Off-Nominal - 53 - Venereal is Taken

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

Jake returns from LPSC 2022 and shares some stories with Anthony. #TacoGate2022DrinksDrumshanbo Gunpowder Irish GinTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 53 - Venereal is Taken - YouTubeLPSC 2022 - Lunar and Planetary Science ConferenceLPSC 2022 - Day 1 | Jake Robins on PatreonLPSC 2022 - Day 2 | Jake Robins on PatreonLPSC 2022 - Day 3 | Jake Robins on PatreonLPSC 2022 - Day 4 & 5 | Jake Robins on PatreonLPSC Artemis Town Hall88 – Lunar Science’s Next Giant Leap (feat. Renee Weber)Follow 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

TLS and go for main engine starts. Hello everybody. We're back. I'm back. I guess this is what I should say. You were here the whole time. I've been on duty here. I've been holding the down. Covering for me. Covering while I galivanting. Hey, look at that. Galvancing. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, very excited to share some stories about last week because I was not on vacation at this time I was working at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. That was pretty cool. The difference of teen working and vacation for you is like how much you talk about space? Probably drinking as many beers.

Yeah, yeah, just as many beers. I tend to be on Twitter just as much, not very good at that part. Yeah, what's the difference? I don't really know. It's tough to tell these days. Welcome to self-employed life, everybody. Run your own business. It's amazing.

But yeah, I know. So good. first today. Everybody wants to hear about Taco Gate. That's probably the one getting to knock. That's the big one we're tracking here. Yeah, there's a couple of tweets. I put it in the description of this so that we can really hear the whole story. I don't know. I got on the Taco Gate storyline late, so I had to catch up, which was like a whole different aspect to it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cool. Well, what are you drinking today, man? Oh, well, it is the Irish day. It is St. Patrick's Day. My favorite Irish drink is the, I, I,

had it before. Gin and tonic made with drum shambot gunpowder Irish gin. It's delicious. Half of that, half tonic. Tons of lime. That's the way to do it. You need a ton of lime. Yeah, tons of lime.

What I do is I cut my lime into eight pieces, and then three of those eighths go into each gin and tonic that I make. Three of the eights. Nice. It's not. So you have to make a lot of, Gens and tonic to make sure that you have you're not wasting any limes because one's right you either have you have to have both a lot of limes and a nice runway in front of you It doesn't it the division isn't maybe I should like rethink how I cut them like cut them do six or something

I don't know yeah because I need like you make you make that like you got two and got two halves left That's fine. So now you got a you got a cut another line when you buy limes get like huge bags of limes. Yeah, so it's fine That's what I got what do you got? Do you bring something bright green like like John Krause inspired you too? I did. I did. Although I added some, I guess okay. Okay, so this is a, it looks less.

Okay, so you see like the chocolate streak on the side here. Uh-huh. Okay, so this is like a Bailey's mint martini. And I sprinkled like cocoa powder on top to add a little chocolate to it. And then it sat here for 15 minutes, but they got started. And then it's all dissolved. And so now it's like kind of a puky brown green, but it's still, I think it's still good.

So here we go. I'm happy St. Patrick's. It's not as bright as John Krause would have it if it was his selection. He likes stuff to be neon. He's all about lighting. So he likes a nice well-lit green drink. Yeah. Jake, we are, before we get into your whole sciencey topic,

we are an hour away from the moment that is off nominal lore that, like, is this to make a break? I'm just wondering, if you remember from your dream, was it this rollout or was it the launch rollout? This is the one. It's the dress rehearsal rollout. It wasn't the real rollout? Yeah. Okay. The first rollout, like the big moment.

When the doors open, it is about to start rolling its wheels right as we end this show. And then we will all be watching. We're picking over to see if my nightmare becomes reality. I see if you are a profit or if you just have bad anxiety. So if you didn't catch that episode when it came out anomalies, that was basically, I don't even remember, it was like a maybe six months ago or something. But I had this nightmare that on the rollout, there was like this tiny like glitch. Something was bad on the SLS where like one of the mounting screws just like had a little too much stress on it. And so it like broke.

And that's not a big deal because there's like lots. But then that added a little bit of extra stress to another component and that one wasn't quite ready. And then it broke. And then it just like cascaded up and the whole freaking thing toppled over on the causeway. That was my nightmare. Which would have been like, which would be very bad. Very bad. Not good for program.

Horrible day. Yeah. I also like that in your dream, it didn't happen when it was just sitting stacked in the VAB. I'm realizing this now because it was stacked for quite a while in the VAB. Hypothetically, it could have happened at any moment. But they waited until the doors open. Everyone was gathered there. it started rolling its wheels and then fell over

and I love that. Well, yeah, because in the VAB it's got all the platforms holding it up, it's not moving, but now it's going to get a good clip. The dynamism. Yeah. 0.8 miles per hour on that causeway.

You don't know what kind of stress is that's going to add. I'm just saying, I'm just saying. I'm just saying, I hope the engineers, I hope the engineers pay attention to this and got it covered. I really hope, so. We'll find out. Anyway, tell us about going back to a conference.

This was, because boy, it seemed like it was return to conference life, which is interesting. It was like medicine for my soul. I'm not going to lie. It was just, I mean, it was kind of surreal and bizarre, but like it was so good to just like be in a space with humans in three dimensions. Like there was people near and people far and sound from all sides. and bad clothes that don't fit and just everything that makes being with people amazing. So, yeah, it was really great. So I'm not, like, conditioned to wear a mask that long because I work here in this office.

And I don't have to wear a mask when I'm in this office. So, you know, and I did the good thing where I, like, bought a bunch of, like, good N95s, a whole bunch so I could like change them out when they got gross. And like after like day three, it had like worn like my skin down all on here. Like it was just like raw. It was raw, man. It was like red and inflamed and it hurt. And so I had to get like nicer cloth masks that probably weren't as safe,

but they didn't hurt. And it was just, it wasn't good. A couple times I had just like go outside and just like be maskless for 45 minutes. Yeah. Yeah. So that was tough and I have like so much respect for people that actually have to wear it at a job 12 hours a day or whatever like you are heroes that I will never reach the level of but so yeah so that was wild though but yeah it was great to you back and how this is your first

attempt going in where you were not just the mars guy so you're probably doubly overwhelmed yeah that was really hard like really really hard and i don't think it was like so hard to to catch all the other sessions, but just because there's so much Mars stuff out there, like, you know, if you count all the spacecraft exploring the solar system, it's like 60% at Mars. Like it's not even a, like, and I knew that, but I didn't quite realize that. So anytime I wanted to catch any session that wasn't Mars, I was cutting out a Mars session to do so. And that was like really hard for me.

Yeah. So some game aspect. Yeah, my loyalty to the Red Planet was like really at a test this week or that last week. So it was difficult. And I missed a lot for sure. But you know what? At the end of the day, you can't actually catch it all anyway. So it's probably good that I took breaks from it because you always go into this stupid thing with like a whole bunch of ambition to like, I'm going to watch every science talk and learn everything there is about all science.

And you're like, da-da. And then like day two in the morning, you're like, what have I done? It's like, I'm going to go get coffee and stare into the black for an hour and just see if I can process some of this. Well, where do you want to go with this? Because you brought us back a couple of varieties of storylines here. Yeah. So I thought maybe we would just kick off what I thought was like the big one that I think our audience will be really interested in, which is all the Starship stuff, because most of

this off nominal audience is not like, you know, as into the planetary science stuff as the core we Martians fan bases. And I recognize that. but Starship is a good crossover thing where there's like a little bit of science and a little bit of rockets and politics. A lot of rockets. A lot of rockets. A lot of politics. A lot of politics. A lot of politics. So it was pretty cool. But I guess, I mean, maybe the world we'll start with is, so I started talking to a few of the people kind of early in the conference, you know, the first poster session and things like that and meeting a few people at NASA that were talking about. And the very first thing that kind of struck out to me was how they were like really, really, really careful to like,

explicitly differentiate the Artemis 3 landing demonstration that was awarded to SpaceX and the Artemis 4 plus the Letts contract that has not been RFPed yet. They were like so careful to be like, these are different. Don't talk about them like they're the same thing. The demonstration mission is one landing and it's this and then the real contract. I'm adding quotes real there. they call it the sustained landings. Like that's that's to them with the real contract is. And I thought that was like a really interesting framing.

So the first like couple of days, I was just like trying to unpack what that meant, you know, like how they were seeing it. But were they saying the words real contract? No, I'm adding real. They're saying sustained.

Stained. It's like the way they say that like one person even said like the contract hasn't been awarded yet. Like, you know, because someone was like, well, what are you going to do with all this starship? stuff, oh, the contract hasn't been awarded yet.

So stop talking about Starship like it's the lander, right? And what they meant by that was the let's contract, which is what we think of as the core thing for the most of the program hasn't been awarded yet, right? So it was interesting. It was really, there's like probably a whole bunch of psychology behind that. Yeah, yeah. And you're saying that's from like a science perspective,

payload space, planning, timelines. I think that's the first demonstration. Yeah, but so, In the context of these, like, what can we fly on these missions? The first one is, because it's the first one, like, the science is deprioritized, right? If there's other stuff going on, that'll get cut from the first mission. Yeah, and that kind of makes sense. Like, if you think about it from, like, if you try to do an Apollo analog, of all the landings on Apollo, Apollo 11 was the shittiest one.

Right, totally. They didn't do anything. They got out once walked around a couple hours. Great landing. Output was low. Yeah. didn't do a whole lot, got out of there real fast. Like it was a, it was purely like a risk reduction for the rest of the program.

And you get to those, like Paul, 16 and 17, more like the J class missions, I think they were called. They had like letter designations for all them, right? You add the rover, you add the extra stuff. They did like multiple EVAs for hours and hours and hours. They hung out on there for days and days. So that kind of makes sense. You think of Artemis the same way.

That first one's going to be like whatever, just an end-to-end test of getting there and back. right so but yeah so that was kind of interesting so maybe that's that's part of it I'm sure it is part of it but yeah and so this this whole conversation eventually led me to trying to figure out what that meant for the rest of it right and then they had this they had a town hall and then they had a couple of presentations in the talks and they got to talking about the science opportunities so there's some calls for the the scientists we can talk about that too if you want but they came to this one slides. I'll get you to pull up this one kind of shot, this table that is in one of the slides

for down mass and stuff. Yeah. So I'll try and explain this chart. This was like the chart of the week for me. And I will fully admit that I don't understand it entirely because it was really complex, but I'll try and explain it the best I can. So down mass, up mass. These are like requirements for taking stuff to the surface of the moon and bringing stuff back, right? So it's like what this is the payload that NASA is asking for. And there's a threshold and a goal. There's two numbers each one of those. So threshold is like minimum requirements and goal is like extra bonus.

If you can do it, we would appreciate it. I don't know how the contracting works on that, but that's what they described it as. And then you see, so initial is Artemis 3. That's like the, that's the contract that's been awarded. That's the one that we, that was the big news breaking one. And then the other two there, so Appendix N, two crew and four crew, these aren't let's, these are the, those, do you remember where they added those like follow-on contracts for like risk reduction? Like, everybody got it, right? So SpaceX, Blue, Northrop, Dinetics, they all got like a piece of that, like extra money for risk reduction.

That is this. And I don't really know what that means. Like they, the requirements go up. And so are these extra contracts like funding them to improve? their bids to take more, I think. Or maybe it's like being like cutting the margins closer so there's more room for payload? Maybe. Yeah. Like just you need to get better. And it's like not too much more. Right. So 100 kilograms to 150. Like it's not a big difference there.

But the goal goes to a ton. It does. Yeah. And I wonder if that's related to Starship being selected. I'm not sure. But yeah. So that was this chart. And so this chart came out and they were talking about so what do you said like they were saying you know hey don't get really excited about the Artemis three mission there's they said there's a lot of constraints on it because this is a demonstration so there's not going to be a ton you know they said there's there's time constraints there's um money constraints on this don't expect a bunch of science payloads and a bunch of opportunities to do a bunch of stuff on it right that's what they were kind of saying um but they even said you know we're mass constrained and you should have

seen my face and I was like, what? Like, you're not mass constrained on this lander. Like, they were specifically talking about RMS3 and they're not mass constrained on that, right? So that's kind of what drove me down this whole freaking rabbit hole and kind of figure out what's going on with this. But, yeah, so that char,

I guess, so do you have questions about the chart? I don't know, do you want to keep going on this? Keep going on this whole mass constrained thing and where that came from. And, you know, I think I got my head around some of this, you know, I don't know. I probably agree with more of it than I disagree, but like let's dive into this.

Because it's objectively hilarious. If you know about Starship and like the magnitudes of numbers we're dealing with, this is a hilarious chart. Because like if you and I, we could carry this on our laps, you know? Like I would hold this amount of payload down to the surface. Especially upmass. Upmass is like, you know what? Shit, Jake, we didn't bring any straps.

Can you just hold these rocks for the launch? Just like hold on to these really tight. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So that's where I was like really confused. And so we started talking a little bit about our Discord and some other people were helping me understand it. And what it comes down to is there's sort of like two circumstances that make for this hilarious situation.

To me, it's really funny. So the first circumstance being that the demonstrator contract that was awarded to Starship was not, they didn't buy the vehicle, right? And we all know this, like we've been talking about this, but you realize what that means. Like they contracted a service to the surface. they did not buy a starship from SpaceX. And that contract is for those requirements. So NASA put out an RFP that said, can you please bring 100 kilograms to the surface of the moon for us?

Give us your bids. SpaceX, Blue, Dynetics, they all hand in these bids. They can all, and they all say, yes, we can take 100 kilograms to the surface. Here's our design that will do it. And that's what they bought. So, like, NASA has not paid for anything more. Two people and 100 killer. Yeah, this is like the equipment.

Right, okay. Like, you know, payload bay or whatever, right? So the people and I think they're, you know, life support and food, that's all part of some or number. But this is just like, you know, science payloads or maybe the suits go in that. I'm not sure if the suits go in that, but regardless. So NASA's bought a small amount. It's a server versus contract.

They didn't buy the vehicle. They bought that much space. And then you have this other circumstance. which is the Let's contract has not been awarded yet, right? And so NASA doesn't know who is going to be taking the landings for Artemis 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and beyond. So the constraint you put yourself in is do you design a bunch of stuff and pay for a bunch of volume you don't know you're going to be able to use, right? Like you take advantage of Starships dump truck of a payload bay, not knowing whether it's

contract or not? And the answer is, no, you don't, because that would be, like, disastrous, right? And so that's where you're at. You're basically having this situation where NASA is not going to use hardly any of this thing, as far as we know right now. So you could have this, like, basically empty starship going down to the moon. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the other part, right, is the contract written in a way that doesn't allow SpaceX to fill the rest of it with, you know, Yusaku Maezawa. Yeah. And so this was like, like, congrats. Dear Moon's also going to the moving on this one. We were trying to think of ways that this could happen,

like what would happen with is space. And so the three things we had come up with was, A, like you said, SpaceX just sells it. It belongs to them. They sell their own customers to take to the moon. This becomes like a whatever, you know, like a clips mission or whatever like that. They just sell it. B, NASA ponies up more money and just for this one and tries to squeeze a little more onto it.

That feels unlikely because, A, there's just, not that much, you know, they've been a little bit money constrained in terms of the lander. I guess that new budget is not too bad, but, and but then be, like, again, do you develop a bunch of hardware that you're going to use for this one landing, not knowing if you can reuse it, right? So that's one thing. And the other one would be, does this demonstration mission, this like early version of starship just fly with less fuel, which requires fewer tankers and simplifies the con

con ops, like, quite a bit, right? that was sort of one idea we're noodling around but I don't know that's the thing so I mean I get it from a contractual point of view right that you don't I mean it's the same reason that like we don't see missions in the Department of Defense flying on or being bid out for just starship or just New Glenn's giant faring like they you want to bid out for that commonality so that you you can have multiple landers I think that that is objectively makes sense the difference is can they can they create some sort of

program that separates the payloads and the allocation from the missions they fly and in an environment where we have a bunch of eclipse missions going to the moon and then we've got starship and we've got potential you know blue moon or the dynetics thing coming online is now the time to set up an office that

that does payload management and manifesting and you basically make you know NASA's like spaceflight for landers. And then, so if stuff's going to go to the moon on clips, then we can reallocate it when there's other missions available. If the clips missions end up with more payload space than they planned on originally, we can get a couple other ones in.

The problem is like the integration of those. Do they all work on the same kind of landers? Are they standardized? Because it's not, you know, like things that people that are buying space on clips missions or NASA's allocating them, they're like, okay, I want to be on the deck or I want to be on the side or I want to be on the bottom. There's a very specific payload spots for that. them. It's, we don't really have like a lot of excess moon payloads that are standardized that

we can just package up and send and unpackage on the moon. Well, I mean, I think there probably is. Like if you put a call out to the science community and said, hey, there's a hundred instrument slots go nuts. Like, you'd get 100. And they just, and put like, they have to fit in this size container and be deployable within 20 minutes or whatever. I mean, the constraints on that, though, would have to be like, a, NASA would have to be comfortable with the additional risk on their very important return to the moon landing, which I just don't see them. Like, I don't know what kind of exclusivity is written into the contract, but there has to be some.

Like, I know they're just buying the services conduct, but there's no way NASA was like, yeah, I just do it every one. Yeah, definitely not. Totally fine. Like, no, no, you know, they remain the ultimate authority. Yeah, yeah. You can pull this other slide up from this. NASA maintains ultimate authority.

I know, this is such a good slide. This is from some other thing that came out this week. But yeah, so I don't see them being super comfortable with that. The second thing would be you're not going to have a ton of crew time. That's a big thing I wanted to bring up. Yeah, we don't even know. Number one, we haven't figured out the suits yet. We don't know how they work.

We don't know what kind of capabilities there are, how long they're going to be on the surface. So if SpaceX is going to sell those to like lunar payloads, it has to be like robotically automatic deployment, right? period. I guess for Artemis 3 specifically. And then even then, like the inside of this Starship is not designed for robotic deployment of payloads. It's a big, tall thing. There's an elevator. Like, you're not going to have... Yeah, they're going to have to... It's not just clamped on the side of a lander

and it just lands and works. No, it'll be more like an Amazon warehouse at that point than anything. Pretty much, yeah. You're going to have like a... They need some picker robots on there. The underside of like the airplane where they put all the suitcases, it's going to look like that, right? And they'll be handling it just as gently. chucking these things out. I think about how far you could throw something out of the hatch on Starship onto the lunar surface.

Everything has to land like spirit and opportunity. Everything needs to be wrapped in deployable airbags because we're going to throw this from 30 meters off the surface or whatever. How far up is the Starship hatch? Something crazy like that. We're going to chuck this as far away from the landing site as we can. And when it stops bouncing, then it's deployed. It's not the worst idea.

That might be the best way to make advantage of the crew time and the payload space. Yeah, I still need crew time, though. That's the issue, right? I would sign up to go and chuck payloads out of the hatch. Yeah. I would do that for sure. I think for subsequent landings, if Starship gets contracted for, say, Artemis 5 or something, I think NASA will be much better prepared to take advantage of it.

You know, now that they'll have some familiarity with it and they'll have probably more secure budget. kind of thing. But like for Artemis 3, I just, I don't see them really being able to take a lot of advantage of it. And it's like no one's fault. It's like a weird confluence of just like all the different things that the way this program was set up. And it's like, it's just funny to me that there's just going to be this huge, rinklander. And then two people are going to come out with like a backpack and be like, we're here. Okay. The other aspect though is that like, you could bring a lot of flags. The other, aspect. Uh-oh, do we lose Jake? I think we lost Jake for a minute. Is he coming back? Did he freeze forever?

Oh, no. This camera is freaking out. He's gone. He's gone. What do we do? Do I kick him? Do I kick him out and make him come back? I'm kicking him out and making him come back. Otherwise, I'll fill the time with my thoughts that the timeline here is that clips might be working by the time that Starship is ready to, I hope it's working by the time Starship's going to the moon. So you could do the whole setup where you're sending Clips missions in advance that have payload, right? Because some of the larger clips providers can take a couple hundred kilograms at the surface. So if you're able to send payloads in advance, even on these other landers that don't have enough payload space, you can basically preposition payloads there for them.

So when Jake gets back, I'm going to pitch them on this again, and we're going to even see if that works. but right now I haven't heard from him at all so we'll see I'm gonna tell him to call me from his phone all right his internet died so we're gonna be holding pattern anyway let's talk about these clips things

because so Bradley asked if Starship is an option for clips they haven't officially been onboarded yet but that was open I think Blue Moon is I don't know if Starship has officially so here we go Jake is coming back

Jacob Jake Robbins your line is open Yes. Hello, caller. Caller. Turn on your video caller. He's not even here. Anyway, back to this question about Starship and Clips. They haven't officially been onboarded yet with Starship, but they certainly could be. I think they left open the option to be onboarded. They would still need to be awarded a task order. And I guess at that point, it would be up to how soon they can get those payloads ready. They could technically sell the other space on some of those missions to Clips, providers, I guess? I don't know. Yeah, Bradley, you're really on the point here because if they have tons of payload space as of yet unassigned and they're able to nail down the timeline enough on the actual mission, they can potentially sell that space. But the difference would be like a lot of the clips payloads, like I was saying earlier, you know, ask to be put on the deck or, you know, let me pull the Astrobotic site because when I've talked to them in the past, it's been these

specific spots on the, you know, in this case, this is the Rover one, but on the other smaller landers, they have payloads, you know, on these positions around the lander. So a lot of it depends on what the payload actually needs access to. And like we're talking about, if Starship is super limited on crew time, I don't know that they can actually pull that off with these payloads because they might only have a certain amount of time to be doing whatever setup they need. So, Jake Robbins, your line is open once again. Oh my goodness. You're here, you're back. I don't know what happened. You had a meltdown. Yeah, it was weird. My internet just sort of like stuttered.

It was bizarre. Let me do my best pitch for what I've got into there. Because we're talking about the convergence between Clips and HLS. Because the Clips timeline, I guess still a couple on the manifest this year, I better hope that Clips is working by the time, at least some of the Clips landers are working by the time starships landing on the moon of people. So even if it's not that first Artemis 3 landing, but it's those other landings, you could use Clips landers to like pre-position a lot of payload, you know, and do like an Apollo survey or situation. So even if Dynetics or Blue Moon doesn't

have enough space to take some of those bigger payloads, but you've got a Clips provider that can land 500 kilograms, land that nearby, you know? Yeah, yeah. I guess you still come down to the same issue of like, does Congress want to fund like a but ton of more payloads for the moon than was originally envisioned in the baseline plans, right? I don't know. Like, Right. What do we do with this for? This is a starship problem outside of HLS too. Like, you have all this capacity, all this volume, all this mass. Is there anyone that's going to fill it with anything? I don't know yet. Like, that's still a big open question, right? Like, it's going to be tough. Starship might be flying with mostly

empty payload base for many things. Totally. Totally. Yeah, I mean, that's, like, if it works, they will be by design. Yeah, for at least for a while, right? Well, they kind of, for the market adjusts to it, right? Might be a couple, one web satellites I could throw in there. Maybe, maybe just a few, yeah. I'll take them all up in one go. How much do you need these to get to space? If they can get them back. I don't know if they've gotten those satellites back yet. Oh, I don't know, man.

What a bummer. Hopefully. Anyway. Yeah. So that's, that was my week trying to figure it out. It was interesting. It's a tough problem because like it's almost so many people's jobs to figure out that situation that it's tough to know who's in charge of that.

Is it the astronaut office? Is it the payloads? You know, payload office? Is it the planetary science group? Is it the mission designers? Like, it's all of them. Yeah. So how does that get forwarded?

And Artemis is not meant. And it's just one project, right? Another huge problem, yeah. Although I feel like we're probably a year out from that being an actual thing. Yeah, probably. I would hope. So, I mean, bring that up. It's interesting, the way the science is integrated in it, they went through this in the town hall.

They have basically, so like early on the program, there were some ground level scientists that, you know, were tasked with figuring out what to do on the surface from a science perspective. So just a couple, like, that's their full-time job now. I've had, Renee Weber was on the show on Lee Martians. to talk about science definition reports. So she's one of those people that was like that. There's Jake Bleacher who gave a presentation, people like that.

So they've been on the ground kind of designing it from the get-go. Then they are filling roles right now for permanent positions on what's called like an Artemis science team. And so their job is to, well, first of all, they look at the whole program. So all the landings and, you know, what are the overall science objectives we want to accomplish? they are looking at sort of, you know, the themes and the big, the big picture stuff. They liaise with the Artemis leadership, so program management to the science community. So they're that kind of glue between, hey, you know, their advocates to the leadership team for the science community and then their communication back to the science community for the leadership

team. So they play that kind of role. And then on top of that, they're going to be putting out competitive calls for each sortie. So like the Artemis 3, landing, scientists can self-assemble into like groups of like roughly 10 people or so and come up with like a plan for this is what we want to get done on this landing. Here are the payloads we need. Here's the crew time we need. They come up with like a science plan and they submit that as like a bid. And then they're going to be competed and NASA will pick one for each landing.

So that's kind of the lay of the land in terms of the like science. But what I found was interesting was they talked about that permanent team and how they are advocating for science, which is a reminder, like, this is not a science program. Totally. But that makes me wonder, like, how easy is it going to be for the science? Could be like, hey, by the way, there's a huge, freaking empty starship. Can we throw some extra stuff on there? Please, we need some money for it.

And this is what I want to do. I don't know, man. It's going to be, it's going to be interesting. The lack of the program office is really, like, it gets back to your whole thing of like, the why of this? because there isn't a clearly delineated reason for any of these missions, right? No. Like, Artemis 3 is, we're going back to the moon.

Artemis 4 is figured out sometime between now and Artemis 3, hopefully. Yeah, it's a mismatch. What is the progression? Yeah, but if you had an Artemis program office, their job would be, what is the progression, what is the actual plan here? Are we building up a singular area of infrastructure on the moon? Are we going to all different ones? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's all done at all. at Hawk right now because there's just all these competing wings of the program. So it is completely unworkable in the current play from my estimation. Like that makes no sense. And I'm not particularly pumped about that. Do you think that they're there are like purposely not like organizing it into a program office so that it's harder to cancel? Like is it a right? There is no line item zero. Is it a ploy? You know like could be. I don't know. It's either. That's been done before, right? It's either harder to get money for it or it's harder to take money away from it. It's both right now. Yeah. I don't know, man. That's a really good question. Yeah.

I guess the problem would be if the, if Artemis was the line item on the budget, then they couldn't specifically fund, I mean, they could always earmark stuff. I was going to say they couldn't specifically fund SLS and Orion and ground system separately, but they could still hearmark. that. Yeah, yeah. And it kind of reminds me of like, you know, this is like now, it's like history to us, but Artemis was sort of like a like a facelift on the whole program, right? So like Brianstein came in and it's like, what is all this ESD stuff? Like there's all this crap going on here. Let's give it some branding. Let's slap a good marketing brochure on this baby and get it moving a little bit, right? But maybe that's all it was. Like it's still the same program underneath and it's just got a fancy name.

Yeah. It's a name and a new lander contract, yeah. Yeah. Maybe a little bit. Yeah, it could be. I wonder how much all this is intertwined with figuring out the ISS future because the paths here are like everything falls apart quicker than anyone's ready for and the ISS is gone and then we redirect focus to Artemis, I guess, or ISS is going to require a lot more time

and attention and that's going to take away from Artemis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. like Lunar Gateway, it's really like a feature famine situation here right now, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, either you're becoming the program of record. Yeah, because ISS is toast or you're forgotten about. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, okay, what's the chances that the PPE Halo module is like, nope, you're going to the ISS now and you're going to be the new.

Yeah, you're the new station booster. Oh, geez. We're going to reconfigure this. We're going to put some. I have not put that together, but that's, your attitude control on it. I presume the thermal design on that is not ideal for LEO, but... Nor is like the propulsion actual capabilities of it.

It'd just be like firing those SEPs the entire time. Yeah, but attitude control, I guess, is a big one, right? That that would need significantly more. It's not the dumbest idea I've said. Back to the drawing. Hey, we did that with Orion once. Like, Lull, you're going to the ISS

and Loll, you're going to the moon or asteroid or wherever, so... but not be unexpected. Yeah, yeah. So you talked to some Venetians, too, I heard. I did, yeah. So this is the story. Venetians? Venetians?

Venetians? Venetians? Venetians are the people from Venice. Yes, so that doesn't work. And venereal is also totally different. Totally different. Yeah.

Yeah, so Venetians is the word. Yeah, so this is like the big, this is the story that stood out to me for the whole conference, and this is what the We Martians podcast next week is going to be covering. So this can be like a little, little preview of it. But basically the Venus community is just like reborn like from the ashes. This is, it's so cool to see. So the, I mean, the thing that stood out to me. So I went to this meet and greet they had in like the lobby bar. They handed out flyers. The Venus community was like, we got a little little thing going on here,

just like leaving them in chairs and stuff. You know, come by the lobby bar at five o'clock and meet other Venus people. I was like, well, sure, I'll go, I'll swing by this and see if I can. make some friends, right? I don't know anyone outside of Mars, so I better start networking at this in-person conference, right? New hot kid on the block showed up, so. Yeah, yeah. And they got three missions coming, so that's cool. And so... You're looking at the Mars, the Mars backlog of missions and the Venus backlog of missions, you know, like, it's the distracted boyfriend meme. Yeah, it's just job security for me when you get down to it. Totally. So I show up here, and there's like, like, the bar is packed. Like this is the lobby bar.

It's not really designed for more than maybe like, I don't know, 50, 70 people or something like that. And there was that many Venusians there, spilling out into the hall. There was nowhere to stand. You're bumping into people. It was like pretty awful. But there was just so much excitement there. I'm like, wow, this is great. And I started noticing that there was like a ton of Mars people there.

I was like, what are you doing here? Like, you're just like, you're just like, well, we heard there were some instruments that might need jobs. And so, you know, we're here for the stuff, right? You know, all the radar people. for job interviews. Yeah. All the radar people that are studying Mars polar caps

they're like, yeah, there's some good radar instruments on these Venus orbiters. So let's take a look. And so I thought that was kind of funny. And then I talked to the organizer and she was like,

yeah, we held this three years ago in 2019 at the last in-person one. And she's like, there was like eight people here. That's incredible. I was like, wow, man,

missions make all the difference. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Changes everything. So that community is just jazz. Like they are just so excited that they had a, They had two sessions for talks, and every presentation was like,

here's what I'm studying. This is our best knowledge in terms of what we know from Magellan data. That sucks. We don't know anything. But don't worry, here is how Veritas is going to improve this. And I'm so excited for this mission. You know, and they just, like, everything was enthusiasm. And it was just like, I don't know, it was like, it filled my heart.

It was really good. So. And the timeline on those is like, I forget the exact years, but it's like late 20s we're looking at. Yeah, it's, well, it, I felt pretty long when I first read it, but then I remember that we're already 22 right now. So, um, it's a true fact, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, 27 is when Veritas launches.

And then it's like 29 for Da Vinci and 31 for, uh, InVision from Europe. So they kind of kind of hit in sequence. And Veritas and Envision are like the two beefier orbitors. So they kind of, they kind of go in sequence. Like one will have been there for a few years already when they don't want to get. that's there. So they have this, their idea is to have basically like a whole decade of unbroken observation from orbit and then the Da Vinci Lander to get this cool atmospheric profile. So yeah, it's coming soon. So that's like, you know, five years away basically is the first one,

which means they're hard at work. You know, talking to all the students and stuff that we're working on this Venus stuff, like they're jazz because these early career people can now start getting it on the ground. And when all this data starts flooding in, they'll be like in, you know, the prime of their career. Running something else, yeah. Yeah, they're going to be like, there are going to be PhDs. They're going to be having their, they're going to have all these proposals for, for predictions and stuff for what's going to happen. And they'll be, they'll be stoked.

So this is how you build a, build a workforce. This is what Mars has figured out. And I shouldn't say Mars is figured out, but this is what NASA has done with Mars. They have like a mission to every launch window pretty much. And there's just always data available. There's tons of complementary observations. And so you can get a job and be an expert in Mars and have, job security, right? And Venus never had that. So you always had to go to pay the bills.

You had to go work somewhere else. And so it's really hard to build a little community up. But all these missions in a row is going to help them. So it's going to be pretty cool. Now, is there a, those are both, are they the discovery class or the, um, yeah, DaVinci and Veritas are discovery. New Frontiers. I forget which classes or which. Oh, no, they're discovery. They are. Okay. So how does it go from like, because Mars was a mix of budget types, you know, then they had their series of flagship missions. What is the process for Venus establishing that? Because like to your point, if they're building this long string of things, they have to be looking at 2030s and stuff. And so that also involves

like doing Decatal Survey propaganda and like getting in there, right? Like what is the, what is the other ground effort there for that group of people? Yeah, I mean, you're probably right. So Decatal survey, although this one, I mean, this one's baked. It's going to come out pretty soon here. I don't know what more is going to be in this one that isn't in the last one. So that might be tough for them. But getting the data there for the Decadal that follows will be pretty important. I don't know if they'll be able to get a flagship right away.

That's going to be a tough sell. They just don't do that many flagships, right? I mean, got Clippers going to take the cake right away. And then Mars Sample Return is going to suck up so much money. Um, so between those two, it's going to be hard to, yeah, I don't know, like, and against the other chance, like other opportunities, like do you do a Neptune orbiter or something? Right. I mean, I feel like it's a better bet that the economics of these kind of missions will change so much

by then that it won't require the same type of flagship investment, uh, in terms of, like, the opportunities to launch these kind of things, the industry changes that are happening, that how much Peter Beck's flinging at Venus. I was going to say, yeah, you have these little rocket lab missions that will help too, right? But maybe they can get some Simplex stuff in there. They could do, they couldn't have a new Frontiers mission. I don't know when that next one. That's still a couple years away, I think, before we pick another one in New Frontiers.

But, yeah. I mean, it is an interesting target for other space agencies, too, that are looking for their first planetary mission or something like that. You got Australia cooking around with different projects right now. I mean, Japan's always doing great. UAE's doing great planetary stuff. So, you know, there's going to be other interests because it isn't a target that is, other than the surface details, is pretty attainable.

Yeah, yeah. Launch vehicle-wise, it's not bad. No, it's easy to get to. So they may just, you know, have to wait for these orbiters to answer some questions and then ask some more. That's kind of how it works sometimes, right? but they're going to be able to do a lot of good work through, you know, the back half of this decade and the one after it for sure. It's going to be awesome.

How about the asteroid people? Did you run the asteroid people? Because there's a lot of good asteroid stuff coming up very soon. There is. Asteroid science is hard for me because a lot of it right now is focused on samples, right? We got Hayibusa back and Osiris Rex is going to be arriving soon. and so a lot of that is just like when you get a sample the science changes to basically geochemistry and I just like I just can't do it I don't know what it is it's just it's just another language to me

it's just like chemical symbols and they're like what does it mean yeah I can't change your opinion on the more sample return like how you're going to feel about that when it happens it's going to be hard like I don't know what I'm going to do I might have to like I got 10 years to figure out you know how I'm going to pivot to Venus yeah see you later yeah I'm done you always like to be at the place that we can't quite get rocks back from you that's like your sweet spot I don't know if we're ever get rocks back from Venus no that's gonna be a hard one yeah no geochemistry is tough so I did go to a few of those sessions but it wasn't a highlight for me well what about like the future ones that haven't happened yet because there's like dart and

psyche and yeah I talked with a dart person I mean that's a pretty straightforward mission. There's not like a ton of science. It's going to be just a bunch of pictures, right? But they're pretty excited about that. It's going to be a big, big thing later this year, right? So, see a big crash. Yeah, the timeline on that one's great. Because it's like, year to year. That's great closure right there. Unless it misses. That would suck. The crazy thing about that one, too, is like the little asteroid moon that they're trying to hit is so small that we haven't photographed it yet. We've only inferred its location

based on the gravity wobble. And so this spacecraft's going to be the first thing to take a picture of it. And it's not going to be able to resolve it more. It's not going to resolve more than like one pixel until like the hour before impact. So like on the day when we're all like connected to the live stream, that's where we're going to see the very first picture of diddy.

That's crazy. Like right before it hits. And then it's just like, what if something went horribly wrong and it doesn't exist? man, kid. And it just whizzes by. I don't know. I mean, I think it's there, but it should be there, but like, what if?

It's interesting, man. It's like a weird, weird thing. But yeah, so that was dark. And then Lucy is still like, Lucy's really far out. It's going to be years and years and years and years before we get anywhere. So I think it's 28, 29 for it makes its first, like, meeting. Encounter, yeah. But into the, end of the 30s for sure for all the encounters.

Yeah. Yeah. The flight profile on that. is amazing. It's incredible. Yeah, it's pretty wild. But yeah, so not a ton of asteroid stuff for me. I try to do some moon stuff, which is cool.

There's some good moon science. But again, all the like geochemistry stuff with like Changa samples was tough for me. Jack Schmidt talk was always a delight. That's always fun to watch. Extra drama packed this year. It was a little bit drama packed this year. Jack Schmidt, of course, The only geologists to go to the moon, so he's on Apollo 17,

the only guy they can go and present lunar science on samples that he collected with his hands. Tell us about the orange rug. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the last few years, he's got a little spicy because he's a little sprinkle of, like, climate change denial into his talks, which is, like, kind of wild for a geoscientist. And then... Hey, man, didn't say atmosphere on the tin.

No, it didn't. Just as lunar and planetary. And then, yeah, there was some vaccine stuff this year, which is... Didn't say epidemiology on the 10 either, so... No, I did not. You get what you pay for at this conference. So, but I mean, so he's a little problematic, but I still like watching it just because where else are you going to, you know, until we send Jessica Watkins back over to the

moon to grab her own samples and do some science, like we're just not going to have this sort of weirdly novel interesting experience. Yeah. That's an interesting thing to ask Watkins. There's a future in which this is what you become. You go to this conference every year and you're the only the only geologists to have gone somewhere. You know, like, let's hope not.

Let's hope it's super mundane by the time that you're old. But like, just letting you know. Let's hope they send like three or four geologists. Yeah, right. And they can have their own session and do all the talks together. It'll be good. I'm just thinking without an Artemis program office, we might not. I'm not super confident.

You really, this really depressed me about the, lack of the existence of that office. So on the day where this rocket rolls out, I'm pumped the rockets rolling out. I'm a little sad that like there's no program. Program, there's no program. If it makes you feel better, the rocket has never depended on a program and it just fine.

This would have been rolling out regardless. That's for sure. It doesn't never need to go anywhere. It just needs to roll out. So, yeah. But other than that, that's kind of the conference. I guess if you want to,

if you want to show the time, Taco Gate tweets, I guess we can talk about that. Oh, Taco Gate. Yeah, let's get into Taco Gate. I got to pull it up. Hold on. So, I mean, there's not much to the story, but I, there's the taco place by the conference center that I like, and I think we go there every year, maybe twice sometimes. And so, like, it was the first night and we're like, let's go get some tacos. And I was all excited. I was tweeting about it.

And I had this whole thing about, like, as the day goes on, it's harder to think about science and easier to think about tacos, right? because you get hungry and you're tired. And so I had all this build up. And then we walked all of us. There was like six of us. We walked over to the taco place. And it was like closed, winter hours.

Now we're only open. Yeah. So as the day progresses, chocolate has become more and more common. But yeah, they have these winter hours thing that they do now. I guess probably because of COVID because this is like a weird fake convention town,

the woodlands, Texas. It's like not a real place. and so these restaurants depend on these conferences and there's not very many now so they were only open like Thursday Saturday or something so yeah so this is like the second attempt they had these food trucks and I went out to see them

and they had tacos and they had a sign on there tacos the person in front of me said can I have two tacos they said yes and then I went up and they were like we're out of tacos first thing she says to me did you ask which part of the tacos are they out of Are they out of? Which ingredients are you out of? Can you...

If you've got tortillas and you got cheese, we'll make something happen. Yeah, do you have the basic structural components of a taco left? Or is it just nothing? But you eventually did get tacos. You eventually found your way to... With a nice group of other fellow taco wanderers. That's right.

Yeah, yeah. And actually, so the lady in the middle there, that's the dark person I talked to. So she told me about the delegation. That's Angela. And we got there. This is open on the third. Thursday and it was great. So we got, we got, uh, we got our tacos. I guess I should show the

picture with the taco. There's the tacos. Yeah, there's my tacos. Yeah, yeah, fried avocado tacos. Uh, they were lovely. That's delicious. Yeah. Winter hours is really funny. Winter hours. As if like, it's ice cream where like they're not, they're not as good in the winter, you know. That's the funny part. Yeah, yeah. So what's your, what's your, um, usually you come away with these, you know, you've got a list of things that you're going to book for the podcast. Do you have any, can you give us some teasers for like what's coming out of this that you're going to book? It was a little bit less that this year. This was much more of like a learning experience for me.

I wanted to scout out and get, like I want to get the leads on what I should be paying attention to. And so Venus came out of that. Titan came out of that quite a bit. I think I need to start paying more attention to Titan. And something I already knew I need. need to do more of was pay more attention to the sun, which is not where I expected to go with planetary science, but holy heck, that thing is important to everything else that we study in the solar system. So yeah, so I got to do like a Parker episode, I think. We had a, actually, Eugene Parker just

died this week, which is very sad. So that's the, that's the sign to really dig into this, I guess. but yeah so that's what I would probably say honestly there's just there's a lot going on this year already to cover so I don't really need a lot of leads we got psych and Lucy and and dart and no more Xomars I guess but in the the silver lining there is I didn't really have time for it anyway what is your prediction do you have a do you have a prediction for what's going to happen to Xomars yeah I think it will fly

I think that Issa is not going to want to miss this opportunity to make a point that Russia doesn't get to have the power to cancel things on them. So that's... Pretty good point to make, if you're going to make a point. Yeah, yeah. Now, what ends up happening?

I don't know. Because, like, they're in a jam. So the rocket is the obvious thing, but that's reasonably easy to replace with... It'll fit in anything. It'll fit in Arian. It'll fit in Falcon. It'll fit in Vulcan.

but the landing platform is Russian so that's a big problem so they have no EDL system and then the EDL system they just finally got the parachutes working on they have like internal components to the rover so there's like radio isotope heating units that keep it warm

those are Russian made and there's a whole bunch of instruments on there so like half the science payload is Russian and it's not just like discrete instruments like some of them work together with the other ones And so there's like a complimentary thing. So some of the European instruments are less good without the Russian counterparts.

So like they're in a jam. This thing is like really, really integrated. So I think they will try and redo it. They will definitely look for partners. I think the U.S. has an opportunity to play some kind of role. The U.S. might be interested in also making that point. I want to get together. Like we talked about, maybe Japan or the UAE is like a spicy new or smaller space agency that wants to get out on a cool Mars landing.

That's possible. But I don't know. You've got to stick the landing, though, right? Yeah. Hey, baby, if you're looking to stick a landing on Mars, this is just one spot. There's only one office that can do that. You've got one shot for that. Yeah.

So, I mean, and even this morning, Yosef Akbacher said that NASA was strongly interested in helping. I don't know what that means other than just a show of support right now. But yeah, so it's not flying this year. It's not flying in 24. The 26-27 window is like your best optimistic scenario. More likely 29 is going to be the shot if it works. So that sucks. You know what that means?

Is it like some of those instruments are going to be like 20 years old by the time flies? It's crazy how long this mission is because they've had so much trouble. They partner with you guys first. And then NASA pulled out, so the whole thing fell apart. Russia bailed them out. They had their own problems for delays. Then they had a pandemic. And then it's a parachute problems.

Like, it's just like a nightmare of this. Yeah. And now Russia can. So that's the only thing with, with ESA is like, every time you guys pick a partner, it fails on you. So maybe you guys need to just figure this out on your own. Yep. This is the time to just buck up and do it. Yeah.

Yeah. Hmm. So. Well, what do we got coming up next week here? Next week. So on the show, joining us next week, we have Matt Brealey coming on. And he's going to tell us about this cool tool that he built for exploring the service of Mars called Aerial Browser. You can see this is the website here. So he's basically like gone through and put a nice interface behind all the raw data coming down from JPL and the rovers and stuff. So it's got like curiosity, perseverance. I think insights on there. And I think he just rolled out like a brand new thing to add the old spirit and opportunity data. So it's pretty cool. You can browse all this stuff and really kind of unpack it and, you know, look by day and by route and everything. And so it's, it's pretty wild. It's a really cool way to view the data. So yeah, I send him a message

and ask him to come on and talk about building it and how it works and what he's learned and all those kind of cool things. So it's going to be another one of those selfish crossovers. Another one of those selfish crossovers of like space science and dev work that you. you and I do sometimes. That's right. I did a couple of mecos while you were gone on this feed. That's fine. That's fine. Yeah, so he's going to be joining us next week. It's pretty dope.

What else? You had an episode out today, right? Main engine cut off? I did. I had some lingering thoughts about the fallout of everything. There was just some stuff I didn't get to last show that I did. It's just a, I'm, I'm, it's tough because all

of the things I care about are in better shape, you know. know me, I've been a Russian space hawk for like three, four years now. But like, Europe getting into human spaceflight is awesome. Yep. And then, and guess what? Then they get to be annoyed at their governments for taking too long on a big rocket that flies people. And they get to be annoyed at what an institutional human spaceflight program is like. But like, if you're interested in more people going to space, there should be more things to take people to space. And then we've got that, how that connects to commercial space stations. It's interesting. There's more customers

for it. There's more ways to get there. More European customers for something like a Blue Origin Station or whatever else. So like, it's going to be messy for the space industry politically and industrially, but there's like stuff that is going to come out and I think end up good for the development of space. Yeah. You know? It's, it's through the worst way possible. So I'd just ruminate on that for a bit because I had, I've been reading all the other space news, but it's hard to pay attention to anything else at the moment

when like something this awful is happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You always put these episodes out like an hour before off nominal. I don't have time to listen to them. Yeah, I mean, hey, look at this. It's a podcasting Thursday is maybe part of my schedule now, Jake. Yeah, yeah. No, but you're right, though, it's difficult.

This seems to always have. This is like a thing with war, right? it always spurs something, right? It always kind of kickstart something. And, yeah, space may be a beneficiary, which is... Yeah, I mean, Germany is spending more on defense. Like, that's a thing that's happening out of this. Yeah, yeah.

The U.S. is going to spend more on space. That's what's going to happen out of this. Like, there's a lot of... It's just everything gets shook up, you know, and the way it all falls is going to be really interesting. As I've said before, this is a story that is not about space and also the biggest space story in decades. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I don't, I don't, I, like, it affects everything in the world because of the makeup of the conflict, you know, and there's a lot of people that are like, what about this conflict, what about that? And it's like, they're all terrible. And one of them affects every part of life in every industry because of not only like the people involved, but the fact that it's at the tail end of a pandemic that totally ruined everything in life. Like everything's, it's just horrible timing all around. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. So. Anyway. And, uh, We'll see what happens to the SLS. I think it's going to start rolling in a couple minutes, right? A couple minutes, yeah, we've got to head over there. So, yeah. And then, so if you want to hear more about LPSE, the Venus stuff next week, WeMarshans podcast will have an episode. I got a few interviews with some of the people on the missions and some students,

and it's going to be good. Okay. The SLS has been delayed by an hour. Oh, half hour. Update, half hour. Okay, update. All right. Okay, so we're not in a rush, but, yeah, anyway, we're going to go watch it.

Yeah. But yeah, check it out. So check out the Venus episode. And yeah, that's the story. That is the story. All right, everybody. Thanks for stopping by. Until next week, see you.

Bye. 4, 3, 2, 1, End the best.