Off-Nominal - 250 - Tile Enthusiast

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Jake and Anthony talk about Starship Flight 13, the heat shield discourse, Dragon beyond 2030, and shockingly, Jake was the one to say “Let’s talk about the National Security Space Launch program.” Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 250 - Tile Enthusiast - YouTube SpaceX on X: “The Starship Recovery team has continued gathering imagery of the vehicle, which is still afloat in the Indian Ocean” Experts warn current Starship heat shield tech is a "dead end" for rapid reuse - Ars Technica Some Thoughts on Starship V13 Flight — Starship’s Current TPS is a “Dead-end” to Full-and-Rapid-Reusability | LinkedIn Actually, Starliner might fly into space this year - Ars Technica A "disaster waiting to happen"? Industry officials worry about Crew Dragon availability. - Ars Technica SpaceX wins $1.6 billion in launch orders for military satellite networks - SpaceNews 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

I felt like the right time to do the song. Congratulations on your great basketball victory. I faded it out for everybody, I think, but me. It was still playing very loud in my game. If you're on the podcast version of this, I apologize for you not hearing. Well, I guess I could put it on there. It's probably dodgier to put it on YouTube. Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. The fixed in post. Jake, do you know the sportsman that we got here in? Philadelphia? The sportsman? Yeah, do you know about the sports man? The newest sport man? I've heard about the new sports man.

Yes. I heard he's reasonably good at sports. It's a good sports. He's a good sportser, yeah. He's got like he just knows how to take the ball and, and, you know, do all the things. Win sports, yeah. Nice.

I know the fan base loves the Sixers song, so give them what they want, you know. I even put the shirt on. I don't care about the fan base. I love. the picture song. Yeah, you do. I don't know anything about the sectors. That song fucking slaps.

I'm like, it's so good. Like, yeah. Yeah. Well, we got a loose one here today, Jake. We got a lot. We got a lot of, there's been a lot of discourse out there. Big discourse on this, on flight 13. Yeah.

Flight 13. Yeah. Yeah, there has. How you feeling? Let's show content. We'll get into it. Cutting off the intro. That was a teaser, Jake.

All right. That was a teaser. What did you make a mead? No. I found a silly here. A LeBron mead. Look how silly this is. It's got a gnome on it.

Oh, look at that thing. La chouf. Wow, where'd you get that? It's got a bunch of, I don't know, at the grocery store. It's got a bunch of French words on it, but I think it says it's imported from, oh no, I thought it says it's imported by a UK company, but it's Belgium. but it's Belgian. That's why it's French. La chouffe.

La chouf. Look at that. Anyway, I thought it's a silly label. It's got a gnome on it. Good for off nominal. Oh, yeah. Clearly the gnome is a big part of our material. So yeah.

I was like, you know, Anthony's pretty short, so I think this works. How did you find out my Halloween costume next year? Yeah. It's got this picture of. you and your 70s on it here. You see that? I don't know if that's what that. That's so good. I've got some more Vernacha. Breaking out the Vernach shake. Yeah. Vernaz. Hell yeah.

Oh, yeah. Keep trying. Keep trying. Man, the Italians and their G's. Jiminiano. Yeah. What? What's the problem with that? You don't like a ny? Like, you'd think I'd be good at it. Like, they do have that in French and English. and it's sort of almost in Spanish. Yeah, almost. But the, man, it's, I don't know, the Italian version of it. I'm just like, trips you up a little bit.

No, it's, it's baloney and don't try and tell me any other word. I thought that was your joke was like, the Italian version of it, it's baloney. That's great. That's a great line. It's a great line. Spelled B-A-L-O-N-E-Y. Maloney. P-A-L-O-N-E-Y.

It's baloney. How do you feel about Flight 13, Jake? That's show content. Hold on, hold on. How do I feel about it? Okay, do you think that this is on purpose, the floaty boat thing? No, not at all, because they would have had something there to recover it way sooner. I mean, I don't think it wasn't.

Okay, maybe I should revise that. I don't think it was not on purpose. Yeah, yeah, I was going to say, probably on purpose in that, it would be great if what happened was it didn't immediately blow up. Yeah. But they didn't necessarily think that this would happen to the extent that it apparently is still intact now. I don't have to check Twitter in the last day, but like, didn't sink yet, right? They're telling you back, right? They're telling you back to recovering it or something.

That's great. That's awesome. That's awesome. It's so good. Yeah. The way, like, it like tipped over and they were like, go. And that drone was like doing like strafing runs to like collect data. And I know, obviously, because, like, they didn't know if it was going to explode or sink.

So, like, just take as many pictures as you can as fast as you can, right? But they were like, they were just so on it. And I was like, they had a plan for this, man. Well, it was on fire for a little, for longer than you would have wanted. Yeah. But, yeah, I know, that was great. That was awesome. We've joked about how the data is the payload.

And it's like, this time it might have been. Like, this might actually have been a valuable payload. I mean, the payload was a payload on this one, right? Yeah, I guess so. I'll throw it up here. I should throw it up. Yeah. I just, I feel bewildered by the talk about this flight afterwards.

I feel totally bewildered by the internet, Jake. Oh, yeah? Like, I truly feel like I've detached from reality on what's happening with Starship here, that we're all now concerned, greatly concerned about heat shield tiles. After the first one is still intact. I'm absolutely bewilded. Welder that we're here having this conversation, 13 flights into Starship, and the first time it still exists after the flight, and we're like, this feels like the end of the road for

the heat shield. Like, this is the best they got. I'm like, what is happening, Jake? Have I been too online about this? Well, I mean, it's one of those, it's one of those issues that is like gone full circle and like, you know, the arguments are lapping themselves and it's hard to figure out where it's still real and everything. But I don't know. It's like there's good news and bad news here, right? Like good news obviously survive, but we don't, we don't really know anything yet.

That's the thing, right? Like, because reusability, my, my opinion has always been like the definition of reusability is like way, like no one has the same definition of what that means. And some people will look at this and go, it survived, it's reusable, done. Like 100% achievement. Check that one off the task list.

We can move on to in orbit transfer, and fuel and stuff, right? But like the real definition for SpaceX for reusability for Starship is like, you got to be able to like tilt that thing back up, fill it up and go like that day. Yeah. And if you can't achieve that,

then the whole premise needs to change, right? Because like everything is built on that assumption. And then it needs to do that 50, times in a row, right? Yeah, and, all right, so my real take is, do you remember when the IPO happened and I said there was that interview, yeah, thank you. There was that interview of Gwen Shotwell where she did the most SpaceX thing ever, which was, we're going to go build chips because no one believes the scale that we need chips, so we have to go build it. And I was like, resounding feeling that, like, they still got it. This week has been nothing, but they still got it because what else is SpaceX

accustomed to other than everyone moving the goalposts on them constantly. Like the entire lifespan of Falcon 9 was, okay, you did that, but you'll never do. All right, well, finally, you did that one, but I bet you'll never, okay, well, now they've flown 36 of them. And one thing is flown 36 times. Like, all bets are off right now. We've got to start moving the goalpost on Starship. Like, they're never going to get this thing back intact.

All right, well, shit, now they got it back intact. I'm like, we're at the first one and we're moving the goalposts. I just want everyone to realize that we're moving the goalpost on the first one of them that are still intact. Well, hang on, though. So I will push back a little bit on that. I don't think the goalposts have been moving. The goalposts have always been there.

We're just like a little bit closer to it. And some people are saying that we're already there. Yeah, I guess to my, my brain, the way it works is that you are right that SpaceX's vision for Starship is like, like, arms take it and put it over here and you fill it back and I'm and launch it. But that's like eventually. And the only way you get to eventually is by flying a bunch of starships first. And I feel like a lot of the discourse that we're seeing and Eric Berger's writing about people feeling this way is that they're missing that middle section, which is like, okay, but you do have to fly Starship with the things that we do have now. Presuming that they'll never change anything about Starship. As if any SpaceX vehicle has never received change is halfway into its lifespan.

But there is a difference, right? Because there is like, there's like, okay, does this need to be solved by going from, block full thrust 3.1 to block 5 where we just like tighten up the margins and juice up the engine a little bit and add a little extra paint on you know they just like it's like iterative right it's like or like there's a fundamental like there's a limit to what falcon nine can do right there's like a point where you can't do any more with falcon nine and if that point is before the objectives of your program that's a problem right at that point is past the program but not where you are now that it's fine, right? And so I get the question is not like, okay, will they be able to like get

better at this? Of course they will. But the question is like, are these heat shield tiles fundamentally ready to be iterated on for the next 10 years and eventually get there? Or is there some fundamental design flaw? Like, can they not ever get there no matter how good they are? Right. There's like there's a limit in some situations, right? I think that's the actual open question. To me, that's what it is. Right. Because like not to say that SpaceX isn't the right company to go after a thing that no one's ever done before, but it remains true, nonetheless, that no one's ever done that before, right? NASA tried with a space shuttle, and it did not work anywhere close to what SpaceX needs to do, right? And so that's kind of the open

question to me. Yeah. At the same time, I think the SpaceX methodology is work on the thing that is the next most near-term limiter. And nothing about the starship cadence or scale-up plans indicates that turning around a single heat shield is the thing that's limiting their flight rate. They have to have all the launch sites. They have to have multiple starships to do anything interesting.

And they have to make so much, make and buy, for our conversation in the pre-show last week, make and buy so much methane to fly this many starships before they're limited by how many times they can turn around a single heat shield.

But can I turn that argument back on its head and use it against you though? Let's do it, yeah. I'm not worried about that at all. Of course they're going to build more launch sites. Like, that's that... I'm not worrying about those things. I'm just saying that they have to do those first.

Like, before they're confronted with the problem that... Are they going to do that lots of starships? Right, but that's what I'm saying is that before they're confronted with the problem of we've ran out of starships, all these other ones they still need to go do that also cost billions of dollars. And by the time that they have gotten through all those, they will have flown so many starships that they will know much better the theoretical limit of what they could do with these tiles than people that are that worked on the shuttle 40 fucking years ago and said,

well, we didn't do tiles any better. So why do they think they can do tiles better? And it's like, probably because it's been 40 years and new people are working on it and we have new things that we can do now and new ways of thinking about it and new ways of processing them. I just don't understand how we watched a flight that went so well and then said, but it didn't work 40 years ago when it was a totally different thing. And now we've declared this is the end of the road for the most valuable space company the world has ever seen that has done more than everyone in history. It's crazy. I think maybe you are too online.

I think I am. It's just driving me nuts. It's driving me crazy. I haven't seen that kind of thing. But I still think it's legitimate to be like, you know, if you put all the problems up on the board for SpaceX and be like, these are all the things between now and the objective. I'm crossing off the things that I don't care about. And I because I know they're just, they're going to get there.

eventually. And when I do all that, the He shields are still up. The shield tiles are still up on the board. That's, that's to me why we're talking about it, right? I just feel like it's so dumb that we are because this is the first one they're getting back. And we're like, hell, they'll never do it. And like, I don't know. They just give them a minute. I haven't see, I haven't even towed at the shore yet. And we're doing like, this is a dead end technology. I'm like, I don't, maybe, but like, yeah, you're too online. I guess I am. I've, I've been on line too much. I don't know what it was, Jake, is that Eric felt the need to write about this, take.

And that alarms me as like, this photo that Scott Miley put out of like some broken things, right? Let me move us out of the way. I'm like, yeah, there's some busted ones up there, but guess what? They get to take them back and be like, I wonder what happened with this one. Yeah.

I bet we can fix that. Like, if you compare the first Falcon 9 they got back to the ones that fly today and come back and look at what they were, able to do because they got a bunch of Falcon 9s back, we're in that same boat here. So even if Starship, even if any of these starships never get reused, they will have 25 starships back, even at their low flight rate when they hit two a month, they'll get 25 starships back a year to learn from and actually figure out what the thing is versus just theoretically working

in a lab on what the best heat protection. No, go go out there, fly the thing, get them back, figure it out. And if it's, if tiles aren't, I'm not even committed. I'm not like a tile enthusiast. I don't give a shit, right? If they want to do something different, that's great. I don't really care that much about what technology it is. I just find it maddening that everyone decides on the internet to talk about, is this the dead end of heat shield tiles after they just got the first one back intact? That's a crazy take to me. And all the people that came before you, specifically with regards of SpaceX, but pretty much with every technology it's ever existed, have failed in this argument that you're making of people will never stop your sentence.

If you're talking about technology, people will never, pretty much everyone's been wrong except for people that are like, people will never time travel. They're the only ones still right so far. All right. So the bad take is... Didn't realize they're so mad about this. Sorry. The bad take is concluding that the tiles don't work. And I think the good take is saying this is still an open question. I'm fine with that. No one's saying that. You need to get more online. No one's out here

on these streets saying that, Jake. I got to get out into this discourse here. You got to get into the discourse. Way it into the discourse, you know? Yeah, open up LinkedIn once in a while, Jake. We're the real discourses these days. It's so bad. I can't go on it anymore.

I tried, man. I was like, well, this is it. Hold on. Let me pull up the Eric article that I'm bitching about. My LinkedIn page is mostly just Trump tweets now, and I'm like, when did this happen? I don't know. Your LinkedIn page is Trump tweets? It's, yeah, it's just like politics now.

I don't know. Oh, really? I'm like, I thought we came here to talk about synergy, but. Not anymore. An AI. An AI, yeah. Here's what, this is the article that I'm talking about. Here's what that taught me about B2B sales.

So I think Eric talked to some of these peeps. But if I remember correctly, they also posted on LinkedIn about this as like an op-ed thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. let me open up LinkedIn while we do a podcast this will be healthy that's going to happen right that's going to be yeah we've seen that since the beginning of SpaceX old NASA graybeards making an op-ed being like this is the wrong direction signed Neil Armstrong you know like load and go these apples don't know anything of what they're talking about signed I don't know so I don't know I don't know I don't know I've learned I've learned I've learned I've

not to read those ones. I guess it was just so pervasive that I felt, I felt completely lost as in, as if we're, you know, we are a decade into the Starship program at this point, but like talking about it as if we've seen a thousand and they've never reused, you know, I have to find whoever posted like an analysis of like, even if they reused Starship one time, it would still be really good. And I'm like, oh, okay, there we go. We did the math on that one.

And that's the thing that I think about a lot, too, is like, there is a difference between a viable Starship program and the Starship program that is required to meet the dreams of the company, right? Because you're right. Like, if they just, if they get, you know, with that Scott Manley tweets, like, if they only get reused every two weeks, it's like it's four times better than shuttle. Like, that's a great program. And they're fine. They're going to make boatloads of cash off that. But that is not the objective. Like, if Starship only ever reaches a two-week campaign.

cadence is like missed the mark tremendously right that's kind of what I mean by about the definition of reusability like that is only four times faster in spatial it needs to be 40 times faster than spatial like maybe a hundred times faster than space shuttle right like because they want to they want to lower the launch price and if you want to have if you want to drop a zero or two off starships launch price cost price either one like that that thing has got to be generating revenue constantly right it needs to be like an airplane where it just like they'd unload load up again and off they go. Yeah, where we're complaining about how they load people on the plane

versus the concept that they are loading people on the plane. I think they should do middles out, back the front. Those jet engines need to be like literally spinning on fuel for like 22 hours every day. But yeah. Anyway, that's my point. The long and short of it is Starboat's very cool. I love the pictures. Starboat is great.

Great. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think they're going to do? I'm thinking they're going to tow this thing back and then what? Put it on a bar. Just bring it home. Where are they bringing it?

Australia? Where are they taking this sucker? Yeah, it's going to, I looked it up. Dampier? There's a port in North. It's going to where? Dampier. It's a French word.

Sounds like a word you should be able to pronounce. This is one of those times where I'm like, do they say it properly in French or do they have some weird Aussie thing to eat? damn, you know, like whatever a stupid thing you're going to do. Damny. Yeah. Yeah. You guys do that a lot too with French words, but.

Name one. Who's our boat, boat loving friend? Gav offshore. Is he, he's tracking? Is that where you found out where this is going? No, I looked it up. I was like, what's the ship? And I went to marine traffic and I did my own research, you know?

I did my own research. Go Australis, right? Australis, Australis. Hey, speaking of Australia, quick side jag. Super weird side jag, Jake. But we've got people putting in the work for us out there in the world. I just want the Aussies to know. I mean, not Aussies too, because this guy's famous elsewhere.

I'm going on Josh Zips podcast on Tuesday. Josh Zips. Zips. Yeah. S is EPS. We have an anomaly. who is a producer over there that tricked Josh

into having a space conversation on his very popular podcast. Uncomfortable conversations, which we will not be having. I assume unless I get into this phase and I start arguing about beach shield tiles, he doesn't know it's uncomfortable yet

until I get on there and start ripping LinkedIn a new way. Or maybe he's been like studying you. He's going to come in real hot. Yeah. Is it appropriate for a billionaire to be in charge of this? And you're just like,

shit. Yeah, my, my, my rampant homerism the last couple of weeks since the IPO where I feel like I'm the only one seeing the Matrix, yes. Honestly, that could very well be a bubble, Anthony. You're exactly right that that may be exactly the song. But anyway, some people out there might know Josh Sepp's and I'm going on there. And we appreciate all the anomalies. And we should use this as a moment to shout out if any anomaly anywhere in the world produces any kind of media,

you should get Jake and I on there and trick your hosts to have us on. Yeah. Thank you for your service. Always fun. There we go. Okay. Starliner. There's a...

I just want to know if Eric Burger is still the real Eric Burger. We'll go two for two on this, Jake. We'll go two for two on the Eric Berger questions. We should have him on the show, hey? Let me just, yeah, let me just... I should call them right now on speakerphone and see the answers. Who are you and what you should I? I don't know, maybe it might do this.

But look at this. These are the most two. That Terminator scene? What's your dog's name? I might, maybe I'll text them. Your parents are dead. Don't say anything when you answer this phone because you're going to be live. But the top, the most two recent articles by one, Eric Berger is experts warn current

Starship heat shield tech is dead end for rapid reuse. And the next one, actually Starliner might fly into space this year. What's happened? He went on vacation, I think, and he came back a different person, Jake. Yeah, yeah. He's feeling compassionate. He wants to give a little. They're feeling good about Starliner.

Starliner is, I don't know. I have nothing to say about it. So I'm bringing this up because of this whole section here about Dragon not flying beyond 2030. And I think I saw some... This is a great story. I love that story. I'm here for that rumor. Did I see some tweets last week that SpaceX is no longer even booking Falcon 9s?

I know we talked about it as a thing being talked about, but I saw some tweets, right? Yeah. So did you follow the drama on that? I don't think so. So there's these rumors that they're not booking transporters. And then the rumors got bigger and it's like, no, they're straight up not booking Falcon 9s. That's what we talked about last week. Yeah.

And Bloomberg published that. Okay. And then some guy on Twitter was like, hey, I'm the SourceNet article. and I made it all up and they didn't fact check me. Got them. Got those big legacy media. Is that true? Yeah.

I don't know if it's true, but that had the tweet happened. And like he's got whatever email receipts. So now I don't know what's true. And then it's like, what a stupid thing to do? That's good. That's good internet. Yeah. I'm like, oh man, you idiots.

Like, what are you doing? Sounds like a sales drive. They were trying to get that price up. I don't know. It was something like that. But anyways, I don't know what's true anymore. I think I heard the transporter stuff before that article, though, so I feel like there's some truth to it. And maybe this troll just like actually gently was correct.

I don't know, because I heard that talk has been going around the industry, I would say. So maybe it was one very motivated Falcon 9 salesperson who's trying to boost their numbers and the seeding this out there. And it made the rounds, right? Yeah. it could very well be that and it could so I want to I want to compare the dragon story though to our take from the the transporter hubbub which is well they're just not selling them yet but they could change their mind very quickly right yeah there's the the the like point of no return is very far in the future yeah but is dragons dragon I feel like has a different relationship

with that right like turning down the dragon operations feels like it would take longer, so you would start that sooner than just not flying any more Falcon 9s. Is it, though, like, because they're not making more, right? Right, that's my thing that was. Weren't they going to run out? They've got a batch of them. And I don't know how they were operating now. Three, three or three or?

I thought it was like five. Is it five? Intrepid, no, independence. What are they? You haven't named a single one yet. Eclipse? What are they called? Anyway, there's a handful of them that exist, and they're flying all the NASA missions.

So like if NASA ends in 2030, then it's like they can they could continue to sell the NASA rate without building any new hardware, right? Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know how many how many flights they could get out of these. Because they're all currently at between four and six flights, the crew ones, specifically. Right, but as you said, I've got them all pulled up. There's five. Can you actually legitimately name all five dragons? There's the one that starts with an eye and one that starts with an E. There's no eye and there's two E's.

There's no eyes. There's no eye. Don't look it up. Don't look it up. Integrity was Orion. Yeah, it was an integrity. Intrepid's a space shuttle. Right.

There's no eyes. Get off an eye. There's no eyes. It's not Enterprise. No. Close. Endurance? Endurance.

You got endurance. Okay. Yeah. there's not an endeavor is there there there's an endeavor yep is there yeah okay so that's the first one yeah yeah got the two ease okay uh there was like a there's like a sheik name there's like a it's like a it's like a snakey one it's like uh a snakey one wow a dragony snakey one you know there's like a cool name uh you want letters would letters help you yeah give me letters give me You've got an R, an F, and a G left.

Resilience? Got it. A G and an F. F. F is currently in space. Freedom? Freedom. And you've got a G left.

I admittedly would not have remembered this one. I'm guessing American words now. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't, this one I don't remember being named, which was Grace. You wouldn't have gotten that. Yeah, Grace. Yeah, I've never heard of course. No, Axiom 4.

That's why you didn't pay attention. That's made up. You made that up. All right. Anyway. So yeah, they've got five. Five crew dragons. But they've all flown four, five, and six times.

Except for Grace. Grace only flew once so far. I don't know. How many? Do you think you think you can do 20 times? Probably. You told me that they've solved heat shield tiles. So what's the problem?

Yeah, here we go again. It's PICA X is the problem. I think I just don't, I'm probably more of a fan of, we don't think we need to fly Dragon Pass 2030 because what the hell is the market for Dragon Pass 2030? Obviously, that's the obvious thing that's actually happening here. Yeah. Yeah. It turns out that the whole crude, crude capsule program, Boeing and SpaceX, was just a government only thing.

So now Jared Isigman and NASA has said there's no market for a commercial space station and SpaceX has confirmed it. The only crew capsule actually flying and making money is confirmed. And the one most interested in markets. And they're like, no, there's nothing there for us. Yeah, it's kind of, it would be a bummer because Dragon does seem like a useful, that's a useful thing to have, even if you fly Starship, right? Like, if you fly Starship up as like a, I mean, I guess not, because any, any, uh, Starship human spaceflight thing, whether that's flying humans on Starship or Starship

as a space station, any of those scenarios also comes with it that Starship is doing really well and flying a lot. So I was going to say if you had Starship up as a space station and you needed a quick get up and down one or two people because of a medical thing, like Dragon's a lot easier. But if you're already doing Starship so well, it's not. Yeah, that's the thing. Like Space X has never liked that. They think about Falcon Heavy, right? Falcon Heavy only exists because Falcon 9 can't quite close the deal on the national security payloads. They get like seven out of nine or whatever it is, eight and a nine. So they have to have this like Band-Aid Falcon heavy thing that exists and they hate it.

And Elon's tried to cancel it before and I hate it. And you have the same thing. It's like, yeah, great. Dragon's awesome. And maybe you can do like one thing or whatever that Starship can. But that means the Starship's not doing its job. Right. And their plan is Starships can handle all this.

So I don't know. To me it makes pretty obvious sense. Yeah. That's a shopping block. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Give me your power ranking of early 2030s.

There's a commercial space station that's flying and it's buying buying flights. Give me your power ranking of companies that you think were most likely to be other providers of human spaceflight capsules. Ooh. Buy 2030 or just the next? No, no. Just, yeah. In the 2030s, the next tranche of human space. spaceflight capsules that are not SpaceX?

I think blue has to be on that list. Not necessarily because I have a tremendous amount of faith that they can execute it, but because it just very obviously has to be part of their plans, and I know they're working on it. Yeah. And so it has to be on that list.

Are you going them as number one, or are you just laying out all your options and then you'll sort them? I'm starting just as the options. Making the list. I don't know how many other options there are though, right? Well, you get into making it up a little bit on your own. So that's kind of what I'm probing at is who else do you think might get in this game? Relativity, Stoke. I would put Stoke on the list as like an interesting option. Yeah. I think Rocket Lab needs to enter your list.

Yeah, probably, right? Neutron's the right size, but kind of a weird format for it. A couple years ago, I might have said somebody would buy Starliner, but now I'm like, that's just a boat anchor now. That's cheaper to just. But would you keep a in the mix? Do you think that they're still in the mix? I can't imagine they are. No. I've flipped. I've flipped on that. I don't think it's eligible. Even if there's three available?

Like, we've now found out that the atlases that are slated for Starliner cannot do anything else. That has been. That's confirmed. News that has been reported. That's a question I had because they got the extra centaur engine, but there's no fairings. That's pretty a big problem, right? No fairings and they can't, there's no boosters for it. Right. So they are, those atlases are just six of those left?

Six of them left. They're just there. NASA is definitely, sounds like NASA is going to use one of them at least, probably two or three. Yeah, they're already, and they've already got their foot in the door for like, we're only going to get three or whatever, right? Three or the six. So there's probably at least six and or at least three, but maybe more available. So I would, I would leave on the table that Boeing is going to sell those clearance three, you know, like get them out of the Kmart bin, but like, I don't think they're going to, they're not going to invest in it and granted new life on Vulcan and make more of them and not happen. I don't even know if ULA is going to be around in four years.

Like, I don't even know anymore. Like, it's looking real dark over there, you know, like. Yeah, you're not wrong, man. So I, unless they start figuring out how to fly Starliner on New Glenn, like I just don't see. I don't see a path for that. All right. And it becomes even less profitable. All right.

So you have... I think blue is probably the top of my list. And then like it's some maybes from Rocket Lab and Stoke. Rocket Lab makes so much sense to me. I mean, they've kind of hinted and talked about it before. And if you want to be and give me your best Peter Beck impression of saying an end to end space company. You can hit me that that real quick.

It's a good, it's good one. It's a good one for them. If you want to be an end to end space company, that's one of the ends. Right? Now they've got a, it's a bit out actually. Yeah.

They've got a suborbital. They've got an orbital small. They've got a larger orbital coming. They've got multiple launch sites. Human space flights is the last thing they need. Wallops gets them to good locations for humans. What can Rocket Lab buy, I mean, I don't think they're going to buy a full ready-to-go captain. They buy Dragon.

No, do they, like, what can they buy, like, from maybe at one level down at, like, systems and components that would, like, accelerate their, their... Give me your best Peter Beck on the Exploration Company. Exploration. Yeah. Exploration? Uh-huh. Wait, which one is that? again. Is that the European?

Yeah. This is the one that just set up an office per your interest in Houston. Getting in the club, eh? They're doing cargo with Nix and then sort of also hinted out, hey, maybe we'll

take the Dragon route and go to humans with this. What's the diameter of that Nix thing and what is the diameter of Neutron? I don't know, good question There's my question Well, neutron's huge

Neutron's monstrous right Seven meters at the base or whatever It's huge It's chunky Yeah but like it has the whole second stage Inside the fairing thing I know that's the weird part Yeah

But I don't think Yeah I'm asking what is the diameter Of the payload Of the payload yeah I think five meters or whatever It's big enough All right It's made to carry five meter

Ferrings I think right Yeah I don't know I'm doubting myself Every other word I say seven meter chompers or whatever, right? But then like the thing comes out and it's like... Yeah, but you know my theory about that.

I always think that's something weird's going on with that. This doesn't look... Something still doesn't look... It doesn't look exactly right. What you're describing is the vibe feeling that you learn how to spot after doing this for 10 years where you're like, that only exists on PowerPoint and it'll be refining something more normal later.

I mean, I believe the chomper thing and the hung second stage, but something just, something seems weird about it still. I don't know what it is. Yeah, it's like. That's going to change. Yeah.

And that's colored by the fact that how many times that we had people on this show, including last week, that you pull up the rendering of their thing and they're like, it doesn't look like that anymore. Like, that was just, we've had that conversation a lot. Once you distill a design from the PowerPoint to the actual thing,

it changes a bit. And all the, like, fancy doodads, you're like, actually, we don't really need this. This is just extra fluff. And then that happens, right? Yeah. All right. So power rankings, you're putting blue.

I'm going to make the list and then we'll sort it. Blue origin. We're saying Boeing three star liners. Put in Rocket Lab. Exploration company. Are we putting a flyer on anyone else, like stove or anything? I don't think star liners are guaranteed. I think it's on the table, but it is not guaranteed.

There is totally a world where Boeing says, hey, Senator, if I put this Starliner capsule and this Atlas rocket in the museum in your state, will you give us a nice contract on a missile thing later? And they go, yes, we will do that. And bam, bam, bam, right off done. Great point. Yeah. So blue, I would say, Rocket Lab, my number two.

Starliner may or may not happen. Number three and then Stokes down at the bottom for me. What about Exploration Company? That's the Rocket Lab buy. Oh, you think Rocket Lab buy is Exploration Company? Okay. Yeah, that's the Rocket Lab buy. I feel like they spent a lot of money recently, but, you know, I guess we'll see.

I don't know. I don't necessarily think that because if Exploration Company finds a home with some of these other partners, Voyager or whatever, and they show a little bit of contractual promise, then, I don't know, Europe has not been interested in human spaceflight. They've just always done the math as if it has to be a program that flies on Aryan 6 and costs way too much. So if something presents itself as an opportunity that specifically doesn't cost as much as they would have penciled in, maybe they end up, you know, getting a little bit more ease of backing or something and it becomes more of a thing. Yeah. So it's so tragic. That's kind of the same story,

you know, your favorite narrative of why didn't you use the Ukraine war to fund a new space station? Like, you idiots, like, what were you thinking? This is the same moment for Europe where it's like, if you guys can get your heads out of your ass and not try and tie everything to Airy N6, you have the political inertia to go your own and not rely on NASA right now because you're going to hate you guys right now. You are no one's friend right now in the international community, especially NATO. And like all of us are spending crazy amounts of money to not have to buy your shit anymore. And like this is your chance.

Some of these things are good shit. It is good shit. Yeah. But not with all the, not with all the fucking closet. Everybody hates their friend who has the nice range rover, but then you, you need a ride and you're like I would rather ride in that than you're shitty Honda Civic so I'll give them a call. They could get funding

for a capsule is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. And they could make it work if they said it's okay if this doesn't fly on Area N6. Right. Yeah. You turn the corner on that. I don't know who else I'd like putting this list though, Jake.

No, it's not. There's no market, Anthony. That's what we've learned. Right. Well, is like, if you're Vast, are you not thinking about like vertically integrating that? Like you make the space station, you're not going to find a way to get people there. Ooh. I actually feel like Vast is a bad candidate for that logic because they have been so, what is the list of only what we need to build and nothing further, such as we don't need to build life support, we'll just cheat off dragons.

Yeah, yeah. So they're so committed to the other direction. I think they're a bad can. I think Voyager might be one buying up astrobotic and others that cost a lot of money and are doing interesting things. Like the Voyagers in the world might be a more apt target for that.

Is that business case like dead in the water then? It feels like it. Yeah. Like we built a space station that is a dragon extension and SpaceX is like, by the way. Yeah. Well, now it's a starship extension. So it's toast in 40 months.

Oh. Oh. I mean put it like that. Jeez. Yeah, Starship extension. Yeah. But that's a stupid thing about that. It's just like, you don't need to extend Starship.

It's got enough already. Yeah. Starship can accidentally take a few vast space stations to orbit in the cracks of its payload bay, you know? like oh yeah we didn't notice we just a couple of space stations slipped into the payload bay well you weren't really paying that much attention anyway here you go here to space station i'm looking at your list jake and unfortunately the next most likely thing that i would put on this list is some old space voltron thing or northrop's like we'll do a human rated

sygnus and you know someone else is like sydnest derived crew capsule yeah and no and And someone else is like, we'll figure it out. And dynamics. Yeah, get the lunar hab thing back out. Honestly, I kind of feel like that's the next, because I don't see, I don't see relativity doing anything in that vein, given what Eric Schmidt's interest seem to be. I certainly don't see Firefly doing it to the extent that,

at least doing it in the way that comes about before the 2040s. I don't even know who else I would rank. Are we missing someone obvious in the chat? Nobody's even said anything about it. Are we missing something? No, they're arguing about Starship. Okay, great. Keep it up, everybody.

This one says, Ken says it'll be landing crew on Starship in 28 to 30. Very wrong, very wrong about that. 28 to 30. Landing crew where? Add a planetary body to your comment. SpaceX. That's who we're missing.

Our intention is not SpaceX. Yeah. I bet SpaceX will be around and doing things. I'm trying to find the other Yeah. Because again, one of our primary thesis, Jake, theses over the years has been like new monopoly isn't any better than old monopoly if we're in a monopoly situation. Not that, you know, monopoly, get off my thing with the whole legal definition of it.

I agree with you. but I'm saying you don't want just one company because then what you get is $60 million Falcon 9s for 10 years. It's like you made your launch cost cheaper, but you haven't made your launch price cheaper because you don't need to. So, yeah. Oh, hey, Kerbil guy. Jake, as you know, that it's our 250th? I forgot. Big year for 250th.

July. The 250th you've been waiting in July 2026. Go us. Yeah, I guess the fact that Jake's not putting on this list a new JSC contract to develop a crew launch vehicle. Well, yeah, the other direction you go, does Axiom just get like absorbed into that old space? Ah.

Yeah. You wouldn't, we didn't even put Orion on this, Jake. Orion. Orion. Orion on non-SLS? I can't even I can't even like think that through

without just laughing and like just every couple years they say it's possible and that they're working on it yeah of course it's possible it was designed to do

like that was literally its first mission before it bailed on it I don't know if you know before it was called Orion it was called the multi-purpose crew vehicle

and one of those multi-purposes would go to the goddamn ISS like this is what it was literally for oh my God Does the full circle I'd be like, oh, I guess we'll go to the ISS

and of course by the time they've like, oh, there. More likely outcome, Orion flies non-Arthumus missions to Leo or one of those three starliners flies. Which one would you rate higher? That's a good one. That's a good question.

Oh, shit. Okay. What happens first? a starliner crew flight. Wait, one of the three, do you mean just any starliner crew flight, or do you mean? Those three that aren't going to be flown for NASA under the ice ice ice ice. Yeah, yeah. I don't know.

That's a tough one. The thing that makes it difficult is that I think Orion on not SLS is becoming more viable every day that we get closer to Artemis 3, which is flying Orion to Leo. So like. But our mystery, which is already halfway to Orion not flying on ISS in a sense. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that brings it more likely. We got to put a pole up of this.

Yeah. What do you fly it on, though? Falcon 9. I don't know. No, I guess it's Vulcan at that point, New Glenn, right? Vulcan. I'd say Orion on New Glenn is more realistic than Starliner on New Glenn. Yeah.

But Starliner on New Glenn. another Atlas past ISS. Funniest thing to me would be if, you know, per some people saying this on who Starliner was trying to be sold to, right? Blue Origin was kicking the tires on that for a minute. The funniest thing would be if they buy Orion. If they thought about buying Starliner and they bought Orion while selling things to the child company. It's really funny.

Realistically, if they were kicking the tires in Starliner, then they were absolutely kicking the tires on Orion. like and I don't you can define what kicking the tires is but somewhere in a whiteboard they went Ryan question mark it would happen if we bought that and maybe and then they added Starliner and maybe they went no Ryan's no good then they raced it but like it got that far at least you know could we buy that yeah Lockhe would probably sell it too you I think I guess Lockheed doesn't own it NASA owns it though right that's the problem I don't know wasn't there a thing like

you're too back where it's like you can go commercialize this I mean I forgot about that Remember that when they were going to commercialize SLS? Right. Well, that was commercialized SLS. Wasn't there also a commercialize Orion? Wasn't the whole stack in there? Yeah. And the solid rocket boosters.

Go commercialize those. The things that some people would come up with, man. These are good episodes. I think these are the episodes that half the audience looks forward to is us getting into these weird, down these weird holes together. other. So, hopefully you're enjoying this, people. Jake's leaving us for a few weeks. We may have some pre-recorded. Jake's got a really funny idea for a pre-recorded. Near a fantasy football league thing. So we may do that, but otherwise, I'm going to make Eric Berger come on here one of these weeks and convince

me that he's still Eric Berger. Defend himself? Answer for your crimes, war criminal. What do you think of Tade Pagacha? That's another question that I have for him. All right, we said Rocket Lab a lot. Jake, I'm blowing my opportunity here. You told me that you wanted to talk about the National Security Space Launch Program.

I didn't say it. Jake said it, and I haven't let you talk about it yet. Well, we need to set the record straight because that's not actually what I asked you. And if you go back to your message and read it again, you'll say that I'd, you'll notice that I did not say national security space launch. I said something very close to that.

I remember read it verbatim. Oh. Jake said, we could probably look at Rocket Lab Alaska and the National Security SpaceX launch program too. That's really funny. All right. Okay, so the reason to write that up is someone in our Discord was doing the math on it.

I can see if I could pull up the message here because it was really something else. but basically like how many of these NSSL contracts have gone to SpaceX. I'm going to read the stats from the Discord. These are not fact check. So this is an anomaly opposed to this. But NSL 3 so far is SpaceX 41 launches, ULA 2, and Blue 1. And even if you look at like lane one, right, is the task order based thing.

Yeah, that's the smaller than, you know, the not quite a good one. It's not necessarily smaller, but it is, it is less, less important. Plagegious one. Lane one is so it's like, SpaceX wins, see two task quarters, then three task orders, then one task order, blue gets one, and then SpaceX gets two more. So Blue's got one, all the other at Lane ones have gone to SpaceX. I mean, again. What was that we were saying about Monopolis?

I was going to bring up, you know, riding in your friends range rover where you could ride in a shitty Honda Civic. You know, this thing's flying. This thing's out of here flying. Everybody else pick it up, you know? Yeah. It's now both the biggest risk and the biggest benefit of our 2020s in space, right? Yeah.

It's all roads lead through SpaceX and that's good as long as they'll have us. and it's bad because at a certain point, you know, they're, like, if Starship wasn't breathing down Falcon 9's neck, man, I think things would be kind of bleak right now. Yeah. Well, and not to be morbid, but this is a real legitimate concern, but like how much a SpaceX depends on one person and how much of the commercial space launch industry and the defense industry depend on SpaceX means that like the government, your government is currently very beholden to Elon Musk, right? And not necessarily... They depend on them as much. I still think you do.

I'm less of a buyer of that. I still think he's a pretty, pretty important factor there. And you can maybe like ride the inertia out long enough to spend someone else up, but that's a lot of work, right? You should do that now. You should get started on that.

I like that you think that they don't have a secession plan in place. Are you just, They are not excited by the Tim Cook era of SpaceX. No, but listen, though, like, how many times have we had the conversation that SpaceX is a 5-Sigma outlier and no one can reproduce it? Right, right. Yeah, so do you think that next generation SpaceX can also? And then Jared Isaac comes in and takes over as a CEO of SpaceX. Funnyest timeline.

Funny as timeline. Gets hit by a bus or whatever. Like, Jared's great, but like, is Elon? I don't know. Right. if he was, why doesn't he start his own space company and go on, take after SpaceX, right? I go after him. I don't know.

So that's scary. That's like really scary. Yeah. My prepper streak, my internal, my 5% of my personality that's a prepper is like just panicking about that, right? You've got to be self-sufficient man, make your own goddamn rockets. Yeah, you mean literally how SpaceX got started? It's like the origin story of it.

Yeah, I mean, we'll definitely still be talking about this when we're 70 doing this podcast. Like, what happened in that era, you know? So, 2,500, we will be. Yeah, it's the number one mystery of space of, you know, why doesn't this come together elsewhere? Why doesn't, and it's tricky, too, because when you get to it, when you, like, elevate to a certain level of business model, it takes the rest of the business model to make the business model make sense. So you hit that flywheel moment and no one else has any part of a wheel. And then it's,

you can't even compare the two things anymore. Yeah. Yeah. What does a SpaceX competitor look like anymore? You have to do everything? It's not making rockets. Yeah, it's not making rockets. Like it's like we assume Rocket Lab is going to do a human spaceflight thing because

obviously they need to because they're said end-to-end space company. And that means having your own rockets and having your own spacecraft and having your own satellite bus and creating your own rocket fuel and having your own launch sites and launching your own space stations and landing on the moon yourself and running a political party and like what all of a sudden you've now operated half of the world economy because the rest of your business required yeah but if you scale up enough you you need all that yeah and that's part of what you know in the IPO discussion i was like that's impossible to get across to people that that aren't listening to this show that understands

the scale that SpaceX is demanding of themselves is such that SpaceX will be one of the largest producers of chips and one of the largest producers of methane in the world. Does this end up like... Maybe it just never actually happens, and maybe this is just like another Amazon, right? Like, Amazon is kind of a similar thing where like they're everything and you can't, you can't really compete with them and they just control it, right? They're like retail, they own it. Web infrastructure, they own it, right?

And they're like, now they're getting into like comms and stuff. There are also just a behemoth of thing that you can't just spin up a competitor at Amazon so that they keep in their lane. Like, that's not really a thing anymore, right? Nor does that stress anyone out. Like, everyone just goes, oh, I bet I find a way to make a bunch of money also using Amazon stuff. That's just fine now. We're just okay with Amazon's just there.

It's not going anywhere. That's just how you buy things on the internet now, you know? I think that's new space is entire. hope. But then you hear stories of there's no more falconines and no more dragons after 2030. I still think that all those stories are written with the caveat of if Starship goes well. Yeah. Right?

Yeah, I mean, just to go back to that, I think the turnaround point for Dragon is still pretty far in the future. Yeah. Not least of which, because ISS had probably going to get extended past 23. It's true. All right, what's your... I'm making you do a lot of rankings on this show, so keep it going. What year do you think the ISS hits the atmosphere? No, we're going to go get it.

The outpost guys are going to go get it. They're going to go harvest it with Joy. Joy's going to eat the space station. It'll still hit the atmosphere, but protected. It'll come home and they'll put it in a museum. Okay, so what year do you think that happens? What year does the last human leave the ISS? Nobody wants to have that happen on their watch.

So it's going to happen in year one of a presidency because it'll been past the point in no return from the last president. So I'm going to say 2033. Okay, I like that. That's good logic, man. But that's still... So when we're president from 20 to 32, oh, that could be this, he could win re-election.

though, right? Oh, shit. That's gamble. That's gamble right there. 2033. That means you have to have something else in place. The old lame duck deorbit. If you're the guy that brings it down, you've got to have something else ready to go. So this bodes well for commercial space. Wow, that was the most hopeful part of this whole show, is that you found a port and a death star there for a human spaceflight. Just because the president's, hopefully, is going to change in 2030, 2028. Don't do that. Because they're going to be a new president.

They're going to try and run for your election, so they're going to, they're not going to set themselves up to fail. There you go. How's that? That is a lot of importance on the ISS program, and I admire your commitment to the bit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so in that mindset, that's six additional dragon flights past 2030. plus a Dragon XL or what's it called?

Dragon XL. That's not a Dragon XL. Maybe it is. The U.S. DORB vehicle, right? Dragon with all the Throids. Yeah. Dragon XXL.

Yeah. Yeah. See, we're going to find a spot for all the Starliners. We'll figure it out. Yeah. That's, Dragon gets retired. 2030, Starliner carries the end of the program.

Comes roaring back, baby. I mean, that would be the funniest outcome. The funniest timeline, yeah. The funniest line is the entire dragon programs happens, and then they flip the keys to Boeing and go, you could take the last six. That is the absolute funniest outcome. Not only do we capture the flag, we also operated our entire spaceflight program under between the time of you launching and starting to do crew rotations.

Oh, man. Can you imagine? That's so funny. That's so funny. All right. Well, there we have it. That was a show, man. That was a show.

It was a show. We went places, man. We feel better? I feel like we got some stuff off our chest there. I did, for sure. Yeah. I'm glad that you're going on vacation to not read the discourse. Who knows what I'll be when you come back?

Dude, ever since I stopped reading the discourse, I'm just a much happier guy. I'm out here in these streets, Jake, harvesting this content, okay? I have to go have an uncomfortable conversation with Josh Zep's Epps in four days, and I'm out here finding the uncomfortable stuff. There you have it, folks. You have a sign off message for us, Jake? Anything you want to? Parting words?

Enjoy the eclipse. Sixers and six. I will. Sixers and six. Congratulations on the king. That's his nickname. They do. King James.

Great billboard in Philadelphia from Visit Philly. 1776. Goodbye, King George. 2026. Hello, King James. Excellent billboard. Great work. It's great.

Great work. That's pretty good. Great work. All right. Well, you know, James would be good for you. Fun fact for people that don't know the details there. They can figure out why you say that.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right. Bye. Join us at Discord. Offnon.com slash Discord. Find out why. Flugs.

Bye, everybody. Did you figure how to say bye in Norwegian? No. Bye. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and the death.