Off-Nominal - 36 - December Hurricanes

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Jake and Anthony are joined by Eric Berger of Ars Technica to talk about the space policy fallout of the 2020 US election, Eric’s upcoming book, and Jake’s bad decisions.DrinksShiner Berliner Weisse - Spoetzl Brewery - UntappdOlde English 800 - Miller Brewing Company - UntappdOrbital Tilt IPA (Galaxy) - Captain Lawrence Brewing Company - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 36 (with Eric Berger) - YouTubeJim Bridenstine is leaving NASA. How should we assess his 30-month tenure? | Ars TechnicaSeven countries join NASA to explore the Moon peacefully, transparently | Ars TechnicaThanks to SpaceX, NASA regains a capability it lost for a decade | Ars TechnicaLiftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceXPicksKevin M. Gill (@kevinmgill) on Twitter for his Fleets and other visualizations of JupiterThe End of Everything | Book by Katie Mack | Official Publisher Page | Simon & SchusterHow a Thanksgiving Day gag ruffled feathers in Mission Control | Ars TechnicaAndrew Jones (@AJ_FI) on Twitter for the best coverage of China’s space activityFollow EricEric BergerEric Berger | Ars TechnicaLiftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceXFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterWatch the Launch of Mars 2020 Perseverance with us! - WeMartians PodcastFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Well, guys, we're through it. We're through somehow the American election. Kind of? When is it really true? This is the question. It's through it. So, congrats everybody for surviving.

It was a crazy week. But we've got some fun stuff to talk about, I think, as fallout from this. So I'm super stoked to be back on stream here with everybody. We've got a good friend with us today. Eric Berger, how's it going? Welcome back. It's my pleasure to be back, guys. It's going fabulous on this Sunday. We always have you slot it in for August, if my memory serves correctly. For some reason, you just became the August guest, but this year I had a child in August, so you got bumped. Well, if you're going to be bumped, be bumped by a baby. I think that's a reasonable trade.

Well, it's good timing too with election stuff, right? Because it's, you're fun to talk with on on administration politics. So I'm really glad that we could get you at this time of year. He had the hot drama before there was even expected drama. You did, yeah. I assume that's what we'll get into at some point here. But should we start with drinks? First, let's start with Eric's epic background.

Okay, all right. Because we are doing this live on YouTube. We do this now on YouTube. I can officially say we're, other than the technical setup that Eric complains about from time to time, we're fairly good at at this point. and it's reliable that we're on YouTube now. So if you are listening and you want to watch

to see Eric's epic background, you've got to go over to YouTube.com slash Alphenomenal. Please tell me about where you got that epic centerpiece. Yeah, so I brought a few posters. One is the Soviet poster over here, which celebrates Sputnik 1, 2, 3, and 4.

And I picked that up in a shop and biking. when I went to a launch over there and I just thought it was pretty cool to sort of see the Soviet propaganda back in the late 50s about those missions when they were lording it over the Americas. Yeah, and I used to know what it said in Cyrillic, the Russian language, but now I don't. And then over here is... You got a dual side. Nice. I got to bring that one close. I'll bring this one close.

This is the fight for Falcon 1 mission patch. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. Foreshadowing, foreshadowing. Foreshadowing. And it's the first time, first time they put a four-leaf clover on the patch, and they've done it every time since. So, yeah. A hundred later.

More than 100. More than 100. Did something get canceled tonight? Did it get canceled? I don't know. Somebody said it in the chat. I'm on vacation, so I'm out of loop. So if it got canceled.

Why are you with us then? Probably for the beer. I'm here for the beer. What are you got over there, Eric? I have a Shiner of Ice, a white Shiner. There it is. I'm keeping a cold in Tana. She can a Shiner.

So when I was in college back in the 90s, I don't know, were you guys born in the 90s? Yep. Most of it. So that was it for me. I'm an old guy. There was a brewery in China, Texas that we went to and had a good time. And it's just a Texas brewery, and they make great beers. They make blocks.

They make whites. They make all kinds of things. So it's false. I'm very kind of Shiner vines. They make Ruby Redbird, right? They do, yes. I have actually some of that in my fridge. It's so refreshing when it's hot out.

I went to this one wedding one time. In the middle of summer, it was hot, and they had all those. And I was just like, damn, this is so refreshing and dangerous that it's this refreshing while it's very hot out. So I do love those. Very, very good memory. Yeah, that's right. Jake, what you got? Well, you know, I was trying to think of what to get. And I was thinking about our good friend, Jim Bridenstein,

and how he will not be the NASA administrator anymore. And so I was like, well, we got to pour one out for J.B. And then I was like, well, what's the best beer to pour one out with? And so I went and got the beer, the meme beer, that I've never tried before. This might be a huge mistake. Oh, no. Don't.

Oh, my God. Like, is it that bad? I've never had it. I don't know anything about it. Old English 800 malt liquor. Have you had malt liquor before? No. Okay.

Okay. If you drink even eight ounces of that, it's going to knock you on your butt. Well, it's only, it's only eight point something percent. Okay. All right, man. Are you going to do Edward 40 hands, too? No, no, into the J.B.

First of all, it's disgusting. Just pouring one out for J.B. here. Exactly. Jesus. Okay, so here we go. It's going to be a great episode. Hmm. Okay.

It's beer. It's not. Don't be, don't be fooled. Don't be fooled. Well, maybe Eric's never drank it out of a coffee. Because it might change significantly when it's of a coffee mug. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. But anyway, so this is to J.B. Cheers, buddy. The Canadian, the most sad about this. What do you got, Anthony? I've got the best kind of beer, which is free beer, thanks to an anomaly. I've got to get my head out of the frame so it focuses. Focus.

Did I get it? Orbital. IPA, Captain Lawrence Brewery. One of our local anomalies, formerly local anomalies, Christine moved out of Philadelphia and sent me a message before she moved that they had beer that they would like to drop off that they could not bring with them on the move. So I've received several of these. I think I've drank one on the show before.

Somebody did. I think I remember it, yeah. Because it's a nice space beer. I can't get it to focus real good because of the facial recognition thing, but... I can see it or real tilt. I don't know what's going on with it, but it's delicious. And it was thanks to an anomaly out there. So best listeners.

Yeah. I love when they bring us beer. We used to get like semi-sponsored by beer on like our fourth episode or whatever. Yeah, that was really fun. It's hard for me to get it now because I can't get it over the damn border. Oh yeah. That shit's close for a while. Yeah.

So I have to only get. So if Canadian listeners out there want to try a beer on me, I'm listening. Not malt liquor. Yeah, not malt liquor. This is strong. He's still doing complete sentences. We'll see how long that lasts. I can feel it in the back of my throat.

I'm not going to lie. So, yeah, that's good. Where are we starting with this, Jake? We're getting right into the election shit? I may as well. Well, let's go into the pre-stuff. So, Eric, you were the guy making the rounds on the internet as being the guy that had foresaged the departure of Jim Brynstein, regardless of the election result.

Yes. Can you divulge more information now that we know the old. election result and these people are no longer in power in Washington. Well, most people are still in power. But here's what I can say is obviously if Joe Biden was elected, which he was, Brydenstein was going to step down. And that was pretty clear because Bridenstein probably would be a little uncomfortable serving under a Democratic administration.

He's got young kids. He wants to spend time with them. that's not like BS. Like he has got this young family. He's been traveling a lot. And so he's sort of looking forward to getting back to that. And the bottom line is the Democratic administration was not going to have a conservative Republican congressman from Oklahoma as the NASA administrator. Yeah.

And that just was not how it was going to play out. And so there was no scenario in which he would remain under Biden. Now, theoretically it's possible he could have stayed under Trump. But I have it from three different sources. that he was out. One of the main reasons is, well, there's just a couple reasons. One is he had not been this fire-breathing, you know, administrator out there slagging the Obama space program. I mean, if you look at the president when he talks about space, he talks about how it was dead when he came into office, we were going nowhere, the space sports were shut down, tumbleweeds. And Bridenstein has

always been pretty careful, except when he's been in the presence of Trump to say, you know, look, I inherited a lot of great things from my predecessors. We've built upon them. We've got a good plan. Trump is supportive of the space, but we did not do all this on our own. The other factor is, so the first chief financial officer under the Trump administration was a guy named Jeff DeWitt. He was a Politico from Arizona.

And he stayed there for a couple years. and he was basically like the White House's, the campaign's person at the agency. So the way it worked under Trump is, and I think it works under a lot of presidencies like this. But you have your sort of, you have your civil servants at the employees, and then after the election,

like the campaign sends someone there to look after the campaign's interests, right? Not to look after the agency's interests, but to look after the campaign's interest. So Trump or so Jeff DeWitt was kind of that, guy at NASA for a while, basically, you know, looking at it. And you look at like, you go down to the deputy chief of staff at NASA. And there were other Politicoes that came in, but DeWitt was a guy. He and Bridenstein didn't always get along. They had kind of a falling out. And DeWitt eventually

went back to Arizona, left CFO. And I think it was about a year ago because his last thing was this budget rollout for the fiscal year 2021 budget back in February, maybe, March, something like that. Whenever they did it and had their press conference, that would think was his last hurrah. So DeWitt then came back to the campaign and was not like the deputy campaign manager, but had a fairly senior role in the campaign. So it was, you know, if Trump had won and he didn't win, but he came fairly close, so it's not inconceivable that he would have won, and had he won, DeWitt's sort of star would have been on the rise. And I'm told by people I trust, not by Jim,

but by people who know these sorts of things that DeWitt would have pushed for Bridenstein to be able. And then the concern, the legitimate concern, is that they would have put someone much more willing to shake up the agency, not necessarily in a good way. and so, you know, we wouldn't have had Jim and we would have had someone probably almost certainly not as good as Jim. Yeah. You know, I think that's like something that's maybe like not talked about very much about Brian Stein.

Like everyone's very quick to recognize like the skill he had with the job. Right. Like he did a good, he did good work getting these programs moving and getting some good stuff off the ground. And everyone's super happy about that. But like we, I think we need to just remember. remember and like be really thankful for the fact that he probably protected NASA from the Trump administration you know and like he may have saved NASA from Trump you know in a weird way like and I don't know if I how that sounds coming on my mouth but like um as a dirty Canadian it sounds like

foreign interference to me or interfering with your your elections and stuff but like I just I just think that like there was there's a whole different path we could have gone down where there was a fire breathing Trump appointee in that role. and like, what would that have looked like? I have no idea. Honestly, that's almost, it's kind of incredible turn of events because it was the politician that went into NASA and got all this flack for being a politician.

And I think those instincts did exactly what you're saying. He knows how to play the game. So, yeah, when he's in the Oval Office, he's saying the things that are parsable to us three is like, okay, he's saying pretty much the same thing he always says, but obviously bend the knee to Trump because you're in the Oval Office, and you got to play the game when you're in that level.

But then he goes out, and he's in congressional hearings, chug and Mountain Dew, he's at these conferences, and he's saying things that are totally different. Or even, you know, in the DM2 events when we were all talking about how weird it was when the Biden campaign had that event with Charlie Bolden and Bill Nelson, and they were all giving props to Brian Stein. He was sending him back. It's that, like, the reason that a politician was good there and selected by Trump,

the Trump administration, was almost the downfall because they, he won't, like, he's a better politician. when it comes down to the politics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great point that sort of he, the way I think the way I phrased it is he held the line for NASA. He kept it from becoming a politicized agency.

I mean, if you look across the board, the Department of Justice now is a politicized agency under Trump because Bill Barr is seen as someone who's doing the president's bidding, not the country's bidding. Same as the FBI, CIA. I mean, you think about these agencies, that are pretty independent and sort of have been dragged into this. And I wouldn't say it was just Bridenstein.

It certainly helped that he had Scott Pace at the National Space Council. Pace is definitely a guy who leans a little more conservative, but understands this space program and did a lot of good things in terms of setting space policy. I think the fact that this was the one true area, aside from the coronavirus task force, that Mike Pence had under his bailiwick. And so Pence took it seriously. and he too, except when he was sort of in the presence of Trump, really was fairly bipartisan about his approach to space. And that kind of freed Bridenstein to be the same way. So I would

give credit to all three of them. And I think you two are right in that Bridenstein is a politician. and, you know, he could have faced a revolt on day one. You remember the, what was the NASA, the anti-NASA account or the NASA Resist account? Rogue NASA, right? Yeah, where did that go? I mean, like, I think everyone found out who it was in that folded up shot pretty quickly. If you guys found out who was, I don't know who it was. I thought it came out who it was, and then everyone were like, oh, sorry about that, and it went away.

Anyway, I mean, he did face a very serious pushback from Earth scientists. when he came into the agency. Yeah, he did. He did not choose to set fire or try to clean house. He played politician, and it served him well because at the end of the day, most of the agency rallied behind him and respected what he was trying to do. I remember being at an LPSC Lunar Planetary Science Conference in Houston. I think it was the 2018 one, maybe 2017 or 2018 one,

when like the first, it was like the first time that the Trump budget had come up. where they had just gone like hack and slash like the budget request had come out hack and slash to the science program and the planetary program had at the same time gone up and uh the so we were in the the NASA town hall and um the planetary director um I'm blanking now it was the old guy and before Lori Glaze it's Jim Green. Jim Green right? Yeah so Jim Green was up there and he was having to defend the planetary science budget because the planetary science is like This is dirty money. You're taking it from Earth science. What are you going to do about it? And I just remember him being very forcey, like, slamming his fist on the table, being like, we are not giving any money back to the treasury.

This is planetary money, and that's how it's going to be. But I mean, you're totally right, though. Like, there was a huge uproar over the Earth science stuff. And I know, you know, we kind of know now that the slashes to Earth science and education outreach. That was all just for show. We always got funded every year. Well, and that came out in that recent Senate bill that went through. that had a whole section in there that was like, please stop doing this. Because we all know the shell game that you're playing where you're canceling these things.

You know, we're going to give it money. Just stop that. I did appreciate that that made it out there. Because that's something that was a tent pole of the Trump budget requests, but that is not unique. That's not the thing that only happens under Trump. That's like a classic budget request, you know,

policy tactic. Yeah, save money with the stuff you know won't get cut. Yeah. Hmm. So, Brianstein, you know, everyone always wonders where he's going to go from here, what kind of things he's going to get into. I would bet a lot of money that he's staying in space. He kind of got his foot in the door in the space world, and he loves it, so he obviously want to stay. I think the real question is whether he goes, like, private industry or if there's, I could see him going to the defense side of space.

He's obviously a military pilot, got a lot of clout in that area. With the talk of the DOD side of space about how they want to revolutionize and take advantage of the new industry, he's somebody that could certainly play a role if there was a role open in any, not that he would be the head of any particular agency under a Biden administration, but, you know, could he get pulled into some project or some lower-level organization? I don't know if you've got anything on that or like, what do you want to do, whether it's just take a year off, wait for the pandemic to go over and fly to Tahiti for a couple of months, then figure it out. That might be a plan, but where do you think that he will land going forward?

I don't have any definitive information on this. I know he's been thinking about it. My sense is that he will go back to Oklahoma for a time. And I think it's entirely possible that he ends up running for governor or Senate in Oklahoma. None of the Senate seats are opening up anytime soon. And so... Kendra Horns is. He doesn't want to go back to the house, I don't think. No, he had a term limit or something for the house. He's a self-imposed term. In Hoffie's seat, I don't think he'll run again in six years, or he may run for the governor of Oklahoma. I suspect he'll end up back in politics, but maybe he does take a space job.

If something opens up him, he'd be great as head of a space foundation or something like that where you do some fundraising, you know, organize, things like that. Certainly would love to see him. in the space industry. Move to Alabama and wait for that one Senate seat to open up? Well, if we can talk about that, if you'd like. That was an oblique reference,

I think, to Senator Shelby, who is up for re-election in 2022. And the latest intelligence I have on him is that he probably will run again. Really, because isn't he like a 106 or something? I think he's 82. or will be 82.

Jake, that's pretty young for our government, man. But I mean, our president is 77. Or our president-elect, excuse me, is 77. So, you know, it wouldn't be too old, certainly for the U.S. Senate. You know, there was some recent reporting on the fact that Shelby, who is, by the way, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. So he oversees the entire budget that U.S. Senate puts out. and oh by the way

it is not an exaggeration to say that he has a reputation within the U.S. Senate as being someone who is at the trough for Alabama feeding sort of in an outsized manner on contracts and he has the power to do that

and whether the U.S. Senate stays and they control the Republicans is going to depend upon those two elections in Oklahoma, or excuse me, Alabama, Georgia, yes, thank you. On January 5th, and it's difficult to say which way

those are going to go, but it's probably more likely than not that Shelby will be remain in charge. So anyway, what I was saying is he has not been fundraising for re-election campaign, and I thought that may mean that he was maybe not going to run, but now it's my understanding he probably is going to run,

and he's got plenty of money, the bank and he would very likely be reelected. I feel like if J.B. went back to politics, he would sit down at the desk and by like Thursday afternoon his first week, he'd be like, shit, man, what did I do? This is not as fun. His love for being in space is infectious when you're talking to him. I think, you know, I think in many ways he certainly has come back to the center as administrative of NASA. It might be hard for him to go back to the far right. That was in the next question. Is it?

Republican Party in Oklahoma. Like what are his true colors, right? Because we've had the debate a lot of times was, was he being, you know, really, really right wing to get the conservative seats, you know, in Oklahoma and his real self is centered? Or is he, you know, being centered to take the NASA role and his real self is to the race, right? You know, which one's the real gym? I personally think the real gym is not the one that's running. in elections because elections make you not a human anymore and you're just a person who collects money to make sure you go into a voting booth on a particular day and push the right buttons.

But it is the perennial debate about him. So yeah, I mean, like Eric's saying, does that, did he burn a couple bridges there? Especially right after his nomination when he's in the, you know, houses of Congress saying that, yeah, it totally changed my mind on the whole climate change thing. And I talked to Nancy Pelosi about, you know, Artemis and, you know, doing stuff in California with Democrats. I don't know. I'm not a political analyst by any stretch of imagination.

These campaigns would be years into the future. But I think Jim is great at understanding his audience and speaking to his audience. Obviously, you know, a smart guy. What is entirely genuine to me is that he does have a passion for space and for sort of seeing the country advance. and the things that he did for NASA,

I think in terms of really pushing commercial space and recognizing the value and it's important in NASA is really going to be a benefit. Now, you had asked, you know, what might NASA in the second term under a conservative leadership under Trump have looked like? You know, I have a sense that the space program would have been pretty vibrant and that they would have looked at where their successes had come

in the first term, which had been through crew one, right, SpaceX, demo two, crew one missions, and this is the company that's delivering. I could very easily have seen them double down on SpaceX and saying, we're going to the moon and Mars on Starship and sort of getting very cozy with Elon Musk. I don't have any insight information on that, but I just, my read on that, is that that would have been SpaceX is doing the cool stuff in space. Let's do more of it. It's not going to happen with, you know,

these other programs. Yeah. That is an interesting kickoff point for something I've been thinking about now that we're going into the Biden administration. The whole Artemis, everything is up in the air to a certain extent. Although, like I...

Nothing is up in the air. That's the problem with Artemis. It's all on the ground. Oh, man. It's been saving that one. The one thing that I was thinking about early on was like this whole, the thing that's going to piss me off the most is when if and when 2024 is trotted out and then it's the Republican saying that's a politically motivated deadline, this is bullshit,

we're not going to fund it. It's going to piss me off really bad. But it's not implausible, although the timeline is completely unclosable. So that's the thing is that with that getting kicked off to whatever it is, whether it's 2028 or not, knowing where the ISS is at at this moment in time with commercial crew flying, we've got Axiom private flights coming up.

The ISS is going to look like massively different by the beginning of 2022 than it did, you know, five, six years before that. And at a certain point, that's going to be the thing that, rather than holding up like, you know, two different fake sketches of what the future of space could look like, you're going to have a really good model in the ISS of a future in space that is already happening today that you can build on,

or this whole new platform that has a gateway and has all these other hardware, and we're doing this stuff at the moon. Is there anything there that might, you know, the fact that ISS stuff is happening and there is new astronauts finding the ISS, there's new modules being built out, and even some from the Russian side, does that offer a competing enough model that it could, like, diverge heavily from where things were going to be heading under the Trump administration.

A pivot back to Leo. Not even Leo, but just the fact that this model is working, look at what we're doing. I think the Artemis model was trying to extend the ISS partnership, expand it, and take it to the moon. And so in that sense, I could continue. About the only thing I know for sure about the Biden administration is that they're going to embrace the International Space Station.

So there will be no more dancing around potential end of funding in 2025 as an effort to accelerate commercial partnerships. I think very early on there will be a commitment to at least 2028, if not longer. That would be one way so that they can hold hands, I think, with Congress on space policy. I think the real question in my mind is whether we have a real deep space exploration program, which I think Artemis was because it talked about, you know, doing some tangible things, or whether they start talking again about using the gateway as a deep space transport and, you know, going directly to Mars. It's the same kind of language that we heard during the Obama administration with the journey to Mars,

which was pure fantasy, basically. It's the Kendra Horn authorization bill, basically, right? Well, yeah. And by the way, there's been lots of noise about, Kendra Horn and being NASA administrator, that to me seems like an extremely low probability. Very hard for me to see that happening. Sounds like one of those things that she keeps leaking to certain people just to put it out there and get it circulating in the media.

Right. If you're worried about Kendra Horn and sort of HR 5666 rearing up its ugly head from the grave, I would not worry too much about that. None of the source tells me exactly what Kendra Horn was thinking on Tuesday when she drove into work. Yeah So I

Honestly I don't know I mean there are lots of people inside NASA You know Who want to go to Mars and don't want to do the moon Right And you've got a new administration coming in And they're going to be looking for ways to differentiate their space policy Yeah

From the Trump administration That's just the way it's going to be across the government And whether Whether enough people care about NASA to want to do that at NASA and there's enough voices for Mars to sort of swing back to a Mars policy? I don't know. These are all things that are going to have to be shaken out. I think certainly we're going to see much more of a focus on Earth science, probably sort of a continued focus on planetary science,

maybe even a little bit more emphasis on asteroid missions, which we've seen some movement in that direction. but in terms of the human space plan program, I don't actually don't know which direction they're going to go. What I actually believe is, you know, we're going to see a green run test happen in the next, I don't know, two months, three months? What do you guys think? I was waiting for that.

Oh, what's he going to bet here? We'll see if we get some December. We'll see if we get some more December in January hurricanes to slow them up. in Mississippi. Fire up harp. Yeah, harp, right.

Well, you know, it's funny. Like, I was talking to Tim Ellis and relativity, and I said, you know, you guys are testing at Stennis too. You got a couple of stands there. You know, how much time did you lose from the six tropical storms of hurricanes? He said about a week. So, you know, I mean, okay, maybe NASA lost a month, but they were supposed to do the green run in July.

So they've had some other issues. Well, they were after the green run in 2017. Yeah, delayed him about a week while they fired up a new print for hurricane shelter, hit print, waited for it to print out, and then they just rolled it over their stuff. Well, as someone told me, you know, they had this valve issue that they encountered, I guess, sometime in October or early November. And one source said they sat around and talked about it for a month. So, you know, things are not moving along particularly fast.

So anyway, so you're going to have this green run test. and is the thing going to blow up on the test stand? No. Almost certainly not. I mean, can't rule it out. You know, I mean, to find people at Boeing, maybe they pull that off.

But more likely, you know, there will be some issue. So the way it was explained to me is like 25% chance of like a pretty serious problem that requires more than a year to fix. And maybe like a 50% chance of maybe a six-month issue. And then maybe a 25% chance of, pretty clean, pretty clean test. So,

you know, well, let's see how the green run goes, and then, then you can sort of make a case on sort of to keep SLS to the backbone of your exploration program. On the other hand, you know, let's say SN8 or SN9 goes up to 15 kilometers and then lands, right? You know,

that's pretty impressive. It's going to look, it's going to look damned impressive. And so that, I think that sort of the outcome of those two tests in the few months will sort of push policy a little bit in one direction or another. But it's really, I think it's really all to play for still at this point. Yeah. Yeah, the 15 kilometer hop is going to be something that may have some really clutch

timing in when it goes up, right, as a new administration comes in and starts sniffing out the lay of the land, right? Right. So, I mean, Elon very clearly understands that Congress is not going to roll over and say, you have the smartest engineers, right? Which he does, right? You have, over the last decade, you have shown the world that you can build the world's best rockets, which he has. Right.

You have shown that you can get shit done in aerospace when the rest of the industry seems to be standing still. still. They're not going to come up to him and tell him that, even though some people And they're like a year and a half ahead of Boeing and their crude flights. Right, and they got 60% of the funding. But Congress is not going to do that, right?

Congress, he realizes that to get past SLS, to sort of get NASA to be able to focus on what is a sustainable exploration, which is

reusable launch, in space refueling, depots, all that good stuff that you guys, your listeners know about. He is going to have to fly Starship and maybe not even just the Orth orbit. Maybe he's going to have to put an orbiter on the moon. Maybe he's going to have to land one of these things on the moon. But one of the reasons he is moving hell for leather on Starship is that, you know, he's got to show, he's got to demonstrate it. Otherwise, it's vaporware. People don't believe it exists. And so they're moving fast.

They're moving toward that goal. Which is one reason why I think that it's not crazy to think we may have an orbital starship flight late next year or early 2022. I mean, they've got the engines. They've got the fuel tanks. 35 engines is a shitload engines, but they've launched a rocket with 27. So, you know, they'll get there. Yeah. Yeah.

I always have lots to think about on these shows. I feel like I'm always caught like stroking my chin. One thing we did skip over that relates to you a little bit, Jake, is that Artemis collectively has a lot more of international agreements in place than the former transitions that got ditched the second. a new president. So, yeah, we made a 24-year commitment to you guys. Yeah, right, for $300 or whatever, but per year, per year, times 24 years. With an administration that I think is going to be pretty focused on like, hey, everyone, every other country in the world, they're going to go on the Obama apology at Tor, I guess, to some extent now they're going to redux that one. Is that a thing that could affect planning to a certain extent to say, oh, like all these people just signed agreements,

They're literally giving out contracts for certain hardware things. Tally Zelania, MDA, they're getting all these lucrative contracts. We don't want to disrupt that too much. I suppose there could be some well-formulated plan to reuse all that hardware on deep space transport or something like that. But would that derail shifting plans? So one of the things that always impressed me about Bridenstein when I talked to him is that he had a pretty good grasp of his space policy. he had he understood the mistakes that NASA and Congress in the White House had made in the past and tried to learn from them so consolation if we go back to

2009 which was the Bush program to go back to the moon by hey we were supposed to land in 2020 on the moon and that program was woefully woefully over budget and behind schedule and it was a total mess and the Obama administration did the right thing by canceling it. But one of the chief criticisms that was levied against Constellation is that it was not international. It was all American. It was a U.S.

capsule. It was Ares I, Ares 5 rocket. And when you talk to the Constellation program manager, guy named Jeff Hanley, nice guy here in Houston, he would say that he took umbrage with that criticism

and he said because we will get to that point. But they never did. It was a U.S. only program. Brianstein recognized that, and early on, Artemis was very clearly a U.S. only program, but he recognized the need to bring international people, and that's why he hired Mike Gold about a year ago, and he came in and devised the Artemis Accord concept, you know, devised all that language, and then did the negotiations. and they announced the original seven, I think. Was it seven? NASA plus seven. Have they announced a couple more since then? Ukraine was the only other one I saw.

Which will really go over well with Rogozen. Yeah. So, I mean, and there are certainly more coming. And so he recognized that shortcoming, and now they have these agreements. And there's clearly some excitement in Japan about this program. and did you either sign one or is going to sign one? They're not originally. Right.

So, I mean, they're reaching new countries. Australia was a fresh space agency that got in there. Yeah. Yeah. And now all of these deals can be broken because no money's been changed hands. And let's face it, you know, no one's expecting the Europeans to deliver a habitation module for the gateway anytime soon. Japan hasn't built a lunar rover for the surface. The Italians haven't built to pressurized habitat for the lunar surface.

So these are all just paper deals right now. Well, and it's also easy for us to think Italy's committed to money for Tali Zelania. But it's also, like, if you live in Rome, you probably see that as, you know, money going to Alabama if you're living in the U.S. All these deals could be unwound. But at the same time, it's, you know, if you're the United States looking to establish good will. NASA is a very powerful tool to do that internationally. And so, I mean, Bridenstein was clearly trying to lay the groundwork to see Artemis succeed and live on into the next administration. I think the way he would say it is he went out and left everything

on the field, to use a sports analogy, and I think that's accurate. He's done everything he can to sort of make this program live on. I think it remains to be seen whether it will or not. Yeah, I mean, and the way I kind of think of that is, you know, with the limited political capital that a new administration will come in with because it's always limited, you know, you have to decide what fights you want to have. Where do you want to make a change and where do you not have the energy to fight and you just let it keep going down the track, right? And I think that's where Bridenstein put a lot of effort is he's like, I'm going to just add so much momentum to everything that I do that, you know, something's going to break through the next change, right? and keep going. And so it'll be interesting because just like you said, the expanding gateway on the same intra-governmental agreement, right? The IGA that the ISS is on really extends that existing partnership into deep space. Then these Artemis courts is like the whole new

facet of that. There's a lot of like all the clips contracts. They're signed. Like those are going, right? That's money that's signed away to companies. All these things are just have so much momentum. It'll be interesting to see what the Biden administration just sort of repackages and says, oh, now it's our idea, but really lets it go forward and what they're going to put their foot down on. Yeah, and that's, he was working with limited political capital. And now where are the supporters for Artemis going to be? Are they going to be in the White House? Who knows?

Maybe not. Are they going to be in Congress? Well, you know, Ted Cruz is interested in Marcos. Mars. And Richard Shelby is interested in in building the SLS rocket in Alabama. And in the House, who knows, right? We don't know. We don't even know who some of the committee chairs are going to be or subcommittee chairs in the House in key positions. And so, and you start with H.R. 5666. Eddie Bernice Johnson is still going to be back. and she supported that.

And they were much more interested in a Mars first approach. So you're not sure what you're going to get in the White House on Artemis. Congress never, to me, really bought into Artemis. They said some nice things about it at times, and maybe their support there, but I think it's not that deep. In NASA, there's definitely a tide of the Mars called the Mars Mafia. Some of those people are still there. and they're

yeah those are his people right but they may they may be pushing back against the moon and then

but I think the one group that is kind of bought into this Artemis is industry and that's important and you've got Lockheeds

Lockheets on board I wish the new space companies are mostly on board and and that's that's why the biggest so if you want to know

what's going to happen with Artemis, the contract, obviously, to watch is the human landing system, right? The companies are due to submit their final bids, I think, in December. Yeah, right away, right? Like, in a couple weeks. And then originally they were going to be announced in February, at the end of 10 month, February or March. So there's three, there's three bid. There's three teams, of course, your listeners, I'm sure viewers already know this,

but there's the national team led by Blue Origin and Lockheed. There's the Dianetics team with about 30 different partners. and then there's SpaceX who's off there saying, we're doing it on our own. So, you know, that's going to be winnowed down to at least two. So I think the first thing that you'll probably see is that that decision gets delayed, right? Yeah, definitely. Because the new administration is going to want to come in and say, well, we're going to be committing to a lot of money here. Congress hasn't even appropriated this money.

So we really want to go out and put our necks out on this. We want to re-compete this. What do we want to do? So I don't think we'll get those awards in the spring, but sort of how the administration acts on the HLS Awards will tell us a lot. And maybe our first real sort of indicator on one, what two is that getting delayed is just straight up a win for SpaceX. The longer that goes on, the longer that drags out, the more Starship hardware there is, the more flights there are. It's a win for SpaceX.

for two reasons, but what's your reason? Well, plausibly Blue Origin could pony up the cash to continue that team. If they were, you know, they seem internally committed to... Is Lockhe going to pony up to cash to continue that team? No, no, that's what I'm saying, is I think if Blue Origin was like, we want to go to the moon for our own... Do you think the other partners are going to pony up cash for that? No, I think Cash Daddy Bezos is going to say, I would really like to step on the moon at some point in my lifetime. I'm going to give some money out here if I...

Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you're cash daddy Bezos at Blue Origin, what is your priority right now? Because I could think of four different priorities that Cash Daddy Bezos may want to be putting money into. And I'm not sure the lunar landers at the top of that list. But what's how, okay, so I see four priorities for Blue Origin right now, right? New Shepherd. By the way, tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the first successful New Shepherd launch and landing. So it's only been five years, right?

So what's your priority? Is your priority getting people on New Shepard? Is it finally finishing BE4? Is it flying New Glenn, right? Which is, we should have an episode sometime where we drink beers and bet on when New Glenn is going to fly. And then finally, you know, is it the lander, the national lander team, right? With three other partners who are not going to self-invest.

How would you rank those priorities for them? I fully agree with you. I am, I'm trying to find, real quick, trying to find a picture where your elbow was on BE4,

because I feel like that's the point of when Bezos got mad at you and that's why you're so pissed off right now, but maybe that's not the moment that things broke down between you two.

No, back then, it was back in, like, early 2016. I thought they would, I thought they would move a lot faster than they have. I agree with you. My point is not that

this is a plausible situation that would happen. My point is that Dynetics would just go, away, like, they'll find something else to do. But plausibly, Bezos could have, could come up with the cash to fund continuing that project to some extent. But the only person that would continue the one of these three projects is Elon and Starship. So the longer this drags out, the more it goes on, the more momentum they have when that gets, when that comes up for a recompete,

or if it comes up for another round of RFPs, they're just in a better situation. We don't have as many question marks open as we do right now, which is like, wait, how many Starships? Do you need to fly to refuel this thing, get astronauts to the lunar surface? Because that, not that any of these particular architectures are simple, because they all have like, okay, you're flying drop tanks that you're going to attach to the side of this thing. They all have orbital refueling.

You have three different companies that are going to fly spaceships that can meet up in various parts of Sysluner space. So in some ways, Starship is probably the easiest because it's a single spaceship that does all these different things. But any delay in that is just insta win for Starship, assuming that it can last long enough in terms of funding that it still exists by the time NASA decides to fund something.

So that's very perceptive, and that's exactly right. That's how I see it as well. Number one, the longer this goes on, you know, Blue Origin has this mock-up at Johnson Space Center, which is made out of styrofoam, maybe. Plywood, styrofoam and plywood. Dynetics has a mock-up. Same kind of thing, extremely low fidelity.

And SpaceX is, you know, building a starship every two weeks in Texas and they're going to start flying them. And oh yeah, they don't have any life support. And they're a long way from that. But they do have light support on Crew Dragon. So they figured out how to put people into space. So, yes, SpaceX has real hardware. And SpaceX will just continue moving right along

as fast as they possibly can toward building and flying starship. And oh, by the way, Starship is not just a one-off thing to land humans on the moon, like the Blue Origin lander or the Dynamics lander, which I think is very cool, the Dynamics design.

But it's not a one, I mean, it's to put satellites into space, it's people into space. It's everything, right? So it's got multiple customers. So, yes, they're going to chug right along. And if that gets delayed into the summer or the fall, and you know, you've got a starship about to make an orbital flight and you've got a couple mockups, you could see NASA come back and say either sort of recompete the contract and just have one bidder or something like that. In that case, it probably would be. But again, it's really all to play for it. But I think that's the right point you're making is that SpaceX will definitely self-invest. Will the other group self-invest? Will the other group self-invest?

invest, it's hard for me to see that happen. Yeah. I mean, the blue stuff. How's that malt liquor, by the way? I'm not going to lie. My face is really hot and I'm talking about because it's like, it's, I'm flush. I don't know if you can see your red color or not, but like I'm making, I'm making reasonably good progress here.

Dude, just stop. Just stop. There have been a lot of people in various chats asking how Jake's doing with that. because they've noticed he's very quiet on this episode. There's like, there's that meme right with this one. But no, it's like the,

yeah, the blue stuff is interesting because they've really been obviously trying to sell all this moon, moon rah, rah, rah, but I don't know how much of it is tied to the Artemis thing. And if that kind of deflates a little bit,

I don't know how is, is their love of the moon sustainable? Like is that, is it, you know, outside of just the landing the blue moon contract, or is there more to it than that that they do want to self-invest? That's a huge question for me. And it doesn't matter until they fly some damn engines, but, you know, it's an interesting question. So that's a good, I would, I would say two things to that question, Jake. Number one, are they just interested in the contract?

I don't know. It was telling to me that one of their recent hires was an orbital habitat. leading someone to lead an orbital habitat team because there was NASA was considering putting out contracts for orbital modules for commercial low Earth orbit space stations and so that would be a case of not chasing just vision but chasing government money the second thing I would say to that just to sort of come back to the discussion we're having earlier is is I asked Jim about this last year I said you know I said what happens if you don't get all the money you need. You know, and this was, this was even last year's, in last year's budget.

And he said, there would be very much a preference for companies that did self-invest. So that, that clearly favors the companies that are willing to do that. Yeah. Well, it's going to be a, there's a, this is like almost, it's a, it's a terrible time to be a space fan, but it's also a very exciting time to be a space fan. Everything's up in the air and no one has any answers by anything, but it also means that stuff's changing and there's interesting stuff happening. This is the golden age of being a space fan. Oh, without a doubt.

We've been to every body in the solar system, so you've got to love. We figured out that asteroids are really cushy. Like, you can't really land on an asteroid. It just, you just enter an asteroid apparently. That was a fantastic finding. We're now discussing, I mean, you know, we're all trashing how much, how little money these landers are going to get. But if Congress decided to now put their two bills together, we'd end up with like $7 or $800 million for a human landing system for the moon, which like once in the last time that happens. It's not nothing.

It's below the NASA request, but way higher than all the human landing money that we've got before. It's more than I thought would have existed. Yeah. Yeah, that's good point. It's about 20% of the 20% of the NASA request. This is unquestionably the best time to be involved in space. you know I first when I first started reporting

it was before the Columbia accident and then I was sort of you know followed all of that and while the space shuttle was a fabulous machine I mean it was we have even if you add up all the capabilities at the space vehicles we have now coming online

you could not do something like repair the Hubble Space telescope the space shuttle was was just a super capable amazing vehicle and it was pretty to watch launch, but by God, the missions were pretty boring after a while because, you know, you'd have six or seven, you know, brilliant people going up and doing things, and NASA made it all look really, really easy, even though it was very hard, and then they'd come back, and you'd do it again

in a few months. And that was basically, you know, basically the space program. And now you have, you have NASA doing their thing, but you also have all these commercial players coming along. You know, what Rocket Lab is doing, you know, and trying to recover their small first-stage booster is really rather remarkable. And you've got that drama playing against the backdrop of ABL space systems, firefly, relativity, and these other companies trying to sort of get to market with their rockets. There's just so much happening with the small and big commercial space companies. It's a fascinating time.

And that doesn't even include the internationals where there's so much activity in China and India and Europe as well. Couldn't put it better myself. we are like far into the show and we have not talked about Eric's book yet. Oh God, yeah. Let's hear about Eric. You're writing what is going to be a pretty exciting book and we would love to hear about, A, just about the book. And also, I want to hear about how you found writing one because I'm just interested in that sort of process.

It's like an interesting thing to me. So give us the pitch. Well, guys, I want to thank you for leaving me about 60 seconds here. no no hey we can go as long as your family's not going to break into whatever room you're sitting in um so you know i i've always been a fan of what SpaceX has done just because they they sort of shake things up and they're they're breaking the mold but it was at the falcon heavy launch in 2018 um where you weren't sure whether it was going to be successful and and not only did they launch it you know, they brought back the side boosters.

And, you know, it was just, for me, I was just like, wow, you know, for an inaugural launch, this was pretty amazing. And at that point, you know, I started to, I mean, you had realized it, right? But at that point, for me, it sort of crystallized that, look, this is the transformative space company of my lifetime. And I started paying more attention to them and realized that, you know, their origin story had never really been told. Ashley Vance's biography, Elon, which is excellent and very insightful into Elon and his personality, you know,

tells bits and pieces of the SpaceX story and sort of how they went from nothing to launching and almost failing. But it tells it from Elon's perspective alone, really, and it doesn't really go into the details. And I figured there was probably a much better story there. and a lot of people who helped him. And so I approached the company in early 2019 and said, look, I want to tell the story of SpaceX's origin.

I want to tell it, you know, obviously with Elon's input, but I like to focus on maybe 10 or 12 people who played critical roles across the company to sort of make that happen and sort of make them major characters in the story. And Elon said he was all. for it. He basically told his people, you know, he can talk to whoever he wants at the company. And also it was super, made it super easy like when you contact other people, you know, who used

to work for SpaceX, but didn't any longer. Their first question was always is Elon on board with this, right? That was pretty nice to be able to say, well, yes, he is. So I talked, I mean, I did talk to everyone. I talked to dozens of people. all of the early VPs on their deputies and a lot of the engineers and tax and stuff who did all the work from the beginning. And it's, frankly, the story exceeded my expectations in terms of all the crap that they had to put up with

to make it to the launch pad at Vandenberg and then the whole story of sort of basically decided that they weren't going to be able to launch Van derbyr on time. And so, you know, having this backup out of, So they went to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They went to the middle of Pacific Ocean. So it's fascinating. The only thing easier than doing stuff in California at a military base is going to the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Yeah, that's a statement right there, right? I mean, in some ways, Van derbyrd was perfect because it was a three-hour drive north from the factory. They were building a small rocket. They figured they were going to be launching mostly to polar orbits. And so it was ideal to have this. And so to sort of, you know, be told that you were not going to launch. for months and months and months and and to sort of have to sit there and just eat that

when you're self-funding the company. That was not something Elon could tolerate. Thank God Delta 4 Heavy launches. Don't hold up launches out in the East Coast at this point. Yeah, right. They'd be sitting out there with the 300 Starlink satellites. And our old, NRL 44. We'll see.

We'll see. Yeah. And so, you know, the book is about SpaceX. it's about some of these people who made it happen. And I just have to tell you, I mean, there's just so many funny, funny stories in the book about kind of those times and the office, the early days when they were in El Segundo and Not on Rocket Road in Los Angeles, sort of getting to Vandenberg. And it was funny, you know, your malt liquor tonight, Jake. I had to laugh because I was sort of the... end of the process a couple months ago I was collecting some photos to include in the book.

And a bunch of people had sent him in and I was working with Tom Mueller. And he sent me this photo of him and Anne Chenery, who was one of the engineers who had helped build the launch site at Edinburgh. Phil Kasuf, who was avionic sky, Jeremy Holman, who was the sort of his deputy, Mueller's deputy and a couple other people. sitting on a tarmac at the airport at Van derogne. And they had just successfully static fired the Falcon One rocket successfully for the first time. And they were sitting around sort of celebrating, waiting for a waiting.

And there was like a, you could see like a picture of like some, some bottles and stuff. And I was like, what were you guys drinking, Tom? How are you celebrating? And so he sends me like another picture like that has a better. images and like there's a big like bottle of mickey's malt liquor sitting there and I was like I said back to I said man you guys went hard because I mean I don't say I tell you but man Mickey's malt liquor will put you on your butt so anyway he you know it's just kind of like you know what was really cool is they all really wanted to tell their stories and the stories that they had to tell

were incredible. Like the first time they fired up the engine in McGregor was Tom Mellor's 42nd birthday. And they got sort of, they celebrated that night. And as they were driving back to their apartments, they had this big white Hummer that they commuted from the test stand facility of McGregor to their apartments,

which were about 30 minutes away, and they got pulled over by the cops. Tom Muller said, what he said in the car at that night was, holy, holy shit, we're all going to jail. This was back in 2003. So it's just kind of like really bringing that

six-year period from 2002 to 2008 to life through very colorful stories. And it's a no-brainer for people were interested in space because it literally is the origin story of the most interesting company of our times. But it's for, even for non-space people, it's just like, you know, it's the personal stories of Tom and Gwen Shotwell and Hans Konigsman and Chinnery and Beulen-Alton and Tim Buzza and, you know, Florence Lee and these other people, some of whom you've heard of and some of whom you

haven't. And it's just, it was, it turned out. much better than I could have hoped because everyone talked to me and the story was, you know, even more interesting than I thought it might have been. So it was, it was really a privilege to write. What is it called? Lift off. Did you say that? Lift off. I did not, no. Where should people buy it? At a bookstore. It comes out on March 2nd, but if you can pre-order it at all bookstores online now, or you can wait until March 2nd. I will also say, I think this is still the case,

but from some friends who have released books in the past, if you pre-order on Amazon, all of those orders hit on the first day that it is out. So it is effectively, like you just received all those orders on that day, which can often drive people to the top of charts, which is very helpful. Pre-orders are helpful for that reason.

So kind suggestion, if that is your preferred mechanism. I can't wait. I'm pumped. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, I can't either. I mean, it's like two and a half, three and a month. This is my favorite kind of stuff that, like,

these kind of stories, somebody who is loves the technical side of stuff and loves the behind the scenes, like early development days. You know, I love all those kind of stories, not just space, but technology side as well has a lot of those early iPhone days. It's very similar with this crazy team that had all sorts of weird stuff going on and pressure from a person who was incredibly driven and pretty strange. And I love all those stories. So this is similar in that regard of colorful personalities that are centered around this crazy story that is, you know, goes down in history pretty quick. I just can't wait to read it. Yeah, there's a pretty legendary story about Elon and Pop-Tarts.

That's shit you won't find on the inside flap right there. Cool. I'm excited for it. Yeah, I can't wait. I mean, there's a, there's a lot of information out there about Elon, but just like you said, I would crave to learn about employees two through infinity, right? Like, you know, what are they, what are they doing to, because this company can't just all be him. I mean, I know he's a big part of it, but there's so many important people that have done a lot of tremendous work. And I'm, I'm super stoked to learn some, uh, about some of those names. That's a thing that I always find interesting that, you know, companies like SpaceX that have such a, you know, public facing leader, uh, visionary of sorts that has a very strong, like,

cultural direction and mission for the company. It is often sourced from that person what that mission is at the outset of the company, but like you're saying, the first, however many number of employees that join that also have a huge say in how things go and the way the company works. And I feel like I'm drawing a lot of my Apple experiences here.

A lot of stuff is always sourced to Steve Jobs when it is actually could be sourced better to other people that were there in the early days. I don't know if that's similar for SpaceX, but I assume it is because that's a very old trope that, you know, a lot of things get credited to Elon that might not be. So I'm curious to find out about that. I would say that Elon probably gets less credit for a lot of things than he deserves in terms of SpaceX. He is that company.

And people say, well, I wish he would leave turning the company, you know, leave it, leave it to Gwen Schottweil to run the company. No, I mean, he is the guy who makes that. company move forward. And if he succeeded, it's because he was able to identify and hire the right people. And so he hired people who understood his vision, bought into his vision, and were willing to work their asses off to carry it out. So it's amazing to me, actually. One of the striking things is the parallels between the Falcon One program, which is what the book is about, and the Starship program. Same kind of iterative design. moving as fast as possible.

They just have more people, obviously, today and a lot more money. And they're only in the middle of nowhere, Texas, not Pacific Ocean. That's right. It's right, they're in the middle of nowhere, Texas. Not quadulane. It is the quadulane of Texas, for sure. That's true. Should we do some picks?

I think we should do some picks. I mean, lift-off, obviously. Number one pick. Lift-off is number one. Do you have another one for Jake? You were in strike. I got a message. a panicked message, but you didn't have a pick.

I think I sent Anthony a DM like two hours ago and I was like, I got nothing, man. What am I going to do? I got, I have nothing prepared. He gave me some suggestions, but I was a dick about it. So what I do have is just it's a very simple one. But if you were on Twitter these days, you know that recently they rolled out a pretty new, a new innovative feature, which is just the same feature that's on every. other social media platform, which is stories.

They're calling them fleets, fleeting thoughts, because they go away in 24 hours. And so all of a sudden, you know, I'm getting all this different kind of content. And it's interesting to see, so just side note, it's interesting for me to see, you know, the people who like tweet prolifically and like come into my timeline a lot. So like I've seen them a lot in tweet form, but maybe they're not into the fleet. So like there's like a different ratio of, of, of. who's in my feed and so like all these these things are popping up my feet and I'm like who are you I don't know who you oh I follow you that's why this is why I followed you like two

years ago but you've never tweeted anything and I completely forgot about you but fleets all of a sudden you're all into but anyway that's a side note so if you're looking for good fleet content I do have one to share with you which is a guy named Kevin M. Gill he is a JPL guy and he does I think he does like data what he says? Software engineer, data rank, glitter at NASA JPL. But he does these awesome image processing stuff, especially with like Jupiter,

but also Mars and Saturn and stuff. And they're all like these video ones. So if you look at those great, yeah, so there's a Mars shot there, but I don't know if you can bring up the, you can't bring up fleets on desktop, I don't think, right? Probably not.

No. But so he does all these beautiful visualizations, especially like with the Juno Parajovs and stuff. And he, you know, animates them all and puts all the things. together. And so the fleets are just that. And it's amazing because it just like really calms your mind. You can just watch this like slow pass over Jupiter with the swirling clouds. And it's very lovely. And I kind of like it. It's been a good mental health boost.

Is that where you got your inspiration for your first fleet? I don't know if anyone saved that anywhere, but we need to post that somewhere. Yeah, my first fleet is very different. But it was a joke. I would never have guessed that fleets would have been a pick this show. Didn't Twitter? I thought they deleted the feature. I thought they rolled it back. No, it's...

I've never seen a fleet, so I don't know. No, you should... This is the 90s kids. That's right. So I actually went, I was like, well, you know what? I'll try this out. And I went, I made this fleet. So I recorded this video about some space stuff.

And it was like three minutes long, but they limit fleets to 30 seconds. So I couldn't post it on Instagram. You never done the story. and stuff? On Instagram, if you do that, it breaks it up for you. And just puts it as like six stories or whatever. This is Twitter, man. You got to keep it short.

I know. It's like minimum viable product stuff, right? So anyway, so you haven't seen that fleet. And maybe you will one day once I cut it up into pieces. But it expires because it's about something happening very soon. Eric, did you bring a pick? I brought two. Yeah.

Oh, I came prepared. A double feature. Yes. Again, another very short note. us off nominal episode where we sent Eric info this morning. We always forget to tell people up front like, hey, remember the one bit that we do. So, Katie Max's end of everything.

You guys have may have had this pick already or not, but it's a great book. It's basically about sort of the universe and sort of the competing theories and how it's going to end. And I like it because it's very well written. It's funny. It's accessible. And it's, it just, she writes very well and authoritatively about the subject.

And so I appreciate, I appreciate that. So. Makes you feel better about 2020 as well. Right, knowing that at some point this will all end. There is a defined end at some point. And then shameless self-promotion, I do have this story coming out tomorrow morning on Ars Technica about a practical joke played in mission control back at 1991. on Thanksgiving morning.

Wow. My first Thanksgiving. It was 29 years ago, so it's not, you know, no big anniversaries, but I sat down with with Milt Hufflin, who was a longtime flight director, and he'd never talked about this publicly before, and it was just, it's a hell, it's a very funny story involving a satellite and space station possibly getting hit. Jesus Christ. I mean, excuse me, the space shuttle is possibly getting a strike

and going into a blackout. Anyway, I think it's very funny, and if you have any interest in NASA. Now it is. 30 years later, it's funny. 29 years later, it's funny. Yeah, he said it wasn't funny at the time. There's also a great bit in there about a practical joke

that was played on Chris Kraft back before John Glenn's first mission, which some people have probably heard. of, but I never had until recently. And by God, it's hilarious. It was pulled by Gene Cranes. So anyway, that's tomorrow. I got one that is topical. This week, China is going to be launching a sample return mission.

So you need to be following Andrew Jones on Twitter at AJ underscore FI. He is the man about China. He writes for Space News now, and I think several other places as well, but he last week had this Twitter thread. I'd probably find it right here where he like worked out what the timeline of this mission is going to be from sources that are not like, they don't post this stuff. He like takes the ground, you know, he goes and picks up the dirt and he sniffs it when it drops and then he's like, I can tell when. I don't know. I assume that he knows Chinese, right? He speaks Chinese. He has to, right? Okay. Because he's like all up on Weibo.

He is the only person that I find consistently providing good information about the Chinese space program. It's incredible. Yeah, he's outstanding. And if you're not following him, you absolutely should be because you're right. I mean, the Changi 5 lunar mission is going to be huge. If you're one of those people that's like, I only follow 200 people. Unfollow me, follow Andrew for a while, and then come back later, I guess, because you've got to be following him. And it's probably the only way we're going to get info on this mission.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's launching very soon. So it's tomorrow morning, today's Sunday. We're recording this. So it's Monday morning. So if you're listening to the podcast version of this, you already missed it. You missed it. But, yeah.

The launch anyway. I mean, it's going to be in middle of December when it gets back. Well, but this, yeah, that's crazy though, right? It's like we're so used to this whole like, oh, Cyrus Rex. Like it took three years to get there. It's going to take three years to get back or something. Cool. We get an asteroid sample.

in a six-year period. This is like four weeks, and we've got a new moon sample on the ground in our hands. That's awesome. That's just so cool. It's so, it's good. I'm really excited about it.

So, yeah, Andrew Jones. The two people who opened China, Nixon and Andrew Jones are the two. You know, if you guys are talking about international launches, we didn't get into this tonight, but the Angara A5 rocket is being launched, I think, next Saturday. Yeah, that's a third pick from Eric.

this is the this is the second launch of this vehicle in six years and it's the second than new shepherd then it's this no much worse than new shepherd it's better than Orion it's better it's

it's hilarious that you say that because I thought the same thing Anthony you know we can make fun of Angara but it's Orion last launched in December like 10 days before so yeah so

this is the Russian answer to the Falcon 9. And it costs more than 100 million now, but in five years it'll cost less than, it'll cost 57 million, according to Dimitri Rogazen, of Russia, who's obviously a very reliable source of information. Anyway, this is the second

test launch. They're launching a two-ton mass simulator again. So, you know, I think SpaceX ought to be trembling in their boots about this launch. Little known fact, Angara is Russian for

trampoline. No, it's not. But I wish you were. I wish you were. I wish I knew what it meant. I always think of Angara, angry Russian Rogeson, is what I think of Angara.

Oh, man. Eric, where can people find you on the internet? Oh, man. Cygai Space Twitter account, and I recover all things space at Arce Technica. If you don't know how to spell it,

too bad. Too bad. Just Google my name. Google me. It says Eric Burk. Don't. Don't do it. Stop. Jake's like Starlink has been scrubbed for the night, so here we can topping it up. Jake, what have you been working on?

Well, you know, I have, I've been trying to like round out the year here. So it did just an episode on equitable designs. This is kind of interesting. So I talked to a caveat manipu who works at Boeing on the Starliner program. It wasn't really about Starliner, but it's just Starliner's, where she works. She works on the spacesuits and some of the other user interfaces and stuff. And just talking about like how you design, you know, the interfaces between humans and spacecraft. So suits, um, buttons on the panel, the shape of the spacecraft, how you get in, all those kind of things. How do you design those in a way that, uh, you know, is useful for a

broad range of people rather than just, you know, a mercury astronaut, John Glenn, five foot, nine test pilot white guy, right? So new toilet on the ISS. Did that come up? New toilet on the ISS? No, I did not come up. No, but she did, well, we did talk about poop a little bit. A little bit of poop doc.

But no, it was really interesting. So we got that one outcome. And I've got maybe one, maybe two more episodes coming out for the end of the year before we hit Christmas break. So I'm sorry to put that. But I got to be honest, so most of my time recently, I've been like deep in this book club episode. I think I've talked about it once on the show, but I'm building this.

this website, this app, that's going to be like a good community collection of all, all of our favorite space books. So it's just like a way to, can I collect them all, provide, you know, reviews and ratings and tags and all these kind of things to build some metadata around it so that we can get recommendations for books. So I just checked, Eric, I got yours in there already. So we're good to go. But, you know, I'm so close to being able to do a beta.

So if you are one of our Patreon subscribers, you know, whether me or M. Anthony, you'll have, if you're at the $5 level, you'll be in our Discord and you'll have access to the beta and you can come play around with it. That's going to be up pretty quick. So I should have some more fun news about that soon. What about you, Anthony? Oh, man. I'm going to talk about crew one this week. Probably more poop at your house is what you must do. Definitely more poop. Way more poop. For sure, more poop. Yep, a lot of poop. He sleeps now, sleeps all the way through the night. It's great. So I'm blogging again. been writing. You probably saw some links, Jake. I've been writing some thoughts. We have a,

we have a channel in our Discord. It's called content. And then anytime we post a podcast or a blog, it like hits this channel with like a link. And it was lighten up this weekend. That's for sure. To push all the Wee Martians out of it. I've been doing that. I'm going to talk about crew one this week. I haven't really post anything yet, but that was pretty spectacular mission. And I think we sort of touched on it earlier, but it's like this is a new era for the ISS. So I've been thinking a lot about that. Like the next year and a half is going to be pretty crazy and the changes that are going to happen up there.

And then the one thing that I'm really excited for, Jake, is the next episode of this show is the last show of the year in which we do the off nominees. Off nominees. And we rank what is the best worst thing that happened in space this year. So I think I know what won it, but there's some time left still. There's some goofy stuff that happened this year. It's going to be a fun one. Tons of launch failures.

Yeah. There's like what, been like nine or something? God, yeah, a lot. It's a lot of those that we're going to go through, but I'm excited for that. Is Sentinel 6 webcast going to be on that list? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. You notice I didn't do a lot of scene switching on this episode, so I don't really have a lot of space to talk.

So, yeah. That's what we got. Yeah. Well, Eric, it's always a pleasure hanging out with you. Thank you for joining us at the tail end of your vacation. vacation here. Hey, thank you. Or maybe mid-vacation?

It's mid, man. I'm taking two weeks off. The first real vacation I've had this year. I don't know. I decided to come hang out with us for a while, but I appreciate it. I had a ball. I had a blast. Bye, everybody.

One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.