Off-Nominal - 49 - Spacewalk Chaperone

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Jake and Anthony talk about some (really good) changes coming to the show, Jared Isaacman’s privately-funded Gemini program, and SpaceX’s Starship…update.DrinksTecate - Cervecería Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma S.A. de C.V. - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 49 - Spacewalk Chaperone - YouTubePolaris ProgramStarship Update - YouTubeStarbase ShirtsFollow 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

DLS and go for main engine start. I didn't even hit record. No, I did. Hello. Oh, it's great. Hi. Everyone says it's new, but it's not. This is not new.

This is just the regular show music because it says episode 49 on the tin, which is ominous foreshadowing for our first topic of the show. How's it going? You're a little shook based on your Twitter account. Yeah, you know, it's not a great day for... Canadians. It's not a great day to be a Canadian space fan on Twitter. Yeah, your vent diagram is having a rough. That's a rough day for your Venn diagram. Yeah, yeah. You know, usually like I, I've been like working very actively on

keeping social media like at a safe distance from me. Like I go in and I get the things I need from it. I put the things I want to put out there and then I can detach from it. But like sometimes it just hits a nerve and you're like. So yeah. So, yeah. So, So, that's how I mean. Do you have a nice drink, at least? Nice. Well, that's a good question. I don't know what's going on.

You've like, give me a couple of teasers on this and I'm very confused. Yeah. Well, I mean, so this is a, this is an episode 49. So this is not a happy hour show. Correct. And I thought, well, if it's not a happy hour show, I should just go back to to a beer like I usually do. And considering what we talked about last episode, I figured the only beer I could, I could really get is. Oh, man.

Double ticate. A very small beer. I got a Jake size one, though. My camera free so. Yeah, your camera froze for second. Oh, that's incredible. Amazing. This is the best coincidence.

We, so viewers, I was suspicious. I bought this today and I was like, I think he might have one of these. We don't coordinate on this. So this is a purely joyful coincidence. But I did get a glass for it, Anthony, because I thought that eating or drinking from a can would be like very undignified on a live stream. I don't know what it is. I'm doing that. It's a tecate.

It's not, it doesn't require pouring it out. The funny thing. What was it? When we had a marina on, I made that like fancy champagne drink. And I, before a show, I changed into a collar shirt. Because I was like, I can't drink champagne in a T-shirt. And then today, I was like, oh, I have off nominal. I put a collared shirt on.

I was like, no, I'm drinking to Cate. This is a T-shirt show. I'm really excited because you've never had it, so. Oh, I've had lots of it. Oh, you have? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Since the move, though.

This was a strictly post-Mexico thing. Yeah. Yes, yes. Interesting. I had never seen it before I got here. A very small new beer. I think, I don't know, it's a small beer in Mexico. It didn't make it to Canada.

Never heard of it? Yeah. Incredible. Yeah, that's great. All right. Okay. That's a great start. Adrian thinks that I have 35 beers aligned up in my desk and I just grab whichever one you bring to the show.

Whichever one I have. Yeah, yeah. That's one way to brute force the answer, right? No, Adrian, we're programmers that we would never take a solution like that. No. Much too manual. Cool. Well, cheers.

Too off nominal, I guess, is the cheers, right? That is the cheers because we have a show update. Yeah, yeah. So I want to start this. Okay, happy hour. Happy hour. That was the thing that we decided would be an awesome addition to the show. I was quitting a full-time job.

We were entering a new era. So we were like, you know what, let's do this thing. Weekly, we'll hang out more. We'll try some stuff out. And then it turns out we thought it's actually what the show should have been all along. We totally nailed the format. Yeah, this is the natural home of Ophnominal, we think. It just feels right.

The time zone feels right. Regularity is good. Yeah, yeah. So what does that mean? So, you know, it got a little awkward for a couple of months there because we were like doing the regular show and the happy hour show sometimes on the same week. Like one time it was like back to back.

Day after day. Yeah. Which, like, didn't feel very normal. And also, that was a busy week. so I do really appreciate that. But yeah, so we've also heard some feedback from listeners that you are very, very mad at us because we don't put Happy Hour in the podcast feed. So all of that factoring in, we're basically off nominal and Happy Hour are folding back in on themselves.

We will have one show. It's this time slot every week. It's just called Off Nominal. And we're going to dump this audio into the podcast feed for everybody. So you'll find you'll be able to get all of the episodes. So that should be very happy for everybody. Yeah, that's it. So I guess happy hour is dead, long live happy hour.

I don't know what you say about that. It was an experimental transition period. We worked out some stuff. We implemented a system where we have like, I hate to break it to everyone. We are professionals. We've got the next six of seven episodes already booked with people and topics. And it's like very nice. a whole system. I've been optimizing the production flow, so this should go into the podcast feed

tonight. And I think it's just the way it should be. It just feels right. This feels like the show. So guess what, audio listeners? If you were someone who's mad at us for having Happy Hour once a week, you just got four times the off nominal in your podcast feed. You got a lot now. Yeah, you got a lot. Four? Yeah, four, I guess. Four a month. Just four to one. Roughly, right? Yeah. 13 per quarter if you really want to get into it. But I will say though, so just like, you know, for the podcast listeners, the podcast listeners are our OG fans. You know, that's that's how we we started and our roots are of course in podcasts.

So we're happy to make sure that you can see all this. But the show is still a YouTube show. So this is where we're putting our effort. There will be tons of visuals and just for production streamlining, we're not going to have like a bunch of extra stuff to try and make it work for a podcast. We're literally just going to like paste the audio in there so you have it so you can listen to on your commute without having to pay YouTube money or whatever. So that's the thing you should just know.

If you can make the live shows, they will be the more exciting, better experience. And so we hope you will come here. We think of this now as a YouTube show, but we're happy to make sure you guys aren't left out and cold. Yeah. And I know like there's going to be some episodes where we probably lives fine as an audio episode, but there's even some people we've booked already and some people that we are currently in the process of talking to that are very visual things that they work in.

So it'll be like, hey, if you're listening, hit pause, go check it out later if you want to see what we're talking about. So I guess this serves as a good reminder for people listening. If you're a YouTuber, then not like a YouTube consumer, not like a YouTuber. But if you like YouTube, then we're also on YouTube. Because we probably didn't say that a lot on the podcast. Oh, maybe not. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway. So that's exciting. We're stoked about that. So this episode 49, we're going to bring back the naming tradition, which I think felt missing from Happy Hour. I don't know what you thought. But there were so many good names that popped up in Happy Hour episodes and then we just never use them. Well, we're going to resolve that.

We got a, we were starting off. We're like, well, I guess we'll do the show update. and then what are we going to talk about after that? And then boom, we got some topics, Jake. Are we going to be arguing about things today? Probably. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Okay, great. Our friendship is at risk today. It's on the line. Yeah, I know. So this is a funny roller coaster because we were like, okay, let's have a, you know, we're going to have some news. So let's do a show you and I and hopefully there's some news. And then there was like, oh, we're going to have a starship update.

on Starbase and Elon Musk is going to talk about all this stuff. And it was like, oh, okay, we have some news. That's excellent. Let's slot that into the show, washed our hands of it. And then that update happened. And there wasn't any information as though it fell right off the radar again. But then we got some new stuff with Polaris. So this show, the format of the show has changed like three or four times in the last seven days.

So we'll see what happens with it. Polaris program. Polaris. What do you make of this? There's a lot to unpack here. I don't think I don't think I've like fully digested this into like the into like the space landscape yet about all the things that this has like a knock on effect to. You know, so I guess that's what we're going to talk about today. That would be one of the things to unpack. Yes.

Yeah. So I mean, I think overall it's super interesting at least from a new standpoint, right? I mean, I'm sure the flights are going to be very exciting. depending on how much we get to see them. But I think overall, there's like tons of weird niche talking points here that we could probably do two or three shows on for sure. Just the fact that it is literally a privately funded Gemini program. I guess we should explain this what happened here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want to do your best elevator pitch or would you like me to do my best elevator pitch? Well, so I guess we got the announcement on Monday, I think, from I don't know who broke it first, CNBC or something like that. And so Jared Isaacman, who flew the Inspiration Four flights, who bought the Inspiration Four Flight and commanded it, he bought three more flights effectively. So two dragons in a starship.

And there's some interesting tidbits about, we only kind of have details about the first one, which is a dragon flight. They're going to go pretty high. They're going to do a spacewalk. How mundane you're saying that. They're going to go really high. They're going to do a space walk.

Well, yeah, we can talk about the height, the altitude of this flight in a second for sure. Yes. And then, yeah, and then two of the participants are SpaceX employees, which is also like another interesting thing we could probably go very long on. So I don't know. Where do you even start with it? And our friend John Krause is back as the content director. Snap is back as content director. Yeah, we'll have to bring it back for some.

more blue drink and talk about this. Blue Curacao update from John Krause. So, yeah, it's like, I don't know, which part do you want to chew on first? There's a lot to go on here. Yeah, there's like some, it's interesting that it went from, you know, a tourism flight for a good cause with some really epic media wrapped around it to very serious business, developing missing pieces of SpaceX's architecture, right? It's basically figuring out the convergence of

what is Jared interested in fulfilling as a space bucket list versus what does SpaceX need to develop. And I feel like somewhere in there is everyone's trying to figure out the financial arrangement to this. And I feel like that's probably the extent of it. The Jared's buying flights and SpaceX is putting up development money to, like, you know, build the EVA suit. I assume they're going to need like a new hatch on the front of Dragon to do the actual airlock

procedures or lack thereof. They're venting the whole thing, right? Yeah, they got to take the Playplace bubble out and put in the Playplace tunnel. Which that's a real bummer that the window is not going to be there. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, you trade it for a spacewalk, so it's a trade you'd make any of you, I think, right? Well, I guess I'm more concerned for the three people. I mean, so the visualization, you know.

You know, that little rendering here on, where is it, that dawn page. Just has a single person going out, and I guess the others get to sit in their seats and look out the hatch while this is happening. I'm like, are they all going to go out of this thing? Is this going to be an EVA party? Probably not because they're all going to get tangled up, and that sounds horrible. But, you know, sucks for the people that don't get to go outside that don't get the playplace bubble. I mean, you could, like, trade off, right? I guess that's a good point.

It was up there for five days or something like that, right? Yeah, but I think you're only doing this. I don't know how much oxygen they got, but. Yeah, all technical questions that are really good. Very true. I really wonder like how much, like this kind of feature, a spacewalk from Dragon, was that considered in the original design? Is there, are there like legacy pieces in the design that were never used that they

can now just kind of leverage and, you know, go from there. So that's kind of a good question. Because I know Dragon's gone through lots of changes. And it's, I remember when it was going to land on land? That was. Yeah, had feet. Yeah, remember when I was going to go to Mars? That was another thing.

Apparently, Jared told Tim Dodd that two people are going out for the spacewalk. Okay. So that's good. Yeah. Which two is it? Well, it's Jared for sure. Maybe Jared and a SpaceX, right? I think it's Jared and a SpaceXer.

Yeah. Although, you know, two of these people are paying for the flight effectively. Two of them are working it. Yeah, yeah. Unless you need like a chaperone. Maybe this is like when you go skydiving and they attach you to somebody first. Tied to the front. Just floating around with a person's trapped to your chest.

Oh, man. Who would you pick? What astronaut would you pick if you had the? go out with the chaperone. So who's behind me? Yeah, who's doing, who's like, who's your Bruce McCandless? Uh, Mike Massimino. Really? That's good.

Because he'd be telling me jokes the whole time and I'd be losing it. He also is the appropriate size for you, you know? Maybe, yeah, he's a big guy right? Yeah. I'm taking, I think I'm taking Grunsfeld. Ooh, oh, yeah. Grunzfeld. Someone that's hugged the Hubble. Or Luca Parmatano because he's been through some shit.

Yeah. Yeah. Or Hadfield, same shit, kind of. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, I want an astronaut that almost drowned on an EVA to keep it nice and calm out there. Adrian in the Discord says, Bill Nelson. Oh, who am I kidding? Bill Nelson. Who am I kidding, though? Tomapeske.

Oh, yeah. He'd do some hijinks. He'd be pretty funny. Okay. Yeah. Because I'm intimidated by like Anne McLean. I don't know if I could match. that energy. Yeah, yeah.

She looks like she would not allow hijinks in the way that Tomapeske would. I would also be intimidated by like Samantha Christophe ready just because like, I think I would just be intimidated anytime I was in like 100 meters of her. It's just like. Peggy Witson, the whole like very experienced people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Where I'm struggling to learn my third language right now and she's like mastering seven or eight or something like that and I'm like, ooh, like, oh, man. Yeah, so that's the spacewalk thing. The flight plan. Let's talk about the very going very high altitude thing. So they say they're going to go the highest Earth orbit, which we are all assuming means higher than Gemini 11. I should know this because it's my boy Pete Conrad, which was like 13, almost 1,400 kilometers.

Yeah. Very high. Beautiful view. I should pull up a pick from Gemini 14. You know that one I'm talking about? Maybe. I know the flight. I can't think of the picture, though.

Yeah, you know it. Hold on. I'm getting to it. Anthony Google stuff. This is another segment. You know this one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're real high.

You see a Gena in the foreground. The agenda antenna, right? Look at that nice curve. That's what I'm talking about. So this is what we're assuming that they're referencing. Yeah. But I have a moment. A lot of complaints, yeah.

I would like to, before you get to your complaints, I would like to talk about how they get to this altitude and what they would do, because I was having a conversation with a friend about, like, what part do they do first? They launch into low orbit, then they go up to a high apagy. And the fun thought that my friend threw out there was like, what if they did a direct launch

to a very high apogee orbit, right? Like some, not a parking orbit, but some low, parogy, high apagy, you know, going up to 15, 1600 kilometers down to like, you know, five or whatever their ultimate goal would be. And then arrow break back down on that apogee. So kind of use a couple orbits to phase down rather than, you know, because that's a lot of delta V to get up all the way to a 1,500 kilometer

and then back down before you were to come back in. And they say that the spacewalk's going to happen at 500 kilometers. So how do you make... Did they actually say it was happening in 500 or is that? But says it on the website. John Kraus is here. So he can tell us which parts of this we get wrong. I'm sure he's been in the flight planning meetings as well.

Because I don't know how you could ever, like, why wouldn't you do this? Well, first of all, why wouldn't you do this plan to do the spacewalk at the high altitude? I agree. That would be functionally more cool. If you're in an elliptical orbit, you can because you go out there and then 30 minutes go by and then you're on the other side of the planet at the high altitude. That doesn't take very long. So maybe 50 minutes or something.

You have to be circular. Yeah. So unless you're a weird theory at approximately, yeah, okay. At approximately 500 kilometers. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how you get there. That's interesting.

Or they just, maybe we're overthinking it and they're just spending the fuel. They go up to an elliptical one, check it out, burn down to 500, do his base walk, come home. Like, I don't know. Maybe there's not much to that. Unless, you know, I don't know how. gutsy they want to be with an entry from the 1500 kilometer or whatever it ends up being the high apagy reentry but that should be one of those things that dragon like a legacy dragon feature is that it's got a pretty beefy heat shield yeah that's what i mean so would this be one of those things that is also part of the flight that hey we're

going to come back in uh jemite one style you know could be could be i don't know yeah all right so give me your complaints about highest Earth orbit. Okay. So first of all, it just isn't the highest Earth orbit because I don't know, I don't know why we don't get to count the Apollo orbits as Earth orbits. Like as soon as the S4B cuts up and they detach from the lander, they're still in Earth orbit and it's got an apogee of like 400,000 kilometers. I don't know why that doesn't count. Like I just, I can't. And I'm especially annoyed by it because they tried to pull this with the last flight too. inspiration for they're like it's the highest plate and then it proved like doubly wrong because shuttle

also beat it like a couple of times and so I don't know I just like I don't know why they keep trying to like claim these firsts that are just not their first to claim I it's like a bad habit with this mission now because they also did it with like youngest person in space first person with a disability first like with a prosthetic like all that ended up being like not true so what about the first sports bet I think this first sports bet have we proven that that is not accurate? No, I don't know. I just like this mission has got plenty of stuff to be really excited about. Like, why try and brag about the ones you don't have? Like, yeah. Well, so, okay, so if I'm going to, let me play the role of gatekeeper, right? Uh, the one, yes, the Apollo things are the Apollo things,

also known as the Apollo missions that go out. The Apollo missions, yeah. They are Earth orbiting, because at that moment, they are, it is, orbit is a state, not a place, right? so they are still an orbit of the Earth. They did not go to heliocentric orbit. Completed one Earth orbit at that altitude would be a way to gatekeep, right? Like, yes, they were in Earth orbit, but they did not complete an orbit. That's a way to do it. You know, is that fair in the world of fractional orbital bombardment systems that did not complete an orbit, but they were once in orbit?

You know, that gets down to your... The first starship flight, right? Yeah, right, exactly. So, like, if that... Did Yuri Gagarin go to orbit? Precisely. Like, yeah, that's, you know, it's all levels of gatekeeping. And then I guess it depends on once they are in the, you know, in the KSP version of the sphere of influence of the moon.

Are they no longer in Earth orbit? Even though the moon is also orbiting Earth? What is the planet, Jake? You don't need to count that one, though, because, like, they hit the other part before. that. So like, who cares if they even go, like, the spacecraft to just vaporize after 10 minutes. Oh, I'm saying, if completed in Earth orbit is your take, they did because, like, they were up there on the moon for a while and then they came back around, like, you know. Yeah. I don't know. It's all gatekeeping. That's my soapbox. Break about the things you're going to do. Like,

yeah, there. We're in the era of like, our SPR team, call me and I'll help you through this. Which firsts to dunk on? Yeah, yeah. Man. All right. So the other, you're fine? Okay, you're all, you feel like you got that out? Can't wait to see which other first it is.

First commercial dragon flight to not have the toilet leak under the floorboard. Could be. It would be a good one. The, so we're talking about the mission profile for this one. And there's third flight of the Polaris program is Starship's first crude flight. The second one is very little info. Yeah. And when I saw the name.

Polaris Day and Polaris Dusk. Blair's Day and Valer's Dusk, yes, in which Jared Isaacman is very old when he flies in Starship. And they bring out the next one. That's like four people are going to get that, I think. Yeah. So Polaris Day, we don't actually have a good, by the way, we're going to use these names so much that then John tells them to use these names on the missions if they have not already. It just says mission too, but I think we can get a little spicy here with this. No details on the second flight.

When I saw the name originally in that like teaser tweet before the announcement, I'm like, oh, they're going to do the first crude flight to polar orbit. And that's not accurate, at least that we know of. Could still be, I guess. They haven't said no to that. Yeah, well, this is an interesting one because it would like... That would be a legitimate first? It seems to make fence.

It would be a legitimate first. But I was talking about this in the Discord. It just feels like a lot of work. And I don't know what it gets you because it's not just, you know, point down instead of a cross when you launch the rocket. Like you have to have to have all the board zone set up, right? And I know there's like lots of coastline, but you need more than just. This is my reason for this, though. Let me go on my little rant about this.

Okay. All right. So the Inspiration 4, oh, wait, this one, what am I saying? It could still be. I literally asked them if this was going to polar orbit or not, and they said they're going to the same inclination they did last time. 51.6, which is where the ISS is. That's where Inspiration 4 flew.

They use that one, because, number one, the way it launches out of Florida, you get all of the U.S. coastline, then you get over to Europe, and there's plenty of zones for abort and recovery. And all of, until someone else. else changes this, especially for SpaceX missions. All of those human spaceflight missions are going to go there because they want to reuse all that same architecture. And, you know, we talked on this show a while back about space shuttle aborting to Easter Island and how, like, bizarre the aborts were out of Vanderborkshire and space. The new route that SpaceX has been flying

south out of Cape Canaveral solves a lot of those concerns because it gives you at least somewhere to base your recovery and abort operations because you're flying down the coast of Florida, you're going through the Caribbean. If you cut it right, you can just go down the west coast of South America as well rather than over the Pacific Ocean like Vanderberg would be or something like that. So it's at least an option because whenever you say what about a different inclination, everyone says, well, you can't even launch directly east out of Cape Canaveral because then you're just over the Atlantic Ocean. So it is at least an option. And also I am not a fan of you, not being a fan of polar orbits because seeing the poles from space seems like a really fun thing

that we have not yet done. I think it would be an amazing view. I think it would be awesome, but I just don't know if that's like the risk reward ratio. Is that right? Like all the all the work to establish a whole new abort zone regime, all that operational planning and set up, do you need people down there? Do you need any assets? And then you just like, okay, get a good photo. Okay, great. That's awesome. But like, is it that much better than just going back to 51 and taking picture of the Northern Lights sideline? I don't know. Like, I guess my issue is like, do we always just want to fly at a 51.6 degrees equation for ever, you're right. You're right. At one point, we do need to fix that. Yeah, we do need to fix that. It's like imagine if planes

worked, but they only went on one particular route and it's like, LA to JFK, that's it. Do we only ever want to do that, you know? Well, the other question I have, though, is can Falcon do that? because dragons is one of the heavier payloads it does, right? Yeah. And you lose... They probably would need to do Falcon Heavy. Okay, so then that's like a whole other new thing, right? Right.

And the era where Starship was not a thing, this might be part of the private Gemini program that we're undertaking. To, like, push the capability of Falcon Heavy being able to fly Dragon or whatever. Yeah. Also, like, how much are they already chipping away at that work because of the flights that they're putting on Falcon Heavy that are the most expensive National Reconnaissance satellites

that we have that also require severe amounts of paperwork and due diligence before you launch that thing. Maybe they're already most of the way there and they just,

everything with SpaceX is if no one's paying for it, we're going to back burner it. Right? That is the basic gist of all of the things that you mentioned earlier that have gone by the wayside

Falcon 1 did that. Falcon 5 did that. Red Dragon kind of got sidelined because Starship was becoming a thing quicker. Yeah. So that's why this is a cool program to me, because Jared is looking at this program

as a way to contribute to the development of space by not just sheer investing money into SpaceX and hoping whatever they do is the right direction in space, but saying, like, I want to do a bunch of things in space, and I would like to incentivize you to actually develop those things. So, yeah, people even mention gray dragon, which would be fly a dragon around the moon.

Like, if that's a thing, that Jared's interested in and the delta between where Falcon Heavy is now and where it needs to be to fly people is not that much and is, you know, coverable by the cost of this program. If SpaceX has a customer, why wouldn't they do that? Yeah. Yeah, no, and I agree. And that's like, I mean, I've been saying this for years, SpaceX's is brilliant. This is making their customers pay for their R&D, right? They did that through all Falcon development. Like, they're just, they're great at it. What they do. So this makes a ton of sense.

And honestly, I'm mad at myself that I didn't see this coming. But it still would depend on Jared wanting that. So Jared is going to have to say, okay, here's what I would have to put into this. And if it's the customer pays for R&D, then he's going to be putting a lot of fronting, affronting a lot of cash to get Falcon Heavy and a polar corridor all set up.

And if you're Jared, Like, is that worth it for that shot? Or would you rather like, is there something else you could do? Right. You know, are there better alternatives? Okay, so that's a legitimate. Here's the legitimate case that I think you're stumbling upon. If you're going to pay money to incentivize the adaption of Falcon Heavy to crude flights,

are you going to, I guess this would, it depends on how they would do this. But like, if the two options were pay this amount of money and get Falcon Heavy to fly you where you're going to go, you're going to go to polar orbit, you're going to try to go see the moon. Yeah. Five days is what Polaris Dawn's going to be. It's not that much longer to do a free return. Yeah, and maybe that's it. But then it's like, well, if you're going to go to the moon, why don't you just do it on the starship flight rather than the dragon flight?

Because that's Polaris dusk. He's going to be very old. Yeah. I don't know. So I think there's possibility. I think it might be true. But I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of reasons why it might not be true, too. I am going to be kind of mad if they used the name Polaris and didn't go to Polaro.

Yeah, right. I'm going to be as annoyed that we wasted the good name of the Aries Rocket on a thing that barely ever existed. Yeah. You can reuse rocket names, though. We've done it before. Especially than they didn't exist. Yeah. Oh, man.

Yeah. Side jagged to that. How happy would you be if SLS got renamed to Aries? Not? Or a little bit? happy. Do you want it to have a real name? I don't think it should be Aries because it's not going anywhere near Mars ever. So I mean, I think it should get a better name. Yes. Yeah. Like Saturn. Yeah, that was pretty clear on the ultimate goal.

Helio. It's wrong. It's wrong. But the majesty of Saturn, I guess. is pretty... It's wrong only because we never put a centaur on that sucker. Yeah, yeah. Jupiter 4. That's a good... Lots of good names. But I think Starship should be renamed too, though, so maybe I'm the wrong.

That's fair. John, content director of the missions that we're currently debating, would like us to break down why Apollo flights and their distant orbits should not count, or should count as Earth orbits. So gatekeeper Krauss here to check with us. Well, I mean, very simply, it's in orbit of Earth and it's very high.

Like, it changes because eventually in the orbit, it runs into the moon and so things happen to it. But like, even so if you really want to like forget the lunar orbit thing, Apollo 13 just did one full revolution essentially. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it just got tugged around a little bit by the moon on the far end of it. I don't know why it wouldn't be on Earth orbit. I guess, all right, let's push this one to the extreme. If you were able to do, well, number one, like, is completing a full circuit what counts as an orbit

or is it merely the state that you are at any given moment? And I think it's a state. It should be a state. Orbit is a state. It is not a place. It is a state. So if at any point you are in the state, of orbit, you are in orbit or on orbit, as some people would say in their Twitter accounts.

So precisely, the Starship test thing is a good example. Like, was that an orbital flight test, you know, presuming that they go to orbit first and then de-orbit less than one full orbit later? Was that ever in orbit? No one would really argue whether it was in orbit. Does it matter if it didn't complete all the way around? I don't really think so. Yeah. So. That's our argument, John. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. So, where are we?

You have some theories, I think, right? I do. Yeah. It's kind of a weird one. All right. I'm a game. I'm game. Okay. So I'm sure you've seen there's, we get into this conversation in our Discord all the time. It's, and it's pretty played out. But, you know, the idea of like how, how much, how much, how important, is Elon Musk, the person, to the enterprise of SpaceX. Right? That's a question that comes up.

Sometimes it's like, no, he's the X factor. Without him, it's nothing. He's the special someone who makes the whole thing happen. And then others will argue the company is 10,000 people that do a lot of really good work. The CEO just can't be that important, right? Like, you know, so you can have that argument until the end of time if you want. But the thing.

thing about the argument of him being really important and the clutch key cog in a system means that you also have a very, very, very, very, very bad weakness in your business and that what if something happens to Elon Musk, right? So if you're an investor, let's say you're one of those special people that got to buy shares of SpaceX and you're a big investor, like you should be really, really worried about Elon Musk all the time. Like you should be like, is he taking care of himself? Is he getting enough sleep? How is it eating?

Like you should be always thinking about that, right? Should be like Fitbit friends with him or something. Yeah, you should. And there should be... Got to get those steps up. There should be a pretty good succession plan somewhere on a piece of paper, right? I don't know if it's Gwyn or someone else or whatever, right? But there should be a good succession plan.

All good management has succession plans. Yep. So I was thinking about that in the concept of Filaris, and I was like, you know, now there is a person who has demonstrated that they can start a business from the ground up to a become a triple comma person, is interested in spaceflight, has lots of experience with airplanes and rockets and management, and is like really, really into the whole vision of space for humanity and all that kind of thing. So I don't know if this is like a plan, but Jared Isaacs, Jared Isaacman is now like a candidate to me. He's a name you would surface of

like. He's a name. He's on a short. He's on a short. this now somewhere of like who could take over SpaceX when Elon Musk goes to Twitter jail forever right like this is and I think the way it would work is that if Elon decided he didn't want to be at SpaceX anymore and Gwen Shotwell became CEO Jared would come in as a C-O-O and eventually be the CEO and that would be that way yep that would be the thing like a not necessarily immediately promoted from going on a spacewalk and then running the company but like yeah you're right if you if you drew a list of like the skills that a person would need to be in the same ballpark yeah you got a lot of the list right there and and if you're on the if

you're one of those big investors you know in the in the in the non-existent board of directors or is there do they have a board of directors i don't even know but i assume so maybe not i don't know if if you're on like the you know the inner cadre of of power brokers behind space x um man jerek Isaacman's a breath of fresh air when you think about public relations. Yeah, he's doing, oh, should we talk about that aspect of like the charity aspect of this all, that that's continuing? Yeah, we should. Because it's continuing.

I don't feel like it needs to if they wanted to stop. I feel like I would give them permission to decide that they're now running the privately funded Gemini program and, you know, talk that up as the good that it is for the direction that humanity's going. Yeah, yeah. No, they could. And this is, this is tough, right?

Because you've got, you've got multiple factors there. Like, you're going to have, like, a, Jared just cares about St. Jude, obviously. And so he might not give it, give two shits about whether you should or shouldn't do it.

Right. He's just going to do it, right? Well, if it raises some money while we're doing it, great. Yeah, yeah. He's just doing it. He doesn't really care what you or I think.

But the second thing could be... All bets indicate that. Like, everything that we have say that that is exactly what's going on there. That's, that's my leading theory. Without knowing the inside of Jared's brain, that's probably what's happened. But then there is like there is sort of a PR aspect to it, right? Because as we've seen, this company has a controversial CEO and he doesn't always get good

press and that's hard for SpaceX. And so being able to attach himself to SpaceX, if I'm Jared Isam and if I can attach myself to SpaceX, but bring in. good juju, that's like, that's a strategic move, right? So basically do like a good version of Jim Cantrell. Attach yourself to SpaceX really hard, but have a good outcome this time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an interesting analogy.

I have to noodle that one for a little bit longer. But yeah, so I mean, there's that, right? I don't know. I mean, if you want to be a cynic, you can you can be like, yeah, it's just, a distraction or whatever. Like is this charitable contribution even like affected? Like would it be better off if he just gave the money that he spent on the spaceflight for that.

Do it, Dylan Taylor. Yeah. Yeah, you can have that. You can have that debate if you want. But I think the one thing is it probably elevates St. Jude to like a charity people, maybe who didn't know about it now consider it all the time. So there's a pretty big knock on effects there. Which is why I think that's a good, that's a good reason.

in your theory of like, hey, he just legitimately cares. And if that's the thing that he can also help raise awareness of or whatever, that's a good side effect. I just think it's like a pretty clear shift that this is now serious business, you know? I don't feel like, and it might not look different to people that aren't us talking about this, right? If you interviewed random people, they might look at this the same as like, yeah, people are going to space, you know, typical derogatory comments of people going to enjoy rides or

whatever, but if you're interested in space, you see it as like, oh, yeah, they're legitimately incentivizing development of things that no one else is. There's two, you know, half the flight is employees. These are professional astronauts to bring up that whole debate. Like, Anna and Sarah are going to be professional astronauts. Like, they could put that on their LinkedIn, professional astronaut, astronaut employed by a space company. Not paid to go to space. Yeah. So it's pretty clear that it is serious business. And I'm, I'm for, I'm, put me in the camp of like being for serious business. I enjoy serious business in space.

Yeah. No, I agree 100% with you there. Because it's like, we've just, we've been through like just years and years and years of talks and promises of like, this is what space could be. And it's like here finally is like just some people with no government sponsorship out there spending money and doing things. And it's like, that's like really refreshing. It's like something could like grab onto and be like, hmm, this is just.

Chewy, right? This is useful work happening here. So, I love that. I think to like out-of-body experience this and talk about if you're like NASA watching this, right? If you're somebody that is in the NASA human landing system program, how pumped are you that someone else is paying SpaceX some money to figure out how an airlock works, right? Because whether or not everyone's getting vented to vacuum in this spacecraft, like that is how an airlock functions. There's just a door on the other and too. So this is like airlock practice that is, this is proving NASA's point that other customers matter because SpaceX didn't get money from NASA to develop an airlock independently of the whole landing budget, right? And they probably haven't spent any money on an airlock through the Starship

program at the moment. I don't think they really have spent any time on that yet. So guess what, the space ops side of SpaceX is now working on airlocks. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, whoever are like the the big lynchpin decision makers at NASA that like greenlighted commercial cargo and commercial crew, they are just overjoyed this whole thing, right? Like, yeah, I don't know, I don't know. There's lots of people that are involved with that, but yeah. I'm getting taken to task here, but Mr. Content Director, we should just call them up at this point, but John Cross is telling me it's publicly confirmed the entire castle be depressed, no airlock. Yeah, yeah, but an airlock is just a spacecraft with a door on both ends. Yeah. That's how it works, right? So, This is airlock practice. There's just seats on the other side, not a door. It's a one-sided airlock, yeah.

Yeah, so they got to like develop the hardware that depresses and represses. They got to develop all the safety checks that they need to do before they do that. Make sure, you know, whoever, who was it, John Young's corned beef sandwich doesn't go floating out the hack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's great. It's really, it's really interesting and exciting to see and it's new and it's fresh and it's gonna like, it's just gonna give us so much more to talk about and think about

And it changes like preconceived notions about what you can and can't do in space and who does things in space and everything about it. It just turns everything on his head, which is like I think why right off the top I said that. Like there's so much here to digest. Like we haven't even really talked about the two SpaceX employees. Like what does that mean? Right. Like there's a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. Like are they, you know, is this is this a one off thing just for Jared or are they like hoping to really grow this? And if they want to grow it, where do they want to grow it for? for like is there's there always going to be SpaceX employees on these ships like is this like basically how starship you know uh flight crews start like i i assume if you're going to send 100 people somewhere and then you couldn't have a crew on there to take care of them flight attendant make sure yeah yeah they're mask on someone to give them that little tiny glass of coke with 15 ice cubes in it like you need to have that right and so this is kind of like the

start of that and that's just really interesting to think about because you know no other scenario to be consider that, right? It does airlock jokes. The one aspect of this, right, that we're talking about private individuals, incentivizing the development of things that they would like to see in the world. On a similar budgetary scale is like, I would really like to see a picture of this particular location on the moon.

I will purchase a developed flight unit to go land on the moon and take a single picture of me on this particular part of the moon that I would like to see. Or I have several hundred million dollars, and I would like, as your favorite would be, 10 insights for very cheap on the surface of Mars. Like once there's, you know, the, we are now seeing this personal incentivization of a mission. I don't think this is the last time that we're going to see something like that.

Yeah. Which is interesting to consider at a larger, like, planetary research scale. Yeah, yeah. Well, and the insight example is actually really apt, because like it you know so insight gets a bad rap because things didn't go very well and now it's it's being suffocated by dust but if you follow the whole history of that insight mission on mars which is the seismometer lander with solar panels the the PI for that has been working with other people as well has been working for literally like 30 years to try and get this

mission like his initial papers with like mission concepts were in the late 80s I think So he tried every way he could do. He tried getting it into Kale surveys and getting it onto this mission class or that mission class, trying to get the Russians to do it. All these things didn't go well. And he finally got this thing through the discovery program. And there was a ton of compromise on it. Like it's not even part of the Mars program.

All the instruments are provided by Europe. Like it's a complete nightmare of a setup. Can to clean all the solar panels. No, yeah, can't even clean up with solar panels. So it's like a nightmare of a setup, but he got it done, right? And so that's like the heartwarming story about it. But what that kind of shows is there's people out there who have these really interesting ideas on what they want to do in space, but NASA was the gatekeeper and he could not get through the gate

except for this weird little side door where he had to hunch over and hurt his neck. Like that's, you know, that's what happened with this thing. And so this kind of stuff with Polaris is like, I really hope it provides, opportunities. I mean, not just this particular program, but the new era we're entering provides these opportunities where someone like Bruce can come up and be like, I want to put 10 insights on Mars. And they go, great, when you want to fly. And there's no gatekeeper, right? So that's pretty interesting. Yeah, it's a thing that the shape of it is something I think we should get used to. The details are going to change. But, you know, foundations, organizations, people always

are spending money to create a research organization or to fund a project, go look at something on Earth, a lot of climate stuff going on these days in this realm, and it's silly to think that that would not happen as it gets cheaper to expand out beyond us. And then in the same vein, it's like, we have an example now, you know, we got to thread the needle for the space nerds at the moment

or for the gen pop at the moment, but not the space nerds, that like this is the serious business time. This is not just a joyride. incentivizing development is I think the storyline that if there's a sufficiently interested person, I feel like that's the storyline to tell them. This is not something that SpaceX does all the time. Because Inspiration 4 was like the thing they were pushing was regular people going to space. But we're using all the same hardware, the same operations. It was operationally the same thing they've been developing for ISS flights. But the difference was the people. And now it's like,

oh no, let's do some new stuff. Turns out, a couple people have not been to space before in the flight, and are like regular people, but that's no longer the unique aspect there. The unique aspect is, I want to do things that SpaceX doesn't have yet, so we're going to partner to develop these capabilities. And I think that'll be true for like the companies that are in the commercial lunar payload services program, they're going to have lunar landers. Like, people are going to want to do weird things when you can get payload to the moon,

and these companies might partner with them to develop special capabilities of their in the future to do that. And that's a great. That's the future I want. That's a timeline I want. Yeah, it's interesting, man. And it creates so many interesting paradigms that were just like so. And I didn't realize how so unaccustomed we are to it.

But like, you know, so one thing I was thinking about was just like, okay, so imagine this program's done. So the three flights have passed. And now you have Jared Isaacman, who has flown to space four times and is, like he's I mean he's paying but he's also kind of a professional astronaut blurry line there but like a pretty experienced astronaut like there's going to be many traditional astronauts with far fewer flight experience like less flight experience than him right and it's like oh what is this what is that what what what what box do you put that in and

the answer is there is no box to put it in it's different and that's this kind of fun to think about just kind of shaking things up a little bit right We get to have new gatekeeper arguments, which is also great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People love those, man. Yeah. You love taking dunks on them, but. I do.

Should we get into the Star Base non-update or Starship Non-Update? Five minutes. Yeah, well, you have the good theory on it. So you put our podcast on this. It was great. People should listen to Miko if they haven't. My theory boils down to the fact that I think this was like an NBC exclusive announcement, like they had something on the day show.

I never actually even looked at what that was, the announcement there. But that's, what's his name? Tom, something or other. It's like the NBC reporter who tweeted this first. I can't remember. One of the Tom's. He was at the Falcon Heavy launch. We watched him set up

his very professional setup with lighting and all in the same press room that we were all in. And we saw some tweets from Jared Isaac being doing flybys of Starbase in the week leading up to this event. Kind of had the sense that there was some Jared connection to the Starbase update, but then it came and went with zero mention.

And Elon referred to, like, there will be some upcoming missions. I think people will be jazzed about. Tom Costello, John Krause informs me, content director, probably talked to Fancy Tom himself. And so there was like all this kind of circling evidence that there was a thing going on with Jared and stuff. Starbase and then nothing happened on that Thursday and then all the announcements were Monday,

which like purely makes me think it was supposed to happen that Thursday. And it was an NBC exclusive. They were going to be sit up there doing live shots or whatever. And Elon and Jared would be announcing it together in front of the fully stacked Starship. This is the first crew that's going to go on Starship. But it didn't happen because NBC has been fairly busy. Not sure people outside the US would know this, but they have been broadcasting the Olympics. The Super Bowl was last weekend on their network.

I kind of feel like they just got punted to Monday. And we're like, we'll get back to that after the Super Bowl. The crazy space billionaire can get shunted to the next. But Elon was like, I'm still doing my update, so we're just going to get out here and talk, invite all the reporters to go drive too far into Texas and spend a lot of time for like, you know, everyone's article had a little bit of sass in it this round of like,

there weren't many news things to talk about. Now, Tyler's going to be crap saying not sure if non-Americans know about the Olympics. I'm talking about the Super Bowl and that NBC was broadcasting all this stuff. Their airwaves were a little full this past week. So that's my theory is that it was like intended to be, there's no way it was not intended to be synced up. From Thursday to Monday and they're not going to mention it. Like that's, that would be a ridiculous thing if not for this NBC time. It's a super awkward comms coincidence that any good cons manager be like, what are we doing here?

Yeah. But anyway, so there were like very little Starship updates because I think the whole thing was intended to focus on these, this person is paying for the first crude flight on this crazy rocket behind me. Yeah. But instead it was like, hey, let's get out those slides from 2016, update them a little bit, put the new metrics and then talk about it some more. It sucks for SpaceX too. Because like, you know, SpaceX's big thing with that update, in my opinion, was all about just like kind of like some saber rattling to the, the FAA. approve it, right? Like, there was a lot of, like...

I'm undecided on that. No, man, there was, like, planted local officials talking about how, how, like, great, the jobs were going to be. Thank you so much for saving our community. Like, there's, like, purely just coming out and threatening, like, if you don't approve this, we're leaving Texas, like, explicitly saying that on the stage. Yeah, that was the one thing, right? That they were much more up front about bail into Florida if something presented a challenge.

That message would have had so much more weight if you could be, like, look at the stuff we're doing with this. like this is not a made-up program. We've got real customers doing real stuff with this. Approve the damn thing, right? So I think that's what they were really, that's the message they wanted to get. So it's a little muted by that,

but hopefully it gets through. Yeah, the might have to move to Florida thing is an interesting one. That's for another time to unpack. Yeah. Biggest star base. Yeah. This is your plug.

Yeah. I was trying to tell the story. Yeah, so I was idly watching this non-update and kind of had an idea for a design. So if you need a new shirt, look at this hunky guy. Isn't he a handsome guy? Holy moly. It's beefy. Yeah, yeah.

So you can get this new Starbase shirt and it's got a beautiful Bocahika sunset on it. And yeah, so if you need a new shirt, new space shirt and you want to support the show, here you go. Do you want to tell them where to get it? Yeah, you can get it on my shop. Shop.wimartians.com. I always assume everyone's. I should set up subdomains for my joke, Weimarsians domains.

Shop that. Shop done. We marchens. I got to set that up. You need a Spanish one now. Oh, man. That's not as funny, though. Yeah.

Yeah, so check it out. I guess we should also talk about memberships, right? We should. We're very poor at this. We should talk about memberships. Especially all the podcast listeners who are refusing to come to YouTube. We have memberships now for this show. So we know it's always been a little awkward to support off nominally.

You have to go and sign up for the Weimarsians Patreon or the Miko Patreon, which just like didn't make a lot of sense. So you can join this channel as a member now. It's five bucks a month. That gets you into our amazing Discord. We could probably do a whole episode on how cool our job. Discord is and all the neat, interesting, weird stuff that happens in there. We've got lots of people who work in the industry and provide us great insights on all sorts of things.

We've got community-run bots that are really, really fun. It's just a great place to hang out. There's a lot of bots. There's a lot of bots, yeah. You can make predictions via bots. You can. What are all the other bots? Oh, they'll fill you on acronyms.

Yeah, we've got launch alerts. We've got temperature conversion things to make it easy to have cross-cultural discussions. We think it's a pretty cool place. So if you want to hang out with us all the time and all the great people that make up the off-nominal community, all the anomalies, five bucks a month in the YouTube channel, and you can join us. So we hope you help. And make sure that we do more of these shows that will do things in the future. You'll be funding whatever hijinks we get into when Artivus won,

Moses's its way on out to the launch pad. It's getting, I mean, I don't know, I haven't really been a lot of updates. We haven't really scheduled anything since hearing about the delay, but we have a lot of plans in mind. We're all planning to go. It doesn't know when it's going to be. Memberships, man.

YouTube.com slash off-nominal. There's really not a better way to, there's no URL. YouTube does not give you a URL that's like a cool thing. No. It's just got to go to the main one. Big join button ran on that page. It's fun.

Anything fun you're working on? We talked about your Polaris episode. The Polaris was a big one. Nothing I can really plug yet. Next week on this show, you will be traveling. I will have a special guest that will be talking about financial space topics.

So take a hint. I can't announce the guests yet because we're working with very professional organizations that have yet to approve our guest spot. It'll be financial space topics that are discussed on this show. Space Spacks, space stocks, stonks, as you write in the show notes. Can't spell space without spec.

Can't. He certainly cannot. Yeah, that's going to be good. I'm excited for you guys. Yeah, I'm taking a vacation next week. Boom. So deal with it. He's going to drink a bunch of tecates.

A bunch of ticcate, yeah. So it's going to be, it's just an offensive amount of ticate. Let's see. Bruce Willis is going to come down and nighty because I'm going to drink so much to cutte. The personal, personal sponsor of all Mexican beer, Bruce Willis, via way of deep fake. Awesome. Well, thanks for hanging out with us, everybody.

This has been fun. See you later, everybody. Enjoy the podcast, podcast listeners. Our friendship is intact. All you people who yelled at us on Twitter, you tweet us and say thanks. Yes, please do. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.