Off-Nominal - 80 - Vaguely a Mutiny

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Ben Brockert joins Jake and Anthony to tell stories from his various adventures in the space industry.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 80 - Vaguely a Mutiny (with Ben Brockert) - YouTubeMasten Space Lunar Lander Challenge Level II Attempt 1 landing and fire - Xoie - YouTubeMasten Space Lunar Lander Challenge Flight 2 - YouTubeXombie in-air relight view from the ground. - YouTubeStig-B flight 3 - YouTubeMoon Express MTV-1X Test Flights @ KSC [Dec 2014] - YouTubeFollow BenBen Brockert (@wikkit) / TwitterBen Brockert - YouTubeFollow 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. Oh, happy Thursday, Jake. Happy Thursday the 13th. It sure is. We sure missed that one on this Halloween. We could have had a nice Friday the 13th this October. So close. We have a spooky guest with us today.

Ben Brockert from, are you in Germany right now? I'm in Berlin, yeah. Yeah, how's that? Did you see that tank? I saw you talking about it. There's a tank? There's a Russian tank on display or something? They got approval for a tank, but they don't actually have the tank yet. They still have to import the broken tank.

But, yeah, there was an art group who wanted to put a destroyed tank in front of the Russian embassy, and then the city, the neighborhood said no. And then they went to court, and court said, oh, you have to let them do that because it's, you know, it's a free speech, basically. And so now they still have to get permission to do the rest of it and, like, actually go acquire a busted tank. Oh, they don't even have a beat on which tank they were. No, no, this is like paperwork before. Yeah, it's very, it's very German.

Wow. It's a real, it's a real Boca Chiquette over there for this particular project. I'm just like, okay, yeah. I mean, I guess there's a lot of tanks available, right? That's what I hear at least. There's a military parade worth of them somewhere in Ukraine. Quite an inventory, yeah. Yikes, okay.

Yeah, I mean, so, Ben, we're excited to have you on because you have, you've worked at some companies in the space world and some that people will know pretty well, some maybe less so. And we're excited to kind of hear your perspective on the things because you've seen a lot of different stuff. And we like to kind of talk to interesting people who have been around and had their hands dirty with all the machinations of this space revolution that's happening right now. There's lots of stuff happening behind the scenes.

And the list of companies that you've been at, right? like it's pretty evenly split in my brain where it's like half of them I'm like this confirms that place is awesome because Ben was there the other half I'm like oh I got I got to figure out what was going on at that place that Ben was working for a little bit it's a pretty even split on the list so you got to frame it differently it's like half the company's good because Ben worked there half the company's good because Ben left there I've felt that I felt both of those things about the same company at times too yeah So that's a circle of life.

Well, did you bring a drink from, uh, I did from anywhere your travels have taken you? I went for, uh, space connection for one part. I went to, uh, Berlin's, um, rum depot. And I have a eight year, uh, Barbados rum. Um, and so I have a small glass of that. And then as a backup, because it's important to have a plan B, I have a Berliner Pilsner, so that is my backup drink.

Jake size, too. That's a nice big one. Do you know the space connection for Barbados? No clue. It's pretty strange. About the place Barbados or that home. I want to say like a ground station or something. Better than ground station.

There was this Canadian guy, Gerald Bull, who decided that the way to put things into orbit was with a giant cannon. And so he worked on a space station. Space cannon. Worked on a series of projects, and the most successful one was right next to the airport in Barbados, which was these Navy cannons just like welded together end-to-end. Yeah, there you go, the harp, space gun. That was very quick. And so this was actually my last trip before COVID.

I went there for New Year's and went and looked at the space cannon and actually stood on top of the space cannon, basically. I remember you talking about that. I just forgot that it's in Barbados because what a weird spot for this thing to be. It's a weird spot for it. Yeah, yeah, no, I don't know why. I think there was some artillery there that they could use. But, yeah, he then... Weird, fun fact, these people went on to found spin launch.

It's the same group. The... The right effect. Yes, it is. The same vibe, same energy. Yeah, Gerald Bolt, like, there should be a movie. Maybe there is a movie, but there should be a movie. Because after that, he then went to a country in the Middle East

and offered to make them a giant cannon. and then started on the process and then was assassinated by Mossad for building a giant cannon that could have been used for other purposes. So that was the end of Gerald Bull's space camera project. Wow.

Yeah, a dark ending. Yeah. But from Barbados... It was bizarre. Yeah, it's a strange story. But they successfully fired a thing into space from Barbados, which not into orbit,

because it's pretty hard to... You can't really shoot something into orbit from a cannon, like you still need rocketry, but yeah, or a centrifuge for that matter. Man. Yeah. I was a strong start right there, the Atlas Obscure.

That's really good. I like that at you took the inspiration from the place name, too. It has nothing to do with the rum, the particular rum that you're doing. Nope. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Anthony, what are you drinking? Well, Jake, for the second.

and show in a row, though nobody knows it yet. More on that later. I'm drinking a perpetual IPA from Troegs. I was, I was, we were talking about Pittsburgh right before we went live. I was close to Troegs on my drive to astrobotic. So I do have some mission patches, by the way. So I'm going to send one to Ben. Got the swag.

He loves Pittsburgh. Ben's a huge Pittsburgh fan. Right of the Cars are Moonroger. We got this thing too. So. I'm just saying every, every press release from now on to any cup. You should say, you know, how their, you know, accomplishments for the city of Pittsburgh. Like, it's a good, it's a good basis.

This is the quickest that I have ever been trolled about anything on this show, and I love it. So, that's great. That's a real quick iteration speed. Yeah, it's good. What do you got, Jake? Cocktail. I'm also drinking, I'm also drinking rum today, so I made a peanut colada. Oh, nice.

From scratch. I had the cream of coconut, coconut cream, what did you call it? And, you know, I had some pineapples in the fridge stuff. So I stuck in a blender. That's great. It's good stuff. Quality. Yeah.

It's Cuban rum, though, not Barbadian. Barbadian, is that the right word? Barbadouin, I think. Yeah. Hmm? I think it's Barbaduone somehow? Barbaduian? Yeah.

All right. I could be making that up, though. Yeah. Somebody check the denominums. Denominiums? I got all. We can't pronounce anything. I think it's demonym, but I don't know.

I went denominator in my brain. We have nothing to pronounce correctly today. So with that. The Barbados denomonym is Barbudian. Oh, man. Well, where do we start on Ben's story time? Give us a little overview of what you're doing now. Because it's mysterious to me. You're just traveling around Europe and you're doing some sort of advising, I'm sure, of companies based on your long history of experience that we can then delve into.

Yeah. So right now, I'm in the process of getting a visa to stay in Germany for the long term. I was living in Cyprus until March, basically. I spent most of the pandemic there. It's pretty easy to get a long-term visa there. And it's a nice warm country to spend a sort of fake retirement, middle-age retirement. I don't know. And so, but then, yeah, I wanted to move to, I've wanted to move to Berlin for quite some time. So I'm in the process of getting a visa. And, yeah, as you suggested, I'm doing some contract work for some companies that are working on, you know, space launch stuff, basically. And then, yeah, so hopefully I have an apartment here. And a lot of the travel this year is because, you know, in the Schengen area, you can only spend 90 days in any 180 days, basically. So I was doing about half time in Germany and then half time elsewhere.

So I've traveled around an excessive amount so far this year to be able to support that a lot into the Balkans, basically, and actually spent most of August in Colombia, which was pretty nice. Had some excellent coffee and excellent weather. So I'd never been there before. So it was really good. And then been back to the U.S. and actually went to Iceland twice, which was kind of excessive, very expensive, but went to all the volcano. You were a volcano chasing. Yeah. It erupted once a year ago, and then it stopped, and then it erupted again.

And I was like, this time I'm not going to miss it. So I spent an absurd amount of money to get tickets and like a $600 rental car for like two days to be able to go see the volcano this time. That's basically the same way we have here in the U.S. right now, though. So don't be too sad about that. It's crazy. Yeah. It's nuts everywhere. But yeah, so doing contracting and yeah, and then we'll probably be. traveling a little bit more and then hopefully sort of long-term stabilizing here in

Berlin, which is one of my favorite cities in the world. Have you gotten to know any of, there's, I feel like you are near some of this weird small launch startup kind of thing that's happening in Europe right now, like geographically. Have you gotten to know anyone over there and what the hell's going on with it? This is the one I'm like, I have not yet to talk to anyone involved with it, but does it seem cool? Yeah. It seems like they got something going on there.

I mean, it's, it's a mix. like it seems like there's definitely a lot of the sort of companies with like big schemes and you know there's the arcus spaces and that sort of stuff going on as well but there's the i think there are there's definitely legit companies that are doing real things and yeah it is kind of hard to tell just over online you know who actually has hardware and who doesn't sort of thing but yeah i have not yet visited the there's rfa and there's is i saar are the two big german ones and i would like to go visit them so i need to like make contact with them and go talk to them.

There are complications with doing, like, it was tempting to go just trying to get a job with one of them, but there's complications with that around, you know, as a U.S. person, basically on both sides of it to be able to do that sort of work. So, yeah, there's both ITAR, and, you know, it's considered defense services, and you have to, yeah, you have to do all this stuff. So, I have, you know, but it would still be cool to go to a room and see what's going on. And there actually are, I've seen, there's seen a few articles about SpaceX, that have joined some European companies.

So it's clearly possible. But I also kind of wanted a break from, you know, small sat launch for just for a little while. All right. Well, then why is that? Let's get into it. Yeah. I just quickly run through it from the beginning.

Like I was in, I grew up in Iowa, went to Iowa State. I was working about half time and going to school and then ended up dropping out because I decided it was going to take forever to actually graduate. So I was going for. computer engineering. Bought a van,

packed it up, drove to Mojave, lived in a van in Mojave for like six months pasturing rocket companies until somebody gave me a job, which was mass and space systems. And so at that point, Maston... You're going too quick.

I need to hear more about that particular time, because that sounds kind of amazing. How big was the van? Where did you park it? Doors did you knock on at the time? Yeah, it was a 17 passenger van, so like, you know, one of the really big vans, but it only had, like, one bench seat in it because if you have all the seats in it, then you're supposed to have a specific license wheel drive it. But the back was actually full of my stuff. So I just had, like, the front and the bench and, you know, basically slept on the bench seat.

And there was a, like, there's an RV park there. So I would go there to, you know, sometimes would stay there, you know, use the showers and stuff. And then sometimes it was basically just like at a dirt lot, you know, in Mojave basically. So it was not a great time. It was an engendered patience. I listened to a lot of NPR. Like there was a, you know, you really get used to the schedules of this American life and like what is on at a given time sort of thing.

But, and then managed to get a library card at the library, and so then did a lot of reading. And then, yeah, it was a long time. I pastured X-Corps. They were building the X-Racer at that point. And I actually filmed the first test flight of it, like, standing at the fence outside of the airport, which was, you know, seeing the first flight of a rocket plane is kind of cool. And then I also talked to scaled composites, and they actually offered

me a job, but it was at the same time that Maaston did, and I was more interested in the rocket stuff than the airplane stuff. So, yeah. But, yeah, Masden had been four people, and then two people left, and so it was just Dave, Maston, and John Gough, and so then they were having to rehire again, and I just was purely lucky that I was there at the right time, and sort of started as a technician and then gradually took over more and more stuff and ended up running flight test programs and engine test program and doing project management and that sort of thing. Ian Garcia started at the same time as me. He was the GNC engineer. I'm still convinced the best GNC engineer in the world because he could single-handedly, you know, build a hovering rocket

by himself sort of thing in terms of software, which, you know, he later went to another, you know, another team that was doing it and it was like 20 people doing basically what he had been doing by himself. So very capable. But yeah, so that was an interesting period in Mojave, definitely. Yeah, that must have been a really fun time here because there was like, it was, I mean, still kind of like that in Mojave today where it kind of has this like dusty pioneer startup feel, you know, where it's just like out in the middle of nowhere. And, and, but yeah, I think it must have been interesting this to be, especially at the ground for someone like Maston, which has a

interesting story that followed that, right? Yeah, yeah, it was, I think it seems a little bit like that sort of plucky Maston rocket company phase has gone away like now. I mean, there's obviously still our companies that do testing out there, but at that time there was Mastin and X-Corp, which were both, you know, small, doing really

interesting stuff, and then there are a couple other small companies doing just really strange things with rockets out there. and some of that had evolved out of Rotary Rocket, which was like the original, like, weird new space, you know, space launch company. That is such an era that it's just like, I don't know, let's try some weird stuff. Rotary Rocket, that sounds good.

Like, let's just do something really bizarre. It's like very much as a synergy or not thing. It was, yeah. Yeah, they raised like $25 or $30 million for Rotary Rocket too. So it was one of the first successes in like, oh, you can actually raise money to do this stuff too. Which, yeah, it didn't go anywhere, but that is also pretty common to the story. But yeah, so, yeah, joined Maston, and it was small. They were doing a four-engine rocket at the time, and then a bunch of things happened.

We ended up sort of rebuilding it into the single-engine rocket zombie and then doing the Lunar Lander Challenge. So there were two levels of that and building a whole new vehicle, Zoe, to do the other level for that. and won the Lunar Lander Competition, which was a NASA Centennial Challenge, which was like a million dollar prize. And then after that, did the first in-air relight of a liquid bi-propellant rocket, of, you know, taking off,

shutting off the engine, coasting a little bit, turning it back on and landing, which was a very short flight, but basically nobody had ever done that before. And it got forwarded around the industry a bit. And at that point, SpaceX was still trying to do parachutes for their first stage.

So, you know, who knows what inspired. I do know that Elon emailed it out to most of SpaceX to point out the video of our thing doing it. So maybe inspired some people to think more seriously about doing VTVL there instead of just doing parachutes, which has worked out for them, which is great. The Loon-Ranger challenge I want to hear about a little bit, because that's, it sounds like a thing that would exist today, still.

And I also hear that there, was a very interesting night before the Lunar Lander Challenge. Yeah, for the level, for the bigger one, for Zoe, essentially the challenge itself, you would have to take off and then have a total flight time of 180 seconds and translate 50 meters. And the 180 seconds is basically that anytime you're hovering on Earth, you're expending the acceleration equal to gravity, you know, of roughly 10 meters per second. So 180 seconds of hover is approximately 1,800 meters per second of delta V,

which is approximately the same as going from low lunar orbit to the surface. So essentially, if you can build a rocket that can hover for three minutes on Earth, that same rocket around the moon could go from the orbit to the surface, basically. And so that's what set that requirement. And then just another, just to make it operationally like a pain in the ass, complication to it, they also made it so that you had to do that twice within two hours, basically. So, like, you would do a flight and then have to dump all the helium out and make sure it's completely empty of propellants and then refill it completely and repressurize it and then do the same flight back, you know, in the opposite direction within two hours. Which turns out to have been useful over time just in terms of, like, it gave me a reference of, like, how quickly you can do rocket operations and, you know, really be efficient about stuff.

but um it's funny how common that like do two do do it twice thing like that became a little bit of a scheme for these projects right it's a popular story yeah space plane was the same thing right yeah space plane the DARPA launch challenge thing like they all do like do two things in an indeterminate time yeah yeah but uh yeah one one flight we did um uh the um what was it and i can't actually remember what it was it was like oh the Well, it had, it was a quickly put together vehicle. It had a composite tank, and the composite tank had a leak in it. So it was dripping fuel down.

And basically it was dripping fuel, which was fine when it was flying, but then it would land, and then it would drip fuel, and then the fuel would catch fire, and the vehicle would burn, basically. And so that's what it did on this one flight one day. And so it burnt off a bunch of wires and burnt off a bunch of insulation, and the tanks and everything, you know, all the structure was totally fine. And actually the avionics were generally okay because they're inside of a box, but a lot of the harnessing, which is pretty simple for a pressure-fed little rocket,

but it was all burnt up. And so we were completely exhausted at that point. But a few people had come in off of a mailing list off of the Internet, basically. Like some people had just showed up. Keith Stormo and some friends from Mojave had just sort of showed up and essentially rebuilt the vehicle overnight, like rewired all the harnessing. took a trash can lid, like a rubber made trash can lid, and took some of the struts out.

It had like a triangular struts between the fuel tank on top and the locks tank on the bottom. So they took some struts out and they stuck this trash can lid in and then they, you know, red RTV plumbing fitting to it, a quarter inch plumbing fitting to it, and then ran the quarter inch tube down the leg so that the fuel tank is still leaking the entire time it's flying, but the fuel is instead of dripping down on the locks tank

and then dripping down on the engine and then bursting in a flame, all the fuel is leaking down the leg as this little pittle off the leg as the thing is flying around. And you can actually see these drips coming off of it while it's flying. And so that was successful. What flight was this? I've got to pull this up. Yeah, this is the Zoe, or if you look at just Maston level two,

winning flight or something like that, you might be able to see. You might be able to see some of it. And actually, I still have videos. Like, I never edited the videos because we were so exhaust. by everything. So the actual company videos never really nothing happened with him, which is a pity. So maybe for like the 15th anniversary, we should edit together a new clip show or something. When you said I still have that I was really hoping you were going to finish that sentence with the garbage can rubber made. I still have the trash can lid. It's actually in my storage unit. Yeah. Yeah.

Is this the one? Is this it? Yeah. Yeah, so it's a fuel tank on the top and a locks tank on the bottom and then two helium tanks on either side. And then a single locks isopropyl alcohol engine. And yeah, from this view, you probably can't see it. But there is a little quarter inch line that's running down one of those legs that's just zip tight on that a slow drip of fuel was just dribbling out basically while it's flying. That's incredible. And so, yeah, I mean, the translation is only 50 meters.

and it has to make us build a fake moon landing pad or moon surface basically which the con i just essentially handed it over to a local concrete contractor and gave him the print and he went nuts on it like i think it was the most fun that that concrete guy had ever had because he's like you know generally people just want to you know poor patios or you know carport foundations and instead i'm like here here's a diagram of a moon base with like craters and boulders and stuff can you build this for us and he did a great job on it so it was really good And now that's his patio. Yeah.

And that's probably still out there in Mojave. I don't know if they ever tore that up. But it's also funny because each competition had to have one of those. So there's one of those out at FAR and there's one of those out at Spaceport America as well. So there's three identical little moon pads that, you know, scattered around the western United States. It's like the ghost of early new space. These little like Atlanta challenge bits. Oh, so there's the fire.

Yeah. So this is the one without the trash can lid, I guess. Yeah, that was the one where there was fire. So, yeah, it wasn't a huge fire, but it was enough to screw up the harnessing and everything, basically. So, yeah, I went home and then came back in at like 3 o'clock in the morning and checked in all things, and then went back home again and went back to sleep. But, yeah, they, you know, a group of people stayed up overnight and rebuilt the, you know, readed the harnessing and had it back together and, you know, essentially put aluminum foil tape

over all the burn mark, so it looked like it was correct, basically. And then we went out and we flew it and we did the two more flights and we won the competition, which was super, super cool. And it was also pretty crazy because, like, you know, you see, yeah, we had, there's definitely a different perspective around operations around

rockets because, like, I was standing like 100 feet away from this thing while I was going. So, like, it's very much not the, you know, not the, we're going to, the rocket is two miles away sort of process. It's like, like, like, Like literally, we go and we work on it by hands. During the reassembly, one of the John's favorite parts of it was that,

not the story is his favorite, not the event, but they put together one of the solenoid valves incorrectly. There's a, you know, a solenoid valve has a coil of copper that opens a little, you know, piston inside of a valve. And so they put it together and they put a washer in the wrong place, basically, so the valve wouldn't work. And so that was the igniter valve. So we refueled the thing and we're on the clock and we go to start it, but the thing won't work. And so with the thing like full of propellant and full of helium and Ian sitting on the control ready to hit the button, I ran in and like sat under the rocket and took apart the solenoid valve and put the solenoid valve back together. And then got 50 feet away and yelled at Ian to push the button so that, you know, and then the thing launches off and, you know, successfully does that, does that part of the launch.

So, yeah. Inside the Richard Garriott Killzone right there. That's for sure. Yeah. firmly. Yeah, it was kind of amazing because like even it was odd because it was like rather than like

the FAA being like no you have to be for their way to be safe. They actually like they put in our flight requirements that people had to be diagonal opposite so that if it flew out that they could the person could push the button to shut it down and crash it sort of thing like they required us to have spotters that were only like 150 feet away so

it's sort of a very different different situation but you know the whole rocket is like, you know, like a thousand pounds. So like, you know, full propellant. So it's not like, you know, it's obviously not a falconite sort of thing. But still, you know, there's some energy there. You couldn't take it.

Yeah. You still don't want that to hit you. Yeah, never enough. It's still undesirable to have that land on you. Yeah. Yeah, the helium tanks are probably about the most hazardous because they can, you know, if you cut the end off and they can go shooting off, you know, from the stored. stored inside. But yeah, thankfully that didn't happen.

So you left Maston. Yeah. So then I actually, yeah, we did the internet relight and then kind of lost direction. Like it seemed like we weren't going to, the original company plan was to do suborbital reusable where you'd launched up to 100 kilometers and bring it back and like the thing that Blue Orchon is doing now. But yeah, there's the relight. But yeah. So then I actually always wanted to work with Armadillo, which was in fact the direct competitor. and so ended up going and doing that. And so there we actually did more altitude stuff.

We launched a reusable, or it meant to be a reusable rocket to over 90 kilometers. It was not reused because it came back very, very quickly, about 400. I forget the units now. Very fast. Just high subsonic, it impacted. I had seven camera, HD cameras on it, and I was able to recover one SD card off of it, basically. but it was an interesting time. There was, yeah, we worked on Rocket Racing League, you know, sort of rocket planes and a variety of different, yeah.

So there were mods and tube rockets and one got named Stig after the character in the British TV show, basically. And then people thought it was an acronym, and then it ended up being that one, another one was Stig A, and then another was Stig B, basically. but yeah so yeah so there I actually did all the video stuff and I actually designed this launch this launch set up basically so yeah this is the one camera

view that survived Is that a moon pad? That is yeah it was launching from the same space in this is in Spaceport America There's a there's a plain one and then there's one with moon rocks and craters on it.

And that's our mission control right there. So again, pretty close. And it actually landed behind us, so it actually flew completely over us and crashed into the desert behind us. And so it's always comforting. Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious when you say that you,

when you left Maston, you felt like you kind of got off track of where you were heading with, you know, that sort of reusability. And is that why you went to Armadillo that that was the direction they were heading and you felt like that was the right way? I mean, it's an excellent question.

It's hard to totally say at this point because it's been 10 years, you know, exactly what my reason. I'd known about Armadillo for many years and had, you know, knew them at conferences and stuff and had wanted to work there for some time, basically. So part of it was just that, like,

I wanted to work there. And it was an odd group because they started as a sort of a hobby group and they would work on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and then they turned into a company, and so they didn't really ever hire anybody that wasn't outside the group, so it was partly just an accomplishment

to be like, now I actually got hired by this group of people. But yeah, they were definitely more focused on actually doing this suburbable reusable stuff, which was interesting to do, and it also gave me an opportunity to do some other things. So I built a 4,000-pound Lox methane engine

for NASA there, for the Project Morpheus, which is really interesting to do. And then, yeah, lots more rocket operations. Actually, like, worse weather, which is kind of impressive. Like, you go from Mojave, but, you know, the cliche of it's a dry heat is actually true, whereas you get into, like, Dallas, and it's, like, 100 degrees, 100 days out of the year. And it's also, like, you know, occasionally get that Gulf humidity up there as well. So, like, that, you know, that does make a difference.

I didn't know you were on Morpheus. Yeah. all those Yeah, Armadillo was the contractor to do the Actually, they sold them one of their original four tank vehicles, pixel.

I think it was pixel. There was pixel and textile. I don't remember which one they sold. But they sold them one, and then they actually ended up using the same sort of, you know, sort of plan for them to build Project Morpheus. And so Armadil actually built the whole

first one, and then later they built it. After that one crashed, they built another one. through it a different process. But yeah, which I recently realized is hanging in Johnson Space Center. Oh, interesting. I didn't, I like totally missed that

the last time I was there, I think, but I think it's just in the hanging from the ceiling in the main part of the visitor center, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, actually, I hardly ran into Pixel sitting in one of the hangers at the shuttle landing facility. Like, I don't really know how it ended up there,

but yeah, I was working there on other things, and then suddenly this old Armadillo rocket was sitting there as well. I think that's where they did the flight tests, was at the end of the runway. They built. They probably got the same concrete guy from Mojave. They flew them in, and he built one at the end of the runway.

Yeah, those are pretty funny. Yeah, they built a much bigger sort of fake moonpad there. Yeah, yeah, used a lot of loose gravel, so all those flights, there would just be a giant cloud of dust that comes up every time. But, yeah. It was a fascinating process. So you went from there, if I'm remembering my history correctly, you ran your own thing for a little bit.

Yeah, so when I went to Colorado. I'm very interested in next, which is Moon Express, but let's save that for a minute. Yeah. Yeah, Colorado had a company called AbleSpace with an E, so different name. This is like before the startup started dropping their letters off the end. Exactly, yeah. And so, yeah, I did contract. there. I worked a bit with John Gough again. He had started up a company called Altius Space

Machines, so I did some contract work with him, and then as well as another company in Mojave. Actually did one with Garvey. It used to be Garvey Spacecraft Corporation. I helped them build their first gimbal rocket engine, basically, and did a few other just sort of random projects, and ended up overextending myself on one of them and basically just running out of money. So then I was at a conference, and I was dead baroque, and I ran into Bob Richards. and Bob Richards was like, hey, I'll hire you. And I was like, okay. So, yeah.

That was the vetting process. Okay, yeah, sure. Yeah, so that is how I ended up at the Moon Express, yes. And so, yeah, went to Alabama, where they had their propulsion test stuff. Tim Pickens was involved at the time, which you might know that name from Spaceship One. He was the nitrous hybrid guy for Spaceship One, basically. but he was involved with Moot Express at that point and so we had an engine test stand right next to a fundamentalist church

so like on you know we'd be working through the weekend had this super unstable like thousand pound thrust engine that just screeched like a banshee and it'd be like at 11 o'clock on a Sunday and we'd fire this thing and make massive screeching noises and I always really wanted to just go to the church one day just to sit in on the service and see what they said when this rocket engine went off next door because they never complained but like there was no way they didn't hear it because it was

you know, a super unstable light into the thing, you know, a sign from outside. Yeah. Yeah. So you were working on the main engines, I guess, for the Moon Express landers? What was your scope of work with that? That was actually a side project. That particular engine was a side project

that Moon Express was doing, basically. But yeah, I was, most of my time ended up there. They were working on the Google owner X-Prize, and the GLXP decided to do these milestone prizes basically as a way to like essentially just give some some of the prize out. And so they set it up so the teams could do whatever they wanted. They just had to say what they were going to do and then do it. So like more sensible teams, like the Indian team said like we're going to build a test a landing gear.

And so they built one landing gear and they did one drop test and they got a million dollars. Whereas Moon Express said, well, we're going to build a full, you know, flight test vehicle like an analog, you know, flight test vehicle. So I basically did an all-nighter and designed a test vehicle that was an approximation of what the actual lander was supposed to look like. And in the course it took like four months to go from like concept to the first hold down test essentially. So like a really fast, you know, throwing it together. So it was a peroxide monopropropellant because we had that engine on hand already. And then it had 12 nitrogen cold gas thrusters to do attitude control. and like 5,000 PSI nitrogen tanks to actually run that system,

which is pretty scary. And then we did flight testing on that, which didn't go fantastically. There were some, they used a cell phone IMU chip, which they selected by which one was the quietest sitting on the bench, which turns out to not be the most useful aspect of an IMU chip. And it turns out that when that one had a rocket engine file, firing under it, all the data would go to crap, and so it couldn't actually fly the vehicle

anymore. And so, yeah, there we go. Is this the one? Probably, yeah. December 2014. But it turns out that if you align the engine precisely enough and put a bunch of weight around the outside to have a really high inertia matrix, then with no control, it will look like you're hovering for a short amount of time. So, yeah. I love, by the way, real quick, I love how I-movie the beginning of this video is. It is so I-movie from 2014. It is absolutely I-movie, yeah.

The last time Orion flew, you were doing this. Yeah, so I designed that cluster of stuff and did a lot of my nights. That's just that one guy from Mojave. So, it was, sorry, God. tenure at Moon Express was what from around this era to a couple years later how long were you there for a buzz was there I was there for about two years yeah so it was before this through this program and then sort of nothing was happening but we were at LC36 and then I left after that yeah I'm just I'm curious like how you now with distance and from both your time there but also

Moon Express doing anything. Like, was there a particular moment when it went from... What happened, man? Yeah, like, I just want to know what happened. Like, it went from you doing this to just like, you know, visualizations, I guess, and like hype, but no, no content. There was actually like a full... So there were, the company ended sort of spread out.

There was a propulsion group in Huntsville, and then all this stuff was happening. in Florida. And then we had LC-36 in Florida, which we were just using its office space. And then there was like the core sort of software and avionics and stuff was in the Bay Area. And there was a sort of vaguely a mutiny, I suppose,

where one of the guys in the Bay Area group went to the investors and tried to get Bob Richards fired for basically the same questions of like, what are we doing, why are we doing any of this? And that didn't go very well. And so, it's really, really difficult to get the CEO of a startup fired.

And so he ended up like Bob ended up basically firing most of the company at that point. And so it was down to a small number of people. And yeah, it went very much into just like we're doing concepts and stuff. Keeping up appearances is kind of the mode that you get into at that point. Yeah, but the guy who attempted the mutiny, his theory was that, yeah, that just like, I don't know. Yeah, it was always hard to tell exactly what was real and what wasn't. I mean, I had never thought that the GLXP was super winnable. And so I got to go build another vehicle and show that you could do fast,

you know, hardware development in the span of a few months sort of thing, which I think is interesting to do. But yeah, I think ultimately, like, I didn't go into it expecting us to land on the moon and I didn't leave expecting them to land on the moon, basically. So is that what you do? Is that your thing? Like, I'm going into this company and you have a particular personal mission statement and then like I'm going to build the hardware very quickly quicker than they think I can

and, you know, deal with this shitty IMU and make it look like we're hovering and then peace. I'm going to find another thing that's a fun project. I mean, I'm highly motivated to like doing new things. Like certainly just repeating something I've done in the past is not very interesting for me. I, yeah, that one was, I did that because I needed a job, basically. That wasn't a, that wasn't a great example of, like, you know, the process of job hunting, certainly. But I met cool people. Like, there's still people, you know, I worked with there that I still talk with.

And that is always one of the high points of every place that I've been at is that there's, you know, ends up. You make, you know, if you end up working long nights with people, you're going to end up, either, you know, friends with them or never wanting to talk with them ever again by the end of the process. basically. There's usually some of both at every company. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Astros. The one we haven't talked about yet, right? Yeah.

Look at the list here. It's pretty modern. This one's pretty modern. Yeah. After Moon X went and traveled around for six months, which, yeah, I don't know, I've generally had the theory that like the idea of like working your whole life and then retiring when you're old. If you survive that long, it doesn't seem like the greatest idea.

And, you know, there's always, there's, there's claims that like if you have holds in your resume that like it will be make it hard to get hired but I think if you especially in a community like this where you know you you get known as you know someone who gets things down or or you don't basically like you know it's a different different situation like if I was trying to work for fortune 500s I'm sure it would be different but basically taking breaks between companies has never been an issue so for anybody else thinking of doing that like go take a vacation between jobs like if you get a job offer say oh I can start in a month and then quit your job. that day and then take a month off. Co-signed so hard. The part that you can survive that long is something I constantly think about that like... Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, the global arc of like planning... Like, I have a 401K, but like the expectation that that is going to be all totally normal and that I'm going to, you know, in 20 or 30 years, like, that's a, that's an ambitious projection. I just think about like, like, we've been on, we've been, we do as, as, as, as, as, you know, is a segment of this show, Anthony reviews the National Parks. We do these trips, right?

And something we talk about a lot is like, I don't want to do these trips when I have bad knees. Like, I want to do these when I can still do that hike. I can still climb that set of stairs. I can still climb that mat. Like, that's, I got good knees for a little bit of time, you know. I've got bad knees in my family. I don't want to waste them, waste the good ones.

I will say that Joshua Tree has some excellent lava tunnels in it. All right, maybe I didn't go in the lava tunnels. Jesus. I did go in the cool. I should pull the picture. The Hall of Horrors, it's got a really cool, like, little tiny, you know, you can go right between these two rocks. That part was very cool.

The rest of it was terrible. So, yeah. I mean, it is a desert. So, anyway, took some time off. Very long. Went to Astra. I was, I was, had the same start date as the CEO technically. Astro was, like, originally there was a company called Vensions.

And so all the Vensions people predate me. And that is the CTO and a group of, like, six or seven guys. but me and Chris Kemp actually both have technically the same start date in Astra when it transitioned from being ventions to Astra. So I was one of the first employees there and was there for four years essentially and started in propulsion test and then ended up running was the director of all tests for the company through Rocket One. And then from there was a little bit, I really didn't want to ever go back to Kodiak again

because essentially we shipped a round. rocket that wasn't ready and then I spent like months and months just sort of grinding away at problems there which wasn't great and so yeah I ended up doing sort of figuring out a new way to do tests and launch automation and we actually got it to the point where running like 35 different test stands and having you know a relatively small software team able to support this huge architecture of stuff and then being able to use the same sort of software processes to be able to write automations for both, you know, any sort of test stand from like, I want to test a battery, I want to test an igniter, I want to test a pump to, you know, actually doing the full launch

automation. So that was the motivating factor was I hate Kodiak so much. I'm never flying back here, so let's automate my way out of this job. Well, that works. That wasn't. But yeah, that works definitely. That's how you said it. Yeah.

It was more, yeah. I just, I don't know. A few companies, it seems like I eventually just get to a point where I sort of go wherever the most interesting problem is. And, yeah, it turned it out to be launch automation. Like, I wrote all of the launch procedures to the rocket, and they still read things that I wrote, and I still cringe listening to them on the comms, basically. Like, I never meant that to live that long. Exactly.

Yeah. That's funny. So, yeah. So it was there. And then, yeah, there was an interesting experience. It is an interesting company. Yeah. I'm curious.

At a rough spot at the moment. Yeah. They're in a rough spot. I'm curious to know what you think about the whole like going public thing for these kind of companies because like you seem to a lot of experience for these style of these like small sort of scrappy getting things started. And a bunch of them are just like going straight into the stock market right now. And we're like, I don't know, Anthony, I talk with us all the time.

It's just like, I don't know if that's right for them yet. Like, I don't think they have the, I don't know, like Wall Street has got just regular investors. There's just like people saving for the retirement out there. These are not, you know, it's not. It spends 401K. It's why he's not a risk planning on this. It's just not some special place where a bunch of investors are, understand what, how these companies work.

And I don't know, I'd love to hear your perspective on that at Astra and anywhere else. Yeah. I mean, the spec stuff is. almost certainly, in many cases, kind of a scam, because there is the person who organizes it, who their entire motivation is to find a company and align their valuation up to the point of what the SPAC has, you know, and say like, okay, this company is worth this much, we're giving them the money, then they'll be public. And so they're just motivated to close out the deal, because if they don't close out the deal, they lose a bunch of money. Like that, that is how the SPACs are set up,

is that the person who organizes it only makes money if they actually follow through the whole process. everyone who put money into this back, they only make money if it's actually a good company, and it almost never is. They can get their $10 back before the transaction closes, which is another aspect. And I shouldn't say that it's not a good company.

It would be more accurate to say that the valuations are almost always wrong, that they always have to be overinflated to hit the numbers. So for some companies, like, essentially, they have lost the ability to raise money. Like, they can't raise any more money they're going to go under, and then the SPAC boom came along at just the right time,

and so they were able to do the SPAC exit, which created a bunch of new problems, because now they're a public company, and they have to do all of the stuff associated with that, like all the documentation and everything to be actually a public company, but it means that they got an ejection of cash that they would have gotten otherwise, basically. So there are certainly even within the space SPAC stuff, like I know there's SPACs in electric cars and EVTAL and all the other sort of areas of technology right now, but there's definitely quite a few companies that had completely stopped getting calls returned from BCs, and then that whole spec thing came along at exactly the right

time. It's like predatory loans, but for companies. Yeah. It's also, I mean, not to talk too much hot shit about your most recent employer, but I was thinking about this the other day, and they bought Apollo Fusion on mostly stock. right and then the stock said like 62 cents now so you know the apollo i don't know what the funding history was of apollo fusion but they i think they got if everything went like they hit all the milestones of all the things they could have gotten like 45 million dollars of cash and then the rest

of it another 100 million was in stock that is now likely not going to be on the stock exchange in a year and so like taking it once it yes exit when it's you know easy money and it's the only money available for you in that life cycle point, but then, like, can you then immediately trade on that for an acquisition and not actually carry a long term? And then weirdly, like, that's the only thing that might save Astra from being delisted if they can convince people that they have enough of a future pipeline of engine sales from Apollo Fusion. It's a real, real weird flow chart that you start drawing out. Yeah, which actually, like, Rocket Lab did it much better, because Rocket Lab took the money and bought a lot of companies.

Like they're selling way more hardware than they, than rockets. Like, you know, they have, their reaction control wheels. Like,

I, like they have a massive contract on that. Like, they're just selling, you know, dozens and hundreds of them sort of thing. So, like, they,

I think they did it better. Whereas Asthma, yeah, only bought Apollo Fusion. And then, I, yeah, it's hard to say that,

like, essentially if Apollo Fusion is their entire business, then, like, just spin it back out and shut down the rest of it. Like, what's the point? I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

It just seems so, especially for a rocket company that launches as often as they do. I know they want to launch more, but like you just cannot have your stock price that volatile. Like, like you can't, they almost have to shut down training during a launch day because it's just like shoots up 40% and then drops 90% because on the call out. They're like, oh, we've seen some weird telemetry and boom. And then, oh, no, everything's fine. And then back up. But, you know, like it's way too, it's way too crazy. for, it'd be like, you know, if you had like some retail company, like, imagine if Amazon

had like a stock price, like, they had visibility to like live sales like to the second, like, oh yeah, we're down to, we're below the line on sales per minute. Boom, stock price. Oh, we got to, someone bought a barbecue. A free service or no. Like, oh, sell it. Yeah. Like, you can't have that kind of visibility into the day-to-day operations.

And you can't concentrate it so much in one one thing, one event. which is like the only activity your company does for a quarter. Like it's crazy, right? It's also even more irrational though than you're saying because I remember Virgin Orbit a year ago or something took a launcher one down like to Times Square or whatever and their stock went way up and then they had a successful launch and it went way down. It's like the irrationality of people seeing hype and thinking about it and not understanding what actually is going on with this company.

It's like it doesn't. And it makes me even more concerned for like intuitive. machines is now doing a spec, which I can only assess is what you just said, Ben, that like they've run out of the ability to get more money infused to them by the sources that they have at this point, and they need, you know, $300 million of cash to finish off a couple of landers or something like that. Like, I don't have a more charitable way of looking at a commercial moon lander company that thinks that's a good fit in the public market.

It's hard to tell from the outside. I don't, I don't have any details of them. I actually, funnily, sort of intuitive machines exist because of armadilly. the Project Morpheus, we infected a bunch of NASA JSE people with commercial space behaviors. Like we showed them that you can build hardware and do cool stuff sort of thing. And so a bunch of the Project Morpheus people quit and started intuitive machines. So like the core group of intuitive machines is ex-Morphius people. And they're still using some of the same technology of like film-cooled, you know, locksmethane engines that are, you know,

the feedback to Morpheus. So, and then actually we also worked with them a bit at Moon Express, and they ended up suing and ended up owning part of Moon Express, which didn't really work out for them. But I'm sure it's still on their balance sheet somewhere. If only Agile was so lucky for owning part of Austin. Hey, baby. Maston, big things for Pittsburgh. That's all I've got to say. What do you make of that, the Maston situation? Knowing where you started with it and what was on the roadmap, and then them pivoting into this commercial lunar company. And seemingly that first is what did it to him?

Yeah, there's a lot of backstory there. Hopefully that will be a book at some point. Because, yeah, I've heard some little bits and pieces of the background of how that whole process worked out, and it's kind of amazing. But I think for me part of it is that they're, like they had a working business. It's a small business. Like it wasn't ever going to, you know, IPO, but business doing VTVL testbed stuff of like when JPL wants to try something

or when someone wants to do Puma and Pinchment testing or anything like that. Like there was mass in space and they could do that stuff. Like they essentially had cornered the VTVL and rocket testing and, you know, doing plucky stuff with a rocket engine in the desert sort of thing. And so that was a real business and I think that that has some value to it. But essentially the, yeah, astrobotic essentially, the way that pricing worked out essentially suggested that that was a negative value in that they, you know, they got a SpaceX credit, which was, you know, the numbers

better, but it was what, like $7 million like launch credit? Yeah. Yeah. And they bought for a few million dollars, basically. So it's actually like they bought, they bought a discount on a launch. And for free, they got the entire space. And a spot in your old parking spot at the, at the dirt lot where you would park a van. And, yeah.

And zombie with Christmas lights on it. Yeah. An old trash can lid. They're like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this? thing. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I hope, I saw the Dave is still there, so I'm hoping that it means that, you know, the doing cool stuff with rockets in the desert stuff will continue.

That would be great. Yeah, I don't know how, I don't know if they planned it, if any of the actual, like, vehicle stuff, you know, Moonlander stuff carries over, or if it's just like the astrobotic stuff is going to be the Moonlander stuff and then, you know, Masson does its own separate thing, That's a sense that I get. Yeah. At least for, at least for, I mean, my concern is the acquisition thing, right? You got two years to act like everything is normal and then we'll shut down the thing that you had going on.

Like, I could see that being the case, but it depends so much on, it could be the case too, though, that like, you know, astrobotic, you know, maybe Peregrine doesn't make it to the lunar surface on the first mission. They've got a long stretch of time between that and Griffin. They need, you know, much in the way that Astra needs an Apollo fusion to show, like, we're still doing this. stuff. Maybe that's what they lean on in that downtime, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, they've, I don't know how big astropotic is, but there's, yeah, there's a lot of companies that do the SBIRs and that sort of thing to be able to keep some money coming in and work on, work on the things that they want to work on. It's kind of a trap because, like, you know,

it's never a lot of money, but, you know, it funds some of your development. And ideally, you get to do something you plan to do anyway and not like, oh, I'm going to go do some completely random thing that some DARFA project, manager wants done sort of thing. But yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're closing in here, Anthony. We are. I don't know. I got the good, I don't know.

I'm happy with the good Moon Express stuff. I think I got the stories I was looking for. Did you get the stories you were looking for you? Oh, yeah. That's some good stories, man. I mean, it's just, it's such an interesting era that you have this insight on, right, from the companies that it's just like still hard to pin down some aspects of that era of space, especially like you're talking the early days in Mojave, like, what the hell was going on out there? And then you try to, like, learn lessons from how people were feeling about it at that time to now, right? Same way that people talk about the telecom industry in the 90s and all the hopefulness of Arridium and

everyone else that was building these, like, crazy constellations, and here we go again. Like, how is this time, can we learn from it? Can we do it different this time? And I feel like there's a little of that with the wacky Mojave stuff that was going on back in the day. Yeah, trying to cram 10 hours or 10 years of stories into an hour is probably much right you should have focused on just just just the parts that you wanted like just just just just just moon next shit talking just for an hour but uh say that for the all nominal meetup that's better that's better fodder for that anyway yeah when we finally do off nominal berlin uh will come we'll drag you out and get all the tank and hang out yeah yeah yeah yeah go to the that's a great idea by the way jake that's a

fantastic idea well we can go to the the uh the birthplace of small launch and go up to Penn a Monday, right? Ben. Yeah. I've been there. The museum is fantastic. There's quite a cool museum there. I would love to go to visit it.

Yeah. It's really good, yeah. Ben, people need to follow you on Twitter. We didn't even talk about your Twitter at all. I'm Wicked W-I-K-K-I-T. I feel like I post a lot less and less snarky than I used to, but I always wondered, like, I don't know. Astra kind of beat me out of it because it was, they were all stealth mode and shit, and I got out of the habit of talking about things,

so I should probably get back into the habit of having more fun with it because, like, it's Twitter. It doesn't matter. Like, I don't know. You had some good ones recently. You had one of my favorite hurricane-related tweets that I need to find real quick, because it was fantastic.

Hurricane and tweets? I don't know what that was. Should we do some background music? No, do you just talk. Jake, are you working on anything? Am I working? I found it. I found it.

I found it. You found it? Okay, great. Three guys at Fort Myers Beach searching the storm south of the show. It says to why women generally outlive men. Two of them got watched away into the Pileys, then they all left, and the camera feed died. I just love this screenshot, you know, especially with the Peerside Grill, upper left, upper left bug, and these three guys just doing some Florida man.

Yeah. Yeah, and someone replied to me because it's Twitter and we're like, men doing adventurous things is like the basis for all advancement in humanity. You found that sad side of Twitter. Yeah. That's why you don't tweet so much. At least you're bare. Yeah. Let's play Twitter in a dozen number.

Jake, you got something going on over there? Yeah, so, well, you're going to hear about this in a week as well that I'm working on this. but we are, I'm trying to get a good show on Voyager done. So there's been some interesting stuff for the Voyager spacecraft. The attitude control acted up in a really bizarre way. And I, you know, the engineering anomalies from Voyager are getting weirder and weirder as this spacecraft ages into, you know, radiation sunset. So I don't know if it's like if it's going to get any more normal.

But so I wanted to tell a little bit of story about it. I have never done an avoider episodes, though I wanted to explore it a bit. So it should be coming out soon. Sounds great. Man. Yeah. Well, I've got an astrobotic spectacular for everybody. Yes, you do.

Two-hour, two-minute and 22nd episode of Main Ninja Cutoff that is out this week. It's five, four, five different conversations with people from astrobotic. Ben loves hearing about Pittsburgh. He loves Pittsburgh. He can't say enough good things about Pittsburgh. And it's great. It's his up-and-coming city of choice. That's where actually if Berlin denies him the visa, he's getting one at Pittsburgh. You do need a visa. Pittsburgh.

Yeah, you do need one of those. I'm sure it's very competitive. There's nothing better than that. But enjoy it. It's good. I think it's, I don't know, man. Eric Berger and I were comparing notes on astrobotic and intuitive machines. And I feel better about astrobotic and he feels better about intuitive machines.

And I realize, he's from Houston. He's biased. We're just rooting for local space companies. Like, that's purely what it is. It's like, we're just rooting for our sports team. So we'll see. We'll see. But maybe this is your next spot, then.

Could be. Maybe. They have interesting challenges. They need engines. They need engines. They need engines. They need engines, yes. As we discussed.

All right, everybody. Oh, next week. What do we do next week, Jake? So next week we have an interesting schedule. What do you want to call this? Experiment. Yes, yes. We needed a way to get Australians on this podcast.

We're not going to do that first thing with Australian. No. We wanted to. The Times does not work out for Australia and that part of Asia. Like that strip of Earth, that longitude of Earth, like really struggles with our time slot. So we wanted to experiment with pre-recording episodes. And one of our friends, Elizabeth Howell, who just wrote a book. We wanted to get her on the show.

and she also had schedule constraints, not because she was in Australia, but just because of other reasons and couldn't make the show. So we said, this is our chance. We're going to pre-record an episode. So next week, it will be at the same time. It's going to come out and you'll be able to watch the hour.

It just won't be live. So it'll be something different. You know, tell us what you think about it. It should be good. It's a great episode. We had a lot of fun recording it. We did. And, yeah.

Talked about weird space medicine stuff. Yeah, yeah, it's coming. It should be fun. Yeah. Lots of gross stuff. It was a pretty gross stuff It was a pretty gross show Anyway

Ben thanks for hanging out You're awesome Thank you everyone else We'll see you soon Bye everybody One two three four five Five four three two one End the death