to cover any of the starliners that might happen or not happen, all the way to the end of the ISS.

So this is the contract that sets the stage for them never flying Starliner. Because they had already, like, Starliner was on the books for six, and then after the last disaster, they'd already, like, kind of covered their call with three of them, right? They kind of bought three more dragon and said,

this way, you only have to do three and we'll convert some to cargo missions so you can get certified, blah, blah, blah. And they're saying, this is the other three. This is the other three. Well, this is the other, this is six more. So this is three and the three they would need for, maybe it's the other three and the three they might need if the ISS goes longer.

There's extensions, right? Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know how to read this other than I they doubt Starliner is going to fly people to the ISS. I mean, wouldn't you? Like, they'll take the cargo if it comes up on Starliner 1. But otherwise, it's up to Boeing to prove that people should ever fly on this. Yeah, you don't want Boeing on it on, you don't want Starliner on a critical path in any capacity right now, right? Not even just like, oh, a crew depends on it. Nope.

Yeah. What was my bet that it wouldn't fly until 2027? Didn't I have something like this? I'm going to be honest with you. I lost track of the cycles because it was like Starliner fails and then we make a bunch of predictions and then it comes back and then it fails and then we make a bunch of predictions. And then we came back and it failed. And then we make a bunch. I don't remember which.

We've been through it a lot. I don't remember which take was from which failure and whether that was the last one or not. I wish I could say I remember, but I don't either. Starliner will fly from 2020. Was that this first failure or the second failure or the, I don't know. I think it was the Butch and Sunny one. Because I bet that was so much longer ago than either of you, either you or I realized. Like, when do you think that mission happened?

I don't know, man. When did Butch and Sunny launch on Starliner? Can you remember when it was? So I remember that. Don't think too hard. Off the gun. Like, give me it right off the bat. When you think of a year, what year did it happen?

It was last year. 2025? Because I remember that Butch's speech was an off nominee, so I think that was the most recent one. Really? Was it? Maybe it was 24. I don't know. That's what I mean.

I feel like it was way longer than we. Was it the previous off nominee? No, I don't think so. That was the one where he was like, God bless America, this is a new era in space light. Then it was like, hold, hold. Yeah, dude, it was June 5th, 2024. was then they launched. Oh, no, it was one.

One back. Oh, dear. Oh, man. What a spacecraft. Has anyone done, like, a cut of that speech with, like, and I'm proud to be an American in the background? Super cut of that speech. It was, like, so over-the-top stereotypical American patriotism.

It was funny. No. Yeah. He's got the accent for it, too. He does, yeah. Yeah, 2024. So we're two years ago. And.

Yeah, because it was in the summer, wasn't it? Yeah, and we're still, who, I don't know. Every report is like NASA's thinking about putting Starliner on the schedule. I don't know. Like, it might. It might.

Like, there's, so one of the big questions was like, you know, oh, should Boeing just cancel it or should they go through with it? And I always kind of had like a pretty good, not pretty good. I had a pretty confident take that like they had collected less revenue than they had spent. Like the percentage of revenue that they had planned to collect was less than the percentage of cost they had planned to spend. So the upside was still there for them to continue going with it. But at the same time, it's also very clear that they are not like throwing resources. at this. Look, we got a nice low mean spend here. We'll just ride this out. Get it, get it across

the finish line. Yeah, to some extent it feels like they're waiting for NASA to have done this other plan, you know? Or waiting for NASA to like to pay out a cancellation fee. Yeah, because they make their money back. You're in a race with the schedule, right, where you're working on a thing and NASA is still trying to figure out their ISS schedule. And you not flying Starliner 1 prevents you from actually landing on the schedule for any of the other Starliners. And at this point, if you fly Starliner 1 in 2027 and you fly it and return it and then convince NASA that everything went well with it, if everything goes well with it, then you get on the schedule. IsS has their schedule out for a year or a year and a half. you're not on the schedule until 2029.

Are you going to fly two missions? I guess. That's the theory. That's if everything goes perfect. And who's betting on that? Yeah. I'm like super curious about the contract like structure there, you know, because like NASA bought some amount of missions, but if they don't fly them.

Yeah. Like if you're Boeing, you're got to be smart to be like, look, if you order this many missions and then you never present the schedule, like we're still going to get compensated for something, right? Like there's some, there's got to be some sort of like thing on there, but I don't know what it looks like, right? Because it can't be, hopefully NASA didn't completely top of the past. Oh, we'll just use them on a future space station, like another space station. And it just sits in perpetuity. So then again, if you're Boeing, you'd be like, we got, there's a, there's a limit on that. Like, you got to order them by this time or you pay us money, right? Yeah, I don't know.

I really want to read the contract. Like anyone, if anyone at Boeing has access to this file I think this is the scoop we're going to get is the contract of Starliner. Yeah. We couldn't even get the Gilmore video, dude. I don't even like this company much anymore. If you're a disgruntled Boeing employee and you have access to the shared drive where the contracts are. Now, there's our market. This is your kid from For All Mankind.

I forget his name now. Alex. I will take that contract and I will put it through chat, GPT, because I am not going to read it. And then we will find out what that's going to see. Then everyone will have. the info. All right. So we're, I guess, they're Alex and we're Lily in the For Allemankind ecosystem. Are you, are you caught up on a problem? Is that? That's how we're playing this. Lily? Is that her name? How's her name? Lily. Sounds right. Yeah. It sounds right.

I know you're talking about. I'm horrible with character names and shows. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know you're talking about. Yeah. That's good stuff. All right. I feel reoriented to life. You're right. Not a lot happened. No, it was reasonably quiet. Yeah, I didn't expect to talk about Starliner. You did not have a Lauren Grush vacation. No, I did not. That's good.

That's good news. It means that I will coming up. So we can't go over two. One can hope, yeah. Well, that's what we got, Peece. Okay. Yeah. The only thing else I got in the chat is the

you've got a Jumanji beard. Yeah. So. You know what? And I don't think I'm going to trim it. I'm going to be lazy for a while. We'll see. It's a playoff beard.

World Cup beard. World Cup beard. So one of your teams is out of the World Cup. Yeah, one of my teams. Yeah. You claim a lot. This will be the least controversial thing a fan of Mexico is done for the World Cup. Man.

Let me tell you. It's not been pretty down here. I've appreciated all the people in Discord sending me links. and stuff to people getting interviewed about being in Philadelphia and us confusing French men with our go-birds nature. That's good. That's good. There's been some good influencer food content, that's for sure.

Yeah. Great memes of everyone, yeah, discovering America. And it's confusing me. But I guess this is the first world-scale event America has hosted in the social media era. To this extent? Is that true? Yeah. Feels weird.

But I guess that's true. They had an Olympics? No, not yet. Not yet. Two years from now, yeah. Yeah. We're going to see even more. It's going to be good.

It's good content. That's good. Good sandwich content, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, on that note, I did hit one guy with a go-birds in the middle of the Loudabrunner Valley in Switzerland.

So we were biking by each other. And he had a Philly shirt on, and I was like, go birds. And he went, hey. And then we continued biking. It was great. He was like... Yeah, it was great. All right.

There it is, everybody. We'll see you later. Bye. We're off next week, right? We're doing... Are we? I don't know. Is it a holiday week next week?

We'll report back. We haven't done our homework. So, goodbye. America's 250. Peace up. Bye.