Off-Nominal - 57 - Ford Taurus-Littrow

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Caleb Henry of Quilty Analytics joins Jake and Anthony to talk about Amazon’s Kuipermania launch contract, and what it was like to moderate panels at the 2022 Space Symposium.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 57 - Ford Taurus-Littrow (with Caleb Henry) - YouTubeAmazon signs multibillion-dollar Project Kuiper launch contracts - SpaceNewsAmazon launch contracts drive changes to launch vehicle production - SpaceNewsCaleb Henry on Twitter: “We had a great discussion. Definitely the biggest commercial launch deal in world history. Exciting stuff!”T+213: Amazon’s Project Kuiper Launch Contract Blockbuster - Main Engine Cut OffWyler claims breakthrough in low-cost antenna for OneWeb, other satellite systems - SpaceNewsFollow CalebCaleb Henry (@CHenry_QA) / TwitterQuilty AnalyticsFollow 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. Hello. Welcome to main engine cut off. No, I did it again, Jake. No, no, come on, man. I did MECO this morning and I can't get my brain out of that. That's the show. This is off-novenal.

Can you see that I have the little sticker up on the wall here with the off-nottal logo? I need some cue cards or something. You either need to do all the intros or I need Q cards. All right, you're right. We got Caleb. Caleb Henry is in. He's in my town right now, but he is not in my house. unfortunately. How you doing, Caleb?

Hey, hey, yep. Up in Philly. And I, like, hesitate. I wanted to say, like, the city of brotherly love, but I feel like everybody does that. It's just like, no, it's Philly. It's the 215. Go with always sunny jokes. We are going to eat some dinner after this, which is going to be great. But, Jake, I'll Skype you in or something. All right. Sounds good. I appreciate that. I appreciate being included. Thank you.

No problem. I'll send you some picks. Jake, you went to Costco earlier. Did you get any drinks at Costco? Well, I kind of. Not for this, not for this thing. But, you know, I spent a lot of money at Costco like you do. But all this stuff, I had to go get ahead of time because I had to make sure I had it. But, okay, so there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of, like, theater to this one today.

So I started with, this is called a twisted bachtail. So this is It's just tequila and orange liqueer Lemon juice And I'm missing one I'm missing one Ah shit Something else is in here

We'll find out what it is It's got a bunch of degrees Oh simple syrup That's what it is But the trick of this one That's supposed to make it special Is that you top it up with a beer With a Hefe-Oisen

So I've got this one today From Germany That's what they had I'm not going to try to pronounce that. Yeah, at the beer company, yeah. Shofer, hofer, maybe, something like that. But I guess you just top it up. So I don't know, we're just kind of experimenting.

This is off nominal here. This is what I'm doing. Oh, nice. I'm just going to put a little bit of beer in here. It looks like you've got like some Home Depot hardware in there. These are my metallic ice cube. So they're a game changer. Game changer because they don't water it down.

So, yeah. Anyway, here we go. It was loose hardware from Home Depot that you just keep in the fridge for a while before them. When I first saw it, I had no clue what was going on. It was like the fourth ingredient is definitely whatever those are. Something that makes a metallic reaction with one of the alcohol. Just some 3D printed bolts that I got from Airjet Rocket Dines. They've got a lot of these days.

It's pretty good. This is like a beer margarita. I like only pour it a little bit. Is that the rule? Like you're only supposed to just put a little bit? I don't know, man. I'm just kind of, I don't want to water it down. Do you think I should put more?

I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. I didn't read the rules. You said there's like a whole thing to it, but. This is just a made up thing on the internet. This probably isn't real. Caleb, did you grab anything fun from the store or anything?

Are you happy houring? I did. So I'm debating. I may wait for dinner just because this is, I had this in the fridge and it's a really good beer, but it's, I just don't know if I'm going to have it right now. So this is from my current favorite brewery, which is Nepenth in Baltimore. It's called Jellyfish Huntress. And you can see a little shout out to Metroid on there.

It's a 10% triple IPA. It's very good. This is going to get rowdy. That's why I said this is a strong maybe. I like the art enough to just appreciate the can right now. It's a good looking can. I like it. I've got still, Jake, it's white wine season here because it's 83 degrees today.

And so I've got some Vernacha from San Jiminyano. I went to this winery when we were in Tuscany in 2018, Torchano. I didn't buy this when I was there. I bought some later because they shipped to the U.S. And it's delicious. That's my summer white wine of choice. So tasty. 83 degrees, though, you've got to get those numbers up.

Those are rookie numbers. Yeah, I think it might have dropped. Oh, it's 81 now. No. It is just a news alert. Spotter lantern flies have arrived in Philadelphia. I have killed seven in the last two days. And they are tiny. You can barely see them.

So I'm pretty proud of that. So, Google it. This is like the most, this is a super, super, super mid-Atlantic joke for everybody. Very local. Just wanted to give a shout out to all the mid-Atlantic listeners that you need to be on your best alert at the moment. Yeah. Like, what is that like applicable to like a hundred miles from? from like DZ, like that direct?

No, because they started in state college and made their way out. So I think, you know, and it's in Jersey now. I think they're probably getting close to you down there and Caleb when you're back home. So keep your eyes out. I'm just wondering if this is anything like the cicadas of last year. People are going to be equally on alert. People here are very on alert because it's like we have to kill them. This is a mandate.

So anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about. If you bring an ear from a spotted lantern fly to the mayor of Philadelphia, he gives you one gold galleon. So he should really get on the bounty. That's a weird way for Jim Kennedy to get reelected. If you bring him 10, you get to hug the Liberty Bell. Caleb, you are fresh off of a trip to Colorado where I've got a little screenshot here. We were just talking about how Michael Sheets was our main source for information. about you sitting on a panel of like the top news story of recent memory.

So number one, how long in advance did you know about this news story that Amazon bought all of the launch vehicles? Did you know about this for a long time? Or were you like, this is an interesting panel that I'm getting asked to sit on? I did know about this. I don't know if I'm allowed to say how early in advance I knew. You weren't surprised when you got there. I was not surprised.

I was hearing rumors and, you know, kind of nodding my head. I think I actually first heard somebody mention like, hey, there's some big launch deal coming up about a week or two before the show. And I was like, huh, this is, this is interesting. And then, like, you know, got the actual numbers. And I was like, okay, the rumors were not even close. like they knew that, I mean, they, like, they knew like a third of us. Like word was trickling out, but yeah, we had to keep a tight lip on it. And I was asked to go out and moderate that discussion and basically talk, lead a conversation

between Amazon, Arianspahus, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance on what, yes, is definitely the biggest commercial launch contract in world history. In ever history, yeah. In ever history, yeah. I mean, it's kind of like, I feel like it's cheating to say this for space because, like, you know, the space race started like 1957. So it's like, we know like very conclusively. Yeah. This is very inspiration for a milestone of you.

I just got to make it. I want to make this sound like as big a deal as possible because I was there. So, no. It was really, you know, we put together a report now that my job is an analyst instead of a journalist. instead of a journalist. That was kind of the way that we sought to distill all this information. And so, like, I spent, like, time leading up to the conference, kind of, like, wrapping my arms around it.

We had the press event itself. And then I spent, like, most of Space Symposium, like, hiding near power outlets or, like, anywhere that I could sit down and, like, trying to type up everything that we thought was important. And, like, what were the ramifications from, the event on the industry at large and for Amazon in particular. Were you at all surprised? I think it was shocking when we first saw the numbers,

that they're buying 83 launch vehicles from all these different companies. But when we started thinking about it, you're like, yeah, of course they are. They have to, like, there's just, if I did the math previously, I would come out somewhere around this. I think the difference in the shock maybe was that they did the Atlas 5 purchase last year, and then they got around to announcing a whole bunch more as one big, you know, one big dump of launch vehicle news. But it's like kind of pedestrian when you do 40 times,

however many satellites, they need to launch. So there's still a small element of mystery here because Amazon hasn't said the exact size of their spacecraft, and it's likely that they won't finalize on the size until after they've launched their two demo satellites with ABL at the end of this year. But even still, with the number of launches that they procured and the number of spacecraft that are supposed to launch per vehicle known, you can kind of guesstimate that it's probably somewhere between 500 and 700 kilograms a satellite.

And then if you also kind of continue to reverse engineer it, you can basically realize that like this looks like most, if not all of the launch capacity that they need to launch their Gen 1, system, 3,200 and some odd satellites. They definitely have the advantage of using the Atlas 5 from ULA as the only vehicle that has any heritage at this point to get their constellations started. And I think that's, you know, they have, they've said publicly that it's regulatory milestones, mainly the FCC, but also the ITU that are driving them to. to launch these satellites as fast as they can. So and also usually I kind of quibble with like the terminology around racing.

I feel like everybody's, you know, as soon as somebody is launching something, it's oh, they're racing the orbit, like things happen really fast. But it rings true a bit here because they have this FCC deadline of getting half of their constellation up by July 2026. And the rockets that they chose are all new. And it takes quite some time for rockets to scale up to have a regular launch cater. So in this case, it is actually a race. It's a race against their own deadline, but they have to move with some urgency to get this done.

So, I mean, my question is why buy them all at once? Like, why not trickle them out? Like, you know, you've had the Atlas one. Why not go now and buy like, you know, 10 Vulcans or something and then wait another three months and then buy another, like, you know, and just see how they're progressing and get like updates on them. I was really curious. I think that that's like the biggest shock to me because you're right, Anthony. Like obviously they have to buy a, you know, a freaking tunnel for rockets, but but like they just like went up and just bought the whole constellation on like one day,

which is like crazy. Like that's that's a headline, right? So I don't know. To be fair, probably more than one day, but I just didn't tell us about it. Yeah. So one of the things that came out during the panel was that the negotiations for this launch contract, or these three launch contracts, took about two years to accomplish. I believe that. It's a very long, you know, like you could get an associate's degree in the time it took for them to finalize the launch agreements here. But as to why, you know, they didn't say exactly why they chose to just do this massive bulk

order, but if I was going to theorize, you know, I'd say that. they knew that they needed to buy up all of that capacity before anyone else could get their hands on it. That's fair. Yeah. You know, when we looked at the Atlas 5 deal, you know, initially the first thing we did was kind of scratch our heads and go, okay, why buy the last nine of, you know, fairly expensive rocket? You know, the Atlas 5 has gotten a lot cheaper, you know, toward Bruno at the helm, but it's still not known for being particularly cheap. And then we realized, oh, they just bought up all of the only vehicle with heritage and a steady flight rate. It's not retiring.

Or, you know, it is retiring. That isn't retiring like in the next, yeah, tomorrow, you know, the next 12 to, you know, 20 months. So they've secured something that can like reliably get their first spacecraft up. And then after that, you know, what do you do to get this whole constellation going? you know, they can't take a backseat to anybody else. Or again, they miss their FCC deadline. And if you do that, then barring an extension, they're capped. That's as many satellites as they're allowed to launch.

And that is a hard cap, right? It's whatever they've launched. It's not that that becomes your half number. Yeah, that's it. If they only launched a thousand satellites, then the FCC would be like, sorry, guys. It's kind of a funny way to do it. At first I thought it was like, okay, now you get to launch. 2,000 total. But a hard calf is really motivating. The extension thing might explain also why they want to

buy them all right now, Jake, because if they're going to go file an extension, which like, doing the numbers, you got nine Atlas Vs. You're going to have like 30 other launch vehicles that you need to fly by the time that that would hit, right? I don't think on average you're going to see a Vulcan, an Aryan 6, and a New Glenn fly 10 times each with commercial customers themselves. that just doesn't seem to make sense for 2026. So has anyone filed for FCC extensions? Is the FCC open to that? Does having a whole bunch of launches already booked?

Give them more firepower to go to the FCC and say, pandemic war, inflation, launch contracts, stamp it out the door. You got until 2029. Like, how does that work? So, yeah, yes, yes, yes, and yes. It is common to get extension requests at the FCC. and also at the ITU level, you basically have to go to the FCC

and make a strong case for why you're trying really hard, why you deserve it, why it's in the public interest, why they'll basically cause more harm than good. Because the milestones, their purpose, is to make sure that people aren't hoarding spectrum and not just sitting there trying to not make use of what in, in a large sense is a public good.

So if you can show that you're doing that, there's a reasonable cause, reasonable estimate that you could get an extension. And that seems fair, right? It is fair. And one of the things that the ITU is discussing now is actually changing or tweaking the milestones that they put in place in 2019.

So the ITU, which is part of the United Nations, has regulatory milestones that in some sense are a bit more strict than the FCC, depending on how you count it. It's, you know, you have two years to get 10% of your system up, five years to get 50% and seven years to get 100%. The start date on that is a little bit tricky because it depends on when you filed or when you brought your spectrum into use, things like that. But, you know, ultimately these are big guidelines.

posts and we can see now it triggers what we estimated it had to be at least five billion dollars worth of launch contracts and probably more you know it could very easily be more well yeah especially considering the like there's all those uLA investments for infrastructure and there's you know area n6 i know is supposed to be cheaper but it's still going to be like an institutional class rocket, right? It's not it's not a it's not the dollar store rocket by any means. And they're buying a big one of all of them. They're buying the big Vulcan. They're buying the big Orion 6. Everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're buying the big one and then after that they're going to have to upgrade it because the solid rocket booster is a considered too small. So

Aryan 5 is getting even bigger for this. I think that's another kind of really unique takeaway from this launch, these launch contracts. You don't often. can see contracts that are so big that people like redesign their whole vehicle or a whole spaceport around it. Yeah, ULIs buying a boat. Like they're, all right, we'll buy an extra ship. Okay, cool. That's a very, that's a weird to me. Do you have any sense of a ULA? Like, my take, I did a Miko show this morning about this. And I want to talk about faring size at some point with you because I feel like that's a huge storyline here. But on this investment side, ULA is building another mobile launch platform. They're buying another boat. They're building another

vertical integration facility to handle more Vulcan vehicles. Do you have any sense on how, like, is that ULA covering that cost or is that ULA saying we'll give you better pricing and schedule priority if you also invest in us to build out more? Like, who's paying for the infrastructure here? That's a very good question. I would imagine that ULA is paying for a portion of it, but they've also talked about expansions for all of their industrial partners. So, Aerojet Rocketdyne is going to have to build, you know, more facilities. Northrop Grumman may have to build another facility. Everybody who's involved in building Vulcan to some extent, you know, Ruag is going to have to build a whole new facility in Europe just to get all the spiel dispensers out for this.

That's like a really interesting, like it's a really interesting sort of follow on because, you know, you have to wonder, okay, so like what does ULA's contract with Aerojet look like for RL10? So they have some sort of standing thing where they can just call them up and get X amount with this much notice. Like is it an open-ended contract or do they have to go and negotiate with every rocket purchase like this? So they have to go to Aerojet and be like, look, man, we got, we're going to need like 100 of these. And then you get the you get the price based on that one by. Like it's really interesting that the downstream effects for someone like ULA that is not vertically integrated. Right.

North of Grumman. It is bought 228 solid rocket boosters. You know? How big is that Utah facility? I don't know how big it is. On the Avio side, at 72 from Europe, right? So they bought 300 solid rocket boosters in this deal. It's crazy.

Yeah, this is not a scale that the space industry is. They bought more solid rocket boosters in this deal than the space shuttle ever used. There's a fun fact. They're probably the second biggest user of solid rockets as a customer other than the DOD. Yeah. Probably at this point. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy.

It's like, it's hard to think about it. So yeah, I'm really, it's really interesting. I mean, for someone like you, Caleb, who's really analyzing the business side of this, this must just be like, like just a treasure trove of joy to, to study and unpack and sort through. I can't imagine what your, your report is going to have to look like for sure. Can you give us like a prediction on what, how you think this is going to go? Like is the, what is the timeline involved here? They said it was a five-year term for all these launches. Do you think it's going to go for five years?

Do you think they're going to get an extension? What is the Caleb Henry fan fiction on how Kuiper gets rolled out? So I'll tell you what I think is the biggest hurdle here. And we've already alluded to it in some aspects. But new rockets take a long time to get up to like a steady operational cadence. And all three of these vehicles that are supposed to be used, are at least two years behind schedule. So not only are they kind of experiencing

and hopefully at the tail end of their own launch delays, but once they've finished that, they're going to have to go and start launching two, three, five, ten times a year. And we ran the numbers. We looked at several vehicles for their first five years. And on average, a new vehicle, the average flight rate for a new rocket

is just under three launches a year for its first five years. That's not very fine. We're including Falcon 9 in that, that includes Atlas 5, that includes Arian 5. It's not something that the industry is good at. Scale is hard. And I'm wondering, because these companies have this advance notice that, okay, you've got a massive order, will they be able to handle it? And it's not clear.

You know, Arian Spas was preparing for a significantly lighter demand than they had projected when they started that program in 2014. You know, they were forecasting 11 to 12 launches a year. Then as the geomarket declined and Starlink and all these things kind of changed the shape of the industry, they were starting to look at single digit. Arian launches a year and getting nervous about whether or not their industrial base would be healthy or not. now that tune is completely changed. This is a whole market that went from, like, they weren't starving, but they weren't really looking at this like robust growth market.

So they had prepared to shrink and now they have to go into overdrive. So I don't follow Ariane very well. Maybe Anthony, you might know this too. But so we're hearing all this chatter now of like Europe wanting to take their own people to space. Do these upgraded solids help in any way with that? Like, does that give them the right, you know, does that, can they funnel that investment forward into, you know, a space capsule that Europe can put people up with? I'm, I'm curious. I don't know. That's a, that's a lot of, a thought I just had. I don't know the payload bump that they get from the better solids to,

I mean, I think they're already fine because the, even the area in 62, right, two solid rocket boosters does 10 tons to lower the orbit. And that's kind of like, if you're in the Yeah, you're already past U-s-sized there, I think, right? Right, well, yeah, you're a couple thousand above that, and Iron 64 does double that. So they're already in the ballpark. The upgrade's supposed to add two metric tons to the vehicle. And that's the one that's also used on Vegas C, right? That's the important part.

They're trying to have like that common solid rocket booster that they use at the first stage in Vegas C. That might be bullshitting. Caleb, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's what the case is. That's what they are supposed to do. not yet heard Issa or Avio comment on what this does to Vegas C performance. It's also interesting because the Vegas C upper stage, you know, as people now are well familiarized with, comes from Ukraine. And there's an open question as to whether or not they're going to have to replace the upper stage with something new. So if the upper stage changes and the first stage changes,

you know, like Vegas is a four-stage rocket, but so that's a lot of change for, for the vehicle. So I would really like to know, hopefully get answers at some point, what happens to Vegas Sea in the midst of all of these forces that are completely outside of their control that are changing that rocket. Yeah. Do you think that, you mentioned how like the slow flight rate ramp up of rockets tend to go, not that Vulcan Centaur and Aryan 6 are heritage units, right? But they are, they are upgrading so many parts of the rocket, but the rocket, but the rocket

concept of operations is the same from Atlas 5 to Ariane 6, right? Like Atlas 5, Aryan 5 to Volkan Zedar and Aran 6 are they operate the same way. So is there any benefit to not having to figure out like new? Because I don't know. I didn't do all the math, but I'm pretty sure like even the first stages probably stage at the same velocity or similar enough that it kind of shakes out in the wash. Do you think there's any benefit there that they're just upgrading like the same idea versus New Glenn, which is like, we're going to go, we have four first stages and we hope that

one of them lands on the boat so we can fly our second and third launch? Like, how does that shake out? I really hope that these companies, the ones that have experience, are able to leverage it. But honestly, looking at, you know, when we did that comparison, you know, Arian 5 was not Europe's first Arian vehicle, you know, that was an evolution from Arian 4. And it still had very slow, you know, early flight rate. I think it flew once a year for the first four years, actually. Arian 5 is kind of a special case because it did not have a good start. There were several failures in the early days of the Ariad 5.

And it was pretty different from Ariane 4 or 2. Like 4 was like was pretty well connected to 3. A clout of the first rocket ever. This like Frankenstein rocket that just kept gloving parts on you. The start of your curbel career. We were like, I don't know, I'm not locked a new part. Put it on there. At some point, they're just like, I guess we've gone to three now.

Okay, I think we're at four now. But like, Arian 5 was like its own pretty distinct unit, right? Like, I don't know if there's, I don't know. And with the solids, that probably made it very, very different in terms of your con-ops, right? Yeah. I mean, when Arian 6 was being described to me kind of in the early years of its development, the folks that Arian Group described it as a, a quote industrialization of Arian 5,

which was their way of saying, this isn't something that's crazy new. We are taking this rocket and we're going to build it in a way that's more competitive. But it's still taking just as long to make the Arian 6 as it is a brand new rocket, basically. New launch pad, new facilities. Yeah, it's so much new that.

Yeah, so it's been a pretty intense evolution. And I mean, I do think it's an open question. Will it scale quickly because they have this experience, you know, over 100 Airon 5 launches and, you know, skill at doing this and organizing payloads and stuff? Or is it going to be a steeper learning curve than even they envisioned at the onset? Yeah. There's also the question. People don't talk about people enough with this stuff too, right?

So look at someone like ULA. If they want to go from four rockets a year that they're doing right now to 20 rockets a year, they're going to have to hire and those people are all going to be brand new and they're not going to have the institutional memory of being like, oh, this is just like an Atlas, no big deal. We just, we just change the label on the side of the rocket and it's all the same, right? So, I mean, so I don't know how much, you know, for blue, it's all new people. So that's that's the problem they have as well. And then for area, like, how much, how much does this increase their flight rate? Is this, because they only bought, sorry, I'm not, I don't forget the numbers, but is it like going from like one or two year?

Okay, so, you know, I think it's probably not as dramatic of an increase in annual flight rate for Ariane as it is for ULA and Blue, right? Yeah, so it was like I think in the past they were targeting, they mentioned it. The early goal was 11, then they started targeting single digits. Now with Kuiper, the range that I heard was 10 to 15. I would imagine it's the upper part of that range. Hmm. And why did they, the new Glenn thing is confusing me because it's, like we bought 12 with an option 15. Why did they buy an option? Just to make sure it works.

Yeah. What are they hedging there? Yeah. I mean, it's a good question. And I'm just, I'm guessing here as well. But I would think that it's the vehicle that, you know, all these vehicles are new, but Blue has the add-on of being a completely new launch company. New-new. Yeah. It's new-new. So they probably want to prove it out first. Yeah, and the flight rate on New Glenn was never really predicted to be that high, especially initially. So if they've bought 12 and they're not really launching for another two years at best,

I'm going to guess they're throwing a bunch of Kuiper satellites on the demo mission of New Glenn because you're making a couple thousand of them. So if you lose it, you lose it. But if it works out, you got 60 more on orbit. So that's cool. So I guess maybe those last 15, it's like if you do really well and your flight, flying on schedule and you still fit within our FCC window. We'll buy a bunch more, but we don't believe that you are going to fit in our FCC window. That's what it's what it reads to me,

you know? And that's, everyone wants to say the whole, like, they had to buy Blue Origin launch vehicles because it's Amazon, which is not true because it's different people and there's a big firewall and Amazon is ruthless. So if they, if it wasn't going to work out for them, it wasn't going to work out. Yeah. But it is kind of like a little bit embarrassing that that's the one that clearly is being hedged against? I think it also has to do with like how many launches does Kuiper actually need?

I mean, they haven't said and trying to run the numbers. Like I mentioned, there's sort of a delta between like what their final mass is going to be. And, you know, if the satellites are all 700 kilograms or more, you know, they'll probably need more launches than if they're 500. You know, what we do know is that they've described

the Kuiper satellites as being bigger than their pure megacostilations. So, you know, one web at 150 kilograms, SpaceX at somewhere around 300 kilograms. And we know that the Kuiper satellites are going to be high power. They've emphasized that these are going to be high power spacecraft. And if you have a lot of power, that means you need bigger batteries, bigger solar arrays, you know, everything increases in size. So I would imagine that the options could be at, a hedge not just for seeing how Blue Origin performance,

but determining if they need to throttle up or down Kuiper's own launch demand based on the final design of their spacecraft. Right, right. Volume seems like a huge part of it too, because even the initial, were those numbers of how many per launch, did they come out of your panel with them? Like the 61 on New Glenn and all that? Even if you look at that,

like fitting 61 under a new Glenn faring compared to fitting 60 Starlings under the, the tiny Falcon 9 faring, right? That is a good indication of volume. Yeah, they definitely don't fit as nicely, which is why I think, you know, my thesis on Miko earlier was that the comparison was not Falcon 9. The comparison was Falcon Heavy with the extended faring

because they clearly need long farings on Atlas 5, on Vulcan Centaur and Ariens 6 and New Glenn. They're giant farings. SpaceX's are tiny. They're building a bigger one, but it's like, I don't know if anyone knows when that's going to land. Is it in four years? Like, we don't really.

know which do we know which of the NRO payloads need that I don't know this sounds like an Anthony department thing so if you two don't know if we're probably screwed here we're asking you what's going on here anyway like the point being volume I think they're going to be volume limited before they're mass limited on all these vehicles you know probably yeah yeah hmm big fairings so got to happen so what is what does blue do with B4 right now because this is like 10x pressure in an already high pressure situation for them, right? Because like we were already having discussions about like, you know,

new glens in trouble because every last B.E4 they're going to squeeze out is going to go right to ULA for DOD stuff. Like there was already like every spare capacity they had was going to get sucked into a Vulcan rocket. Now they have to do that again twice as many and supply 10 times as many rockets they were going to make. Like, so does this, is it, is, is money going to help them solve that? You know, just the actual launch contract of like, okay, now we can scale up.

Or is there something different they have to do? I'm just kind of throw that question out there. I don't know. Because it seems like a tough spot for, like, whoever's in charge of B4 is like, got to be sweating now if they weren't already. Yeah. I asked Tori at the satellite show in March whether or not it was too late to switch to the AR-1.

and he was like yes Caleb Jesus Christ going Twitter once in your life I just I wanted to know you know when the two rocket engines were announced

you know AR1 seemed like that you know it wasn't asked for and they built it anyway you know it was it was the odd one out and you know

now B4 is five years late certainly would have you asking the question Could I have had an engine, you know, a few years sooner than I do now? You're right. Tori's answer was no. But he has been more positive about the BE4 lately compared to, you know, past events. So it's still hard to read into that because, you know, they've been saying soon.

It's been soon for years now. Yeah. So he's tomorrow. But, yeah, I do think that their tune has genuinely changed. and I have to imagine for Kuiper that they would not have taken the risk here if they also didn't trust that the B4 is actually close to the point where it could be ready for launch. I mean, it's obvious why they didn't choose, why Kiper didn't choose SpaceX because Musk and Bezos have been feuding forever.

I'm still unconvinced. I'm unconvinced if Bezos rolled up and was like, hey, Elon, do you want $8 billion? that he would be like, nah, I'm okay. I'm all right. So, Bezos is never going to do that. Yeah, I guess. Maybe that's more likely. But he's not even at Amazon anymore.

He bounced. It's not that SpaceX. SpaceX would take their money, but Blue wouldn't give it. Amazon wouldn't give it. No, I mean, you look at the vehicles that are out there. It was really, it was these three that they chose, Falcon 9, which you can rule out, Russian vehicles were ruled out, Chinese vehicles are always ruled out.

Antares. Don't go on Antares for me. Come on. We know Antares can launch four. Yeah, it's launched barely more than like Rocket Lab. That's the other one that people were talking about was Neutron. That's, you know, projected in the time range that this would be helpful for. So, but to your point, like maybe they do need to buy a couple more later.

And if Neutron does well, they could be in a good spot to launch, you know, a couple spares or half a plane or whatever it is. because they're going to need excess capacity beyond the FCC mandate. They're going to need to do replacements and then they're Gen 2 and stuff. Orbitable spares, updates. If, you know, three years from now, they're like up against it or two years from now or whatever, they could do everything go in, buy a bunch of neutrons and then, you know, push the whatever rocket is late, they can push that to the later ones. You just keep that contract for, you know, that's always a flexible thing they can do.

Yeah. Yeah. And I also think that you have to add. Let's do it. We have a business case now. We think we can get Amazon sloppy seconds. Give us some money. Here's our theory.

It's Antares, but a giant faring. Antares heavy. It's three, it's four, five Antares. I want somebody to finish up. With the AR1 on the bottom. You mentioned AR-1. That's the only hope for AR-1 is that Antares comes calling, right? Like, that's the way out for AR-1 if they still want it to be exist.

Firefly was talking about it sometime ago. Oh, yeah. That's right. And Fireflies beta, if they ever do it, would be around the same class as the neutron vehicle. So both of those are slated for, they're advertised for 2024. I, in my head, I just tack on a customary two-year delay to everything that I see announced. So, 2026 is the most realistic for both of those in my head. But yeah, those would be, I think, viable constellation vehicles.

They're kind of in that medium class where Sluy's once occupied, and we saw that that did work for OneWeb up until it didn't. People are asking about India in the chat. Michael asked, surprise India didn't get any. I'll throw in Japan in there as well. They've got the H3 coming online soon. Is there any thoughts you have on India and Japan and how they maybe can maneuver in? I mean, India obviously has done a lot of ride share missions over the last couple years

for U.S. companies and whatnot, but there is that whole opening up with Russian vehicles being no longer useful to anyone. Yeah, I'm not surprised that India didn't get any launch contracts here because Amazon was prioritizing heavy lift vehicles, you know, like the heaviest of heavy. They forced Arian to make a bigger version of their rocket that they're almost done building just so that they could do this mission or do these contracts.

India's largest vehicle, you know, the GSLV has still, is still suffering from issues with its crew. cryogenic upper stage, you know, I think four flights have failed. I will, off the top of my head, I think it's, I won't even do that. I don't know what the failure rate is for GSLV, but it has not proven itself to be a reliable vehicle yet. It flies very infrequently and it often has issues. PSLV is too small.

Japan's MHA, I was actually a bit surprised that they didn't get anything because if you wanted to have dissimilar redundancy, you would choose only one rocket with the BE4 engine. But, you know, I just, I don't know what the negotiations were here. You know, they chose three companies that they think could get it done. I will say that MHA has slowly started to prove that it can do commercial missions. I think they were almost entirely focused on the government market in Japan. They were known in the past. for being expensive. And hopefully they can bring their cost down with H3,

but it just hasn't been proven yet. Maybe Amazon wanted to see more evidence of that. They have the Marsat-Marsat contract. They had the Emirati-Mars mission. Those are definitely some flagships that could usher in more commercial business for Japan, but it's still in a wait and see. And I guess maybe one last thought on that,

because so much launch capacity has been taken up by Kuiper, in our report we have that this could benefit Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and others, right? Literally there's nowhere else that you can go to SpaceX, you can go to Japan. There's not

a lot of available launch capacity. So they could win in that way. People are asking whether you want a contract or not, this is still demand, right? It's still just huge launch demand. So, yeah. And before this, it was like, Like, no launch company was, would have said, like, we're happy with our amount of customers

that we have, you know? Like, talk to anyone. Go to a conference. Stay at the bar late. Talk to anyone that works at a launch company. See how confident they are and how many launches they have on their manifest. No one was confident about it. No one.

No one. From the company that you're thinking of that was comfortable, no one was comfortable. So, yeah, you're right. That like, this definitely was a lot of demand. Now it has eaten up a lot of supply. So, I don't know, people come calling. Space flight's got to find somebody to fly with. They're SOL on the medium of the heavy lift.

So maybe they'll go do some more in India, do some in Japan. There's going to be some huge. Japanese company? Yeah, I think Mitsui did have a, you know, I honestly, the details of that, that M&A deal were always kind of cloudy to me. So I know that they had, I'd have to read up on it again. Because Space Flight did so many things and they only wanted parts of it. So I don't know. This is also February 2020.

So things probably changed since that date. Some weird stuff since then. Everyone's February 2020 plans are very different now. Totally different. One thing that we didn't talk about is probably worth touching on at least briefly, a surprise for me and I think everybody at the Kuiper announcement was that even though they had a panel lined up with these three major launch companies, when Amazon got to talking about the system,

the first thing that they did was talk about their antenna. And, you know, Anthony, you and I have talked about this in past MECO episodes. Yeah, for years. The nitty-gritty of antennas and all the toy. I think you blew my mind once when you told me that, like, the phase rate that were on the market was like $40,000, was, you know, that's a cheap one, 40 grand. Yeah, that's what everyone was excited about. Great.

Gives you a sense of price in that world. I mean, when your only other applications are like detecting missiles on Navy ships or like being embedded in radio telescopes. Turns out you can charge a lot for that. That seems like a very value-priced activity. Exactly. So what did you do with that? that they're saying, what, 500 or something?

Was their statement? Yeah, yeah. And they said that they didn't even start with the satellite program until after they had figured out the antenna. So that's really important because it's a complete reversal of how basically every other megaconsolation has been done. Everyone said they figure out the antenna in time, whether it was Telodesic or Oak 3B or One Web or Starlink.

it was always the second step or the third step, the next step, and it just frankly didn't happen, or it happened in a way that was so underwhelming that these constellations did not live up to their original vision. You know, for Starlink and Kuiper, it's still playing out. But if it's true. January 2019 to this tweet from Greg Weiler that it was, what, $200 or something?

thing? This is the old Caleb article here from your past life. What the hell happened to this whole storyline that Greg Lauer was like, we got it, we nailed it, $200. Peace. Yeah, and that's why, you know, I as well have learned and matured from that experience of writing about this article. I tell people now that if you see one of those boards, like those printed boards of an antenna, that's the equivalent of the engine hot fire for the antenna industry. Like, it's sexy, looks cool. for two seconds, right? Yeah, it doesn't actually mean as much as you think it does. So are you interpreting that statement from Amazon then as like they're going to come in with

and do the Amazon thing and just gut the price of this service as like a really competitive offering because they have this antenna figured out? Like what do you what's your Amazon basics antenna? Yeah, exactly. Like they're just like they just find out what everyone else is paying and then the algorithm just knocks 10% off that price and then they win. every time. You know, they didn't go into the engineering details of how they plan on bringing the

price down. What they emphasize was volume, which is something the industry has frequently talked about. But usually when people talk about it, it's always startups. It's, hey, we've raised a few tens of millions of dollars. And as soon as we have scale, yeah, it's not Amazon. Amazon is already shipping millions of things. If they say that they're going to ship millions of antennas, it's much more believable. And then the second element of this is because the spacecraft are going to be high power,

there's a ratio here. You can either have a high power spacecraft and a smaller antenna, or you can have a smaller spacecraft and a really big antenna. And so it looks to me like they've decided to really emphasize the spacecraft part and say, hey, we're going to put all the muscle into what we have on orbit, drive down the cost of the antenna and let consumers buy that part. So hopefully Which is

Sounds right to me Yeah Yeah yeah Hmm Huh That's good insight right there That's a good note I'm like a potential customer of these

Constellations Because like I You know I live in a place with not good infrastructure And I want to move even outside of town So I have SpaceX available to me now But I would love for someone to put a little pressure on them for price because their price is not great right now. Yeah, and that's the good thing about having more than one constellation.

People, the whole idea, and I think U.S. Internet subscriptions suck a lot of the time because people have just one option, maybe two at best. And if we could get multiple systems up there and have them drive each other to be better, it's the consumer in the end that wins. It's local anecdote. I can see, if I look out this window, I can see the Comcast Tower. Just the almighty Comcast. So you know, I live in CableTown, right?

And I am on a street that is served by Verizon Fios. And it is shocking how cheap I can get Comcast service compared to my friends that live on streets that don't have Verizon to their house. Now I have Verizon. I have this nice gigabit fiber. But like, it's, it's double. or triple, like, friends that live in Northern Liberties in Philly that don't have a lot of Fios roll out there, double or triple for the same Comcast plan. I'm like, all right, so if Jake's in this situation with Starlink, then, yeah, there needs to be somebody else ready to

sell. And, you know, I don't know, maybe we can do like five minutes on one web, because how do you think their timeline is altered now that they have to find, I mean, they got all these, like, I don't know if we know how many Falcon Nines they bought, but they bought some Falcon Nines. what do you think their timeline shifts, right? Because they were going to say August was when they were going to finish their rollout. And they said, man, we'll be able to serve the whole world then. But is it still a year away or more than that? Yeah, August was the original goal.

When their whole launch agreement fell apart, we were estimating a minimum 12-month delay between then and when they would finish their constellation. With SpaceX, it's still hard to speculate because they issued the most crucial. cryptic press release, the history of press releases. It was just, we have an agreement. No, we're not telling you when it starts. No, we're not telling you how many. Please go home.

And like that was it. So, you know, I just guessing if they could get at least, you know, I don't know. It's really hard to guess. I think it's reasonable to think that they could get the rest of their constellation up, you know, within, in 12 to 18 months. It's still, it really depends on what the parameters are for their SpaceX agreement. I, you know, I think it was an interesting detail that came out that Ariana's boss basically had to go and call up SpaceX and say, hey, like, it's your turn, you know.

Just some of the good in the industry, you know. There's a lot of his competition. There's only a few players. Everybody wants to be the best, but it's good that people work together when they need to. to get these things done. It's the meme, though, the handshake meme. It's like, you're up, Elon Musk, you're shitting on Russian launch industry.

It's like, that's the meme, you know? Like, both of them were like, let's show them, we don't need them. There you go. Yeah. One of our early, you know, something that we were speculating internally when this first happened,

and before they had signed, the SpaceX agreement was that maybe one web could use this kind of agreement or use what happened to them as an excuse to jump directly to a second-gen constellation because they've been pretty open and talking about how the constellation that they were designing, you know, 2015, thought was going to be revolutionary, is not revolutionary in 2022. You know, it was designed with 1.1 terabits of capacity. It sounded like a huge amount, but Viassad is putting up basically the same amount

on a single geosatellite, which they'll hopefully launch this year. I haven't looked at their schedule lately. But if a single satellite can do what their entire Leo constellation is supposed to do, that changes the script. And then everybody else, SpaceX talks about launching a terabit per Falcon 9,

telosat light speed was supposed to be 10 to 15 terabits. It's like all of a sudden they go from being, you know, this fancy, you know, the greatest thing ever to like, like the Ford Taurus of the satellite sector. We got our episode title. Snuck the title in right at the 53rd minute. Amazing. They know that they have to do. They know they have to do something new. I drove a Ford Tafar, excuse me, a Ford Taurus.

Disclaimer. It was my first car. are. So very familiar with what it can't do. But yeah, we were talking about that. You know, maybe this could be their opportunity. They want bigger, more powerful satellites. They're much more amenable to inter-satellite links. You know, they've got all these shareholders that have interest, you know, putting GPS, P&T-type payloads on it. And they want to have configurable capacity and all sorts of stuff. It could be their excuse to just jump to the upgrade. But that looks much, much less likely if they have launch agreements in place that can get those

last 200 satellites up in orbit. Right. It's good times. The Constellation Wars have begun. Jesus, Christ. It's not the title. I want it to be. The Fort Torres ones too good.

Caleb, we had you on, like, right when you were leaving space news or right after you left, I forget exactly what the timing was there. But how long have you been not doing the journalism thing, doing the analytics thing? And what is your review this many years in? Yeah, do you like it? Yeah, so it's been a year and a half now. And it's still a bit surreal. You know, like I think because of switching jobs during COVID, it's very strange.

Like, I emerged at this conference and people are still like, I love your writing. I'm like my last byline it's like published like well over you know a year ago you're like you're not paying any money at quality analytics you're not reading my writing yeah exactly it's like what's the last thing you read

huh but it's been good so I appreciate like having time to do more deep thought on big announcements like this one you know kind of think across the implications for the industry I think I think I brought this up when I was here before that I always struggled with trying to like have an opinion on things because people would ask me my opinion and like as a journalist you just kind of like it's like beat out of you to have like you don't have opinions you know I think the only thing I had an opinion on the space industry was SLS and it's because I never wrote about it but now everybody has an opinion about it comes with a territory we even got that out of Faust and he was on the show in December It's hard to not have an opinion.

But, you know, I think there's been some kind of professional growth there and just learning how to work as an analyst and how to try and provide insights to people and not just keep referring them to statements or articles or whatever. So that's been good. You know, I enjoy it. And I'm still in this industry. I don't think I'll ever leave.

I hope I never leave it. So it's fun. And I also enjoy still being a neutral voice, getting the survey, getting to literally still talk about everything that I did before, whether it's rockets or antennas or the FCC, the ITU, or satellite manufacturing, you know, these are all the things. And so it's been good. I hear more things under, you know, NDAs and.

I was going to ask if you get more info as a journalist or not as a journalist? It's weird because sometimes I think I knew more as a journalist just because you're just like vacuuming up information all the time and then like publishing it. But at the same time, I like, just things that you hear all the time, they're like, oh, okay, well, I can't say that. But that's pretty cool. People would like to know that. So it's fun. If anything, I think it's been encouraging just to like see all of the exciting things at the, the, industry is doing and you know kind of to see a different side of it you know people as they as they're

in the process of figuring out what they're going to do next so that when they do go to the press they kind of go with a conviction that they've made the right choice you know sometimes as an analyst you can see how the sausage is made whereas before you know they just kind of presented you what they've made and that was it you had an interesting timing too where like you know the the last couple of years of your writing were the changeover moment from like the geostat industry to mega constellations. And now you switched right at the moment when that started getting real. And there was actually hardware going to orbit and launch contracts being announced. So I feel like that timing really worked out.

Probably not coincidental to your decision to switch over. It's, I don't know, I've just, as somebody who like, you know, Jake and I stay away from the word journalist for what we do. But more comfortable with the word analyst. And so I'm like, okay, that's interesting, that Caleb's doing that thing now. So I've been like keeping an eye on how you feel about it generally. Lower case day, yes. People, even though I made that transition during a time when it seemed like the industry was in like a deep, like, session of soul searching.

You know, the whole decline in geostationary satellite orders was because nobody knew what to do next. the tried and true model for decades appeared to be failing. And even with hardware going up, there are still more people asking questions than ever. I think every analyst firm is very busy right now, people coming to them, coming to us, trying to understand what direction, you know, every facet of the industry is going in because it's all changing. And some people are pushing forward with plans that they, they have convictions will work out.

But a lot of people are still trying to understand what is the future of this industry going to look like in two years, five years, ten years. And, you know, there's more excitement, I think, still, than there has been in the past. I mean, even though this is outside of my domain, just being on the space symposium floor and seeing like a Toyota-branded rover,

your prototype, whatever, for the moon. I was like, well, that's really cool. You don't see them here usually. So if the Fort Torres rover though, come on I'm waiting for my Ford Taurus Moon Rover That's what I want

That's the one you get after the prototypes once we hit scale And everyone needs a rover and then look at the Ford Taurus River Incredible But it's good The Ford Taurus Littro Shit that's so good

That is such a deep reference. Yeah, yeah. Deep cut. The deep cut. That Venn diagram is where off nominal lives. I love that. The poor tourist litro. Yeah.

Awesome. Caleb, where should people... No, I was going to be like Caleb do his plugs first because we just talked to all this shit, but we didn't tell anyone. Where do they go? If people were like, Caleb Henry fans and they're dying for more Caleb Henry in their life. How do they buy your reports? Yeah. How do they pay you money?

Yeah. to our website, cruelty analytics.com. All our research is there. Most of it is behind a paywall, although every once in a while, we do issue something for free. I think there's a free Earth Observation geospatial report up there now.

You can also follow me on Twitter. It's C. Henry at underscore QA or Chenery underscore QA. Chenery. And I'm there. Mostly retweeting stuff, but occasionally I opine. So that's good stuff. Do it, people. Excellent.

Got some links in the show notes. Okay. Yeah. Anthony, what do you have been up to? I know you got an episode out today on this very topic nonetheless. I did. I did put one out. So if you want more thoughts on farings and money,

and I think that's probably all we missed. We got through most of it. You've probably got most of my takes in this. And why isn't Starship part of this? Yeah, the Starship thing. Oh, in the small launch industry. We didn't talk about that at all here. but like, boy howdy, are they missing out?

So if you want some thoughts on that, I've got it over at Managing Cutoff. You put out, did you put out a show since we talked? No, no. So I'm a little behind. I read your interview announcement today, which is what it's what it is. Yes. Yes. That's for patrons.

So if you'd like to sign up for the Weimarsians Patreon, you'll get early advanced notice of all the great interviews coming up. But I will just tease that Decatal Survey for Planetary Science. is dropping, which will be the biggest policy news. I have, well, it only comes out once a decade, so it's the biggest one all I've covered so far, you know. So I'm pretty excited for that. It's coming up.

It's the most important Decatal Survey in your life. It is. It's like elections. Every time one comes up, it's the most important one of your lifetime. Yeah. Next week. What are we doing here next week, Jake? Next week, so we're being a little, little loosey-goosey, a little open with everything

next week. So we have some, you know, we're going to leave a slot open here to talk about some of the news coming out because there's more wet dress, wet dress rehearsal stuff happening. There is potentially some other stuff dropping as well. And so we might just do like a grab bag. I don't know. We're going to do it off now in style and see what comes up. So we may have a guess for that. So stay tuned. Just keep an eye on the Twitter feed and on the channel. Of course, if you subscribe, you get notices of all that stuff. And if you really would like to show, and you want to give us more money to buy fancy German beers imported to Mexico. You can become a member as well.

You can become a member. Dinner for Caleb. Dinner for Caleb. And so there's a join button down there if you're on desktop. If you're on mobile, I think it's like a top menu bar up here. Just scroll until you see membership and then you can pop up. So five bucks a month joins you the channel and you gets you into the Discord to hang out with the rest of us all doing shenanigans in there every day.

Pay us money so we can buy a Fort Torres. Yeah, we need to buy a four tours. Caleb, thanks for hanging out with us, and I'll see you in some couple minutes. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. See, everybody. Thanks, Caleb. One, two, three, four, five.