Off-Nominal - 247 - RTGs Don’t Grow on Trees

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Jake and Anthony talk about the PROMISE rover, the state of decisions in NASA’s Isaacman era, Rocket Lab buying Iridium, and they give Jeremy Hansen a clap out. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 247 - RTGs Don’t Grow on Trees - YouTube NASA may send a backup, nuclear-powered Mars rover to the Moon - Ars Technica NASA Awards More Moon Base Science, Previews New Opportunities - NASA We managed to glean some interesting details about the Artemis III mission - Ars Technica NASA chief praises progress Blue Origin is making after launch failure - Ars Technica Blue Origin, for the first time, is expected to raise private capital - Ars Technica In a bold move, Rocket Lab acquires Iridium Communications - Ars Technica There were not one, but two asteroid encounters this weekend - 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

DLS and go for main engine, start. Go at throttle up. Negative return. Hello, Jake, being very mean to the chat right off the bat. It's a term of endearment turds. Okay. All right. You know, it's, maybe you don't have that in the United States, but when it gets to you.

We're making these people show up an hour earlier than normal, and you're giving them shit, you know? This is as I texted Jake. It's different. Right, okay. Good point. Good point. Yeah. as I texted Jake, this was a

classic summertime Anthony adjusted child care schedule of an hour earlier. Yeah. But I've been sick, man. I feel out of the loop on this. This wasn't even, this was just me being sick for three days, which I'm like almost

never sick, and I just actually had a legitimate fever. And I felt like it was 2020 again or something. It was crazy. So, yeah. All right. It was not fun. I'm feeling better.

I'm feeling better, but I do feel somewhat out of the loop so, but the good news is since it was holiday last week, we have many stories to catch up on. We do. And we were putting together a list. I forgot that we haven't even talked about that moon base update with the Promise rover. Yeah, yeah. And a Blue Origin launch pad thing and a rocket lab buying Eritium. We got so many things happening.

Blue Origin is asking for money now. Right? Hour earlier appreciated from the EU, Jake. Real talk. part of me wonders if we should just make this the time slot so we also stretch the time zones a little bit into Europe we could so yeah we'll see how many Europeans write us and ask us that and then we're normally at we're normally at four right four eastern right so what's that so that's 10 on the continent right just a little yeah yeah depends what time of the year right yeah yeah even

worse go to central European time a little later you know would have been something to consider something to consider. Yeah. For our friends over in the EU. We love them. Yeah. Except for when they play our soccer team

and our soccer team embarrasses itself by not showing up in any way and looking like the team that we all expected to be there. Well, I mean, you guys just thought that you were going to get carried by the president and it just didn't happen on that game. Oh my God. If I have to hear this shit one more time,

everybody at FIFA's the most corrupt the most corrupt I'm like all right no not like that don't do don't do like don't do the corrupt thing but it's like but you said it was that's I thought that's what we do like oh also that was a bullshit red card absolutely something's playing I just made a sound come out of my hold on it just told me sonos thinks I wanted music when I'm yelling what's happening I don't know what song is yeah played some John Mayer Actually, if you want to do a quick World Cup thing, Jake, I have a concept. I think this VAR implementation in football, as it is, is not the best I've seen in sports. It seems capricious and there's rules when they want them. So I have a theory on how we can fix this. If you are using VR to review a foul, I think the way it should work is that the victim of the foul needs to, on microphone in the stadium, explain exactly what. happened, how it affected the play, and why he thinks it should be a foul, and VAR is used as a fact

check on those arguments. So when he watched this England game last week, and Harry Kane kicked some guy's leg, and the ball, and that guy still kicked the ball and cleared the ball, that guy would have had to say, he kicked my leg, so I couldn't kick the ball and I couldn't clear it, this was a foul. And they would go to the tape, and they would say, no, he kicked you, but you still kicked the ball and cleared it. This is not a foul. It is a fact check, and you need to be clear about what happened and what was the impact for me to use this thing. I love it. I love it.

I, so this is like my first time really, really watching like soccer because I generally have not liked the sport too much, but I decided to try it just because the whole, you know, went in Rome, Mexico, blah, blah, blah, blah. But my take, I think it needs to be more extreme to fix it. I think we need to just bring in the entire referee organization from the NHL and have them rewrite all the rules for soccer and then hand it off. because it is the rules in soccer to me just seem completely incentivized towards like procedural wins. Like no one,

none of the rules are like, yeah, just play the ball, man. Just like if you want to win, you got to just run faster, kick harder and be stronger. That's how you win soccer. It's like, no, it's like, I'm going to like do this thing so the guy can't get the ball and let it roll over the line. And then I get a throw. You know, like it's like the most unsportsman like crap I've ever seen. It's just like it's inferior in all ways. hockey man like empowers the refs they're just like no i'm letting i'm letting it go if that was a

wussy play you didn't try hard enough i'm waving it off but just you know they'll do that right you you do one of these like oscar winning performances where you throw yourself in the ground and clutch your knee oh my god i've never been more hurt in my life diving penalty you know like yeah i mean technically that should be a thing in soccer but yeah it's not man it's never is yeah my favorite one of those is when miraculously better as soon as the yellow card comes out when the guy commits to the act, but they've already given the foul, and then he realizes it, but he still has to follow through, like, do a minute of acting because you started the overreaction. The walk, I'm walking it off.

It's getting better. It's getting better. It's getting better. It's just theatrics, man. Yeah. So that's my opinion. I like it. Turf it.

Boom. All right. Soccer takes from your favorite space podcast. There it is. Everyone we care about is out now, so that'll be the last of it. Yeah. I got a little French loving me. I got a couple of best friends that are French.

So we're pulling Alley LeBlue for now. Cycling spillover? Is that all this? No, it's my great friend from college. My wife's close friend at work, who is my great buddy. Like, we got a lot of French overlap. All right. Yeah.

We'll go with that. Cool. Love it. You got a drink? Yep. I got a freshie. I got a delicious little summer beer at the tonewood freshie. I've had these before.

They are so drinkable. These are lovely. Pale ale. Love it. I was talking the other show. You remember how I came to the sudden realization live on the air that I really like cucumbers? Remember we were talking about that? Yeah.

So I found cucumber lime. Art Seltzer. Look at you. Bravo. Something new. Yeah. Is it strongly cucumber? Like.

Let's find out. Like you know. Oh, is you've never even had one. Yep, that's strong cucumber for sure. Like when you're checking at a fancy hotel and they have cucumber water. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are, these are like low calorie, like no added sugar, like light, light, light ones. So it's almost like...

You can drink 12 them on a beach and not worry about it. You absolutely could. Only 5% and it's like little, yeah. That's the Artemis three beers is what we're having on the beach. If it's one of those again. The fridge will have 6,000 of them again. God, that fridge. Oh, you're reminding me.

There was so much beer in that fridge. Who didn't know what to do with it? Unlabeled, too, some of it. Yeah. Remember the one bottle that just had like a handwritten note on it? It was like a Sharpie on it? Yeah. And it was enormous.

It was a growler. Yeah. Oh, my God. And I drank it on a show. Good times. Anyway, so where do you want to start? Let's get into the feel like we got more on the Promise Rover thing. I didn't realize it.

I didn't realize there was something to be heated about. And you tell me you've got some thoughts on this. I do. I do. I think there's some general. So let's try to remember what was in that moon base update. Promise Rover, obviously a big thing. A couple more lander contracts.

Peregrine back from the dead. I think as far as anyone knew, that we're not going to be any of other Paragon landers. Now there's two more. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. more firefly, more intuitive machines, shoring up the reliable three pretty much.

Yeah. I'm loving all these new clips awards. Like I, to me, it feels like very in spirit of the program. You know, it's like the point of the clips thing was like, we were just going to blast it with task orders.

It's just like, you're going to fly a hundred of these. And then like if 20 fail, like it doesn't matter. Like that was the whole point, right? And then they did like four and they've been like, kind of, kind of,

right? is mixed results. Were these tied to a task order? I haven't been able to figure this out yet. I haven't seen what task order this was tied to. That's the problem with the contractual problem with the clips thing. It's like very unclear what's committed and what's not. It's just like you get a conversation and then you get onboarded into like a group that's allowed to bid.

And then you make a bid and then you may get the bid. And then the bid is only for a part of a thing. And then it's like, oh my God, where they also said that. When does the money get transferred? When do they fly? And all four of these landers were getting. getting the same basic set of three payloads that have already flown. The plume imaging camera that they've flown a couple times. The retro reflector, which if you say you're going to the moon,

they'll hand you one of those, I think. And like a radiation spectrometer. Where's a standard suite of tools. And everything else, they were like, well, figure, they were said, we'll leave space or something, but they didn't really commit to, we will fill more payload space. So it felt very much like,

what is probably sensible that we just want to fill a backlog of these providers. Like the criticism we all had about how this is different from commercial cargo and crew, which was you did development in those, and then you bought six missions so these companies could plan for a production line and plan for a flight cadence. Clips never had that. It was, you know, Astrobotic flew one Peregrine. So they couldn't design that program in a way that was a Peregrine production line.

There was no reason to because they would have to go win other task orders. So it felt so specifically like adding one more lander to the companies that have more landers in production and adding two landers to the company that had shut down that lander line. Like it's very pick and winners and losers. This is very much not, well, Peregrine was just the best for that particular task order. They're all the same fucking thing. So they just decided we need one more here, one more there and two more there and it'll balance out. So like I'm stuck because I think that's healthy.

if we're talking about this as that program. But I also think it is kind of not the point, which was, I have this task order, compete on it, give me the best price, go fly it. I have this task order, compete on it, give me the best price, go fly it. It isn't that anymore. This is more of like filling a backlog,

or setting up a backlog of landers that will fill later, which if that's what we're doing now, I think I could support that because it probably results in healthier lander systems, but it isn't the thing that we said clips was going to be.

Yeah. Yeah, it makes you wonder if it's kind of like the healthy middle ground because the like the competed commercial services idea, you know, it can save you a lot of money, but it's really hard to be strategic with it, right? Like unless it's like an established thing, you know, like I think you can be strategic by buying Falcon 9s, but there's not much else that you can be super strategic about. Like it just, oh, it's going to be there so we can just kind of make plans and not worry about that. Like no, the eclipse like needs to be planned to be there. Like you are in control of that. NASA whether you like it or not. You can say all the fancy commercial commercial commercial commercial as many times as you want, but these are NASA missions, right? So I think maybe that's their right choice. Just get the pipeline going and have these things scheduled so that they're working on the landers, even if you don't necessarily know exactly all the payloads yet and there's going to be changes later.

I can get on board with that. Especially because the clips program is supposed to be, like, let's be honest, it's supposed to be standing up a new market, a new industry, right? as we'll do standing up a new thing that doesn't exist yet. And you're going to have to see a lot of money into that, I think, before it can get on its feet. Yes, and I think my main thing is that, like, I don't have the access to contracts to know or I don't, maybe we got to bring Randy back on to explain some government behind the scenes and how money works or whatever he told us the one time. But there's something about this award that just feels to me like, is that how we wrote down on the paperwork that this was going to work? And clips is too small.

It's flying under the radar enough that it's not going to get that attention. But there's something about that's tingling in my head going like, this doesn't seem like the way that they said it should go. Well, I mean, we can dovetail that right into my other topics. So I think that's going to escalate into a higher theme here, I think. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah. All right.

So Promise Rover. We can go to that. So to recap, this is like we're going to cannibalize a bunch of parts from the, from Maggie and from what's the other one called? The Perseverance test bed. I forget all the names. But Curiosity and Perseverance Rovers at JPL, they have like duplicates that are in the Mars yard and they like use them for operational control practicing, right?

So when there's like an issue on the actual rover, they'll, they'll test out like procedures on it. So I guess they're going to take mostly Maggie, but also parts from the Perseverance one and assemble some rover and then slap a RTG on it and send it to the moon and do something with it. So, yeah, I don't love this one. My one question for you is they don't need these anymore? Well, I think they do.

Maybe. I'm still waiting on like some really smart people to tell. me like I kind of need like you know some I need the chief of the Mars program to come and tell me whether they need them or not and then we're like okay well that's fine because like I suppose you could make the arguments it's like well look curiosity is 15 years old we've hit every problem we've practiced every procedure like we know this rover back to front we'll probably figure it out without this test bed right right we'll try it on the other one we have two of them on Mars don't try it on one of them well it sounds like they're cannibalizing both though so

I think they're going to be no I'm saying try it on curiosity it works on the first Just do it in production on the other server. Right. Yeah, exactly. Make that staging and then. Yeah. So that's an issue, right? And I don't know enough about the actual risk there to determine if it's like a lot of risk that we're putting on to these Mars missions by not having that available. But then sometimes it doesn't matter whether there's a lot of risk or a little risk because then you have to look at what you're actually doing with it and be like, what is this for? Like what is this promise rover for?

You're going to center the moon and then what? Like is it going to do some like flagship level science? I don't know. Maybe, but they haven't really talked about that part yet, which is the kind of a normal thing right now with this little stretch of stuff. Right. So I started to wonder, because I remember back in the Decadal, if you remember there was a mission called Endurance that was proposed. Like kind of an idea to talk about it, right? And I went back to look at it.

And it's kind of funny because the Cato is kind of like, look, Artemis is happening. And science is like the 17th objective on this thing. But we've got to try and make something out of this. And so here's an idea that we could maybe glob on something useful to this like whole little thing. Right. And this rover has an RTG and it's like hyper fast. It's supposed to like cover like thousands of kilometers and go across the moon, pick up a bunch of samples and then drop it at a landing site where he went to pick it up and go home.

Right. So that's cool. And so I was kind of wondering like, wait, is this, like, is this endurance? Like, they just not call it that. They changed the name or something. But I don't think it is because I think, I don't think it's like these test beds can't go as fast as this. So the whole mission thing is going to change. And as far as I know, there's people still working on insurance and they have not been repurposed.

So I don't know. It feels like, I don't know what this rover is for. And then we kind of get back to this whole idea of like, well, is it worth the risk? school, like not if there's any reward for it, right? And I'm worried that this is like just, they just want to do it so that they can say it's been done and, you know, beat the Chinese and just land it, do a couple donuts and call it a victory. I don't know. It feels like, it feels like a little bit of a made up thing that I don't really understand yet. And I think what makes that worse is they're using an RTG because like those don't grow on trees. So like if we're putting

an RTG on this rover, some planetary emission is not getting one, right? And we get a new one of those like every, I don't know, three years or something like that, they roll off the production line. So that's, yeah, that's my spiel on that. That's a pretty good spiel. Yeah, and, and I mean, they also were pretty mealy-mouthed about the promised rover. Like, this feels like a thing they announced way too early. Like, we're thinking about it. Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, yeah. because like all right how are you going to land this thing right how heavy was the original lander cursor yeah right so you've you've timeboxed this outside of your tenure anyway by saying that yeah that's i think i was a little disappointed when they announced we're going to do an update and we have some future landers to talk about i was hopeful that this would have been a quick response to the Blue Origin incident to say, hey, it's not great that our large cargo landers are all in the same basket as our large human landers, thereby tying those efforts up together in terms of their timeline.

Yeah. When impulse space, intuitive machines, and others have talked about having one-ton class landers. I was hoping this was going to be some sort of agreement to, like the initial commercial crew dev contracts, right? Some money committed to people that are developing one-ton plus landers. because we now have a handful of payloads that need that payload space and only have one or two rides to the moon that are spoken for for several years to come or just not available right now and well both of them are not available right now because one's still in development one's rebuilding

a launch pad so i was hopeful that we would shore up that that base first before continuing to stack payload backlogs on top of them um yeah maybe a little chicken of the egg right where where you want to have more, you want to have a more compelling case of, look, we obviously need to fund one and two ton landers because look at how many payloads are stacking up here in the loading dock waiting to go to the moon. So, and also if this program is going to take five years to tool up, like you're saying, what do we do with the actual payload space on board this rover? What are the capabilities we could? Because I don't think, I don't think you would fight too much on like, you would be pretty good at finding out ideas that we could do with this platform on the moon.

Like, I don't think you're resistant necessarily to that concept. That's never going to be the problem. You send them on the moon, a scientist will put a payload on it. Like, they'll figure out, they'll find a way,

right? Yeah, absolutely. And we haven't sent this kind of thing to the moon before. Right. But it's more just like, you aren't doing good science if you're just sort of like filling in the cracks of stuff.

Like, there's no planning for our science, you know, there's no going after large scientific questions and then making plans around answering those and and building a cadence towards like larger question. You're just sort of like grabbing something, Charles Darwin, Jake, you know, he was in the cargo hold of a ship or something. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Yeah, let's let's do science by accident. Love it. Yeah, great plan, right? It worked once, so. That's the nice thing about random. It happens sometimes, yeah. Anyway, my point being, it's obviously going to, take years to put that together and form a real program around that.

So your landers would catch up to you at that point. But I am disappointed in that, in the wake of the Blue Origin explosion, my hope was to, if NASA were to take the Jared Eisenman call of NASA has agency too, we can make our own decisions. We are in charge of what we do in the world. like looking at the effects of what that explosion has done, even if you don't agree with like, it's going to delay this mission by that many months

and it's going to delay this thing by that many months, even if you don't agree with that particular assessment and you're more positive or you're more pessimistic on that, you can still look at it and say, well, what did that create questions about? And one of the biggest ones I saw was people talking about, well, can you fly that lander over, at 39A on a Falcon Heavy?

It's like, well, no, because you have to fuel it with a thing that they don't have at 39A. Can you fly that payload over on that other vehicle? No, because that payload and the integration thing doesn't... So there were a lot of like functional level vulnerabilities that we exposed. We talk all about resiliency and like interoperability. And then this happens and we have none of that. Like, there is no capability to take a lander there and put it over here. So I think if you're really going to be true to that that idea that Jared Eisenman is

expoused, put the money in the effort there to make the base that you're relying on more resilient because NASA and the DoD are the only two users of that. Like, you know, I guess Northrop Grumman appreciates when they can fly signals on anything, but that's because their vehicle gets fueled in a way where they can put it on a Falcon 9, they can put it on Atlas 5. They can do something when they have an issue. Kind of lucky, right, yeah. But as we get more complex payloads, and especially,

when we get lunar landers and things that are highly complex like that, it is so integrated between the lander and the launch vehicle in a way that most people wouldn't realize that that becomes a huge vulnerability. Now, that's intractable in the case of Starship, but on these other ones that fly under a payload faring, there are things that NASA is, it is in their purview to invest in that could make those interoperability things possible. And that's being ignored, I guess to your point, and in contrast is these kind of like showy, we're going to fly a test bed to the moon, look how cool we are for going and raiding the supply cabinets, where I'm like, I don't know, do the boring thing that would make this more survivable over the long term.

Because we just did a planned, not a plan, but like we did a not shocking and surprising explosion at the Cape, right? A vehicle we had on the pad blew up. That's aren't the only kind of explosions that could happen. Right? Like other rockets could hit there. That's a thing the DOD worries about all the time. And I think this incident showed we would be truly screwed if that happened in the wrong spot on the Cape.

Yeah. Good moment to fix that, if you ask me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Processing that. But here's my easiest one. NASA owns half of Cape Canaveral.

DoD owns the other half of Cape Canaveral. from a pad perspective, not half and half, but of the good ones, half and half. Shots fired, LC-14 or whatever. But come up with a solution or a framework even for making sure that we have propellant interoperability at pads. So that if a payload needs methane or add a certain pad that might not need methane for the vehicle that flies there regularly, that we can service. it. If a payload needs liquid hydrogen, we can service it at that pad. That's

the kind of resiliency that we do not have right now because it's like, you know, when we flew in two machines on a Falcon Heavy or Falcon 9 or whatever flew on, right? They had to add the capability to fuel methane at the pad there. This is not a problem when you use storable propellants.

And I think this is if there's one little Easter egg in the article or the interview that Eric Berger had with let me find this article where did he have

this article at the aftermath of the catastrophe hmm I'm scrolling he wrote a lot recently he had an interview oh here we go maybe not

this is a great segment of this show Jake Anthony Google things had. What article I'm even looking for? I've blacked out at this point. He had an article about the plans for Artemis 3 and what that mission would amount to

given that they're not going to board Starship and they're going to dock with Blue Origins, Lander, and all that. The change that they made to that test version of the Mark 1 lander was that it wouldn't use the BE7 engine. So it wouldn't have cryogenic propellants. It would only have basically attitude control thrusters that would be hypergolic. So the little hidden nugget of information there

is that they can fuel that at a payload processing facility and put it on any launch vehicle. It no longer needs to be fueled at a launch site that has hydrogen capabilities. Right, SpaceX launch pads right now do not have hydrogen capabilities. So if that use the B-E-7, it could not fly on a Falcon Heavy

because it could not be fueled there. But in this state, it can be. It could be fueled and delivered. to that launch site. So that's what I'm talking about is like, you own the launch site, DOD owns the launch sites. They lease those pads to individuals.

If they wanted to invest money to upgrade the functionality and the capability of their launch sites to have this interchangeable propellant capability, I know it's really complex, right? There's people probably listening. Like, you know how complex it is?

Like, not really, but yeah, sort of. And my point is, if anyone has the money to invest in that, it's the people that have the most, the most potential to actually use that capability, NASA and the DoD. They have payloads that are diverse, that are complex, that need to fly on anything, and they would benefit from that. So I would like them to invest in that. I don't expect SpaceX or Blurgeon to do it because it's not really economically sensible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love it. Weird rant. I don't know. Great idea. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. Smart. You still got it, bud.

I still got it. I still got it. Yeah. you're on the other end of the fever, but you're out of there. I can't find this fucking Eric Burger article to save my life. I don't know. Yeah. Oh, man.

Yeah. Okay. Doesn't that feel like the thing that Isaacman's saying, though? Of like, what can NASA do in the face of this? It's like, make sure that that doesn't screw up your plans as much as it appears to. Man, I was starting to think not so much because, like, there's that and then, you know, this promise thing and the clip stuff we talked about it. And then we can look at skyfall too. And I'm starting to think that there's like a lot of sell in the future for the for the present here.

Like it's there's like a lot of just like what do we got on that? Where's skyfall coming to those? So skyfall is like we're going to use the old PPE from gateway, right? And fly to them, fly to Mars. And then freedom. What do it was skyfall? Skyfall is the reentry thing. And sky falls the three things. And sky falls the, thing that's attached to it, it's going to drop down into Mars, right? Oh, oh. Are they also calling that skyfall? Yeah. Wasn't Starfall is, I'm thinking Starfall.

You're saying skyfall. Yeah, I got it. We need that to the star diagram again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so, so yeah, the freedom. Okay, SR1 freedom. Whatever it's called, SR1 Freedom. Right.

It's going to fly the old gateway with a nuclear engine to Mars, drop the reentry vehicle. It's going to open up mid-sky and three little helicopters are going to come out. Cool. Sounds amazing, right? The only problem, so the skyfall payload is they put it into the Mars exploration program and said, like, you're going to own this. And they didn't fund it. So like, after all the congressional wrangling, like, they didn't actually get any additional money for this. And so the Mars office was instructed to find the money somewhere else. And so now this mission is going to cost, I come at the expense of something else.

It would have been way worse. Thankfully, Maven died. And so that money is going to get freed up, right? There's a little bit of cash there. But it's still going to be like a, still going to be a,

still going to be an issue though, right? We're going to have like something to give like that's named after a lady. Here we go again. Lady telescope. Canceled. Brutal, brutal. Yeah, so they got to find the money for this, right? And it's like, okay, well, so now we got to reduce budget for something else. And then again, I asked, so why are we doing that?

Like, what's this for? And you're going to have these three helicopters that just sort of like fly around. Like, I don't know, the utility for them on perseverance was that it was like, it was directing the. two billion dollar rover to go do all this great science right it was like a good scout for that but what do they do on their own and there's three of them again is this just are we just going to like doing rc races on the mars and be like we got another win guys NASA number one number one and then and then what right and it's like not like this mission's going to be cheap either like yeah you get a free gateway out of

this free propulsion element at a gateway but so got to launch a nuclear thing on it like that launch is going to cost $200 million because whatever providers are going to be like, well, it's got nuclear stuff on it. We're going to triple the price and, you know, do that whole thing. The helicopters, the ingenuity was like 80 million bucks. Was it? I was going to ask what the price that was. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, hopefully they'll bring the price down when you buy the next three, but like, it's not going to be five million bucks, you know. So sometimes you sell the second and third and you're like, should have charged more. you know so I don't know I don't know about that but yeah so again that just feels like

we got to get we got to launch something we got to we got some hardware just launch it we got to do something with it go go go and then it's going to come at the expense of whatever actual missions that are out there you know doing work and I don't know not loving that either so um is there you're more tied into the the scientist out there in the world. Is there a, is there a, have we all given up on this administration saying the words Mars sample return in a row? Well, that's a great point.

I mean, that all ties into it, right? So, like, the science part of this admin has been very lackluster and pretty disappointing. And that's probably the number one beacon of, yeah, we're just giving up. The number one priority of the science community. No, gracias, right? like yeah which i can't get my head around because you have you have blue origin rocket lab a couple others loudly stating for this amount of money we can do mars temper they're saying that so much more confidently than the entire commercial space station market

maybe not vast. Even Vast doesn't feel as confident about their commercial market as Rocket Lab saying $4 billion and we've got your pieces of Mars. We're ready to go. Just literally sign the check and this is going to get done.

Yeah. Now, some may say that Peter Beck just bought Eridium for two Mars sample returns. Some may say that, Jake. I'm not, but some may say that. I ate Instagrams. I just, I find it like weird that NASA,

they got a little bit out of pocket with the commercial space station market. They went out there, they talked some shit. Industry reacted and they said, oops, I'm sorry about that, we'll rethink. And then we're just going to go with the plan that was in place. They backed down from that so weirdly that I'm, I am thrown off by how cool. quickly they let off the gas on what I thought, again, was handled poorly but was the right direction. And then on the Mars Amper turn thing, like your predecessor kind of gave up on this program, but left it at the feet of let the commercial market do it for less money, which is

kind of also the thing that you're into. And it would... Not sure than a no-brainer, right? No one disputes that this would be the coolest science achievement, like, since we went to the moon. I don't know. Like, where would this rank on, on... I mean, one thing that I wonder about this is, like, is it just too big of a top line item to commit to in this budget environment? Like, what can Isaacman do when every year the president's going to be like, cancel the science mission directorate? Like, right, right. Can you really be like, I got a $4 billion mission idea? I don't think he can. How about instead of taking $6 billion out, I spend it all on going to Mars and getting them.

That might be why all this, this like science stuff's been so shit. It's just like there's no way he could ever like meaningfully make a commitment in anything, right? When his boss is going to come down or whoever at the OMB is going to come down and be like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, right? So maybe that's it. But either way, I don't believe in blaming the guy out there. Like, you're the NASA admin.

This is what it is, right? Yeah. It just feels so weird to not even talk about it at all. all to not address it in any way, right? Because I think it would be honorable to go out and state, I mean, they did this the commercial space station market. I can't get over this comparison. They went out and they loudly said, there is no market here. The economics do not work. We are not going to support this. And then they got yelled at by the industry and they said, actually, you're right, we'll keep doing the plan that we were doing 10 minutes ago before we told

you that there's no market here and the economics don't work. It's like, what the? And then on the Mars Semberton time, it's just don't mention it. Don't say, like, I'd rather them come out and say, mission, the mission breaks the planetary science budget that we have right now. We think that this is a meaningful thing. Right. Yeah, exactly.

I don't know, but, yeah, it's, when's the next decadal? Remind me on that cycle? Is it just on the tens? Yeah, but it's like, it takes three, four years to put it together. So it's kind of like, it spends like a two years coming out, you know. Okay, got it. But I think the last one was like officially, officially out in 23. So so called like the 20 to 23 was when the last thing happened.

So yeah, in about four years, we'll be kicking off meetings and stuff. man 23 to 2032 okay well because my I guess my point was like that that will force the issue again right because we don't expect that to be less of a presence in the decadal right still matters well that and that's the thing with the decadal is it's not like politics don't affect it because the questions are still the same right and that's what they're telling you they're saying like this is what we need to know to further the industry whether you can afford it or not this is what we need to know right this isn't about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, just it feels weird to not talk about it so much. It's very weird. Yeah. And then, nope, I mean, I won't say it up publicly before I get this date confirmed, but I'm, like, I was going to ask the guy. Like, nobody's going to ask. We're not talking about it.

Crazy. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe it's just, we got to get Dr. Z back. Let's get Dr. Z back on here and, and hash this out. part of it could just be that it's like embarrassing right it's like a pretty big fuck up for the agency yeah how much money was spent on it did we ever get that one or two billion i think okay out the door yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean we've wasted a lot more than that on space things oh sure yeah yeah how's that test ad in in uh oh yeah eight two or whatever that thing is yeah a monument to what could have been. Not Missouri. I think it's Mississippi.

You were close. One of the M states. Yeah. That was a good one. That was a good one. ML2. What did we waste on ML2? That's right.

A2, the A's work, right? ML2. No, ML2. Oh, ML2. Yeah, you're talking about that. What was the test stand called? Yeah, A something. One of them. A-something, right?

It's to build a Constellation engine test stand, right? And after it was canceled. The A3 test stand. A3. Gotcha. The A3 test stand was completed in 2014 at the cost of $349 million for the J2X engine that was canceled five years before that. So it was a remarkable piece of pork. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Here's a quote from Roger Wicker, the member of Congress that pushed for the completion. Administrations come and go. I think it makes sense not to leave a partially constructed asset sitting there. I do believe... Let's follow up on this.

I do believe a decade from now, this was 2014, yeah, a decade from now, we'll look back and see that it has been used in a very positive way. has the A3 test stand seen anything since completion? Which one did relativity buy? I don't think it was that one. I think the A3 test stand is still unused. Oh, at least to Rocket Lab now. Oh, hey, hey.

When was that? For Archimedes or whatever? Wasn't? Is that where it is? Yeah. But unfortunately, for Roger Wickard, that was in 2022. was when they did the ribbon cutting. So I don't think it had been used by 2024 in a very positive way. Got them.

Bam. You would have failed your prediction. Yeah. So, all right, anyway. Great segue, Jake, that we never would have planned on. Rocket Lab. The A3 test stand. Give me your hot take about Rocket Lab and Arridium.

My hot take? Do you have any opinions? I'm happy with it. No, I think it's good. It's great. Love it. Matt Dash is like, Peace out, baby, yeah.

I don't think he's like peace out. I feel like he's going to be around. Wow. I think it's sticking around. Right. He's getting money out of this, right? Right. Yeah.

Cool dude. He shares. I had a great time when we had him on the show. He was awesome. Yeah. That was a lovely show. I'm curious to see what, yeah, what they do with it. I mean, it's the tough thing with like a company like Rocket Lab doing their strategy like

this of just like acquiring every corner of the industry is like it becomes really difficult to like, I don't know, see the big strategy. It's just kind of like, what is the objective here? Or he's just trying to just be big and be a part of everything and make money. And it's like, maybe that's fine. But it's like the vision gets murky, right? when it's just like all your attention and money is going to just like acquiring these little component mysteries and stuff.

All right. In different services. I'll fill in the gaps. It's not a bad thing. It's just makes it harder to understand, right? I think I think that's unfair to the decision behind this one in particular. Because I actually think this is a brilliant idea for them. Okay.

Let's hear. I think this is a pairing that I'm so mad that I didn't see that this would be the thing that happened. Because for years, They talked about... Yeah, I was like, damn, that's so obvious. For years that Rockalab had said, we're going to run our own constellation,

we're building Neutron, we're going to have our own constellation. Peter Beck has said this on so many earnings calls and podcasts and whatnot. But they never had filed anything. So, like, there was never, we just figured, I guess there's no movement yet, or they're doing it in a secret way

that nobody knows about, but there was never anything we could tie to Rockalab. So I guess, as time went on, should have been obvious that they were going to buy somebody existing in this space. So this gets them right into a constellation that not only generates profit right now, like Eridium was profitable, and their revenue was more than Rocket Lab's revenue last year. So when this closes, they are more an Eridium company than a Rocket Lab company. And then once again, why launch for anybody else becomes a question.

but I think the the markets that these companies target if you look at Rocket Lab and who they sell launches and spacecraft to and who Arridium sells services to are kind of similar in that they aren't the super mass market commercial company they have use cases that they excel at they have good relations with government

emergency services national assets like spy agencies buy a lot of Rocket Lab stuff Kind of a similar thing in that this is like a The Iridium network is you know low data rate but hardy can get through weather It's gonna do better through storms when you're Starlink You know you'll be dropping off of this if it starts raining where you are right now And the other huge one is the GPS alternative market that's kind of coming becoming a thing now

That in the era of much more GPS jamming You want to have alternative position at navigation and timing signals so that you can have a switchover if someone is jamming GPS in a location. Erridium has been marketing this. Not only marketing it, but they have like a little ASIC that can go in a device that can use the 66 satellites in their constellation as a GPS alternative. So like that kind of service sounds like Rocket Lab selling a rocket to the NRO because they want to go to one very specific. It's like a, it's not exactly the same, but do you see what I'm saying that they're like targeted industries and targeted markets that have high trust,

low users, but high trust. And that's what Rocket Lab has too. And so I see that as a complimenter. Yeah, it's a good fit, right? Yeah. And then it jumps, you know, think about how much money Rocket Lab, it's probably not $8 billion, but how much money Rocket Lab would spend filing for a constellation, getting through the whole process of building it out, launching it, acquiring all the users, rolling out ground stations.

Yeah, just the time that would take. Just the time that would take. I don't know. Yeah. What's the, what's the rocket lab's total salary for four years,

right? Like, right, maybe, it might be closer than we think to, yeah. I mean, $8 billion is a lot,

but, you know, it's kind of interesting. So you take that and then you roll in, what can Rocket Lab do with their own satellite platform? What can they do

with this idea of alternative position navigation and timing signals? What can they do with some of the markets that iridium you know Arridium just bought

bought out the rest of Arian who is this aircraft tracking company that had hosted payloads on Arridium satellites they already owned like I think

they owned like 40 or 60% of the company already and they bought the rest of it so now that's included so they do aircraft tracking so it's a really interesting mix of things

and it's like a functional money making company so obviously you like that if you're a public company like Rocket Lab but it also just feels like they kind of have the same vibe to me in the industry. Yeah, they kind of do.

Yeah. I don't think that invalidates my point. No. Can I, uh, let me throw one on top on this, Jake. Sure. Arridium. Arridium is much cooler name. Yes.

I'll give you that. This might be the moment. This might be the moment. rebranding. Rebrand, drop new logo for Aridium. Eridium labs. This is like United and Continental. right? Like, keep the design aesthetic of one, but the name of the other. Like, let's keep the

rocket lab design aesthetic, but eridium as the name. Yeah. But hopefully they don't get more corporate though. Like, you know, like usually when those mergers happen, it's like the words get smaller and they turn into acronyms and the logos get less complex and they turn into just like geometric shape. Then you end up with, like the North of Grumman thing. N-G, yeah, N-G, right? Which is like R-L-I. That's going to be what is. No, don't do one of those. just eridium. Irridium is a cool word.

It sounds good, it feels good to say. Eridium. It's very cool word. Yeah. Sounds a little threatening. It's a dinosaur word. It is.

Yeah, you know, okay, this is another unrelated thing, but there's a dinosaur museum in Philadelphia, or not in the Philadelphia area here in South Jersey, over by Rowan University,

the Edelman, dinosaur thing. I don't know what it's called. Edelman Fossil Park. What is it? Edelman. fossil that's something

Edelman Fossil Park and Museum here we go Jake Oh yeah So this is in my area It's small Keep your hands dirty But it's awesome Yeah you can go

You can go dig in the quarry and stuff And they also have Like dinosaur statues That were so realistic That it freaked miles out And I could not be in there anymore I had to take him out of the zone This mosesore in particular

This was a very terrifying Oh, yeah. But this is apparently one of, there's like two places in the world that they have discovered so far. I think one's in Canada and one is here where the layers that are exposed because of where it's at,

but also what happened in the resulting floods that happened after the impact that washed a lot of animals into the area. You have pre-impact, impact, and post-impact. in one zone that you can see all the same time. So you have a good understanding of when things died out. And this little part right here in Jersey is like one of the spots. And I was like, look at that.

If I found this one, I was a kid, maybe I'd be into rocks like Jake. Yeah, I said the other area is probably where I grew up, right, that whole stretch. I think so, yeah. Southern Alberta and then northern Montana, it's like the Hell Creek area or whatever. That's like dinosaur gold, baby. And now you live in the impact zone. Yeah, I know. I've just moved from one dinosaur zone to the next.

Look at that. A little World Cup take on the way in, little dinosaur facts on the way out. Yeah, we'll like to make it up a little bit, right? All right, well, uh... We had one other thing on the list. Didn't we? Oh, the Blue Origin launch pad.

You watch that video that Dave Limp put out? All the cranes. Yeah. Crane video? Let me pull that up. I love that they've just realized their crane destiny. Where's this video at? It is very strange to me that they've chosen the crane as the replacement for the transport re-erecter, though.

I don't quite get that. It's good for, like, getting us to the next launch the fastest, but it feels like they're going to have a more permanent solution than just rolling a crane out to the pad every time they want to launch. I don't know. I mean, listen, we don't want to draw too many conclusions from the visualization, but this didn't look like it rolled out to the pad. This looked like it

was installed on the pad. Right? Didn't, don't, you don't, you didn't think so? It looked like a permanent crane asset, like a commercially sourced, commercial off-the-shelf crane installed at the pad. Commercial off-the-shelf crane. Yeah. Yeah.

Which, why aren't we always doing this? I think this was my biggest, my biggest thing of like, like Star Base obviously needs catch arms, so that's different, right? But this, see, this little crane looks installed in that spot, or is it driving there? I don't know. I don't know. It's got a little road going up to it. Maybe it does.

Maybe you're right. Well, maybe it's the same crane from the boat. They said it's the reverse process of the boat, so maybe it is the same crane. It literally drives over to the where they get the thing off the boat and it drives here to put it on. That's a long way to drive. Now the crane's not there. See, it's gone. Yeah, I'm supportive of this being a new way of them saying, hey, we're going to do stuff to get flying again sooner.

We're going to be a little fast and loose with it. And then this little platform, this little platform for payload integration, Jake. I'm waiting for you cut to the... Cory Bruno is responsible for that. Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm going to take us away so you can see again. Tell me what level the white room would be at here, Jake. Ain't this the crew system level?

Yeah, it would probably be a little higher, but yeah. No, I think it would just be a little step up off of that platform. You think so? I think the crew access is the bottom of the payload. I guess it would be a little higher. Yeah, because there'd be a stack with an engine. Some sort of trunk, right? Service module is some kind, right?

Yeah. But it's a, that's a big platform. Look how big that platform is. You could fit something there. Yeah. I don't know. I'm encouraged by them just seeming to approach it from a more fast and loose way, you know? Yep.

So that seems good. Punch it. Yeah. Let's go. Now what if they got $10 billion of outside investment, as is being reported? That's very strange. That's, that's, I did not see that one coming, but, uh, You think they're going to, is there, is there a AI play coming to drum up the money?

Man, I don't know. I don't. Terra wave AI? Terra wave? I don't know. Great question. They say they have a lot of lunar landers in work here, Jake. Yeah, they do have a lot of little landers.

It would be interesting if it's much more of like a traditional, infrastructure play. We're making excavators for the moon and heavy machinery. We're a caterpillar, but for space. I mean, that was part of their mission statement, right? So move the industry off, off Earth. Can't do that without some cranes and backos, right? And money.

And money. Lots of money. A lot of money. A lot of money. Yeah. All right. So where do we land? let's see, Blue Origin good, Rocket Lab, good, NASA,

selling the future for some quick ones. That's it. Oh, we got two new looks at asteroids. Should we look at those pictures real quick? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some fun ones. Let me pull those up. They're just little baby ones, though.

Smaller than we thought in one case. Yeah. What was the one called? It was like... So, Tianwen, 2 went to 1, right? which is like the little sharp jagged one. Yep, that was this guy. This guy here.

Crazy little guy. What's the name of it? It's a Hawaiian name? Yeah. Camo Oalaoaleo. Camo Olauea. Camo O'Alewa. This is cool looking.

They're still like 20 kilometers away or something. So I got to log in again. Price going up, Jake. Price going up. Inflation at Space News. what was it before I think it was like 175

was it now it's 250 so that sounds like a little more an inflation Dylan jeez for past gas Dylan Taylor what's up

uh now take this one looks like what other rock we've seen before yeah but what was that one it looks like the one the

the one the New Horizons went by uh rocoth or arrocoth Is that what I'm thinking of? Or it also looks like Cherrymov Garek Samenko, right? I guess it does, yeah.

I think I might be thinking of this, right? They're both contact-binder. Are these the pictures? Is that a real picture? What's the real picture? This is the real picture? Yeah, that's the real picture. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

Contact binary. Well, look up 67P as well, right? Thank you. Complete. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. That's the duck one, right?

Yeah. Yeah, well, you love these little ones. You're a big fan of this. It's going to be so mushy if they touch it. It's exciting to, like, have N greater than one for this weird type of comment, you know? Yeah, right. Weird type of asteroid. Because now we can do some.

Right, obviously, there's a lot of them like this. Yeah. Do some comparative science, figure it out. They're fun. this guy's kind of interesting. I feel like this will get a lot more interesting than it currently looks. Right now it looks kind of boring. The jaggedness is interesting.

That means it's new, right? That's the geology trick. Jagged means new, right? Has it had time to wear down its corners yet. Yeah, or what we're seeing. This image just looks so flattened, though, that I'm wondering if some of the jaggedness is three-dimensionality that we're not seeing yet. Maybe. Maybe.

right because if this was taken from approaching from underneath it's like edge on or something yeah yeah or like perfectly face lit right you're not going to have any dimensionality to it but maybe when they get closer and you have some side lighting you're starting to see some more slope to it although some of these things look so sharp that there's some really sharp edges there yeah interesting but this one's a sample return right it's the other one is not going to high abuse of two already did its thing so it's not yeah this is the the post high abusa two it's just observing yeah yeah yeah yeah we love a jack submission around these parts we do yeah yeah the discord was talking about uh mmx coming up soon that's gonna be a good one too

phobos lander it's crazy let's go that's crazy you know you play kerbal and you landed on the on the little stupid moon. More like docking. Yeah. Yeah. And he just bounce off of it. In orbit. Gone.

Eve. No, that was that was Venus planet. Duna. What was it called? Hmm. Chat. Help me out.

What was the little turd moon called? Ike. Ike. Like. Also my favorite astronaut. Yeah. Is your favorite president? I put in the description that we would talk about

as your favorite president, is your favorite president? Is that you said? That we would clap out Jeremy Hanson, who is retiring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Retiring. So that'll be great that we can get them on the show. While you're ahead, baby.

Ten days in space, I'm out. Let's go. 17 years in the astronaut corps. He's seen how the Canadian Space Agency goes. Yeah, yeah. Not going to wait around until 2041. Were you surprised? Did you think he would stick around a while?

No. This doesn't surprise me that much. No. No. I mean, he is, you know, the world's heartthrob

and has some children and, yeah. I'm telling you, like capitalize on that, you know, you're not going to, you're not going to get a better mission at the CSA. Like,

it's all downhill from space missions for him. Like, the next best thing he could hope for is in the next five to 10 years he gets to go to the ISS for a tour. Like, that's like that. You know? Fair enough.

I mean, he can come on this podcast whenever he likes. Whenever he wants. Especially now in retirement. It'll be easier. Email us at Jeremy Hansen atoffenom.com. It'll work. You have your email if you want a job here too, I guess. Yeah, we'll reserve it for you.

You can be a third co-host. It's fine. So good. All right, man. Well, we got some stuff. coming up in the calendar, right? We do, we do, we do. Too many windows open to pull this up.

Yeah, I know, me too. So next week we have Jason Dunn coming on from Outpost. Ah, yes. So we're talking about some reentry. Well, this has been your thing, right? What are we doing about all these reentry vehicles? Why are you here? Explain yourself.

That's what I want to say. I was supposed to talk, before I got sick, I was supposed to talk to the CEO of Inversion Space this week on MECO. So that will be rescheduled, hopefully, this week, also doing reentry vehicles. I also received one or two other messages from people who are either users of or developers of reentry vehicles saying, hey, feel like I should give you and Jake a call sometime. So we've struck a nerve out there, Jake, in the segment of the market. My favorite move, my favorite move that we do is we just, like, this is stupid and I don't understand it.

And then everyone just emails us and we get them all to come on the show. Yeah. Got them. It's a trap. It's good and I also kind of hate it when I'm like, oh, fuck, all these people are listening to. Jeez. Yeah, that's also true. These takes weren't for you.

You never know you're going to shake out. Actually, the Promise Rover is pretty far in development. come at me bro come at me if only dillon taylor actually it's a pretty good value yeah jeez it's pretty good value it's been more on space news than i do on freaking netflix but okay yeah that's true man well uh that's it y'all thanks for hanging out with us this is a fun one it's good to be back good to be back on the internet So, bye. Bye, everyone.

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