Off-Nominal - 79 - A Wake of Creative Destruction

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Anthony took a trip to Pittsburgh to visit Astrobotic this week, and he’s back to talk about it with Jake.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 79 - A Wake of Creative Destruction - YouTube127 - Checking in on CLPS (feat. Anthony Colangelo)T+223: Viper Delayed, Masten Unravels, CLPS Moves On - Main Engine Cut OffAstrobotic Unveils Peregrine Lunar Lander Flight Model | Astrobotic TechnologyAnnouncing LunaGrid, a Commercial Power Service for the Moon | Astrobotic TechnologyAstrobotic Acquires Masten Space Systems | Astrobotic TechnologyCubeRover Funded for Survive the Lunar Night Mission | Astrobotic TechnologyAstrobotic’s Wireless Charging System for the Moon Can Survive Lunar Night | Astrobotic TechnologyFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hey, friends. I'm back from Pittsburgh. You're back from the Steel City as we learned. What of many in the state. Yeah, not that unique of a nickname. Apparently, all over the world, we got Steels. I think we called Hamilton the Steel City, too, in Ontario.

Sounds right. Yeah. When your economy was run for, you can hear me filling my wine up from the box. I got box wine today. I love it. That's what kind of show it's going to be. Yeah, I was a little scramily getting back home. It's box Cabernet Sauvignon, which is actually a pretty delicious box.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. All right. Hi. I'm doing the drink segment. What do you got? That simple.

We're fast. I'm keeping it simple today, too. I just made a margarita. So I got some new, I got some new tequila on to try. And that's it. Just tequila. There is. And the rest of the margarita stuff.

So, cheers. Not a sunrise, just a regular. It's good, too. Yeah, steel study, man. Steel City. That's where I was. Did we clarify what Steel City it was? No, I said Pittsburgh.

Yeah, I guess we ensured the fact that there's many named that. But no, it was Pittsburgh. Yeah, I drove. You're in Pittsburgh. You know, clean from one side of the state to the other. Best time of the year for that. Like, I don't know, this is the time of the year when everything starts to turn a little bit, especially when to get into the mountains and all.

Great time of the year to drive. I've driven to I drove from Niagara and Canada to Boston twice for Halloween to go to Salem so it's kind of the same thing you're crossing like the whole part of Massachusetts and Northern New York around this time you know but three weeks from now

where there's nothing but leaves and just gorgeous the rolling hills and all the browns and yellows and oranges and it's just rich yeah it's lovely country this time of year and it's one of those funny drives when you get west of Philly, like onto the main highway we have, and your maps are like 284 miles straight. Like, I have no directions for you except go drive to Pittsburgh and then we'll catch back up after that.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Alberta is the exact same way. You leave Medicine ad to go to Calgary and it's like in 314 kilometers turn left at the airport. Nothing but ads for governor and Senate races here in Pennsylvania. if anyone's anyone's following that. Real fun, real fun races, especially when you get out in the middle, man, it's like, man, these are definitely ads

that are trying to get turnout, but I don't, there's nobody out here. So, anyway, all right, I've got a couple of things. So I should give this some, I guess I should talk about why I went to astrobotic. Yeah, yeah. Why is you go to steal a city?

So I knew that we're getting, close-ish to these first couple of commercial lunar payload services missions flying. We talked about this a few months back on Wii Martians. Yeah, yeah. It was a little while ago, episode 127, I have in my notes. This was two months ago. So we talked a lot about the state of the program, but I knew, you know, there's hardware to be seen now, and they're getting close-ish to flying, so started organizing a little trip with the help

of some anomalies. We've got some good anomalies out at Astrobotic. You know, it was a good time. Hung out with Haley, Tori, they're in the Discord, if you're in the Discord. And Olivia, who is communications lady at Astrobotic. Super cool people. So we hung out and then took a trip to their factory the next day. And the intention to see whatever they've got to see, but then also to talk to a lot of people. And I think I recorded four, five different, like 20 or 30 minutes segments with different people from the team. Nice. So I have a ton of editing to do, just not like that I need to edit stuff out that they said.

I just need to like listen back and figure out what order these things should go in and do my best job and to compile this. Yeah, you're stumbling into the Wii Martians production workflow here. I'm happy to say, though, the hardware that I bought in March 2020, or February 2020, whatever it was, got a good workout on this one, slapping mics on different people and the Zoom held up. So I've got a lot of content to sift through and figure out. which order things make sense. So you'll hear all that on main engine cutoff probably next week sometime. Um, but where I'll start is that I like to do these visits as a bit of a vibe check

because if I just wanted to go see the hardware, I'll just wait till it's on top of the rocket and I'll, you know, go visit it when it gets integrated or something. And I think a big part of this is going, picking up the vibe from the people, seeing what the office is like, seeing what the factory's like. There's a, there's a major, I think I noticed this when I did. a trip to nanorax years ago. And I went in there and I was like, oh, wow, there's like, there's, when you go to companies, they think, like, the information they're giving you is the information,

whereas a lot of times it's, it's not at all. Like, the information is how it feels to be there and what they don't tell you. Those are the two things that I find key. Vives are good. Everyone seems very happy. It's a really cool spot because, like, there's this, weird Pennsylvania space scene to some extent, right? There's NASDAAR Center I've been to, uh, AGI, which does like the trajectory software

and that kind of stuff. There's a ton of people that have come out of the Penn State programs and are now engineers at various space companies and then he got astrobotic on the west side. So there's this like a little bit of a Pennsylvania space scene that is interesting. So steel city space scene. Yeah. Steel city space scene. but it's cool because everyone is like not everyone but most people I talk to are fairly local

like they yeah went to school nearby grew up nearby and that's kind of importing people from the from the big space markets around like that's not too bad yeah when you go to those right it's people from everywhere there's there's no real rhyme or reason of how people ended up at south uh on space coast or south california like nobody really you're describing this this sounds like it's like the craft brewery of space companies. It kind of feels like that though, because everyone is really, like, excited about the local area and the fact that one of their big struggles is that it's hard to get the Pittsburgh people outside of Astrobotic to know about Astrobotic.

A lot of people don't know that there's a moonlander being built next door to the football stadium. It's interesting. So they're actually, they're opening up this museum that I got a chance to see as they pull it all together. I should pull up the website for it. They're opening next week or something like that, the 15th. But I got a chance to go through and see what they're doing there.

And this is really cool because they're targeting it at like middle and high school kids that are, they're specifically targeting around like career trajectory and saying like you could, you could work on space. Totally talent pipeline. Yeah, it's like, hey, welcome to museum. Please apply to Carnegie Mellon and then come work at Astrobotic. It's like so straight up. Yeah, here's your Carnegie Mellon application, and we've pre-filled out a job application

at Astrobotic, which is post-dated four years from now. 100%. Yeah, but it is very cool. The museum backs right up to the clean room, so you're just in the museum, and the clean room is right next door. That's nice. But I think it was part of a theme that I noticed of them trying to figure out, like, you know, a lot of the people that work at Astrobotic are from Carnegie Mellon or the other local

schools, and it's a big point of pride that people are from the area that work. at this thing. It's just, I don't know, there was a different vibe than you get when you go to Houston or you go to, you know, L.A. or something and you talk to space companies there. It's just a different framing. Let me get into the vibe check, though. Like I said, everyone's spirits are high. We'll talk about the hardware in a minute. But there's one thing about a vibe check that I like, and I feel like I need to make this official in some sort of theorem that can be named after me. So when you walk through things like this, office space or factory space, right, what I like to notice is how much, how much like prototype or test hardware is just everywhere. Are you stepping over it everywhere or are you like, do you not see any?

Like have they experimented a bunch and there's just an excess of hardware? They don't know where to put it anymore. There's piles in the corner. There's piles on desks. Everyone has a 3D printed moon rover on their desk because it was like the one they were screwing. around with and then they're done and it's just they don't have anywhere else to put it that is exactly what's happening at astrobotic there was like i should have counted there were like you know a hundred different wheels just like laying around as like either you know structural test

articles or like functional wheels that were like and we ran out of space like it's just over there in the corner stepping over stuff there's like oh that's the structural test article whatever oh there's sort of the ramps that we were testing for for Griffin and viper for a little bit but they're just like in a pile now because we needed the space that is a key thing it's just like, because you look at photos of SpaceX's, like, junkyards, the old one out at Hawthorne or the ones down in Boca, chicken. And there's just, like, just like broken rockets flying around. It's just everything, right?

But then you look at, like, when the PR comes out of like, we moved into a new factory, and it's real sleek and there's like nothing in it. So, I don't know, there's something about the quantity of, like, have you left a wake of creative destruction or not? A little bit. Okay. All right. I'm feeling this. Yeah, I'm feeling what you're putting down here. Yeah. The Anthony Colangelo, uh, hardware richness theorem of company, is company health? Yeah. And it's, because I think what it indicates is iteration speed. Like, have you screwed around a bunch of times and tried to figure out what the right way to do something is? Or are you trying to get this

right on the first time? That's the key. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Now it could also, you have to be careful, right? Because that could also mean they like screwed up a lot. But that's a matter of taste, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because it could, it could signify we don't know where we're going. Everything went wrong all the time. Yeah. Yeah. We had to try all this stuff because our first ideas were not good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But it's, I think so what I, what it is then is like, does most of the waste product look the same? And it's just minor tweaks or like, are they iterations on a, on a very common theme or are they drastically divergent? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ultimately, you'd want to have like one room full of weird, wacky stuff that just like, that was the experimentation room. And then another room where the good ideas got picked up and started honing down, right? Yeah. So, yeah, that was the general vibe check. I'm getting. Spirits are high. So there's stuff everywhere. Stuff everywhere.

Lying around. Yeah. Like, when you go into some of these rooms. This is what I'd ask too before you went. We need the factory fill, fill check here. Yeah. That's the situation. And it's not even like, that stuff's not even in like the clean room, right?

That's just here where people are working or in the component test labs or whatever. I forget all the names for the different rooms that I was taken into. They have a super cool mission control setup that then has, so there's mission control and then a wall of windows and like a boardroom conference meeting room. And then on the other side of that set of windows is the clean room. So this is where I set up for my interview that there's windows on either side of view. One side's mission control. One side's the clean room high bank. So that's a very cool spot because they were running mission sims and mission control.

They were working on the payloads on the other side. You asked, like, are there people working or are they just walking around? And there was active work everywhere, which was good sign. I didn't feel like I was in the Truman show. That's good. That's good. That's really cool. So the mission control thing is really interesting because, like, I find, and I don't know why this surprised me,

but like it was one of those things when I first saw like on a stream there was like the space X mission control for whatever mission they were doing. It's like here's theirs. And like this thing clicks in your brain like, oh, there can be other mission controls. Because like for a long time there was Houston mission control and that that is mission control. Missions are controlled there. Not types of missions in general. If it goes to space, it comes through this room. That's like kind of what the thing you get. And now there's all these companies popping up and they're all making the wrong. own. You got a SpaceX one. You got a Blue Origin one. You got the rocket lab one, the Firefly one. And now Astrobotic Moonlander Mission Control. Like, that's pretty cool that there's

like all these utter little takes on it. Because it's one of those, it's one of those things where you, then you start to ask like, how could you make mission controls better? Like, is the layout of the room with just a bunch of people at desks? Yeah, the stadium seating of desks. Is that correct? I mean, that's how NASA has done. Everyone's got it. I don't know. So like something seems to be working there. But then you're going to start seeing all these. these different ways to look at it. And then the big question I would have, like that now my mission control,

the Jake Robbins theorem of mission control things is how many desks were there? Was it like there's five desks with like some key positions or was it closer to like, you know, when when ULA launches an annual satellite and there's five rooms full of 500 people and they all have uniforms on? What's, you know, what's the situation? I think it was, now I'm trying to remember. I think it was two columns of maybe three workstations across.

each column and then maybe five or six rows. It's pretty big. It's not enormous. It's probably as many people. It's as many people as you would expect. It's not the little Astro one with four people jammed in that little webcast thing. It's not like they're sitting in a tiny house doing mission control. It's more, it's a smaller scale like SpaceX looking room, you know.

Kind of like a rocket lab size maybe. Yeah, something exactly like that. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Different from the SLS one, right?

Totally different. Yeah, from the many SLS. But you were saying there's other mission controls. Like, did you know that there's like a little auxiliary mission control at Johnson Space Center kind of near the main mission control? There might even be like two other ones. I think they have three. They have like the historical one.

Yeah, that one. You know, and then there's like the proper ISS one. And then there's like a backup one. And then they also have the, um, the backup one of Johnson is that where Starliner rents out to use? Yeah. But it's smaller. It's like half the width, I think.

Yeah. I probably have a picture of it. NASA contracts Boeing to fly a spaceship and Boeing recontrax NASA back to use. It's awesome. And there's also a payload mission control in Huntsville. Yes, that's right. And there is a little mini version of that at Nanobrack's office in Houston. Mission controls everywhere.

This is everywhere. There's all these mission controls. A lot of missions. Who's in control? Where's mission control control? Who's controlling the controllers? All right. The hardware.

You can, we have the crackpot theories document in our notes, right? Yeah, I don't know where this came. We may or may not be adding to that today. Because I'm going to tell you a situation. You're going to tell me where between totally regular and like Charlie Day conspiracy theory this falls. Okay. Okay. Anthony scheduled to be there on October 5th.

Okay? That's when I was there yesterday. Main structure of the spacecraft. So that's the tanks and like the main chassis, right? Happened to leave for pressure testing on Monday is returning today. Hmm. So, and they said it was at a facility nearby. So do you believe him?

putting my tinfoil hat on. Did they roll it out? I don't think I'm that important that they would have moved it for me, which is the real killer of this theory. I'm not the president. We have some anomalies on the inside, though. They might know how influential you are. Yeah, I guess.

So what? The three of them are listening? Yeah, yeah. They ran into the out of the factory floor and said, we got to get that cardboard sticky tape model out of here because they're going to know that we haven't built anything yet. We were joking that like when they say, The main lander body's not here.

It's like there was just a sheet over a very lander-shaped item. There's an intern standing in a landing shape. Oh, man. It's like two people in the Lama costume, right? They, so it was apparently going under pressure testing, the tank edge and the main body. But there was a lot of stuff around still. It was like all the good parts were still there. There was a whole rack of landing legs.

There were eight on this. shelf and there's only four landing legs so I assume that's all the flight spares as well. They look beautiful. Like pristine, they look wonderful. All the payloads and the decks that those go on were there still, I think the decks where the decks might be part of the other article, but payloads are all there. The avionics that would go back inside the vehicle, we're all still there, all wired up. They were running tests on that actively so that when it comes back in, they can immediately

start reattaching everything. Now, the most important number, Jake, of this visit was the rocket engine count. Right? There are 12 attitude control engines and five main engines. So there should be 17 rocket engines plus I guess any flight spares. I don't think they're going to have active spares for those. But there should have been 17 engines if everything was going great. Do you want to guess at how many engines I laid my eyes on?

is 17 per vehicle that's how that's the design 12 attitude control five main engines okay so 17 per vehicle and all right so this is going to be either good news or bad news that sounds like uh i don't call it i mean they got they got a couple contracts right so they must be going for for at least i don't call it like 40 40 engines 50 you think there are 40 at the place i don't know i you're leading me on a weird weird setup here i don't know where i'm What's the joke? What's going on? There were six. There were six attitude control engines.

Well, the other 17 were on the actual model going to the further testing. No, they're the last thing to get integrated. I was asking. Yeah. There's no main engines. Good news or bad news. Okay. It's all bad news.

There's no main engines. Half of the attitude control engines. Not a lot of engines. All right. Okay. The mission, if you ask anyone, in that building. They're still flying the end of this year,

even though the rocket doesn't have main engines and the spacecraft doesn't have main engines. It's still, everything's going great by the end of the year. I kept asking people, I was like, I'll book a flight for spring. And they're just like rolling their eyes.

No one's going to say anything, right? But yeah, the main engines were cut off. Yes, 100%. It was a severe main engine cutoff leading into this engine. So, oh, Banda is in the chat who, uh,

Shekhov's Ben in the chat. So the engine situation is really weird. The main engines in particular are a weird thing that I have recently been trying to unravel, but, and I still don't feel like I have the full chain correct based on talking to multiple different people. But, and I need to like do some more history on this, but the main engines are not something that astrobotic, they're not working on them internally, they're not even, acquiring them themselves.

Like they have a, they're using an engine that NASA has a contract for where NASA contracted with dynetics to make engines. I don't like this. I don't like where this is going. I think I already screwed it up.

I think Astrobotic has a contract with Frontier Aerospace to provide the engines. And Frontier is providing engines that NASA contracted for from Dynetics. I don't know. I may have got all this information wrong,

but I've been trying to draw a Charlie Daymap of like, I've been told different things from three people, and this is the best common denominator I've found. So, NASA is in charge of the project that is making the engines, and then they are providing them to Frontier who's providing them to Astrobotic, and I'm very confused by all this. So, notably this is not the engine set up for Griffin. I don't know if you noticed, but if this went well, they probably would have done the same thing for Griffin, and it's not at all.

So, it's a bummer. Okay, all right. So, yeah, the engines were very close, by the way. They were, I was standing in this conference room and then there's a window to the high bay. And there's, they were like, if I could open the windows, I could have grabbed one. They were very close. So it was not like I was murky about how far away they were. They were extremely close to my face.

So you could do a proper count is what you're saying. Yeah, I got a good count. Yeah, was six a number where you said, how many engines do you have? They said, we have six or were you just like, like face up against the classic one, two, three, No, I woke up and I went one, two, three, four, five, six. How many should there be? And they said 12 and I said, cool. It's good to know.

You're like, are there anymore? Are you hiding them? Are they also at the other facility getting pressure tested? Yeah. Okay, so hardware has passed the Anthony Colangelo theorem of vibe check and the engines, not so much. Yeah. Engines fail. And this is the tricky part, right?

Everyone's in such good spirits. Engines aren't there yet. And I'm wrestling with that. It's not the irony of this launching on Vulcan is now like really, really hitting me. When are you launching Vulcan? Oh, it's great. We're launching this year. Do you have engines yet?

No. They're coming. They're on there. They're so close. Like you just have no idea how close these engines are. That's the major concern. Okay. So here's the grand.

theory on Vulcan and Astrobotic, right? Like, everyone's playing scheduled chicken with everybody. I don't get the vibe that astrobotic is going to miss the bus and Vulcan will fly without them. I don't get that vibe. Okay. So. Why not those?

Because you're saying, because that's all a ULA thing, right? Like, they're saying, if we're ready and you're not, we're moving forward with something else. Right. And certainly, astrobotic needs ULA a lot more than ULA needs astrobotic. So if ULA had a Vulcan put together today, they would. would just fly, you know. Yeah.

So you're all you're saying that B4 is going to be just as late, so it doesn't matter. Well, yeah, it sounds like the testings are going all right on one of the engines, and it'll be shipped out soon. But YOLA did, what, a tanking test when they took Vulcan out to the pad, they took that Pathfinder out to the pad. But connecting engines is a whole other, you know, with plumbing. It's a whole other thing. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. You know, Yeah, Vulcan's one of those ones were. It's fired under a vehicle. It's fired in a stand. And it's their first go with methane and all brand new. First go at any designing any rocket, I guess, right? That's true.

Yeah. So I don't know. I think the, oh man, Ben's really just pulling the puns out there. The lander, I think, is going to be ready before. I'm guessing like May. Something's happening nearby. I don't know what that. I can hear that.

That's coming through. There's a tiger in the room next door. I think it's just that my son's out early from school. May is my vibe on net May is how I feel. Okay. All right. That's not too bad, though. If it launched May June, it's like in the grand scheme of things, it's not too bad.

Yeah. I always talk about like these, you know, these, yeah. out now. The clips program, you know, like, it's one of, we talked about this on the show when I had you on. We, there's a lot of like positive vibes for clips. It's like such a new idea. It's breathing fresh life.

And we have all these brand new companies. And it's like, we always have to stop and remember that this is literally a bunch of brand new companies that have never launched anything or flown anything or done much of any, you know, real flight hardware like this. And they're asking them they go to the moon. Like, it's going to take a little bit. They're not going to be on. time.

Yeah. That's my major concern, though, with Astrobotic, is that, so Intuitive Machines has three missions on the manifest already that have clips, right? They have clips payloads for the third one, I think, too. But that was the one they announced before they even a bid for a task order. I don't know. They also have one all commercial mission reportedly. So they have a bunch in the pipeline.

From Astrobotic right now, and, you know, nobody would specifically tell me about a second Peregrine mission. There's just a Peregrine mission for this first flight, and then there's Griffin Flying Viper. So my concern is that both of them have to work. Do they get the Maston contract too? Who knows that? So all I picked up from that was that they're like, it kind of seemed like they're not legally allowed to talk about it yet because they're undergoing like the bankruptcy reorganization. Yeah, I mean, my bet would be they're picking up that task order too. And that would be second paragraph mission, but like, I don't know, if they could have said that, they would have I don't, I did not track Maston enough, but did they make their own engines?

They did, right? I mean, they have historically, I guess, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what the plan was for the other one. I wonder if that's a solution for the thing we just talked about, right, with, you know, this weird, unbelievable reverse merger engine acquisition plan, whatever this thing is. I mean, the weird thing is, though, that the second Peregrine mission would not be until, like, 26. Like, they got a couple years, right?

Because they're going to fly this. And then I can't imagine they would sneak one in before Griffin flies. So, oh, that's right. There were lawsuits. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Mastin and Agile. There was the whole thing.

Yeah. I would just write off all the Mastin stuff and say, we'll figure that out later. Like, it's really, it's super interesting. how all these clip companies, if you like take a step back and look at the whole ecosystem, like the clips contract just came in and went like, bam, here's a bunch of money. Like task order, task order, task order. And just like hit this like small niche part of the industry. And now they're all just like scrambling around and trying to like scoop it up and buying

each other and going out of business. It's all the same people. It's like, it's like 300 people that just keep going everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, screw you. I'm going to work at the other guy. And then they just like trade.

Like they just pass each other in the night. And it's like, yeah. It's really interesting to see, like, you know, a little bit of NASA money and it just, the whole thing just starts boiling over. All right. But even without that, right? Even, like, if you do the math on the Mastin acquisition, it's a crazy good deal for astrobotic. Yeah.

It's $4.5 million. And that includes a launch credit with SpaceX that they said was valued at $14.5 million. So that's already a good deal. You're going to get, you know, I assume some people left after, you know, they got furlough, loaded from mass and I assume they just some people just left and found something else to do. Whoever's still around now is congrats. They can put on an astrobotic t-shirt. They're really good engineers.

And you maybe get a task order out of it. So I don't know exactly how the acquisition math shakes out about like what value would assign to each of those. But a task order, a launch credit and a bunch of good engineers for four and a half million dollars is great. Yeah. It also means that astrobotic has four and a half million dollars. Yeah.

You know. It does. That's good. and it means we can call them Masterbotic now right? Astrobotic. I hope not. One of those words that is completely benign, but it sounds like it isn't. It does sound particularly weird.

Sounds kind of gross, yeah. That's why I'm going to keep saying it because it's going to make people uncomfortable. Astrobotic also has all these other projects which are really interesting to me. Like there's, they're working on this, I should pull up the picture of this thing. Yeah, what's the solar panel on the RC car project? That's kind of a weird age to me. Oh, well, I should say. So there's the Landers Department, and then there's, like, the mobility team, right?

There's all these people working on rovers because they've got Cube Rover and they've got these other contracts that they actually have for Rover projects. And they've got the idea with Cube Rover is that they're selling like CubeSat-sized payload space on a rover. There's a rover on Peregrin that was developed by people when they were at Carnegie Mellon, most of them now work astrobotic, but through time they had worked on that rover. Part of the astrobatic museum talent pipeline, yeah. You're going to love this one, though, because that, when it deploys,

is going to go look at the engine plume interaction with the regolith. So that would be cool. So great, great rover, you know, that makes it. So the whole, oh, and there was also, I saw a flight model not that necessarily has a flight assigned yet,

but a flight model of a cube rover getting ready for a vibe test, very much like my vibe check. And the people that were working on this, one of them is an anomaly. And number one, put Olivia up to make some Joshua Tree jokes to me, which was fun for my idea.

Number two, I was asking how many rovers they could fit on one of these landers, and he was doing some spitball math, you know, eight or nine or something. So he offered if we want to have a rover race once maybe the YouTube membership to take off. You and I can get two rovers and then race them. So how do you feel about this? Okay. So I need everyone to go to the top of their screens, scroll over to where it says membership.

The membership is $5 per month. You can put in any figure, though. I'm pretty sure you can do more. So if you want to amp up $5 to $10, $30 million, whatever works for you. Check the price on a cube rover first. and then we could do a yeah I like a little bit of race a little bit of race I think we could get Jared Isaacman on the show and pitch him on this we could pitch him this idea oh here we go here we go it's pretty good it's not a bad plan so anyway okay there's whole mobility side that in the crackpot

theories uh Jared Isaacman funds the off nominal drag race so all this stuff comes together where they've got I feel like they have that kind of grit about a commercial company where it's like, we're working on all these constituent components that come together and we can assemble them in different projects, right? We've got landers that can deploy rovers. We're working on this vertical solar array project with NASA. They were one of the three that got down selected to do at least design demonstrations of the vertical solar array for South Pole infrastructure.

And then just like mash it all together. What can we build? And this is what we got. Have you read about this? Yeah, briefly. It seems, I haven't quite connected it to like why I would want to buy this yet, but it seems kind of interesting.

I get it. Obviously power is nice to have, I guess, but I don't know. I'm trying to think of who the customers are going to be. And anytime I ask that question and the answer is, well, NASA and no one else that I'm like, ah. Yeah, it's pretty much the answer for all this, huh? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes the answer is other clips providers, which is NASA. So that's a thing. Derivative NASA. Yeah. But anyway, the idea is it's a rover. And if I can remember the acronym correctly, they call it the lunar infrastructure trailer or lit, which is great. It's lit.

So it's a rover with a solar array that points up in the sky. And then they can drive it around to different spots on the moon, position it in points that get a lot of sunlight. Yeah. And then these Cube Rovers, the thing on the bottom left is one of their Cube Rovers that is carried on the main trailer with the solar array, but then

when deployed, can drag a cable to a different spot on the moon and, you know, use either this little pad that you see that looks like a little radar array is a magnetic charger, or like a wireless charger thing, which reportedly is good for not letting Regolith into your connectors, which would be problematic if you're doing close.

Yeah. That's clever. So the idea would be that they can deploy these, move them around the moon with, you know, think about like an Artemis landing site, right? We've got the, what's the terminology, Jake? It's a region that is made up of sites? A moon village? Yeah, that's that, that, that.

Is that correct, though? It's a region that has like 100 sites in it or something? Yeah. Sounds right. Is that right enough for me to continue my story? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're looking at, I'd like, you know, yeah, they're trying to think more flexibly and broadly about areas

and what might happen in it rather than saying right here is what we're going to do this specific one thing. Or to, you know, make it a realistic example. If for some reason the crew is delayed launching off of Earth to go on an Artemis mission for, I don't know why they would ever have delayed. that would change their timeline so substantially. Can't really think of many reasons. But then they would be in a different landing site, you know, a month later.

And if you've already landed your stationary solar array, that's not great if you have to land somewhere else. So, you know, you can drive this sucker over to where you need it and then you've got some cabling to hook up. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It seems cool, but you're right. Like, who's a cool capability? It's a cool capability. And like, you know, if I'm thinking about NASA's like eventual plans, if they want to get to this, sustainable thing in a way that we all know NASA is going to have to do it, which is the plan's

going to change 146 times before it actually happens. And there may be, there absolutely will be times where they have to go, we already have this one thing on the surface and now we're changing our plan. So we're going to, we got to move another thing over here. And like, can we get some power over here somewhere? And then the astrobiarch be like, yeah, we'll just drive over there. All good. We can change with you. Like no big deal, right? So yeah, it's a cool capability. And the time horizon on this. They're designed for 10-year lifetimes. So I kind of feel a little bit about this like I do about Northrop Grumman's life extension spacecraft. If you can make the business case close with a reasonable amount

of customers and your lifetime is a lot longer than that, then you're in good shape. But it also doesn't matter like if you think that the industry or the economy for what you're offering is better in five or 10 years than it is now, and you can plan to outlive that, then theoretically you'd be able to make money. So, yeah, Kurt's asking, these are the red wire rollout solar rays, like on ISS. So, like, we know they work, and now it's just a matter of,

can you do this whole rover coordination with the cabling and make sure the cabling doesn't snag when it's going out or back in, and, you know, what happens if it does? Can you cut the cable and roll somewhere else? And then they're going to sell power, just like a power company on the moon, like, based on how much you use.

Mm-hmm. So. Mm-hmm. But it would be funny if the rates went up, like, when they were a little bit more in shadow than they were. Yeah, yeah. The Artemis astronauts were streaming too much Netflix and they went into the higher rate. Sorry about that. We're now charging you $3,000 per kilowatt hour instead of $1,000 per kilowatt hour, whatever.

God forsaken. Yeah. It's a cool project. But it does bring to the same question. is always of like, you know, some of the customers they reference are like a rover going into a permanently shattered crater, shadowed crater that is going to do mining operations, can't get power unless you got something like this. That's good one.

On a cable up the hill, yeah, okay. Yeah. They mentioned like plugging in other landers. Like if Intuitive machines or someone lands something that needs permanent power, they can go plug that in. So that's cool. I guess it could even be their own, right? If they needed more power than they, like, does it change?

your honestly it's kind of like refueling right in orbit like it changes how much mass you need to send initially do you need to send such giant batteries or can you send just enough to get you to plug down the only the only issue I have with that idea because it sounds like a great idea but it built on the assumption that you're going to land all your crap in the same spot and like so far we've you know I think all the intuitive machines contracts are in different locations aren't they I mean like you can say South Pole but like that's like saying yeah they're all landing in United States like that's kind of a big place. I think one of them is not going anywhere close to South Pole.

I think it's going to the north corner of the moon. So like, so like they're planning for a time when you actually have density of landings like assets in one area to like have it to require that flexibility. Right. And so is that five years out? I, I don't know. Yeah. It's like you're writing checks that need to be cashed by a cadence of flights that is as of yet indeterminate.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like what if you land in one of these in the moon on our current rate, how many eclipse missions would land in that 10 year window? A few. One, one if you're lucky.

Yeah. One more if you're lucky, you know? So this is the other aspect is the scale of this thing, Jake, this takes an entire Griffin to land it. Really? They're that big. They're big. Yeah, they're huge.

Because like the, so I guess I don't have a scale. I was imagining the rollout solar array was maybe like two, three feet raw. like a meter wide kind of thing, right? But is that not the case? Are those way bigger? I don't know. I mean, they told me it takes a griffin to land it. I don't know if that means they can have other stuff on there too.

But, hmm. Yeah. There's no banana for scale here. No banana for scale. Well, if it's the same rollout solar array, can we look up how big that is? I don't know if it's the same one. But it is A1, you know?

ISS Rosa width. Let's find out. doing research. 2,000 millimeters across. So, yeah, okay. Hmm. Two meters across. Seven and a half meters long.

I mean, that's pretty big. Yeah, that's a big, it needs a big faring. Hmm. So that it's, I don't know, that kind of limits it a little bit. Yeah, yeah. This thing is huge. It's going like, I think it's like 15 meters high, they told me. Is that right?

No, more than that. 20 meters high. Wow, that's really high. It's big. It's big. Yeah. If you thought Starlink was dim in the night sky. You have these little flashies on the moon?

Is that where I'm going to. That's okay. Moon's already pretty bright. So we should be all right there. Okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, that's, I don't know, man. It's just like, I'm really excited for this stuff.

I just like, I've not, like, if I, even if I churn up the best optimist in me to try and like imagine what it looks like. I just haven't figured out what I think the most likely outcome is for like an economy to a point where we need all these companies developing all these services. You know, that's where I struggle. I'm just really, I know with a downer, but like I just can't like please. If you know, please tell me what the best theory is because I'm like struggling with that. I can't quite see it.

It is the it is the problem that we talked about with clips that it is dependent on like I think a lot of times people say this is like commercial cargo for the moon. And it's not at all like that. That was NASA providing development money and a huge amount of missions that you could do, you know, production planning based off of and math based on that kind of commitment. This is not at all like that. This is a task order based thing. So you win the task order, you don't.

And that task order needs to pay for the mission, but also the runway that gets you from being on-ramped to the mission. Like, that's how really thing. Yeah, they kind of like skip a step, right? Like they went right to, we're just buying pens from Staples. Like it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, hmm. It's like they, yeah, I mean, I guess to some extent, no, not even. Like, it's, it's even different than human landing system, which they say is a task order-based thing, the next one coming. But there's also this, like, milestone-based payment situation.

Yeah. For the initial development. So. And then the problem is they've on-ramped a ton of competitors. So there's a race to the bottom. mechanic in the bidding process where intuitive machines and astrobotic now you know the other two firefly and draper they very quickly learn ooh we did not charge the right amount for this and they adjust their next bids for that but the people that are new entrants are like yeah we can do it for

$40 million yeah yeah we'll cut that no problem yeah yeah hmm what do we do Anthony how do we fix this SLS. That'll get us out of this jam. It's launching on Thanksgiving, right, Jake? That's what we think. That was our best crackpot. We were looking at the launch windows. Because the window opens earlier in that,

but they're all crappy nighttime launches. Yeah. Where NASA's not going to be happy with it, and we're not going to be happy with it, because I don't want to wake up at two in the morning to watch this thing fly. I'll pull up this, pull up this thing. They finally posted them, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we were guessing that, is it 22, 24, and 27, I think are the three dates that would, like, slip in. And those would meet the, because there's a cut out on the 26. You can't fly that day because of the Orion problems. So 24 and 7, 22, 24, 27 would meet the three and seven days. they're all green, they're all during the day, and there's no cutouts.

Like it's, so that's my, that's my guess. And then we, it'll obviously scrub the first time and then it'll fly on Thanksgiving just like a web for the Christmas. That's the,

a 24 minute launch window is really funny to me. That's hilariously tiny. Like, that's an instantaneous launch window. That's what that is. RESTL as it is. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. you can't, there's no 24 minute recycle they have available, there's like no option for that. And even in the case of when the rocket got too wet overnight, like it rained and pushed it an hour. Yeah. So, oh, I forgot something about my astrobotic visit. So wait, I have breaking news. Breaking news.

Yeah. Breaking news. Do you remember a few shows ago when our friend Ray Payoletta was on. on here. Uh-huh. Uh, and she had a particular project in mind that she was just looking for the right company to take on. Do you remember by any chance?

Oh, no. What her project was? No. She's trying to find the company that would put googly eyes on a rocket. Google the eyes on a rocket. Okay, here we go. I saw no fewer than two pairs of googly eyes at the astrobotic facility. They were on, they were Googly eyes.

enthusiasts over at the company. I talked to multiple people about vibe testing, Googly eyes. We talked about outgassing and how much that would be a problem with Googly eyes. I think they're working on it. I think they're working on this problem.

And Ray should be soothed to hear that somebody is actually working on the Googly eye problem. Somebody pinger on Twitter. So, yeah, let I don't know. Astrobotics the company. Oh, man. Yeah.

So that's good. I was uplifted by that. Anyway, that's my final astrobotic update. Okay. Yeah. And you can hear more next week on Miko. Yeah. What are you going to talk about on the show?

What's new ground? You're going to do your interviews? Is it what it's going to be? Yeah. It's going to be a long show. I think it's probably going to be like an hour and a half of interviews. Ooh. Or two-parter?

It's a lot. No. Maybe. You're going to layer in some music? That would be easier. The weird. I don't, maybe. I don't know. I haven't determined at all yet.

As I told you, I got back yesterday. I haven't figured this out yet. It's going to be long, though. It's cool. It's a long drive. We talked to the mission manager. We talked to payload managers. We talked to the executive director of the museum. Olivia, who I mentioned, does communications there. Who thinks Eric Berger hates astrobotic, which I thought was really funny. I think people just think that about everything. Yeah, it was really cool. We talked to tons of people.

couple of people from the mobility team. So it's great. It's exciting. Yeah. I'm excited for I, I, you know, I'm, I know I'm a cynic on the outlook for that economy, but companies seem awesome. Like, I'm really excited to see new moonlanders and all the different science payloads that are going to be, you know, having an opportunity to fly when they probably wouldn't have otherwise is like super rad. So like, I want this to work. I, I, I, I, I, I, I'm worried that it won't, but I want it to. Yeah. One of our anomalies that's been around for years,

Haley was telling me about, I forget which particular payload, but one of the NASA payloads had been in work since the early 2000s, and this is basically the first opportunity to fly it. So it's like, you know, the timeline on, like, you think, you know, the way that Venus scientists are concerned

about not getting Venus missions, people that were interested in the moon were like, It's right there. Why aren't we doing anything with it? And it's been decades now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because they did a lot of moon stuff at first, obviously, with Apollo and everything.

And then it just went, poof. Like, it just cratered. And everybody, like, there was, like, the planetary science, like, dead zone in the 80s. And then it all came back online with Mars. And that's where we've been. So, yeah, the moon people are only... Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

Uh-oh. We lost them. I wonder if we lost him, lost him. Oh, he's back. I'm back. The moon people. You got fired by the moon people and your whole internet died. Oh, no.

I was going to say, no, the moon people are only just getting back at it. It's like been the last 10, 20 years that they've really been getting back on that horse and flying stuff, right? So I hope it works. It's exciting. I hope it works. It's exciting to be a lunar planetary scientist. Yeah. I'm excited.

I think, like I said, I think May is my vibe and I'm going to try to go back out for the landing. so we'll see how it lands on the schedule. That'd be cool. That'd be cool. Yeah. Sit in one of the many mission controls. Pick your favorite mission control. Oh, man.

That's cool. What else you got? You got anything good going on? What did I miss when I was out? Yeah, well, just I was talking about Venus. I put out an episode this week about Venus. I brought on Paul Byrne. Brendan's brother, right?

Yeah, Brendan's brother. It's funny. They have the same last thing. And like they are, Paul Byrne is a regular guest on Brendan Byrne show. Yeah. So it's the Burns. But he's a hilarious guy.

He's very, he's very outgoing personality. So he's really fun to talk to. I met him at LPSC. We talked a little bit. But he's the PI of this mission going to Venus that's a balloon. Like a balloon mission to Venus. How sci-fi is that?

Like, it's one of those ones you're just like, no, it's just something that only exists in a Stanley Robinson book. It's not a real thing that you can actually do. And he's trying to do it. But there's a bunch of drama because this New Frontiers 5 call that NASA is doing, that's the medium-sized mission. That's our dragonfly, not Caesar mission that, you know, that I'm still better about. The New Frontiers 5 call was like caught in the middle of two decadal surveys. So there was like, on the last one, they were like, you should, send this to Venus and some other places.

And then NASA never got around. The budget didn't come through. So they didn't come around to actually executing it. So then it like rolled over. And then they had to recommend again in the next decade. And they said, keep everything the same. And then NASA was like, what if we did the same? Except we don't include Venus as a possible spot to do it.

And all these people that are working on Venus for like, are you kidding me? Like what? You can't just change this. And so anyway, there's a bunch of drama. Was that the fact that like Venus got. all those missions like bang bang bang right in a row well this is what we're asking this is the question we're asking is that's not a very that doesn't follow the the methodology of the decatal survey which says it doesn't matter where you go the question's what the questions you're answering

like planetary science is planetary science and the planets are just tools to get to the answers like if you want to know has life ever existed in the solar system there are a couple places that are good places to go and do that it's not specifically a venous question or a mars question and so anyway That's the drama. So if you want to learn more about that, you should go listen to it. Paul's a lot of fun. He, we riff a little bit because he makes fun of Mars a lot on Twitter. And so I have to give it back to him a little bit above Venus.

And we have a little bit of fun. So it's good. Speaking of Mars, can you, this is a title side tangents to have a minute. What the hell was on ingenuity's landing leg when it was flying around? Well, we don't know. but I think it was just more like parachute fiber or some sort of fiber from something, right? Because there's like the crash site for the sky crane.

So it drops the rover off and then it flies off and it flew northwest of the landing site and then, you know, blew up. And then the rover did its thing for a while and then it actually drove around past it. So we have like those cool pictures of the of the back shell and the parachute and stuff. And we got all this awesome photography. It's a space archaeology. Yeah. But then we seemed to.

driven into this like that we drove downwind of the crash site and there's just like debris everywhere like we've just made this place a garbage heap it's hilarious it's actually really really funny but little pieces of the parachutes and the back shells and all the different fibers around the cloth that wraps this or that or whatever has like over the last year and a half uh spread over this landing site and it looks like yeah it's this thing up here right some's a little fiber yeah just on the on the leg itself. You got to get it to cycle again there. But yeah, it's a fell off mid-flight, it looks like.

But so it's been interesting. I don't think we've ever had a mission that's interacted so completely with its detritus. I just said by that. Yeah. I would have sucked if it got like sucked into the rotor and it like crashed the helicopter or something. But the other piece was inside the sampling mechanism for perseverance. right, which is like not, that's not good, right? They freaked out a little bit about that.

And not the rocks, but there was actually like a fiber in there and they don't know what it's from. And again, it's probably just picked up in one of the stupid. So, like, wouldn't that be awful if like one of those fibers wraps around it real bit or something? Like, that's not going to be good. We don't want that to happen. At least we have the atmospheric sample, though.

We do have the atmospheric sample. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. Well, what do we got on this show next week? Oh, Sheckoff's Ben. We got Ben Brockerd on next week. That's right, yeah.

One of the people watching on Twitter. So we got, we have it in our calendar as Ben's story time because that's what we're looking for here. So it's going to be great. Yeah, yeah. So Ben, prepare your best stories that you would tell over beer and we'll, we'll unearth some of them next week. It's going to be fun.

And what else we got? Oh, if you are not in the Discord, the Discord, the Discord's been popping off lately. It has been. It's been good. There's some new people popping in. We're having, I mean, we're trying to like, we're trying to like renovate it, I guess is the thing we're making all these changes to it's getting remodeled. It's been infrastructure week in the Discord. It has been, yeah. So we upgraded a bunch of our bot technology and there's all these new kinds of channels and stuff. It's now a community server has some extra features. But there's lots of cool, like, fun stuff you can do. It's not just a chat room. We've got community people that are building bots. to do fun activities and we've got the official bots, if you want to call them that, that are, you know, right now the party bot is in the live chat feed along with the episode, collecting ideas for episode titles, and you can suggest those. And lots of fun stuff. It's a cool pop in place.

Lots of, lots of cool, I don't know, just activities and hilarious joke. We had a freaking huge fight about barbecues yesterday. So anyway, that's all I'm going to say about that. I miss that one while I was driving, unfortunately. Yeah, he didn't miss much, but once again, I am right and everyone else is wrong. So, yeah, that's how most of the arguments go. That one broke out into Twitter, too. You know, you know it was good if it broke out.

It broke out of the box that we had for it and it was into Twitter. So please come be a part of that. Yeah, how do you get in there, Jake? YouTube membership. So five bucks a month. You support this show. You help Anthony go to visit places like Master Robotic and you help me pay for these very expensive of margarita ice cubes.

And then you get to hang out with a bunch of other space weirdos, I guess, is what it would be. I know you're a space weirdo and you want to come hang out with us space weirdos. So please, please join us. It's a lot of fun. YouTube.com slash off-nominal. That's sort of do it.

I'm half thinking we maybe should add a different way to get in there than YouTube.com slash off-nominal. So should we have off-nom.com slash support or something? Yeah. Yeah, oh, I wasn't even, I don't even mean URLs. Yeah, 301 redirects is not my concern there. It's just like generally like, I don't know, feel like people are an end of the YouTube thing sometimes, but we'll figure that out. Yeah.

Well, you can also support either one of our patrons to do it as well. So there are actually three, there are three entry points. So if like if you if you like off nominal, but you don't actually like Anthony and really you're just here for me, you can just go to we Martians. com slash support pay $5 there, get the same thing. and then Anthony doesn't steal my money. So it's definitely an option. But you do support somebody who says mastrobotic. That's true.

Which is alarming. Which is a little gross. And I understand if you need to go to miko.com slash support instead and do it that way. The last thing I want to mention is that I did put out a show a week ago about the private astronaut mission changes that have happened. This was one I had been thinking about for a long time, Jake. And I feel like. Yeah, you stewed on this for a while. I did.

I stood on it. I let news collect because there are many different storylines here. And I feel like it finally hit a critical mass of, I know what's going on here. And I feel like you should check it out because there's something, something's going on there. It's really curious. I feel like they made the program and part of people at the ISS program are like, ugh, why did we do that? It feels a little bit like that in some ways. So, did you know, this is a fun fact.

Did you know that NASA now requires 10 hours of time from the former NASA astronaut that is to fly on all private astronaut missions? I did not know that. So, yeah, I believe that's an unpaid internship. Hmm, okay. So, it's interesting. So yeah, check that out. The Astrobotic Show coming soon.

There's some fun, there's some fun trivia in there about some great high school bands and their relationship to astrobotic. So dashboard confessional and Andrew McMan of Jack's Mannequin and Something Corporate and Self-Titled Fame make an appearance in the episode in a fantastic way. I don't even know if you know those bands. Dashboard Confessional is a name I have not heard in a long time. A long time. If you, you can talk to me, but mostly you can talk to my wife and she'll tell you all about. Dashboard Confessional. That was, yeah.

Same with me and Alia. Yeah. That hit hit peak moment for, yeah. Yeah. Well, he's been to, he's been to Astrobotic. It's a great story, and you can check it out on the show. All right. That's what we got.

Breathe in. Oh, does that? Please tweet us which Dashboard song would be the soundtrack to Peregrine Mission 1, and we'll see if we can make that happen. You're thinking about it. You're thinking about it. hard. That's it.

That's where we're end in this show. You just back kill me. So good. So won't you kill me? Oh, I die happy. Oh, no. You went from saying that it was your wife who was the fan to singing dashboard

confessional in this show. Yeah, we're at the same age. It's true. There were some real hits. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Thanks, everyone. We already, yeah, we already plugged next week.

That was a quick. I'm excited and I'm pushing the button. I thought personally we didn't plug next week, but we did. So, see you later. We talked about it quite a bit. Bye, everyone. One, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one, into death.