Off-Nominal - 65 - Star-Lionel Richie

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Jake and Anthony catch up on the news, from Starliner’s flight to NASA’s announcement of new spacesuit contracts for ISS and lunar missions.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 65 - Star-Lionel Richie - YouTubeNASA, Boeing Complete Starliner Uncrewed Flight Test to Space Station | NASABoeing’s Starliner capsule completes first “nail-biting” docking at space station – Spaceflight NowStarliner concludes OFT-2 test flight with landing in New Mexico - SpaceNewsNotice Of Intent (NOI) To Issue a Sole Source Modification – NASA Commercial Crew Space Transportation Services - SAM.govNASA to buy five additional Crew Dragon flights - SpaceNewsNASA Partners with Industry for New Spacewalking, Moonwalking Services | NASAKeeping Our Sense of Direction: Dealing With a Dead Sensor - NASA MarsLionel Richie - Dancing On The Ceiling - YouTubeFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hey, everybody. Hello. Welcome. Anthony, you're back. I was back last week. You were back last week, but we had such an important guest that it was not about you. That's true.

So this is now about you. How was your time off, man? How did you enjoy it? It was nice. Are we doing Anthony reviews his trip real quick? Because I got some shit to talk about Joshua Tree National Park. Yeah, I've heard that you are less than impressed. with Joshua Tree, and now we've just lost all the California listeners.

Yeah. They might even agree with me when they hear my reasoning. I have thoroughly explored the states of Utah and Arizona. Pretty much, like Utah, middle to bottom, Arizona, top to bottom, all the national parks within some of the state parks. And never has there been more underwhelming nature than Joshua Street National Park. It's so underwhelming. They're weird trees.

I'll give them that. But, you know, I just, the whole time, wished I was in Utah or Arizona, to be honest. That's really funny coming from someone like who lives in city land, you know, like, you know, the northeast is just, it's just buildings and concrete. And you go to Joshua Jr., like, this is terrible. Well, objectively, the California desert is the most boring of the United States deserts. Wow, okay, all right. It's just boring looking. Maybe Nevada might give it a run for its money.

A couple minutes in the show We're dropping all the hot takes on which parts Just send me to the Sonoran Desert If you need to send me To one of them You know Soirro's way more beautiful than Joshua trees You know

Yeah That's my take it So good Good good So if you're going to Joshua Tree Make it early on your list of national parks And then Go to the other ones in Arizona and Utah

You want the ascending The crescentre Of of satisfaction action and you've got to start with Josh I did get to check off. I have to take your word for it. I did complete the circuit on this trip and

I have now seen all of the space shuttles like in person live I've seen them most of the ones launch I've seen all the ones that are still around launch but now I've seen all the ones that still exist up close and again the Endeavour exhibit as it

currently stands is the most underwhelming exhibit but boy howdy is the new one that building going to be epic. Yeah, one day. I don't know if you know about this. I'd pull this up. It'll be like in the future. Were they?

They're actually doing it? Because like for a long time it was like there was a little like poster on the wall that's like we hope it looks like this one. Still there. They still haven't gotten all their funding. That like external tank is like sitting in the back alley waiting. Like it just got delivered and it's like out there. Yeah.

Yeah. It's still covered in the shrink wrap from FedEx or whatever. The endeavor or the external. tank that is at the California Science Center, the best view of it is from the Rose Garden next door, where you just go out the back of the center and go in the Rose Garden that's beautiful and Endeavour sitting there. But yeah, this, I'm trying to find a mock-up of what the new Science Center will look like. I think it was like the Samuel Ocean thing, right? Yeah, because this will be the only shuttle that's standing upright on display, right?

It's going to be epic. It's like the full staff. You'll have solids. ET, the whole launch stack basically. Yeah, I don't know why I'm having such a hard time finding a good mockup of this, but yeah, mockups is what they do have. This thing is like SLS1B, if you know what I mean. Oh, this is the new model too, because there was an old mockup floating around the internet that

was not this one. This one's going to have this glass floor that you can walk out over the stack. It's going to be epic. Yeah, Tyler is talking about how no one cared about the external tank. I literally went out to the garden because my wife had to go, she was doing something. She had to like run to the other part of the museum for a second. And she was like, all right, you take Will and go look at your tank if you want to.

I was like, great, I'll go out back. And yeah, it was just me and him standing there and like the one guard that sits. It was kind of like, I felt like you at a launch, there was like a handler for you to make sure that nothing went down. That's how I felt when I was looking at the tank. Oh, that's amazing. Anyway, yeah, so trip is good. And I got some travel and or daycare funk that you can hear. Uh-huh. Not COVID.

Did a lot of tests. Not COVID? A lot of tests. It's weird. So you want to do some drinks before we get into some of the space news that you missed while you were away? I do. I do. I'm opening mine.

Mine's a pretty looking can today. I'll be honest. I've got a victory. It is called the, my face is in its frame, so it's not focusing. The victory. Brotherly Love, Hazy IPA. Hmm. A little Philadelphia shoutout.

Trifilio of you. Could use a little brotherly love around here. A lot of places could be a little bit of fun. Yeah, this is a one that has been making its way up my regular rankings. Tyler in the chat is drinking hard mountain dew. That's when you know the week's got to come to an end pretty soon. I was going to say, that's what you know you're our target demo. Yeah.

So I have another Principia one. I had this brewery a while ago, a couple episodes ago. This is the extrasolar New England IPA. So, and if you needed a proof that I live in Mexico, look at that condensation on there. Look at that. That's really, really going here. That's the rainy season showing on my cold beer.

Yeah, you were tweeting like you're experiencing new sun angles. Yes. Yeah, the sun's past zenith now. Actually, I looked that up on like time and date.com or something, and it says it gets to like 88 degrees or something. Because if you're below the tropic circle, like the tropic of whatever that North one is, or if you're in the tropics,

then theoretically close our meals. You'd cross over, right? It's pretty bizarre. I didn't measure it with like a system. No, it's close enough. But like it's way past straight up, man. And it's like, well, like there's no escape from it. Your shadows are just like, so it's pretty weird for me.

Yeah, for us that spend our lives in the 60 to 70 degree sun angle. Yeah. Totally different. Yeah. For me, this is winter and this is summer. Yeah. That was my favorite thing. The first time I went to the UK and you look at all the satellite dishes that are

on everyone's house and it's like, how are you even seeing that satellite? That's pointed like directly level. It's sideways. How do you actually see that? Yeah, yeah, this is the reality we live in. So, yeah, but cool. So, man, where do you want to start? Because, yeah, this is, this is mostly your catch-up show.

I know we wanted to talk about Starliner. Maybe we should start with Starliner first. Yeah, you should start with Starliner. I think some of that stuff probably dovetails into, into the spacesuit stuff. Starliner is the reason that I, like, if you know, I may have put out a show or two where I did talk about Starliner. So I have read up on Starliner, right? I've read the news, I've read the reports. You did the thing again today where you drop an episode like an hour before their show,

so I can't listen to what you published. But my thing with it is that Starliner in particular, this mission, there's probably a lot. Like if you a month after Nauka got to the space station, went back and read the articles, you probably would have been like, okay, it got there. But you weren't along for the ride of like, is it going to deorbit? Is it going to kill the space station? So I feel like with Starliner, there was a lot more flavor to the story than I got witnessing it two weeks later.

And so I want to dig into was their flavor, how flavorful was it? What were the hot takes I missed? And where do we stand with those today? Like, I want to just check in there. Yeah, yeah. Well, there definitely was flavor. But this is, so this is the interesting thing. It's really hard to, like, unpack this one because, like, you know, if you've

spent the last two and a half years like ripping on Boeing for their first flight. You know, if you're the kind of person is like, oh, Boeing, you really messed up OFT1. You really, then you went out to the pad and you messed that up with the vows and doesn't, doesn't Boeing even know that it gets humid in Florida? Like, who's even running this show? Like if you've been on that train the whole like two and a half years since OFT1, you were just, you're looking for it. You know, you're like, where's the thing?

Where's the thing on this flight that's going to prove me right over? the last two and a half years, right? That's, that was the, the mentality like on, you know, out in the Twitter verse and all that kind of thing. So, you know, every time there was like a momentary flicker of something was off nominal, it was like mad speculation, like just dumping information everywhere. So it was like really hard to like piece together what was real. What was it?

So yeah, I thought I thought the launch went pretty well because like the launch countdown was like bang on like it just happened normally. Like, there wasn't even, like, the same day, like, push back 30 minutes or something like that. Now, I did watch the launch webcast, but I was also a solo dad at the moment when I was watching it. So I didn't catch 100% of detail on there. But I'm pretty sure, like, a couple seconds into the launch, they did a call out for, like, the clock is right. Is that true? It was like, just confirming we have quintuple chucked and the clock is right.

Confirm, confirm the clock is right. It's a SpaceX cheer at the background. Yeah, they're all. Yeah, they absolutely did that. And they, they, I think they did it a couple times. I'm trying to remember now because there was one, they did it like at right after launch. And then they did it after separation to like confirm that leaving the Atlas like it came, it came away with the right, the right data.

So yeah, that was probably the funniest. What were they going to do? Catch back up and like try to reset it. I don't know. I don't know, man. But yeah, so I mean, that seemed to go okay. And then you had all the various little things that started to crop up, right? So thrusters didn't work.

And then it was like, okay, is that a big deal or not? And they had all these redundant thrusters. So that seemed like it was okay. The thing that was like really, they really, you know, straddled the divide of like real and not real. And what's going on was this coolant loop thing. So because the article, like you said, when you go and read the articles after, it's just like they also had a thing with the coolant loop, but it wasn't. wasn't a big deal and then they docked and you're on right but when that was happening there was

like especially like you know in some of the sub communities out there in the world there was like talk about that being like disastrous and I don't know I don't I don't know if that's true now like I don't know what the yeah I don't know how severe the accolent loop problem is the article read like they kind of had this fix already in mind like it seemed so quick that it was fixed that it was like okay no problem like a little patch update yeah yeah anything like hey this thing broke but we thought about it anyway and we already did a fix for it. Yeah. The like the I'm really curious to know how much of this is related to the existing problems,

right? Because we knew that there was thruster problems before because they had this whole valve problem on the pad on the first time they tried to do it like last year or whatever that was. August. And that's that's like the that's the aeroget rocketine stuff. right? Because they built the thrusters. No, you fix it. No, you fix it. Yeah. And I assume that the, the whole system is aerodet. So like the thruster is connected to the, what is the manifold, all the pipes that send, you know, fuel to it. All that valve system is all like an aerodet interconnected system. And so I wonder if the thrusters problems on this is related to that. And it was sort of one of those like, you know, on the ground. They're like, look, these thrusters have a bad design. We know that. We've experienced that. We've come up with a bunch of workarounds. We can get through this flight and accomplish all the other things.

And then when we get back, we're going to deal with this with the long-term solution. I kind of wonder if that was what was happening there. And then we're accepting the risk of, you know, what is the failure rate going to be on this? Can you survive without it? Yeah. And they had all this redundancy. And it's just the test flight. And they needed to get the other stuff was so critical, right?

Like getting on orbit and docking with the station and all that stuff needed to be figured out. Right. And so if you have to redesign the other stuff anyway, and you have until the crew flight to deal with that, do you just proceed with this and get it out of the way? That's my hunch. I don't have a source on that or anything, but that's kind of my hunch on,

and they're going to continue this fight with Erijet about, you know, whose fault it is and blah, blah, blah. So is the coolant loop related to that same system? I don't think so, but I don't know. So, yeah. I think your take's right about that, the thruster thing,

because, I mean, we sort of talked about this last week when I got back and you were trying to catch me up a little bit. like systems that are designed to have redundancy are championed when it's announced that way like Falcon 9's got engine out capability how badass is that it can lose a whole engine to make it orbit and then like two of 12 fail it's like what the up you know

but it's like no that was like I mean even Orion's that way right the service module has the major maneuvering engine it's got slightly smaller maneuvering engines and then it's got the reaction control and there had to be enough smaller engines that it could do all the burns it needs to do, albeit over a longer period of time, to get back from the moon if the main engine fails. So, like, that kind of thing is always built in to human systems specifically.

So... Yeah, especially at NASA, right? Like, that's... Fix why it broke, but this was also one of those cases where if it was any other company with any other lead-up to this flight, we would have been fine saying, yeah, they said it has redundancy, and they proved it has redundancy and all as well. Like, it's the context of it being Boeing, Boeing having the worst last five years of any company for like eight different reasons. There's just all the context around it makes it seem a lot

worse than I think objectively when you say this system is redundant and we use the redundancy. It's like great. That's cool. Yeah. And like they absolutely have to fix that for the next flight. To be clear. Before people are on that, like figure that out. You don't want to have like that sort of normalization of deviance where it's like, I don't know, it's okay if it breaks because you have redundancy so we're not going to fix it because then it's not redundant anymore, right? Well, no, but I think that's the point of redundancy is it breaks once and then you fix that and then you don't need that. You don't need that worry anymore. But like the first time it breaks, you don't want it to fail immediately and kill people. Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So my take overall was that the

flight went like pretty well. I think at the end of the, you know, even today, I'm sure Boeing is probably like, you know, there was things I would have changed if that could have. But at the end of the day, we got the flight done. And now we can focus on crew flight. We have a list of stuff to fix. Like the path forward is probably a lot clearer for them now. And so that's kind of a win, right? That's my, I don't know. I didn't think it was. I didn't think it was a that bad. People were pretty harshing on it, harshing on its buzz, but, you know. They needed to get this done. And there was a slot in the schedule. And if they were going to go fix those valve issues, it wouldn't have happened until next year. And that would have been disastrous. That's the other thing,

too, right? Because we've got a crowded, crowded ISS schedule. Like, hey, we can slot in here. We're otherwise ready to go. Let's do it. Right. Yeah. And the port allocation is a thing that I've harped on a lot, that SpaceX has switched their cargo flights to Dragon 2, which needs to dock instead of birth. There's only two ports that that station's got for Dragon, Dragon Cargo, and Starliner. And that's, you know, not even with Dreamjaser coming online soon. So there's doing crew handovers and cargo deliveries,

there's just tight windows to get to that port. And up until after Starliner gets its crew flight test done, it is not going to be the priority because the schedule is it's set for the crew that's going up on SpaceX flights, it's set for the cargo that's going there. So Starliner was always going to get punted until whenever it fits

just like Axiom was a couple of times on the schedule. So it's just like the traffic jam there that it's not doesn't make it easy to get that slot on their schedule. Yeah and that makes like a lot it makes it a lot easier for the ops planners for ISS now because now

that's off the books. They don't have to worry about this, just random thing coming in that, you know, it needs to fit. Because like once it's operational, it'll be one of the two flights of the year. And so like you've already got that kind of factored into the occupancy. But right now you have two SpaceX flights happening a year and this has to be extra.

And so like fitting that in is difficult, right? So this is, yeah, I think for everyone involved, they're very happy that this test is done and mostly successful. And so did they was, what was the context around? them saying by the end of the year, we'll be ready for crew flight tests. Was that also considering

the failures that happened on the mission? Or was that like stuff they said even before the launch, like based on our current schedule, if this goes well? Well, they said it after. He even, Steve Stitch is the NASA guy, right? Is that the guy? Yeah. So he was like over the moon in his comments, right? 15 out of 10, this is the best flight ever. And that was after he knew everything that happened, right? And so I'm interpreting that one is maybe more of that NASA optimism. Like, The test knocked off all of our checklist of stuff, like ostensibly. And so we think we can proceed with crew flight on the normal notional schedule. I think the rubber will hit the road when they review the data for trustors.

Yeah, when they dig into that. Yeah. Is this solvable by the next flight easily or is there actually like a redesign? And then that's what we're going to, that's how you will know. Like all the speculation, did the flight go well or did it not go well? when they tell you the plan for a crew flight to ask one, you'll know whether it was successful or not. Yeah.

There's been a couple of things people have been saying in the chat about SpaceX getting awarding these extra flights to the ISS after Starliner landed. And I hate to break it to everyone in the chat, but everyone got, everyone's got a bad take on this one. So I'm ready to unpack this. Everyone's saying that they bought those because of the Boeing flight or whatever, right? Like, oh, the cooling failed. Oh, because they like SpaceX better or.

that's cheaper. I actually don't think it's any of those reasons. No. So, TLDR on this situation, not these flight extensions. Are you doing TLDRs today? Do you want me to... I've read up about this one and there's less flavor to this, so I can provide the TLDR.

Yeah, you know this one better than I do, so... So SpaceX, even before this, had gotten extensions for SpaceX crew, seven, eight, and nine, right? Three additional flights. Yeah, that's three, right? Because the originally, the contract for commercial crew was the flight test, program and then six operational missions. So SpaceX is flying those. Crew six is like late 20, 23 at this point, or depending on Starliner flies, it could be like early 2024, but they're

basically already through their operational missions that they had contracted. So in March, NASA said, here's three more, $775 or $6 million. And then they now announced, they haven't signed the contract yet. They had to announce their intent to award more missions to SpaceX. Because it's the sole source, right? Yeah, so they announced the intent to buy five more flights, which would take them all the way through 2030, which is the current demise of ISS. So this has to happen based on everything NASA's planned on previously, because the plan was always fly one Dragon mission and one Starliner mission a year.

from like day one that was NASA's intent when both of these were flying was that they went two flights a year so if you just run the star line'll schedule out star lineal ritchie title of the episode playing in the crew capsule at all times someone give me a render in the puffy Boeing suit I need I need Lionel richie in the in the starliner suit anyway You run the schedule out, right? We said crew flight end of the year, maybe early next. They have to sign off on that crew flight before they get their operational mission assigned. So, SpaceX Crew 5 is like next spring, March 2023, April, 2023.

There's going to be an operational mission in the fall that year. So if crew flight goes well and they get signed off, theoretically Starliner could be that late 2023 flight, but I think it's more likely that they're the early 2024 flight. They have six flights, one per year, do the math. You're at 2023. Nine, yeah, okay, yeah. Regardless of whether they could fly Starliner twice a year, whether they could bring the price down on Starliner, because we know it was more expensive than Dragon, whether they

could magically have a launch vehicle, but there's not enough Atlas V's left, so they would have to transition to something else, which is honestly, like, yeah, it's a lot of paperwork, but you've got six years to do it. You're telling me that they can't do whatever the human rating paperwork is for Vulcan, then you definitely could. So it's honestly just straight up, like NASA wants TikTok schedules. And we've only got six years to fill out based in the current schedule. So this is SpaceX's award for being efficient and getting flying earlier and having a better cadence to their missions.

Yeah. That's my soapbox. Yeah. And I don't think it like even, you won't even really notice that difference because like we've basically already experienced the difference. Like the SpaceX flying when Boeing isn't. That's happening. now, really. And then once this thing gets going with crew flight and the six operational flights, it'll feel like Boeing's just an equal partner. And then that last couple of years,

no, the story will not be about Dragon and Boeing in 2029 and 2030 if that's the end of the ISS. It'll be about the end of the ISS. So yeah, you won't even notice about, yeah. Yeah, that's just how it goes. And yeah, there's so much extra stuff for them because I don't know. You'd have to wait. So you have to wait for crew flight to work and then go and certify a bid after that. Like they probably, Boeing probably wouldn't be able to sign an extension for like, you know, two more flights even to fill out that last year until 2024, I guess. Like how long it would take then to put that together? Maybe late 2023.

And so they probably just want to get ahead of it and just get it out of the way, right? Yeah. Yeah. There was some speculation that people were like, oh, this is NASA putting pressure on SpaceX to not turn off the production line of Dragon. And I don't buy that. Because that, I don't know. The announcement between shutting down production line and this coming out was like not a governmental paperwork cycle of way. No.

No. No. No. Yeah. I don't read too much into that for sure. There's the whole thing about like the other flights that these vehicles would do. Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about this too because so the this is a and I actually I mentioned this on my red plan review show and I thought I was going to catch heat for it. I was waiting for someone to do it. But like I made the suggestion that Boeing, this is a one and done for Boeing. Like Starliner is going to fly these six flights and then it's toast. Right. And I and I said that knowing that there is the plan like Boeing is a part. I don't know what the team member. There are a team member on Orbital Reef with Blue Origin as a crew transportation partner. There's lots of renders. with Starliner approaching Reef.

So, you know, if reef is successful and NASA gives them more money and they build it and they fly it and it's up there, sure, you know, Starliner could happen. But that's, none of that's a given, right? Like, none of that is for sure yet. And so, you know, does Boeing go through with trying to find that extra rocket and doing all the work to swap it over, whether it's Balkan or New Glenn, which is what Blue Origin would like, right? I wanted to see what you're taking on that.

Do you think they'll try and market this the way SpaceX has marketed other things, or is it like? No, I think this is it. Yeah. They don't want to foot the bill for figuring out a new rocket setup. I would bet more money. Like, if I'm doing safe bet, dragon flies to Orbital Reef, risky bet. I'd rather bet that Blue Origins fly on their own crew vehicle to Orbital Reef, you know,

like, rather than Boeing. Yeah. That seems more likely to me. I just don't think Boeing's at the point in their life right now where they would want to more heavily commit to something as weird and unsustainable, given that it's not... Like, SpaceX's thing has always been doing missions

that are headed directionally in the way that they're heading and of marginal profitability or losing slight money to do it. Yeah. You know, so they knew they wanted to get in human spaceflight. So this program made sense for that. Which has always been the problem for these old contractors because they don't have a direction. They just, they just make stuff and play checks, right? Yeah.

This is more akin to Northup Grumman with Cygnus and Antares. That system, you know, Cygnus is getting a bunch of derivatives with NASA programs, but they're not selling it to other people. They're not flying other payloads on Antari. It was purely built for this program. And maybe relevant to the next topic we'll tackle. But maybe it's good to have one company who's doing it for your reason second and their reason first and another company that's doing it for your reason first, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. But SpaceX is always the outlier. We always talk about this. They're always the weird outlier. Well, and so the other side of that coin is, you know, if Starliner was produced to be a, you know, to play in the market of human spaceflight and NASA is just one customer and Boeing wants to offer this service everywhere all over the place. It has to be competitive because

like NASA has an interest in having the redundancy and the two providers and keeping Boeing people working and there's all these other complicated reasons that they'd want to buy Boeing. But like, Jared Isaacman is going to go, how much does SpaceX cost? How much does Boeing cost? Okay, easy decision. Like this, it's not going to be, it's not going to be marketable. It's not going to be competitive, right? So even looking at Orbital Reef, I know that they're a partner. So that does kind of change stuff. But any other, you know, Orbital Re is supposed to be like this like open platform.

It's like a public square. Anyone to come to hang out. Anyone buying like a separate private flight, there's going to be very little reason to go with Starliner unless they do some serious work to bring the cost down. But, yeah. I also don't think that Boeing's. sole reason for being part of Orbital Reef is Starliner. Like, I think that was an also ran in the same way that Sierra Nevada or Sierra Space is like, yeah, we'll do Dreamchaser too, but they're building that other habitat.

They're building something else. Boeing's building that like, legit, uh, experiment's, yeah, they're running the, they're supposed to be leveraging their, their ISS operational management, right? And I think that's what the two member thinks about, not Starliner. I think Starliner was like, yeah, cool, put our, you know, you have, we have the IP, put a, Maybe we'll fly something one day, like put it in there. But I don't think... Just to make the renders look at it.

Yeah, I don't think it's like... Nor do I think when Boeing was negotiating with Blue Origin about what their role would be. They would be like, we're only doing this if we can fly Starliner to the thing. Maybe we were. But it's... That would be a weird thing to negotiate on. And Blue probably wouldn't buy that, right? Right.

They'd be like, no, man. Like, yeah, it's an open platform. We'll figure that out later. Hmm. Yeah. all right that's the puzzle pieces to unwrap

over the next 10 years guys I do think that like thinking about you mentioned Jared Isaacman and Polaris program and Axiom flights are all on dragons at least through

officially through Axiom 4 right now I think they announced but presumably always like dragon's going to have 30 crew flights when Starliner's got six you know

that's I hate to be a a really sour note on this kind of thing but like look at human spacecraft over time and look at when their failures occurred was it before or after seven flights in you know like on average on average you don't find all the issues of the human spacecraft

until you're like a lot more than six flights in So if dragons at 30, and God forbid they would have an issue, but had worked through it at that point, and Starliners at six once a year and clearly isn't putting a lot of momentum in, even if you're at that point, and Boeing's trying to find something to do with the Starliner line, like that, that's a rough spot to be in, let alone the Europeans are getting into human spaceflight, if it goes the way that it sounds, Blue Origins probably got some plans up their sleeve. like where are we going to be in 2030 and do you think Starliner at that point

would have a future? Maybe the Europeans want to buy the Starliner. Maybe, maybe. Not the worst idea. I can't imagine the fact that it's paid for going. That's exactly. That's the fastest way for Josef Ocacher to get a bunch of airbus lobbyists in his office

like Pronto 2-3. This is the S-330 is the name of this vehicle. Yeah, they'd be knocking on his door, Schnell, for sure. Yeah. Worst prediction to put in the off-nominal discord. Europeans buy the Starliner. What if they buy the IP and then make Airbus make it? Yeah, do like a, the thing that everyone's ruminating on Orion, I guess, right,

that they would like sell the IP commercially or something? Hmm. That's interesting. There it is. Orion. That's the one right there, baby. They already make the service module. That's the one.

You think Orion can't fit on Aryan 6? I don't know, man. I have not run those numbers. I know it's pretty junkie. That's a crackpot theory right there. Put that in. We got to have like a crackpot theory section of our prediction bot. Crackpot theory, yeah.

Yeah. Orion gets bought by Airbus. It would be an amazing one. And honestly, would probably make sense. Like that sounds kind of legit. Yeah, yeah.

I would, you know, would Lockheed, I guess Lockheed doesn't own it, right? So they can't really, hmm. All right.

Write that one down. Crackpot theory. We'll check back on in the 2030. In the 2030, yeah, January 2020, 2030. Let's do a show where we like a gather

whatever crackpot theory. I'm going to make a document in our thing right now. That says crackpot theories. I'm doing it right now. Oh, man. Okay. Well, I think that's the signal to move on in the next topic then.

So space suits. So the news, of course, call-ins, aerospace, and axiom are, I don't want to say received contracts. Is that right? Is this the right word? They said contracts or they said award. Did they get money? I don't know.

They got some guaranteed money. Okay. Or they will receive. Maybe they haven't yet. But like, see, this is the thing, man. It's very confusing. It's a very interesting. structural award.

I hope you have some theories about why that is. I kind of do. Yeah. So at very least these two companies are onboarded into the new spacesuit program. So they're going to be eligible to compete for task orders from NASA to provide spacesuit services for the ISS and for lunar surface missions with Artemis. So the whole program is like over the next 12 years. So from now until 2034 has a cost ceiling of $3.5 billion that would split among all the companies and all the task orders they award.

It could be less than that if they don't need to spend that much. And then the individual task order should be focused on like, you know, that I need a suit for this EVA on ISS Expedition 76 or whatever it is. and how much will you charge for that? And there's probably some milestone ones, too, that I'm missing. I don't know what the taskwors are going to look like. And then that'll be like, you know, that'll be $200 million or something, right? And then they'll get that. And this comes on the heels.

So there's a question here about XEMU. So this comes on the heels of NASA spending a long time, like 15 years or something, like some ungodly amount of time developing the XEMU suit, which is that, remember there was that hasty Jim Bridenstein press conference where they had the girl out there with the blue and the red white and blue xcum issue. So NASA had been like developing that like as a cost plus contractor with ILC Dover, I think. And it was not going well. So like 15 years, it wasn't ready.

It didn't work well enough. It was not producing results up to speed, which is why it took so long. And they spent a bunch of money on it. There was a scathing. Is it OIG report that came out like the, or no, a G. report or something like that, that said, like, yeah, this is, this is just a waste of money. It's not going to be, like, this is now your, your long poll item for Artemis. Like, it's not the lander anymore.

It's the damn suits. So you're going to be able to get there and not walk out on the surface if you don't, you know, clean up your act. And so they pivoted and they offered this, this thing here. So I guess the IP from this is going to be available to these contractors in some capacity. That's what they say. Yeah. And I also, isn't, like, I'm pretty sure Collins was already part of that existing contract.

team, whether they were a subcontractor to ILC Dover. So there might be some like mushy crossover there of the same contractors kind of practice. Axiom feels like they're pretty new. But the call inside of it may be, you know, we're repackaging this and giving you the money in a different way. Yeah, I'll see Dover's on their team. So yeah, like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, yeah. So that's kind of what happened. So I guess, do you want to start with the structure? Like, what do you think of that? Just reading as you catch up. It just sounds like, well, they're being very dodgy as well about like how much money was spent on this and they won't tell us that, nor will they tell us when the task orders come out. They said they won't say the price of the task orders either.

The task order based thing is bizarre for this because it's not like clips, the commercial lunar payload services, right? The idea there was on board a bunch of companies that are making moonlanders because there was a bunch already announced. And there's like 14 on that list or something like there's a lot of companies on there right yeah yeah in the teens and this is the way that even some of the um like department of defense launch vehicle contracts work that there's a bunch of launch vehicles out there so we'll onboard all these providers will put out these task orders for certain missions to fly on their standardized vehicles and then they will say oh that where we're at right now that'll cost you a eight million dollars to do that you know small satellite to this orbit and they can pick them this feels like we don't have our budgetary ducks in a row to be able to have an official spacesuit program. So we do have a couple hundred million laying around. What was the in the latest budget? 150,

$1.50, I think. I think it was $150. In that ballpark. This feels like let's disperse that money to two vendors and figure out how to get the money for spacesuits later and also figure out, like, we don't know what the hell space suits we need. We haven't figured those plans out yet. When are you going to need a spacewalk on the gateway?

I don't know. I don't know what order the gateway is launching. I don't know how many flights we're getting there. I don't know how often Orion's launching. So it feels like both trying to dodge around not having money for it yet in the budget and also not having plans that you can specifically say we need six moonwalking suits and we need four EVA suits for the gateway. Yeah, yeah.

And that concerns me greatly. Yeah, and that's an interesting take on it. but I had a kind of a similar but a little bit different idea too. And that so you have like it feels weird that you get a suit as a service. And I know like you if you like if you like if you take the, if you take the, you know, yeah, like take the preconception out of it. Like I know it's more important than renting a tuxedo for a wedding. Like it's, but it's kind of similar.

Like it's. I hope it's at least higher quality because. Yeah. Yeah. With better return timeline. But like it's still going to be a use suit. that smells like another person, like when you get down to it, right? But it's got to be back at JSC the next day after you get back from the moon.

You haven't even adjusted to gravity or gotten over your hangover yet, but you got to get this here by 10 a.m. the next day. Yeah, yeah. So, but my guess is, though, so related to the funding and also related to who we're talking about here. So if you, like, if you watch the press conference, it was super like old guard NASA. It was like, you know, it was a Johnson press conference and you had all the Johnson people and it was in Houston and and this kind of you have this old school contractor in Collins, you know, it's been around for a long time, you know, it's been around for a long time, doing all sorts of things. And then you have AXEM, which is kind of like an old school NASA contractor in disguise, in disguise, right? Because like it's a, it's a shiny new company

doing cool things, but it's being run by Mike Sephardini, right? So there's a little bit of both in there, right? So it felt very insidery, like it felt very old guard NASA insider thing. Moneywax celebrity showed up at the press conference like this. Yeah. Yeah. Hello, all my fellow former employees. But so the thing I was kind of wondering, and this is total pure speculation. So like just throw me under the bus if I'm way off.

That includes you listeners. But like cost plus is now a faux pa. Like it's not cool to talk about cost plus anymore. It's cool to talk about fixed price. And if you want to win over a comment, Congress now, you have to say, we're changing everything. It's going to be cheaper. We're empowering the commercial industry. We're, you know, revitalizing American businesses with this fixed price fee. It's good for NASA. It's good for the industry. Shiny, shiny, shiny. You got to

say that to get the money. And so I kind of wonder if this is just like a fixed price in kind of all but name. Because when you compare it to clips, you have these one and done flights that are task orders. So intuitive machines, here's $100 million to take this lander to the surface. And then we're done. Right. And so that's like a true fixed price service. Then intuitive machines could not win any other contracts after that. But there's only two providers here. And it's a huge cost ceiling, $3.5 billion. It's like more than they gave SpaceX for the freaking lander. And so there's no real limit to how many task orders you could give. You could just keep giving task orders to these companies in the same way you might with a cost plus contract, right?

Oh, yeah, we need a little more. Give us another task order. Okay, here you go, right? And we're going to award you this milestone on this milestone. So I don't know, I kind of felt like this is sort of how can we do the suits in the same old cost plus way while making it feel fixed price so that Congress likes it and gives us money for it? And we don't have the flack anymore. Yeah, I guess mine's like a version of that, right? Where it's like we have. haven't talked to Congress yet. But whenever we do, whatever they put in the budget, we're just going to do a task order for exactly as much as in the budget and say like, yeah, 2020, suit work, you know, here it is, like bill it to JSC. Yeah. So, yeah, so it's interesting. I'm

really curious to see what the task orders look like and, you know, what the prices are for those as much as we'll get to see them. But it'll be interesting. I'm not super. I'm not super, like enthused by this quite yet. I think it has a lot more to prove. This is a weird one. This is the concerning thing though. What if like are we getting the point where there's going to be one of these contract setups that's like using all the right language for the wrong service and then it totally takes the whole thing down. Yeah. Yeah. That's a major concern. Because the, you know, compared to Dragon and Starliner, there's at least like an inkling of a market for that, right? And SpaceX as well, able to use those funds for their rocket, which is

definitely a market for. You know, that one, that's, that's the textbook example of how you want this to work out, Falcon 9. But who's going to, I mean, I think Axiom is the only super big winner out of this because they're going to develop suits anyway for their suits. So now they can offer this extra service. They get NASA funding for it. Like huge win for Axiom.

Great, great strategic move for Axiom. But like, I don't know, is Colin going to sell their spaces suit services to someone? Right. I guess theoretically they could sell. it to the Blue Origin people or whatever? Yeah, they get put one on leaf. But I also kind of feel like Blue is doing that

weird little one person spacecraft. Like they're doing like this version of scuba diving. Yeah, yeah. Like you're right on this little crazy scooter thing. Like this is like the blue spacesuit model, right? And so do they want? I don't know. Like, and even beyond the market, like,

there were there were like monetary figures you could look up to estimate launch costs and spacecraft production costs. But like, Glenn's the last time somebody made a spacesuit that also had an accountant nearby. I don't know. How do you estimate, how do you figure out what a spacesuit costs? The only, like, the only data we have is XEMU and that was not going well. Yeah. I know. It's interesting. And SpaceX is going to make their own. So like, they're not going to be a potential customer. No one else is going to the moon anytime soon.

So like, you're not going to use these. The lunar surface suits are, they're going to be, Artemis suits, whether you call it fixed price or cost plus or not. And I don't know. It's interesting. I don't know what they, but what's really curious, though, is so if they're selling these lunar suits as part of Artemis and SpaceX is not part of the program, are they going to fly like a call in space suit on the on the Artemis lander, you know, on the starship and then these SpaceX astronauts get out in a, I don't know,

I don't know. It's been interesting. but you open the closet in the airlock and it's like some really sleek looking suits and then the collins one yeah yeah and sorry you can't wear this one you don't have a license for those one there's a free trial you can try it on if you want um but it's uh it's not available unless you swipe your credit card on the on the thing here you're not going to be able to it amazing it's locked in a locker like the little like phone chargers to go like i need a space suit total SpaceX move too right Just like, yeah, we had a bunch of extra space on the starship.

You didn't buy this space. So we're flying. We're just flying some suits to test them. And they're going to be in a nice glass display case. So you can see them when you walk out. Yeah, totally. Yeah, all you said was 100 kilograms of this space suit. So we put like Iron Man style like a suit displays up in the airlock.

Oh, man. That's incredible. So, yeah. Is I actually going to use their suit. Only exception for famous. Yeah. So good. We've cracked it.

We've cracked it. There it is. Shift four payments. That's good. Oh, man. Okay. So, yeah. So that's, you know, that's that's that.

I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know what Collins is going to do other than just collect task orders like a cost plus contract. Axiom hopefully will run with it. Yeah. I mean, this is the same thing, right? They picked a contractor that we clearly know what. axioms plans are in the future they're going to have a space station they're going to do spacewalks they're building this anyway so this is the thing that SpaceX always gets on about like we're going

in this direction this is relevant enough to our mission come on board you can not defray the cost for us and we'll build it and it might be suboptimal because it's to your specs but some of those are good specs anyway let's do it Collins is like we're here if you need us you know yeah they're the they're They're the starliner of this arrangement. They're the starliner, they're the Antares, is what it is. They'll get their six operational spacesuit services, and then Axiom will sell the other 30 or whatever it's going to be. The weird thing is, though, that, like, so in the hypothetical future where SpaceX gets

onboarded to this, like, Jared Isaacman will have paid most of the cost of building a spacesuit, I guess. So there's going to be, like, very little development needed. So, like, SpaceX could avoid interact. acting with this program until they need to. And then... This is the other weird thing, though, right? Because you have to imagine, so SpaceX is definitely building a suit for EVA.

We know that. They're probably going to build one for the moon because they got the lander. Yeah. Yeah, they're working on that. So the question is, did they compete for this Space Suite Award? And I think we know, I can't remember it. Like, probably, right? I think they were in the list, yeah.

I'm pretty sure they did. So why didn't they win? Because they probably had a really, really good price knowing that they're already getting a bunch of Jared Isaacman money and they're going to do it anyway. They probably did the same thing they did with Starship where they like really underbid it because they said we're going to put her own money in and you don't have to cover it NASA. So if they like really won on price, why didn't they get an award here? And I know there's a whole discussion about, you know, let's get some new contractor blood in here. And I'm all on board of that. But I'm still curious.

That's not a governmentally defensible selection choice. Government procurement laws really has to take the price into effect. And so did they bid too high? It doesn't have to take price into effect. It has to just follow the rules that they set out of the contracting. Right, right, right. And most set price as a major rule, but it doesn't have to be. That's a slim delineation I want to make.

Okay. You know what I'm saying? So maybe if you put out a proposal, you say this is our criteria that we will decide against. You don't have to include price in that list. Right. So if the selection criteria that was in the RFP for this did not linear price or or weighted price way down, curiously they could have lost on, I don't know, like it wasn't a good suit. I don't know.

Maybe they half asked the EBA one or something. Like we don't care about EBAs. Here's our EVA suit. You're tethered like Gemini and like Jared Isaacman will be. That's an interesting thing that. Someone's got a, well, that source selection document will be out in a month or something, right? It won't have money figures in it, but it will have. their like selection criteria yeah yeah yeah okay well that's what that's what I'm keeping

an eye on because something doesn't something doesn't add up there to me I don't know it's like you should have bid and they probably did low is so why didn't they win and better that that but whatever well at least we know what Polaris the fourth mission will be it's only three right now but you know yeah yeah okay space suits man space suits Yeah. You think they're going to onboard other suppliers later? You think that'll be a thing?

I guess. Is there enough services to buy to fill out that many contractors? I think this is set up this way because they just haven't figured out which ones they need yet. When? Like, I don't know. I mean, the telling thing about how this program is going is if you see these companies announce partnerships with the commercial Leo station companies. that are not axiom, you know, whether that's nanorax, buying Axiom suits or buying Collins suits or whatever,

or one of these getting onboarded as a partner on Orbital Reef, then you'll be like, okay, like the commercial thing made sense a little bit. And because NASA on the commercial Leo thing, and I think this is important to remember, they are not going to award a commercial Leo station and then also buy a bunch of stuff around it, like transportation and spacesuits and all that. They're buying end-to-end services from that station.

Everything that entails. Transportation, cargo. Yeah. So it's up to those companies how they want to handle that. So, you know, Axiom in this case, they want to have space suits for their maintenance of their own station and for, you know, excursions that people are going to pay for to go out and do a spacewalk. So NASA doesn't care if your space station requires spacewalks or not.

Like, they probably prefer that it doesn't, so they don't have to be. go outside and do those things. But, like, yeah, the whole, like, commercially blooming part of this fixed price task order-based thing doesn't ring true to me here, but it does ring true that it's just like, this is a way to delay putting actual requirements around specific missions until we figure that out. And in the meantime, we can go, you know, to Congress and ask for that amount of money. Right, right, right. Well, lots of time pack with that.

We shall see. We shall see. What else happened? We got the ingenuity's all screwed up. It is. Yeah, it's suffering a little bit. So it's winter in the northern hemisphere in Mars.

It's cold. And so the first thing that really happened was they basically ran out of power because at night the heaters turn on and it was colder and colder. So they turned on sooner and sooner and then they just ran out of energy. And it went into safe mode. And then the clock reset and there was this whole thing where it was calling home at the wrong time. But they recovered that and they turned the threshold down. So they're just like the only real option on a tech demo like this is just let it suffer in the cold and see if it survives.

Right. Like we don't know what the actual robustness of this hardware is in the cold. We never tested it for that. Let's just, you know, instead of turning the heaters on at zero degrees to turn it on at minus 40 degrees is basically what they did. Right. And so it's being exposed to cold right now. but it saves the energy, so they're able to recover that. It's a dusty season, so there's even less energy to get.

So it's like kind of a rough thing. But then they were spinning it up the other day, so they're trying to get ready for another thing. And they're testing it now just to make sure that the cold is, you know, not hitting it. And the inclinometer is broken on it. So I guess there's like a, like when it lands, it has a two-way inclinometer to, you know, so on the x-axis and the y-axis to tell what the tilt is, right? So is it like up like this? like what's the landing position of the helicopter?

Because that dictates what you do as soon as you take off because you got a level, right? So the inclinometer provides that starting point data. This is your starting state. And then when you lift off, you need to correct it to this. So they don't have that information anymore. But they can use the IMUs, which are the things you use after you start flying, kind of in that initial phase and the landing phase to like see what your orientation is. It's apparently less accurate, but it works.

so they are able to do that. And they already knew this was going to happen. Like it was like a hunch that the inclinometer would go after a while. And so they actually wrote all the software to switch it over, you know, basically just like a little piece of code that goes in between where the inclinometer passes the information to the flight computer is now just going to be intercepted by IMU data. And they should be okay. That's the idea.

But are they doing stuff while they wait for the cold or is it like they're down for a few months? Like what's the operational plan? I thought they were going to dump a bunch of data and they did one big flight like they uploaded it because it's been like lagging behind the rover for a while. Like it's been trying to catch up because it had to go with this whole crossing of this sandy area. So it's been like really on the far edge of the range envelope and the signal strength wasn't high enough to like really juice up the data. But now it's caught up and the rover's going slower because it's doing science again. It's not like booking it across the crater right now to get to the delta. So they uploaded like a whole big flight,

but I think there are a couple flights behind. There's still just a bunch of data sitting on the hard drive on ingenuity, solid state drive, whatever it is in the long-term storage. I don't think they have a hard drive on that. But, yeah. It's just hacked. Yeah. Yeah, you just got to.

So I thought they were going to do that, but I don't know, maybe just power isn't that bad because that takes a bunch of data to really, you know, to fire the transmitter off like that. or it takes a bunch of energy to do that. So we'll see. Yeah. But it's, you know,

it's, this is kind of what we expected. It's supposed to have lasted five flights. We're at 28 now. 29 is coming up. Um, and it's an off the shelf, like,

it's basically like an Android phone with a propeller. So it's like, it's, you know, it's, it's not really designed to last this long and in this weather. So, like,

you know, good for it. Huh. And so it's, it doesn't have enough power to fly over to insight and save it. it should be able to save up the energy and do it like they're getting ready for it and in a couple of months. To fly to Insight and save Insight.

Oh, not to Insight, no, the first of it. Not to Insight. No, no, no, no. Insights, the time has come. Yeah. Are there any good conspiracy theories about how Insight's going to die and yet they detected the largest Marsquake ever? Makes you think.

It does make you think. Yeah. But no. I think it's just luck. some good luck for this mission finally yeah I needed it it had to balance out after the land insight selection and the yeah

the dirt and the dust devils surviving this long was not a level one priority no um actually this time we've got a riproar an episode next week how much reading have you done it's a lot more reading to do

and not a lot but I have a lot But I have a solid about a reading to do. Like, you know, 20 minutes a night gets me there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So last show with Lauren Lyons, we talked about how Lauren has been on our list forever. Yeah. This next guest has been in our list for maybe longer. I'm pretty sure she was on, like, the original, like, hey, we should start this show called Offenominal.

Who do we have on it? And then we made a short list of like five or six names, and I'm pretty sure she was on it. And there's no. There's no guesses in the chat yet, and I'm surprised by that. But this is tied to a book release that's coming out in like two weeks. Laurie Garver is going to be on here. And boy, when you read the first chapter of her book, is she not holding back anything about her time at NASA elsewhere in the space policy sphere.

It is an epic takedown of all of her haters. It is going to be amazing. Yeah, yeah. It's, I'm like a third of the way through and like the it doesn't stop. So it's unreal. There was there was like and I'm just getting to the point where she's like getting into the NASA administrator, a deputy administrator role and it's like, ooh. Yeah, it doesn't get less spicy as you go. They probably on the book, there was so much of like these weird little moments of of how DC actually works where she's like talking to two parties. of an agreement and no one has agreed to anything, but she's telling both that they did

so that they both agree to a thing. And it's just like this epic puppet mastering that she's doing. It's just incredible. Tyler's asking her the book's out now. It is not out now. It is, so she's coming on next Thursday. It'll be out the following week. Yeah, so we're like a few days before. The Tuesday, the following week, yeah. So the book is called escaping gravity. Is that correct? If it didn't change more appropriate. No. I can sure of that.

I'm pumped. It's going to be amazing. I'm excited. It's going to be a heck of a heck of a show, I think. It's going to be really good. So, yeah, pretty stoked. Be there next week.

What else is we need to talk about? Memberships. Memberships. If you'd like to show everybody, please help support us by joining iPhone or iOS or mobile up here, desktop down here, down this way.

Five bucks a month gets you on the off-n-nobl Discord, which is the coolest place to hang out. we had an interesting discussion today related to the mobile launcher that was the other news that we could have covered too but the mobile launcher too for SLS which I had another skating OIG report come out today. Should have been a task order based fixed price contract. Should have been a task order based mobile launching because it's like it's like a bigillion dollars over budget and 10 years behind schedule and we're not even we're not even

anywhere close to our launching. So we had a good, you know, a good discussion about that today about what could go wrong with it. So it's, it's been pretty fun. So if you want to hang out with us and talk about these things as they happen, you should pop into the membership because it's a lot of fun. And it helps us, you know, pay for this because it's our job. It is. We need salaries. We got, we got beers to buy. We got beers to buy and shit posts to do like this one on Twitter earlier than Jake did. NASA going into the UAP domain, which is the worst.

Wasn't that weird today? Like it was a press conference. They announced a press conference like an hour before it happened. They're like, rush us out, rush us out. We're going to talk about aliens. Go, go, go, go. This time, it is about aliens. Yeah.

So, anyway, that's how that goes. So, yeah. And then you put in an episode today if you want more Starliner talk, right, Miko? It was Starliner. It was, yeah. I mean, you probably got most. of it, to be honest, but there's maybe a little more detail around some of the stuff that we talked about. And, you know, it's 30 minutes of, you know, talking about commercial crew, which I don't often

talk about commercial crew these days, you know, because it has been doing its thing. So it felt like a good time to dive into it. Cool. What you go? Next week, I'll have an episode in Wee Martians. It's semi-related. So we're going to talk about the lunar program at NASA, the lunar science program, and how it's like kind of tangled up with Artemis and human spaceflight and technology development. You know, Eclipse is not in the planetary science division and what's the Decadal saying about that? And how do we do good science and how do we? There's a lot of questions I have about the weird, you know, it's very different from the Mars program. So I have a good guest coming on to talk about that and, you know, unpack it.

We'll see if we can figure some stuff out. Sounds legit. You're going to ask about the moon suits or what? we'll see i wonder how much uh how much of the science uh objectives are making into those requirements probably not very many not yet anyway maybe the task orders once they get around gotta have pockets got to have pockets that's about the only thing that's going to be in there that would be amazing yeah hopefully it has a tool belt tool belt pockets and a selfie cam that's about it yeah yeah yeah yeah the most important part

anybody all right all right all right all right Thanks everybody Bye 1 2345 5 4321 end of death