Off-Nominal - 38 - Sorry, I Got Too Itemized

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

With our beloved JB on his way out, Jake and Anthony have been appointed NASA autocrats for five years with $25 billion per year to spend. They have done the homework, mostly, and will now unveil their grand plans.DrinksSci-Fi Hamster Wheel - Thin Man Brewery - UntappdPolaris Hazy Northeast Ipa - Mariner Brewing - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeAnthony’s Budget (Numbers, Excel)Jake’s Budget (Excel)Final FY2021 NASA Funding Provides Only 25 Percent of HLS Request – SpacePolicyOnline.comNASA's FY 2021 Budget | The Planetary SocietyNASA's Commercial Crew Program is a Fantastic… | The Planetary SocietyPicksMars 2020 Mission VisualizationSuperstore - NBC.comTerraforming Mars | Stronghold GamesPARKS Board Game – Keymaster GamesFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

Anthony and I have been stressing about this all week, so we'll see, we'll see. Do you know how I know that you went pro? How? You gave us homework for off-nominal. That's how I know. Okay? Yeah, yeah. I did definitely take on this episode knowing that I actually had time to work on it.

It's been on our backlog for Probably like a year, right? I want to say like a year, a year and a change maybe. We were like, we should do this. This would be really fun for episode 18. And then here we are 38, ready to go. Yeah. But yeah, it's going to be interesting.

It's a good time to do this episode. We're on this. I think here's what I'll say about where we are generally. Space policy is going to be intriguing for like the next several months. I think regardless of who you voted for, or how you hoped things turned out, this is one of those moments where stuff changes and change is inevitably interesting.

So if you are able to separate your space nerd from your policy brain and look at like changes in the environment, there could be interesting things to discuss and break down and I feel like the best way to do that is with a beer in our hand. It's the only way to make plans. That's what I always say.

Oh, man. Well, what are you drinking? What do you got to do? I got a quite an interesting can here. I went down to the local beer store, and this one is called sci-fi hamster wheel, which is a foreshadowing element

for what I feel like we're discussing today. But look at this can, man. Like, there's a... That's really good. There's like, you know, all these hamsters is having a hell of a time. I think they're in space. They're in some sort of...

Space hamsters. Maybe starship. This kind of looks like the thing that they used to make the carbon fiber starship back in the day. The spinny thing, yeah. So this is pretty good. This is, I don't even know where this is from, Finnman Brewery, from Buffalo, New York. Go Bills, I guess. Nice, okay.

It's kind of near my old neck of the woods. It is, that's true. Yeah, yeah. There was a international border between me and that brew, but still very close. Currently can't get there, but it was very close. So I have, I don't know if you remember, I don't know, it must have been, I think this is also about a year ago. But I mentioned how like I just found this like space brewery sitting. Oh yeah.

Very close to my house that I had knowing about. Yeah. So I finally got a beer from there. So this is Mariner Brewing. Oh, wait, I put you full screen on that sucker. It's nice looking. I'm backwards here. Okay.

Mariner brewing, which is, yeah. So it, they kind of leaned in it. It's actually on like a Mariner Drive or something, a Mariner Street, one of those kind of things. They kind of lean into it and took the Mariner space thing. So this is the Polaris, hazy northeast IPA. I love the can. It's like really simple, beautiful blue-green color gradient thing with constellations.

So what's in it? It's kind of like a, it's like a fruity northeast-style IPA. There's some juicy hops, it says. Juicy hops. Yeah. But they're pretty good. I got a pack of them. Oh, but they're fizzy, man.

I don't know what's this batch. Look at this. See what's going on there? Yeah, it's going to need the glass and some time to settle. So I will pour and maybe I can start drinking it later. I spilled some already. I did pregame this one with a different beer. Did you?

I've been preloading for this. All right, do we want to talk about what the schick of this is? Yeah, so what the hell are we doing? Okay, so... I'm not kidding when he said we gave us homework. We have Excel sheets. We do, we do. It's going to be so much fun.

Okay, so this week, Joe Biden took over in the White House, and Jim Brianstein stepped down on Wednesday, so we lost our favorite administrator. It's a blank slate with space policy. And I was thinking about this as like kind of a fun thing to do. So let me ask you. you a question. Have you ever heard, tell me if you've heard this statement or this argument before. NASA's budget would be so much better off if they didn't have Congress mucking around in it. Correct. I heard it all the time. Drink? Everybody drink if you heard that.

What about, uh, oh, they should appoint the administrator for like 10 years and should not be fireball so that you can like have continuity of purpose. Saw that tweet today. Drink that one. Okay. We should just cancel SLS. Saw that tweet today. So I haven't looked at Twitter in three hours and I know there's a tweet in there that says that exactly. Yeah, somewhere in there. So I hear that all the time, but like I don't know if anyone actually kind of plays that through.

And so I thought maybe we would turn the armchair NASA administrator to like a, I don't know, a more thought out armchair. NASA administrator. We're not going to go much farther than the armchair. Sitting back in your armchair with Excel sheets. With Excel sheets, yeah. So basically the premise is Anthony and I have both done some homework and we have put together what we would do if we were the NASA administrator with some special caveats. One, we get a five-year term. No questions asked. We don't have to go through Senate confirmation. I don't know. Joe Biden pulls some magic executive order or rabid out of the hat and we're just, we're just in. I don't know how we did it, but it happened. And he also somehow got

us $25 billion appropriated each year for the five years with no stipulation. So the NASA budget literally says Jake and Anthony get $25 billion a year, period, and they sign the bill. There are no stipulations as to where we or how we spend that money like there are in the current NASA budgets. But with that in mind, it is still like, we're still trying to play this like we were really the NASA administrator. So we start, you start with today, like you have all the existing programs, you know, in place and your job to make whatever changes you think you can do in five years. We were having some won'ty questions in the chat. People want to know about inflation. What is your inflation policy?

So I thought about inflation, and I just thought, I don't want to do the math on it. So we're just going to like just pretend like we've factored that in. Exactly. Whatever we've put for $24, it's $25 and you do the math then to decide what that will be. Exactly. That's not fun. No one wants to do inflation on a live broadcast. So that's the schick.

I don't know. Anthony, do you have any questions or anything to add to that? So, no. I'm curious if you want to start with your general approach and then talk about. and then talk about and then show off your budget or the other way around. Yeah, there are a few ways we could do this, right? Hmm. So why don't we like, why doesn't one person start and then we'll just kind of wing it?

Okay. This is off nominal. Got it. I don't know if we need to. Yeah, we've done all the homework. We can't be doing that anymore. Yeah. You want to start?

Yeah. And I also, I want to just add one more thing too. So people are going to have opinions. You guys are going to have opinions. It's fine. we are going to get stuff wrong. We're going to like, you know, not understand where budget lines things are on. We're partially because we didn't have, you know, partially because, well, we don't always, like, have that information.

And then even if it is out there, we only had a week to really look this up. So we may not have spent all that much time trying to get down to every single dollar. So you just got to bear with us. It's going to be weird. But I think it would be fun. So, yeah. Yeah, why don't you start? I want to hear your broad approach first.

Okay, so here's my general take on the way I approach this. I tried to step back. I think everyone, you know, the scenarios that you were laying out as the preface of like, what if NASA did X? What if NASA did Y? What if they gave all the money to Elon personally or whatever? Everyone has those. And I don't think any of those, like, those are fun to say.

But I don't think, and this made me, like, reassess the way I think, of actual NASA plans that have been laid out. I tried to say, okay, I have five years, which is not long. Like, you can't pull off a thing in five years. So my thing was like, what is the one problem that I think should be solved? One or two problems that are intrinsic to where NASA is currently, and how can I unstick them best? Not necessarily like I'm going to be the guy saying,

we landed on the moon again, my name on the plaque of the limb, right? I don't think any of that's realistic, but I was approaching it as a way of like, what is the problem that I think ales whatever the scenario is currently, and how can I unstick it? So, I did, in fact, do the thing. I did it. You did the thing? I did the thing. I canceled SLS Orion on day one. Okay?

Right away. So I've got a 2022 budget. What's that? I was so afraid that. I was going to be the only one with a spreadsheet. I'm so glad you made. No, I got spreadsheet. I've got color-coded. Green is where money went up. Red is where it went down. Blue is where it stayed the same year to years. Clever. So I straight up canceled SLS and Orion from on day one. And I actually, so here's why I say that. I think if we had, if you handed NASA a lunar lander tomorrow,

there's only so much fun you could have with that because your flight rate is stuck so low. So I flight rate was the thing that that was my guiding light on the exploration line item. The other big thing that you might notice, if you can read this tiny ass text on YouTube, and I'm getting questions already, what about commercial Leo? That is my other thing that I dove into here. The ISS is a logjam in terms of planning. And it's not necessarily so because of like the actual amount of money in the, line item. It's not an, when you look at the budget overall, right, the ISS portion is in the

current year that we just have is $3.9 billion is like the top line space operations of which is mostly ISS. You've got 1.4-ish for the ISS itself, 1.8 for transportation, 700 million for flight support and things like that. So it's not a huge line item, but I think it demands such focus like organizationally from NASA and it demands such operational. like gravity, that it's a thing that you have to unstick. And especially so because this sucker's running out 10 years right now. It's not a ton of money year to year, but it's a 10 year thing that is stuck in your budget. So I think... Interesting. Okay. So I put a ton of money in the first couple of years, as you'll see, into commercial Leo development. My point being that I want NASA to

get, by the end of my term, it could potentially be the case that if NASA wanted to leave the ISS, they could only buy flights and crew time aboard a space station or a module or whatever it is. That's like my goal. It's not going to happen in five years, but my goal is to try to get it to the point where, like right now, NASA just buys cargo and crew flights up to ISS. I would like them to be able to just buy the time they need in Leo for whatever it is that they want to do in the future. So I dumped a billion and a half dollars the first year here into commercial development of ISS and Leo. I'm given half of that, roughly 40% of that, to Axiom to build out their stuff, right? They've got this plan to build out a module on the ISS. I'm given the other half to free flyers,

so that'll be competed with like Axiom, nanorax, Blue Origin, whoever else wants to get in the game there. That one's a longer term play, right, when you want to put some stuff elsewhere. So this is, this This is my crux of the thing, is that I want to start a new program at NASA called Human Habitation. And that's going to contain this whole idea of living in space and that'll contain the Leo stuff, but it also contains some farther out lunar things as well. Okay, so those are my guiding lights. Are you confused yet? Nope.

Flight rate to the moon up, money spent in Leo down, but you got to do that by putting a bunch of money in up front. So I'm taking, we're getting like this extra $1.7 billion up front. So I'm putting a ton of it, almost all of that into, build me a new Leo station, someone else operate it. I'll buy crew time as needed. Okay. So let's dive into the exploration stuff. I've got $2 billion in the first year to begin the commercial cis lunar crew program. This will be development.

This will be either extensions of commercial crew as it exists today. this will be, you could propose a new thing if you want. It could be maybe you've got an extra module where they can like hang out in for a couple days. My goal would be the first phase of it would be two crew members

to lunar orbit and back for a two-week mission. It would be like the baseline thing that we need. So that's going to start year one. I'm keeping the human landing system around. Billion dollars now. I'm going to slow roll it. Okay? Because I don't think, like I said,

if you handed him a lunar lander, tomorrow. It's not that useful if you can't get there. So I'm slow rolling HLS a little, giving them more time to develop the plans while we get commercial cis lunar crew rolling. Okay. Are you cracking up? You loving this? Yeah, I love it. Okay. I haven't even gotten into the planetary stuff yet. Man, this would have been a fun thing to do in person as like a live show. I'm just realizing how we could do our best Zubran up there. With like a big PowerPoint behind you? Yeah. Oh my God. It would be amazing. Okay. So I'm keeping

HLS. I'm slow rolling. it. They get a billion to just keep developing some stuff. People are telling me it's not possible to ramp it up that fast. The chat is like off the hook. Why not? I'm getting too Bill. I'm giving it to Kathy leaders. I'm saying you do what you want to figure out with this. Okay. Then, okay, so here's where some of the other stuff comes in. I've got a human cis lunar habitation and logistics program as part of this. That's going to be the only other thing I'm saving from the Artemis program other than the human landing system development contracts.

is gateway logistics, because that's kind of useful. It could be a space tug in the future. It's an interesting project. I would like to give it some cash to survive. Another part of that money would go to similar to the kind of design study phase of that commercial free flyer program. I'd want a similar thing to see what people could do around the moon. But the biggest part of that budget, I forgot to mention about my human landing system. I'm down selecting HLS to starship and Blue Origin, and I'm taking dynetics and I'm making them study a version of their lander that's a human habitat on the surface. Because it looks too much like Jamestown base for all mankind, and that needs to exist. Okay.

So you're actually making, you're making down-select decisions in your scenario. Yes. Interesting. I didn't make any of those. If you're an autocrat, why not get some shit you want? Yeah, I guess. I guess, yeah, yeah. Okay. Hmm, interesting. Everyone is so, the chat is flying.

I'm not reading any your questions. I know. I can't even keep up with it. So everyone's like, well, what about this? Just bear with us guys. We're getting through it. Yes, we're going full laverro on this. We don't even give a shit.

We're an autocrat. Okay. All right. The next line item that you'll see here is cis lunar launch R&D. Okay. This is an idea. So you might notice some trends here.

Let me give us some more preface of what I'm thinking. There's a thing about Orion that often comes up, which is the Orion program has amassed this collection of knowledge of like what it takes to, have crews on board for that long of a mission, specifically around cis lunar space. They have all of these things built in that are like the best of our knowledge about keeping crews alive. I don't want to, so like Orion is useful in that way. It's a thing we've talked about a lot. I want to take that and make it useful elsewhere. So those people are taking whatever they're doing

on Orion today, and they are in that human habitation program by way of working on the Leo stuff that we've talked about with habitats, the cis lunar habitats, even commercial crew, a commercial cis lunar crew, right, that's going to have to have similar constraints. So those people are they're going to be useful in those spots, right? The other side of that is the SLS. We have a bunch of people that like to talk about launch vehicles. I want to start a program that takes a page out of our friends over the Space Force of the National Security Space Launch program. All they do is say we have these nine orbits, you got to hit them, we'll give you a bunch of money in the future. Same thing. So what we're going to do is, again, this one is going to be one that grows over time.

So the first year, it's a pretty low budget. We're going to start a program to say 40 tons to TLI, 20 tons to lunar orbit, that kind of stuff. You can do it any way you want. It could be a big-ass launch vehicle, distributed lift, refueling. You propose the architecture, but you just got to hit reference orbits in the same way that Space Force does it. So that's something that, you know, I think could be useful for all of these other programs, right? It hooks into HLS, because you've got to get things to the moon. It hooks into the habitation stuff. You got to get to the moon. Could hook into commercial crew flying more complex missions. So that's something. Then I've got another line item for some spacesuits, some unpressurized rovers. Start that a little bit of budget to get that thing rolling. Okay? Had a bunch of money left over. So the part that Jake's going to be really thrilled about. And by the way, all my other years are just going to be like, this is going up and that's going down. Okay, I've scrolled my notes here. Planetary Science. Oh, so hang on, hang on, hang on.

Okay, okay. Okay, so maybe we should like dig into more of this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, I'm chuckling because, you and I arrived at very much the same place in completely different ways. Okay. Nice. And so that's kind of why I'm laughing out of here. Okay. Okay. Let me go through mine then, and then we can kind of compare

and contrast a little bit. Can I just tell you my two planetary science things? Okay. They're going to make you so thrilled. I thought you were going to go through the whole. Oh, no. I have like three things. I added three things.

Number one, Clips is getting more money. I'm adding like $600 million a year for Clips. We're upping that flight rate, specifically at least one a year of a one ton lander so that it promotes some large landers taking cargo to the moon, which would be useful for a lunar base in the future. The other thing I'm doing is $300 million a year for commercial Mars communications. You're getting your...

your communications orbiter, that's happening. And the other thing I'm doing, I'm buying a goddamn Venus mission. It's going to the surface. It's going to the clouds. We've got Venus balloons. I've got it to be like a $3 billion program over five years. That's it. Okay.

That's what I'm doing. I like it. Okay. Over to Excel. It is startling like how similar our things are, but completely different. Okay, so I think you started with the SLS question, which I think is like it's the crux of this entire, like there's so much money in that program that what you do with it, like dictates the entire, the entire thing. So I started, actually, I went all over the place.

So I started, I did one first where I did the same thing as you. Day one, it's gone. See you later. And then what I found out was that when I was like thinking, and I think it was large in the chat to say you can't spin up a program that fast. You also can't really spin one down that fast. You know, when you've got people on contract, you've got. You've got. hardware splayed out all over the assembly floor. This thing sitting in the B2 test. Yeah. So, so I went, uh, one more. I said, well, what if we just flew Artemis one and then canceled it after that, which would give you time to kind of spin everything down and

not waste that hardware and do all those kind of things. And then I went even one further. And I ended up, uh, keeping Artemis 2 as well and ending the program after that. And I'll try and, I'll try and explain a little bit about how I ended up with that. my guiding principles were a lot like yours. I did the most amount of work in the exploration systems world. That was where the most change happened. To me, the radical thing of my administration is ending SLS. I just kind of took it from a more realistic approach of like how fast it could be.

Not my burnt ground approach. It's thrown into the garbage bin, right? And because like I did the math too on like employees at Marshall and Stennis. and Michoud and in Colorado and, you know, a lot, like, that hurts, man. Like, it is- They're sticking around. They're running my programs, as I mentioned. You got to find out where they're going, right? So, so basically, I had like a four-pronged approach to, to target this. So basically, first of all, there is this, we were talking about this in the Discord area. There's this workforce glut in NASA. They've got a huge amount of retirements

coming up. And so my thought is, I'm going to dump a bunch of money. into early retirement packages. So we're going to, you know, all the people that are going to age out in five years, they'll be gone. And then I'm going to attack like half of the people that are going to age out the five years after that with early retirement packages, dump like $400 million worth of early retirement packages across NASA, but target those centers so that we can pay some people to retire rather than letting people go.

So that's kind of one-prong approach with it. I'm going to be moving a bunch of them to... I just read the chat. I screwed up a metaphor and said burnt ground. And it's a baby version of scorched earth. That's what I was going for. Yeah. I get this...

What do you call it? Cis-Looner commercial crew? I have deep space commercial crew. Okay. Nice. Which is the same idea. I like mine because I could... My thing was I was going to call it C3.

Oh, nice. Right? Because then the program office would be C3PO. Hmm. See? I like it. Mine's deep space because then I can just extend it to Mars next time. That's the, when I get my term extended.

Crew dash gateway. So this program sort of bundles in the crew to lunar orbit, which is going to, you know, because Orion. not doing that anymore but it also I using it to do your your heavy rocket development because I want to have both those things happen so what I'm going to do is basically just you know here's your requirements get this many people to orbit around the moon blah blah same sort of reference got it concept and then let people use whatever rocket they want it's going to have to be big and they'll have to just figure that out um so good now I'm trying to think

of my other things that I had for the, I'm looking at my sheet now. You got an artificial gravity line item in here as well. Yeah, you like that? That's for you later. So I was thinking about this stupid SLS program and I figured if there's this deep space commercial crew, it's kind of a stretch, but like, what if they could compete SLS in it? And so as a way to sort of lessen the blow, I will be returning the IP for Orion and SLS to their parent companies free of charge, you get it back.

I'll cut them an amazing deal to lease out Michoud if they need it or Dennis or Kennedy, all these facilities, you can get a great deal at it. You guys take the stuff back and if you want to come back with a proposal and compete it in the Deep Space Commercial Crew program, you're on to it. So that's the thing. So whatever NASA control is left of that IP, we'll give it back to them and then they can get into the bucket with Starship and New Zealand. Jake is such a manager.

Never fire someone and let them quit. Exactly. So that's kind of a where I'm with that. And then the Deep Space commercial crew program would be managed through Marshall to try and get those people kind of moved over. So I think with those like multi-prong approach, we should be a lessen the blow a little bit. Now, what's very different between you and me is that I am keeping Gateway.

and Gateway is actually going to be sort of the centerpiece of the new Artemis program. Rather than focusing on the human landing system, it's more like Gateway is the sort of the crux of this because I think it does a lot of good from the foreign policy standpoint. There's a lot of cooperation going on there

that I think is important. You get your goddamn arm, I know. I get the arm. That's not going anywhere. Like it's double budget line item for an arm. And then using that as the platform to both enable the D-Space commercial crew, the human landing system.

I did the exact same thing. I slow-rolled it. It's going out to 2028. That's when we're going to do the landing. I think we hit like $3 billion a year. I think you actually hit high funding the year before I do. Like mine peaks at like 2024 because my goal is to rush C3 out there and do basically do the Artemis missions you're keeping but with the commercial vehicles.

And as those missions are happening, the HLSs. money is like, you know, on the down swing from the peak. So ideally you'd have it ready for the next mission or two. Hmm. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, I hit the commercial crew hits in like the second year, I think, where it really ramps up. Excuse me. And then human research goes up along with this because I think one of the gateway objectives

really has to be about understanding how people work in space. Because if NASA has one job, it should not be to be building rockets. It should be to like buy. down all the risk that companies can't do, right? And so that human research is a great thing to do, deep space crew, you know, just becoming experts on how to live in deep space should be like the centerpiece of this gateway program. And so all the other programs feed into that as a way to do it. So I scroll.

Am I scrolling? I think you can scroll. Yeah. I'm trying to bring it all up here too. I forgot an item from mine that you might also have. I put a bunch of money into Deep Space Network to get them some new. I did that as well. They're down in my construction line.

You'll see that down at the bottom. Hmm. Okay, yeah. So that's sort of the broad. And then, oh, yeah, good question in the chat. Will it be permanently inhabited at the gateway? So that's what the artificial gravity thing is. The artificial gravity line is a specific project to add a module to gateway,

to study artificial gravity because it needs to be something we look at. NASA is the right organization to try that. and have it fail if it fails. And it will be a long-term habitat. So following the existing gateway program, we'll start with Halo and I have, and we'll get those kind of short-term crews going in the 2024-2020 region whenever we can get this deep space commercial crew online and then follow it up with the artificial gravity one after that.

So that is my exploration line. I assess, I think I rock the boat a little bit less than you. I went after, let's see, let's see if I can remember here. There's so many numbers now that I'm like really struggling to get through all this. You dropped the ops pretty substantially, right? Not too bad, no. You didn't. No.

I was reading your wrong line item. Sorry, got too itemized here. I wrapped up research a bit to kind of accommodate all the commercial crew opportunities that are going to happen. and I'm thinking like a specific program to enable more student projects. If there's going to be so much capability for like QSAT deployments and crew time, let's get some students, some opportunities on there. I'm going after KASS because they are managing that lab very poorly.

So I don't think they're going to be sticking around much longer. But really just kind of keeping the trend line going on commercializing it a bit, really focusing on getting Sierra Nevada up and running is like a third provider. I think the ISS does a good job again with the international stuff, but also just as a place for companies to, you know, do stuff to build capsules, Dragon, Starliner, Dream Chaser, all that stuff is like really, it's had a lot of positive dividends. I don't want that to go away.

So I didn't really do too much to ISS from that perspective. All right. Let's hear it. See how I went down like every line item? Seriously, holy crap. I had to figure out where all this stuff was. This was actually a really fun exercise. It's just like, how much does this program cost in every year?

So, yeah. So science. Now, you might be expecting me to like go hog on this, but actually, like, I don't have a big problem with the way science is going right now. So where I went was, so Earth science, I just give a bunch of extra money for research to make sure we have good data for climate change initiatives, you know, just for Biden to make some good decisions. But in the planetary area, I really wanted to just unleash the community. So taking the complete opposite approach of an autocrat, I'm dumping a bunch of money into the competitive mission. So New Frontiers and Discovery and Simplex, the like tiny ones, they're getting ramped up.

So we're going to get new frontiers. I want one mission selected every five years, discovery every two years, and Simplex every year is to have these missions just rolling out and then let the science community, you know, compete those missions normally. So we will probably get a Venus mission one way or another. Yeah, I was thinking I had new frontiers on my list of ideas, but I was like, no, we're doing the Venus thing. I'm an autocrat.

I get the one I want. I don't have to wait for this selection. So I chose a Venus flagship, but the, original idea for that amount of money was going to be a new frontiers up, you know, upping the flight rate of new frontiers. Yeah. So the one I went after, so I canceled the Europa lander because like we're nowhere near that. Like what are we doing waste money on that right now? The clipper can go forward, a sample return with Mars can go forward. And then in place of the lander, I'm spinning up my Neptune orbiter because that's got to happen. That's going to be the next

flagship that I kick off. So a Neptune orbiter, to explore the moons and Neptune would be, I mean, I'll start it off and then on my deathbed I'll watch it arrive at Neptune. It'll be great. But yeah, and then astrophysics barely touched.

I canceled Sophia after one year because like, sorry guys, it's not really working out. And left all the money for Roman and James Webb. I ramped up money in that. Did you do space technology at all? I don't know if you looked at that.

I didn't screw with the line item there. I figured that the, so you have nuclear surface power here. I was going to roll that power consideration into that habitation program. Right. And link it tightly with surface habitat.

Yeah. Yeah. So I dumped money into surface power and nuclear thermal propulsion just because I like I like nuclear stuff in space. It's fun. One thing I should have done is, now that I'm looking at this portion of, I should have zeroed out the inspector general because we're autocrats. I love the thing to keep me accountable.

I should have zeroed that out. Taking that 44. That's another Simplex mission, right? Oh, yeah. I did not touch aeronautics. I didn't even dig in the line items. I did. No, go ahead.

Oh, I was going to say, so the construction line there is the deep space network. So there's like $100 million in the first year and then 30 more every year after that for maintenance and stuff like that. And then I just, money I had left over. So I started this like clean. energy thing, I think just sort of in line with like whatever Biden wants to do with build back better. Let's make all these NASA centers solar powered and spend the money a little bit on the buildings. I did miss my earth science line item in which I put in the first year half a billion and I was going to hand deliver a blank check to the office of whoever runs goes and just

tell them to do whatever they would like to do with those. Whatever you would do this half a bill and it's yours. basket. Yeah. Everyone keeps bringing up in the chat, like, how do you get around this thing and around that thing? You're missing the point. You're missing the point.

We don't have to follow any of that. We've got a blank check across the board. So I'm walking, hand delivering it to the goes office, putting it in there and say, that's yours. Yeah. Yeah. Because I love goes. They're very expensive.

Very expensive satellites. They're like two bill apiece. Yeah, they are. Yeah. Very nice, though. do you want to talk about some of the like how we got to these things or what we discovered about ourselves in this process? I definitely do because this is like you said this is like a super enlightening thing and

I when I was like going through this I really I think the biggest thing that's struck me was just how fast you can spin stuff up and down because that was like that completely dictated how I was approaching this. That's the only reason I have Artemis one and two on there is because like I'm probably spending that money anyway, so I'm going to get a flight out of it. Like that seriously like the only reason to do it. Now that I'm looking at how we approach things, what I think would be great in our administration is for you to handle the first two years and then I'll help out with years three to five.

You're the vision guy. You need to be the big picture. For two years, I'll do some more work on this. I'll be the CFO and then. Yeah, I'll do more work on my plans long term, but you got the first two years. So like that first year was always the hardest. Like that was, I think you had the same problem where like that first year you had a whole bunch of money left over because you cancel a bunch of shit you don't want, but you can't spend it fast enough. And so it just sits there, right?

Exactly. And what you were mentioning about like, what do you do with all these people? What my goal was and what I think generally about actual world, not not fantasy world that we're in, like I said, I want these people, like I said about Orion, right? They have a lot of knowledge there that is tied up in Orion today. That is not shared, like if you ask them, they'll share it, but it's not being actively shared to different programs. And the way that it could be if you said, you are now in charge of a human habitation program that involves people living anywhere in cis lunar space or anywhere around Earth. And have them transfer that knowledge by way of, like, working on these programs that get it out in the industry. Because you mentioned the ISS legacy of being a place where all these industries sprung up, right?

We've got SpaceX and Axiom and a ton of others that are springing up around the ISS. And, you know, SpaceX has went very commercial, but Northrop hasn't done a lot with, you know, they're not really doing much with Cygnus or Intaris at this point. So the intention is to grow industry. And I think that's the healthiest thing for the industry overall. And the long-term vision is that these people currently work on SLS and Orion, but if the industry grows, it's got to need to be a lot. I don't know if you try to hire anyone lately in the space.

industry, but I hear from a lot of people, it's very hard to find the people that you want to hire. Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of work there to be done, and the point is that I want to take that, like, best legacy of the ISS of growing industry and, and use that elsewhere, right? And get the flight rate up towards the moon, do the same kind of thing at the ISS and get NASA out of, like the ISS, like we said, in terms of winding things down, it takes 10 years because we're currently extended all the way out to 2028.

So if you get to the point where you can buy crew time on a space station, if the next year you decide that you want to do something different, you just don't buy flights that year. You know, you're not already committed out five years. And that's why ISS ties you down. Not because the $4 billion is a huge amount of your money overall, though it is, it's because it's a long-term commitment. So I was thinking a lot about that too.

And this is something that's been on my mind a lot lately is like you so use the term tied down, right? Like you're tied down at the space station or tied down in Leo, stuck in Leo is a term that you hear a lot of lot. But I kind of started I started thinking about it differently in that that's what we asked for. You know, when we talk about, oh, we need to go to space and do things and live and work in space. that's what the international space station is and that's what the gateway is right it sure is yeah i almost like kind of laugh sometimes because like oh yeah we're stuck in space like no no you you said go to space so we went and now we're here and we can't just go back because then you'd be mad that we were not there anymore but now we're doing work there and that's well no but i think that's

the thing that i want to get over right there's there's this fear that like oh we can't have a gap again between like we did between shuttle and uh or uh apollo and shuttle and shuttle and shuttle and commercial crew we can't have this gap. And it's like, why not? You know, obviously I want to see people flying to space all the time. But if you're on an unhealthy path for the long-term view of actually expanding the industry and doing work on more places than just the ISS, maybe you got to break a couple legs sometimes, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's my biggest problem with ISS right now, is that what is the point at which people stop extending that, you know, through Congress at this point? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I, I, I mean, I,

I would hope that when they stop extending it is at a place where groups like Axiom and SpaceX and whoever, like, they have enough between. They're like, well, we're just going to keep doing this. Exactly. That's my main goal, right? Like, you can tweet at me if you want my line items for exploration long term, but my main goal is the next person that takes over is in a position to say the ISS is no longer our best interest.

there's better options out there. The Russians can't plug all the leaks that are coming out of Zvesta, apparently. ISS is a thing that it's not holding up well right now. Like this year was bad for ISS. Yeah, yeah. That's something I didn't factor in is that like, and it did cross my mind where I was like, should I be planning five-year budgets for ISS? Like this is, I don't know, like it could be in danger.

You got to wonder what happens though, right? What if we're all committed? All these governments are committed to 2030 and it's just not going to make it. Yeah. And what does ISS mean is if Axiom puts a couple modules up, some to the IGA, right? So maybe we, I don't know, ditch Zvezda. Obviously, Zvezda is very tied into all this, right?

And that's the other part is that it's not a modular station where you can just take anything apart. It's very interdependent. Hmm. I think it's funny that we both arrived at deep space commercial crew, though. that's really interesting to me. It's the natural thing. I don't think you can sit here and see the success of commercial crew.

And we'll see what happens with Starliner for sure. But it's like hard to not buy the winner, you know? Yeah, exactly. And I was looking up as part of this. I pulled up that article that Casey Dreyer wrote about the cost of commercial crew and how they got two spacecraft with all these flights for the price less than a Gemini or something like that, the way he phrased it, which I enjoyed. It's crazy.

And it was like, you know, I think he put cargo and crew together. It was like $7 or $8 billion total. So it's obviously going to be a lot more than that for SISLuna because you have a lot more constraints. Yeah. But it's not going to be... What did I spend? 13 billion in over five years on these days. It won't be the end by that point.

Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting when you start, there's different ways to think about it, right? There's scorched earth or burnt ground, as I like to say. where you just go for certain things, but then you start thinking about like these, where is it going to be in five years? And I never really consider that.

And that's the way that I, like, now I want to, all the plans that we're going to see come out in the next couple months, I want to say, like, what aren't they addressing? Because I think it's fun to play in Fantasyland where we're going to have an HLS system

in four years and land on the moon and all that, but it's like, if you haven't addressed any of the sticking points, you've just tacked on some wish list items. Mm-hmm. Yeah. it's it's funny too because like going through this exercise i have so much sympathy now for nasa administrators in a perspective of like two things like one and then jb talked about this a lot as

building for sustainability right like what can you build that doesn't get canceled by the next guy was like something that i thought about a lot and then the other one was just uh which we both did was just pick your battles right so it's like you go into this and you're like maybe there needs to be a whole dressing down of aeronautics, but I just, like, I only got five years, and I just, it's not the hill I'm going to die on right now. You guys are, you can coast through five years, and we're going to, we're going to cancel us a list. That's where I'm going to spend my capital, right? So it's, it was a super illuminating experience. I just got to say, like, I'm so glad we did this, even though it was homework. We could get so lost down this revenue, and I'm sure people

are going to be like, what did you do about this thing? I just grew up that one. What about this? Yeah, yeah. I'm going through and trying to see if I missed anything. If you aren't angry at us right now, please let us know. That's how I'll handle this. Oh, and obviously we're renaming Stennis. Just want to throw that one out there. Yes, agree.

Co-signed. Do you have any names? I looked for like an hour, man. I couldn't find something that I loved. So I'm going to let. Shelby Space Center? I'm going to let the good people of Mississippi decide what they want to name it. How about that?

I'm going to open a contest out. We'll do the NASA thing. We'll get a schoolchildren to name it. It'll be that same kid. He popped up in the webcast again. Yeah. Alex Matheter or Mayther or whatever. Yeah, he's a crisis actor for NASA webcasts.

He pops up everywhere. Man, we burned some time on that one. We did, yeah. Are we at picks already? Where are we? we're pretty far along. Is there any, I'm wondering about, so Tyler in the chat asked how we came up with some of these like very specific numbers because we have like, you know, $2.5 billion in some spots or

whatever. I've got a 1.356 at some point. Like, what was your strategy for some of these items? So I tried to go through, like for, to start with a baseline, I went through it. tried to find as many like existing numbers as I could. So my my left most column is like literally this year's budget as best like I figured out. And then for the outward years, I went, there's a big document that NASA put out for the FY21 budget request, which gave me like some concepts of like how much they think this program's going to cost. So for things like a good

example, be like the Lucy and Syke mission, which are launching soon, you know, they're going to cost a lot this year, but not the next year in the year after that. Like what's the operational costs. So they have all those numbers. So I put those as like a baseline. So I just plugged all that in and then I twisted the dials. That's kind of how I. So if you see one on mine like I don't know, whatever. Yeah. 751.2. Psyche. 187 million, 152 million. Like that's all just from a budget request or something. So I had like somewhat realistic numbers to start with. Yeah. And that's the weird thing is that it's, it's very hard to find actual numbers. Yeah. The budget requests are mostly disposed of right by Congress immediately.

And then if you look at the actual appropriations bill, did you read the actual appropriations? Yeah, there's nothing in it. It's nothing in it. It said it shall spend $7.4 billion on this thing and that shall include. It's brutal, man. It's brutal. It's not a table. It's in terrible serifon.

Yeah, that's awful. I was looking at like, say, so I just pull an example here, Earth Science. So Lansat 9 is coming up and you've got Sentinel 6 as well. So two new satellites. The outward year operational costs for Lansat is only $3 million a year, apparently. But Sentinel 6 is like $15 to $50 million a year. I have no idea why it costs like an order of magnitude more to operate Sentinel 6. Like I have no idea.

I'm just like, I'm plugging it in. So partnership with the Europeans and there's got to have more people on staff for time zones or something? There's just like interesting things you find when you go through this, like digging through line item by line item. Yeah, it's pretty fun. The one thing I will say about that is the ISS line items, it's expensive to fly to the ISS. And then you look at, there's like a science line item called biological and physical science, ISS.

It's like $79 million. Right? So you're spending $4 billion to operate the ISS, and there's a science line item for $79 million. And part of me's going, like, what are we doing up there? ROI, baby, ROI. What are we doing up there? Get me 1% back from this baby.

Yeah, it's interesting for sure. People are asking to share our spreadsheet, so we should put them out somewhere. Yeah, we'll put them out somewhere. I'll upload them and put them in the show notes. The only other thing I didn't talk about, well, just a small one. So I didn't talk about sort of the hiring stuff. And Lars called me out. He said he likes the space grant increase.

So I did dump a bunch of money into space grant. But just sort of related to the forced retirements that I was, sorry, not forced, early retirement packages that I was giving to people. We need to hire young people at NASA. So one of the other strategies, I think, was to try and find ways to make NASA appealing for young people, right? And so I think the deep space crew stuff will be like a good draw. Beer in the fridge at work with the ping pong table. Yeah, beer in the fridge, yeah, beanbag chairs.

So, but basically I'm just like spending a bunch of money. So space grant is to get the pipeline going. So like to get a whole bunch of people on some grants to go through that way. And then I actually created like an outreach. This probably already exists. But I'm going to like double fund this like hiring outreach department to like really go out to job fairs to universities and like get that going out there. Because we basically with the early retirement packages, I did the math. I need to hire like 1,700 people over the next like five years.

They need to be like 25 years old, like undergrad. So this is going to be a challenging thing. You know our audience. It's about 1,700 people around that age. Everyone who is an anomaly gets hired at NASA. Yeah. I mean, that would be our greatest legacy. And by hiring outreach, you mean going to conferences and doing meetups.

So, yeah, that could be a new policy is we need to hire young people, get some undergrads, get some master students, get some fresh ideas in there, because we got to start offloading some of this knowledge because these old people are going to retire and then NASA is going to be useless. That's going to be the problem. Is there a line item in the hiring outreach program for podcasters? Yeah, there's definitely got to be like 10 more NASA podcasts on top of the 15 they already do. So, yeah, we're in there, buddy. It's a coffee time with the administrator is the new podcast.

Well, that's what I got, though. That's my budget. I love how close we got. That, like, warms my heart a little bit. We could, we could collaborate on this. Yeah. Yeah. If this is, like, a Senate and House reconciliation meeting, it's not very long.

Yeah, we'd have this banged out over a lunch hour and some pizza. Yeah, it'd be fun. Okay. You got a pick? I do have a pick. So, as you are aware, we are about four weeks away from the Perseverance landing, which is very exciting for me, lots of stuff coming up. But I wanted to share, NASA put out this, I don't know, it was like a plug-in or like an extension to their eyes on the solar system program.

and it is basically the entire perseverance landing simulation in eyes of the solar system. So you can watch it like timestamped step by step. I guess I should probably just, oh, you're right up here. Perfect. You got it. So yeah, you can like, whoa, there's a crew stage step. That's a cool camera thought. You never let it want that long, did you?

Before. Neither did I. So you can watch it like minute by minute, you know, where all the things happened. You can jump from event to event. You can speed up time, whatever you want to do. And you can watch the whole thing. Hard to control. Right down to Jezero, which is like just so much fun.

So this is something you need to go and just sit through this. It's like 16 minutes if you watched it end to end. So it's not very long. And it's awesome. I went too fast. I went too fast. Yeah, you went really fast. I went really fast.

And you can watch the cruise stage or the sky crane fly off and crash in the distance. It's fun. You were mentioning something. about looking at the trajectory and not, there was some talk in the Discord that I caught that was like, didn't realize how I can't slow it down fast. Yeah, like it almost like overflies the landing period. Like I kind of thought you'd come in on this like grateful arc,

but like it, you know, the parachute deploys like maybe a couple kilometers out and then it just slows down really fast and goes almost vertical. So it had a much steeper curve down than we would have expected. It was pretty fun to watch. I'm sorry for anyone watching this because I've probably made you see sick as I, try to scroll around this thing. It's not the most intuitive control of the viewpoint,

but, you know, there's the parachute. Oh, speaking of this landing, did you want to make an announcement? I don't have all the details yet, but yeah, we are definitely doing a live stream again. So if you watched our launch event, it'll be very similar format to that. Tanya Harrison will be joining me again

as a co-host, so we're going to have some fun with that. Still lining up guests. But you will be able to watch along with us as we do that again. So it's going to be a lot of fun. There goes. There's a landing. It's a visual bit, audio listeners. Yeah, you got to get a full experience on the YouTube's spreadsheets and visualizations.

I love it. Well, I have been playing a bunch of board games lately. Oh. We bought a couple. Kid got me a few for Christmas. One of the ones we've been coming back to is an old school. game called Terraforming Mars.

Have you played this? I have not played this yet. I really need to, but I've heard it's interesting. So I got, here's the, you can see the art style, right? What does this art style speak to you? National parks? National parks. I meant an era.

Do you have an era in mind for like this kind of art about Mars? This is very like, that's almost like 80s. kind of feeling. It's super like 80s, 90s feeling. So I was like starting to play this and I was like, man, this feels like some old school terraforming Mars stuff. Open the manual with all the rules.

Sometimes they give you like play examples, right? Like there's three players. This guy does that thing. This other person does this other thing. And here's what would happen. And I'm like, man, this is like pretty old school terraforming Mars stuff. The three names and the instruction manual that they use. throughout for the examples are Kim, Stanley, and Robinson.

And I was like, yeah, I figured this guy was a nerd like us. It's so red, what is it, red, green, blue Mars is the trilogy? There's some cards in here that are like straight out of the book. But it's really fun. So you're obviously terrifying Mars per the name, but you're kind of building out you're a corporation because all sci-fi is always corporations. and you're collecting like cards, building out strategy, kind of, you know, expanding your territory by way of adding greenery tiles and all this

kind of stuff. And it's a very fun game, even so far as like my wife is not interested in the topic whatsoever, but really digs the strategy. We've only played two-player games, which are only so interesting because you have so much room to expand that there's not a lot of constraints on what you're doing. so I assume once the pandemic subsides and we can play with more people, it'll be more fun than that. But it's pretty fun. And if you're a space nerd, you get some nerdery out of it.

And I enjoy some board game time to get away from screens for a bit. That's nice, man. Some non-space games that we've been playing. There's a game called Parks about the national parks that is absolutely beautiful. I need to pull it up. I guess I'm doing non-space picks now. welcome to non-space Pixar.

It's like a game where you're hiking through national parks and it sounds weird but there's a lot of interesting strategy to it you've got to like collect different national parks

by visiting them and there's gear you can buy like backpacks and all this stuff it's beautifully designed this sounds right up my alley it's so good man we've been playing this one a lot

we bought the expansion for this one that adds like camping as well it's a beautiful game really great design all these artists did unique art for each national park. So you mentioned national parks.

So this made me want to plug this one because it's fantastic game. So if you've already played Terraforming Mars, which probably a lot of people out there have, check out parks. Nice. Well, if we're doing non-space picks, I have a TV show I can share. Okay. It's called Superstore. Have you seen this?

I have not watched it. I mean, I've seen ads for it forever. Yeah. Is this a relevant to your life thing, though? Yeah. So it's basically the office, but it's, set in like a Walmart. And as a recovering retail employee, this, like, it is so on the mark.

I can't even, I can't even begin to describe it. Like, half their writing staff have to be people that are still working retail on the side to make their ends meet because, like, it's so on point that, yeah. So anyway, it's really funny. You can do that sort of thing. You can watch stuff that's like too on the nose for you. Yeah, I loved Chuck was really good. good because that was basically like I used to have that job.

But it was like, it was a joke at work that it was a show about me. But I just like, I'm thinking of Silicon Valley and I just could not do it because I'm like, I've been to that party. No, it was good. I liked it. So, yeah. Cool. Good picks.

What are you working on, man? What's going on in your other world? Oh, man. I've had a couple of good guest shows. So I've decided, I feel like I would. get in this mood at the beginning of the year, where there's, takes a little while for like the news that I analyze to pick back up. So I feel like it's a good time to reach out to some people. I also had a really long gap of guests because of Will showing up. I was like, can't plan on

guests. So it took me a while to get back into a flow where I got a good guest slot. So the last couple weeks, I've had Andrew Jones on. We talked all about Changa 5 and then the Chinese space program generally about whether they will get stuck in a low Earth orbit space station much as we are and spend most of this show talking about. That was fun. And then I pushed him to help me figure out the commercial companies in China. There's all this private investment now for various definitions of private. I just haven't really figured out what to make of them yet. So it was cool to have him explain to me. And I feel like I check in with him every couple years on this. like please explain to me the organizational structure of Chinese space generally.

And then last week I had Megan Crawford of Space Fund on, who you will definitely remember, maybe not considering how some of the nights went at IAC last year. We talked all about like the finance side, which I never really dig in too much. I cover like big acquisitions or whatever, but we talked a lot about the like holding companies that are popping up, this shady special purpose acquisition company,

trend that's just totally shady to me. And it was really cool to unpack that. And I've heard from a lot of people that enjoyed it being a different topic than you might, you know, get from time to time. So that's a really good one. And then by the time this goes up, I'll be a day or two away from Christian Davenport is coming on the show next week. So it'll be fun. We're going to talk about SLS Green Run, Virgin Orbit. He's been on the list for a while, so I'm excited to talk to him. Yeah. Your interview with Megan was really good. I found that like super super interesting is some stuff i just did not know and so i always love it when sometimes like listening to space podcasts like because like we're just reading this stuff like all

the time it's like nothing's really news but that was like oh wow like i don't know any of this stuff like this is great uh so it's good but yeah what about you what you got well uh yeah we're i'm ramping up my cadence so um uh i in the past five years i normally do a We Martians episode every three weeks, and I'm trying to up it to two. So there's going to be a lot more this year, which is exciting. But like it's a lot harder to spin this up. Same thing. Getting these projects up and going, man, oh, it's tough.

But I feel like I'm in a good cadence going here. So we just had this good episode with DeVisha James, who is a volcanologist, planetary volcanologist, which is like the coolest job title. Not the rocket. Not a volcanoes on Mars. Volcanoes on Mars. So she helped me learn some things about volcanoes, which is really fun. And then I'm deep into this perseverance planning.

So you are going to be helping me out with some production stuff again. It's going to be a lot of fun. I think I've got one or two guests confirmed, looking for that third one and getting that all up and running. And then lots of merchandise stuff. So I've got some new shirts that are out. so you can get a Perseverance landing shirt. I made this wheel shirt, wheels down, I'm calling it. I don't know if you can bring it up, but yeah,

and you can get it for kids too, but all these new designs are for kids. But yeah, so basically some Perseverance Rover wheels with the swervy treads, which is pretty cool. There is a fun one that's sort of an idea out of our Discord, Delta Yete. Yeat.

So that's something that we've been kind of looking at for a while. this is a really fun shirt to make. And then I also want to say, so this is the last week, guys. The Jim Bridenstein fan club merchandise is coming down at the end of next, basically at the end of the month. So if you want to get the mug or the shirt, those are the two merchandise items left. This is your last week.

And if you're listening to the podcast, this comes out on Tuesday, you have only a few days. So hop on that. I can bump to show up a couple days to give everyone an extra chance. Yeah, give them a chance. So yeah, but that's a, it's been a lot of stuff. So just kind of, you know, I'm getting into the groove here of like doing this full time, which is like really fun.

It is very different. It's really freeing. I've been able to like sit in on some like meetings and webinars and stuff and learn some stuff. I sat in on like a decadal survey open session this morning. I never went able to do that before. And it was a lot of fun. but it's it's great it's fantastic I'm excited for you I can just tell like the the vibe that you're getting into yeah and it is hard does the start of the year is hard because everyone

else is getting started too you know especially this year so I feel like by the spring when things are moving yeah it it hits like fast and furious for me because we've got three Mars missions landing in the next four weeks and then And then there's like a couple weeks and then LPSC happens. And so like that's all like super big cover stuff for me. So I'm basically going to be like running my butt off until the end of March and then I'll have a breather. So we'll see. But it's all good stuff.

I'm happy. Well, this is a good show. Can we not do homework again for a couple months? Yeah. Then we'll bring on a guest next time and make them do all the talking. Oh man. Bye, Jake. Bye.