Off-Nominal - 84 - JPL Christmas Party

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Somehow, it’s almost time for Artemis I. Again. Yes, again. And then we break down some hot planetary drama from this week.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 84 - JPL Christmas Party - YouTubeNASA leaves its Artemis I rocket exposed to winds above design limits | Ars TechnicaOff-Nominal on Twitter: “lol”WeMartians Podcast on Twitter: “I’m seeing a lot of commentary about how SLS is "unlucky" or "cursed" due to the timing of the hurricanes approaching Florida. There definitely is some luck here, as hurricanes cannot be predicted, but I think this is missing the point and giving way too much credit to Nature.”Eric Berger on Twitter: “An unbiased industry source spitballed tonight that the first SLS launch will probably come around 2023.”Acting NASA Administrator Lightfoot Memo: Agency Update – Feb. 15, 2017 - SpaceRefNASA Keeps Psyche, But VERITAS Pays the Price – SpacePolicyOnline.comGood Night Oppy (2022) - IMDbFollow 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, Jake. How's it going, buddy? I'm great, man. How are you? I'm doing all right. Quite a week. Yeah. News, it's been some stuff. We've been leaving schedule slots open on our calendar to be like, let's just leave the window open in case there's any news that pops up

and we can like kind of aggregate. This turned out to be one of those weeks where that was a good idea to do that, I think. We need one of these. And like we need the, if things happen, escape hatch once a month that we can, you know, do this when we need to. And a lot of this news is perfect for our show because it's like big news, but there's no information about it. So we can just kind of fill it. Incredible.

Yeah. So I'm excited. I'm excited to hang out with you a bit today. I feel like I've been getting out of vacation. for like 10 days and it's like not it's not accelerating and I don't feel good about it. I feel like it's nice to catch up a little bit. Well, the sickness hangover really, you know. Yeah, yeah, that's a, that was not helping at all.

I got the, I got the whatever RSV cold thing flying around and you might still hear it on my voice. Sorry about that. I had that already this year, as you would expect it was the one of us with the two-year-old. Yeah, the daycare vector is real. Yeah. So what do you clean an out with today? Oh, yeah. We both ask it.

Okay, I'll go first. I'll go first. So I am back with, I've done this one before. I don't remember if you remember this one, but this is the, the Mayan liquor, this Ishtabintun that they have around here. I had this cool bottle. Do you remember this bottle? Oh, yeah.

It's like a pyramid. Yeah. So it's like a, kind of like a mead, but with Star Anise in it. So it's got that black liquor. Sambuca flavor to it. And then you mix it with rum and a little lime juice. And it's, hmm, it's perfect.

So, look at that. Lovely. We've got a golden monkey. Have I had one of these on the show before? I don't know. That's 9.5%. A nice light 9.5.

Okay, it's going to be a show. Is there raining in any else? You got a little connection jitter. I'm like, is Starlink getting rained on right now? I can check. It's not.

Blue skies, so. All right. Well, is it a windy? There could be a little bit of lag, we'll see. But no, it's looking good. It's looking good. All right. Where do we even start?

I think my internet, despite, like, once, after the Starlink part, it gets down into the ground, into the real internet. And I think it just goes, like, straight undersea cable to Florida and up the coast to you. So maybe it is the hurricane, just like, not right here, right? It could be something else. I Jake you should we start with the SLS one because I feel like this is a quick

A quick cat part of the show This is the quick cat okay I love it Is it the quick part? I don't know Should we save it? Should we save it for the end? We can start with it We don't have rules we can just do it

We won I was What was I doing over the weekend First of all I need to check a date stamp on this tweet Yeah this was like Sunday I'm having a little like you know, not really looking at the internet day. And at some point I fired up Twitter and I saw this tweet that you tweeted.

And I was like, Jake definitely did like the Sharpie Map joke again. Because you did that the last time too, right, when it was coming up the coast. And I'm like, this is not a real hard left turn that this hurricane's making. Because it's, this could not be more comedic. It's true. It was real. Unreal. So I don't know what to say about this. Okay, well, I had a thought because everyone was talking about how, like, oh, this rocket has the worst luck.

Just the worst. How unlucky. What are the chances that two hurricanes would hit this rocket in the same launch campaign? And I got a little mad about it on Twitter because I'm just like, this is not unlucky. Like this is, this was inevitable because these launch campaigns are so long. This thing has been trying to launch for like, what are we at? 12 weeks now, 10 weeks, something like that. So, I mean, this thing's been on the pad for at least half of that.

Course a hurricane hit it. What was everybody expecting? I don't know. In a way, I was really grumpy about it. So I did a whole big Twitter thread about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I went off it. And unfortunately, the SLS fan club got a hold of it, and they came after me on Twitter.

Yeah, I got in trouble with it. I did not get ratioed because it's too good. I never get ratioed. But the comments that came from me. So anyway, I'm very sorry fan club. I know you love your rocket, but it's not very good. I'm wearing an SLS shirt, though. Look at this. You're always merchandising. That's for sure. you're always merchandising yeah yeah I mean like this is also a weird situation in the timing of this one because last one they had ample opportunity to I mean they certainly waited until the last possible

second but they had many days to talk about what they should do about the impending hurricane and it was coming from the other side of the coast it was going to be a different situation this came on them quicker than they really had time to react to. So even if they thought they should have rolled back, they were seemingly in a spot where they couldn't. Like, you know, they had to set up enough at the pad that to unroll that and then roll it back is too much work. Yeah, and that's, that's, uh, I, Eric Berger was making that point a lot. It's just like, it doesn't matter now.

like, because we were, you know, the two days before we're like, are they going to roll back? He's like, they can't. It's too late already. Because it takes for damn long to do anything with this rocket, right? Like if they want to roll back, that 11 hour trip takes them like three days to get ready for. And so they would have had to make the decision like on Sunday or something to do that. And at that point, it looked fine, you know, like it was just too much. So yeah, this is, I don't know, it's a struggle, man.

This thing is just, this launch campaign has just exposed every, operational design engineering and the rocket and I'm trying to figure out if it's going to matter like if they're going to go back and we got to make changes and I don't know what that ends up looking like

or if they're just like no this is what it is and they just keep like this we're just going to do this every time like I don't know this work yeah this is how Artemis works it's like oh we missed we missed the fall 24 window for the Artemis 2 launch so we're going to go to fall

2025 now or whatever it's going to be you know like it's just awful how how clunky it is i don't know what do you think i was thinking about the potentially infamous em one letter right remember that that hot moment this was more recently than we realized when when we were like oh they might put people on em one it was still called em one this was early days of the trump administration i guess yeah yeah i don't even think bridenstein was the administrator yet right I don't know. That was like one of the first things they did. They were like, what can we put people on this?

No, maybe, maybe Bridenstein was there. I can't remember now. I don't remember. I got to look that up because my point about this thing, I've been thinking about that recently. And yeah, no, it was Lightfoot. Lightfoot sent the memo. Lightfoot did it.

Robert, February 18th, 2015th, 2017 is when this went out. So, all right. So my point of thinking about this was that at the time, the, where we all landed on that was that, like, there literally was no benefit to doing that worth the risk of doing that, right? The risk-benefit analysis was, like, all risk, no benefit. This is almost, like, the other side of that situation where they are so dying to get this thing off the launch pad and will now openly accept risks like this, or in this case they

were forced to, but last time they were almost leaving it out through that hurricane too. Like, they didn't decisively roll it back when that hurricane was coming in. So they're so much more willing to accept risks because the, I feel like the spot that they're in now, you know, we know that we had some actual dates on the solid rocket boosters that they're only certified through like the December 9th and 14th or something. Very specific dates. Yeah, but we can hand-wave it away, but it is more work that they then have to go do, right? So every like additional week they're staying on the pad and not flying, the work in front

of them is going to build up quicker than they have time to knock it down because it's getting all these life limits. So the- There's a critical map of constraints where it just becomes infinite at some point, right? Yeah, and that the acceleration of which those things are going to build up, they have to do is like you can't hire enough people to do those things. So it's just interesting to see now in this other, the other realm of Artemis Run, right? Five years later, we're like willing to accept a lot higher risks for this mission because like what else you're going to do

at this one? This thing has to fly at some point. It's just getting, I'm annoyed that we're still talking about it. Oh, it's brutal. It's like soaked up so much airtime, like, and thought time. Like, I just, I agree there. Like, they need to fly so that we can talk about anything else other than the Artemis one launch campaign because it's just, yeah, it's going to keep going. And like, I don't know, I don't, I'm not convinced they're going to make this window anymore. Like, how much time is it going to take to go and check the rocket out and make sure everything's okay? Absent of just soaking up even more risk where they just kind of like fly a drone around and go,

that's probably fine, fired up. They act like I do when I get a rental car. I walk around, I'm like, I'll figure it out later if there's any problems with it. No obvious damage, it'll be fine. Exactly, right. You do a real brief walk around and it's dark in the parking garage and you used your cell phone flashlight and you didn't see like your one quarter panel was blown in so you're like, whatever. You know, I did my most recent trip, like I did one of those and then like a day into the trip,

I was like, I don't have a front headline. That was the whole thing. I think that's the recent one, which was the last. time the Artemis tried to launch that Mustang that I rented stupid thing had a huge like gash and I had no idea I drove it all the way from Miami to Orlando and then someone was like yo your car's broken I was like oh oh so yeah yeah art of this one the Jake Mustang of rockets I guess my real situation is yeah the launch are they making this launch window probably not right they've already bumped from the 14th to 16th seems unlikely that they

would get that one off. So they plausibly have the 19th and the, and Black Friday. Is that where we're at? That's the, that's to what's left. Although, do we hear back on whether the,

the range was going to work through the Thanksgiving weekend? Because I think they had come up, but they were just going to close that because they didn't want to, they didn't want to close airspace while everyone was flying around to, you know, they were very expensive dinner. I thought that was just like Wednesday and Thursday. Mm, okay.

Yeah. Nobody flies in Black Friday. I don't know the custom. You should try it one year. You should come up here one year for it. I have been there for Black Friday. It is not ideal. But yeah.

I do want to give us a quick shout out to an episode of this podcast that we did almost exactly two years ago, November 24th, 2020. That was simply called December Hurricanes. And it featured Eric Berger. We were talking about last December, two years of Decembers ago. I think we were talking about last December. Right? It was in 2020.

We were talking about December 2021. Okay. Yeah. And here we are. No, because that was talking about that was back when it was at like Michoud and all the hurricanes were hitting Michoud. Oh, this rocket's so unlucky. All the hurricanes hit.

Well, yeah. Well, it was there for four and a half years. Like, it's going to get a lot of hurricanes. And so they kept blaming the green run delays on hurricanes. Oh, yeah, all these hurricanes. And so that was Eric's great joke. It's like, we'll see if any December hurricanes come up. Oh, my gosh.

Yikes. Yeah, it has been so many Decembers and so many hurricanes that I forgot. Yeah. Yeah. So two years ago, it was getting ready for the green run. That's how long ago it was. The other thing that's really embarrassing about SLS is when they have to say the names of the launch periods that they're working with right now,

and they're like, well, launch period 37 is going to run from this date to that date. And you're like, that implies that you missed 36 launch periods. And we're in the 20s or whatever at this point. But still, the mid-20s is embarrassing. They started doing the math on lunch windows. Like, launch period one was summer of 2020. That's what it was, somewhere around there.

So that was the first window where they were like, it's time to put the trajectory guys to work and figure out what days we can launch. because we're getting close. And that was 27 launch windows or ever ago. Yikes. Oh, man. It's just yikes.

It's just, it's such like in the space fandom world, it is so cliche to make fun of SLS, but yikes. Yeah. So my decision now is if this slips into December, there's going to be a rocket lab flight out of Virginia finally. So I'm like, well, we'll see how these schedules collide because one of them's kind of more interesting to me overall in terms of future stuff. And there's not many people that have seen an electron fly with their own eyeballs that close. That's true. Yeah. I don't even think Peter Beck has stood that close to an electron and watched a fly.

So that's my problem, Jake. I'm looking at early December and I'm like, middle of nowhere. Virginia or East Coast Florida. Don't know. Should we talk about this planetary hot drama? We could do that. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to need you to run me through this because I caught a couple of the headlines

and it was content dense enough that I was like, and this may or may not be why no one has had a Miko Headlines episode this week because that and I'm also been a little busy. But I'm like, I've read through all this stuff and I think I get it. But I also feel like this is one of those reports that is about something specific and also things very general. Like the people have been waiting to say things to JPL for a long time is how it feels. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So, okay, so we'll recap it here.

On Friday, the IRB report, the independent review board report came out for the Psyche delay. So if you remember, Psyche is that mission to an asteroid. It was going to launch in August. and then they were like, oh, crap, oh, crap, oh, crap. And they moved it to September. And then they were like, oh, crap, oh, crap, we can't make it. And they delayed it a whole launch, a whole year, basically. So the story at the time was that the reason it was delayed was that this test bad software wasn't ready yet.

So they bought one of those SSL-1300 satellite buses, which is like a geocom, you know, a satellite. So it's what we'd use for whatever satellite TV. I don't know what you guys use. Those geosets are for. Like cell phones or something? You tell me. I don't know. But it is not normally used to explore planet stuff.

So that's the key point here. And so Maxar had sent over this test bed, which is like kind of like a, you know, one of these that'll split out on a board. So you can play with it and run software against it and do all that kind of stuff. And the software that arrived was not up to speed. and so they had to like really rush and work on it and they couldn't rush fast enough. And so there we are. Software delays the thing. It's ready now, which is the sad part.

Like they didn't need that much more time, but they missed the window. And that's how that. Uh-oh. You're back. You're back. You're right for a second. Hold on. Your satellites aren't working.

One thing satellites do is provide internet and yours aren't working that well right now. But now you're back. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's these Leo ones. Should I upgrade to a geo? internet? Should that what I ask what I should do? Is that better? You tell me. Yes, there would just be

30 seconds of dead air between each of our comments. Okay, where did I, where did I leave? Should I, how much did you lose? Uh, I don't know, you were flabbergasted about these satellite buses going to the planets. Yes. Oh, this test bed. We're talking about the test bed. Yeah, yeah. So this test bed arrives. The software is not ready. They rush and rush. They can't it's solved in time, so they missed the window. So anyway, so they decide to do this independent review of this delay. And that was kind of my first indication that something was up. Because, so they had the press conference back in whatever it was September, August, September, somewhere around there. And I asked them, I was like, do you do an independent review every time

something is delayed? Like, is this normal? Because insight, which was, you know, the last time one of these happened was delayed. I'm like, did you do an independent review of that? And all all Lori Glaze said was this associate administrator is really fond of independent reviews and just let it hang. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. Meaning Dr. Z? Yeah. I mean, Thomas Sibrookin is partial to independent reviews. I was like, okay, well, that's a good way to answer the question. We're also not answering the questions. That's good. So anyway, so this review comes out Friday. So here we are.

I'm going to get the answers. And it was like, it was not a good look for JPL. We'll just put it very, very bluntly. Basically, it came down to like, yes, the test bed wasn't ready, but why didn't anybody notice? Because there was like very poor staffing at a JPL on this project. They didn't have a chief engineer assigned for Psyche. like high level management positions were missing. They're saying like you were probably 10 to 12 managers short

if you right there, 10 to 12 full time experienced leaders short on there. There was like the weird culture of not allowing problems to get like passed up the chain unless you can provide proof. And so it just wasn't a good look for JPL. I love this little side jag into like sitting on remote work that happened in the report as well. I thought that was really funny.

Yeah, yeah. And that was especially poignant given that the guy that chaired this board was like 115 years old. So, yeah, it was definitely not a thing that really felt like it was in touch there. But so they walked back the remote work stuff a little bit later. I just, it was funny that it was like, well, no one knew about the problems because everyone was on Zoom calls. Is that what no one knew about the problems? you think you would have found out if it like yeah it's just a hilarious like I understand the impulse to say that that like oh I don't visit it's the butts and seats thing right like I don't visibly see that you're struggling at this project so therefore I cannot ask you questions about

the project where that that to me is just like you are saying that I don't want to put effort into finding out how your thing is going I'd rather that information just happened to me. Like, I don't want to do work to find out how you're doing. I just want to be able to like feel the air and be like, oh, it looks like it's going well. Yeah. I don't want to be a proactive manager. I want to be a reactive manager. I don't want to do any work. I want to queue up in my inbox and I will solve them. I don't want to have to go looking for problems. Yeah. Yeah, it was a little rough on that. But anyway, so this stuff comes out and it's like JPL is really understaffed and they were explicit and it's like it wasn't a psyche problem.

Psyche is just the first place that these problems manifested. Clippers at risk, Mars sample returns at risk, Nysar is at risk, all these different things that JPL is working on are at risk because of these staffing problems. And so NASA made a very tough call, very, very hard decision to hit a pressure valve and they delayed the Veritas mission by three years to say, all these people are. are going to now stand down and go work on the other missions so that none of them are at risk and we're going to put basically a sacrificial lamb like this one project's going to suffer all of the delays that are kind of piling up on every other project right which really sucks for the veritas

team like i got i got big sympathy for that team because they were all excited about venus getting selected and they were stood up and they were firing all their cylinders and yeah boom three years out of their sales. And then they have to go work on psyche too. Like that's what's also funny. They get like grounded and punished. Like go help them out. Yeah.

So this was especially tense because this was Friday that the IRB report dropped. And so they delay Veritas on Friday. Monday is the start of the annual meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group. So all of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group. So all of the Venus community was like already on a plane ready to go to a giant meeting to talk about how exciting it was about Veritas coming and everything. And then this hits like three days before, just literally over a weekend. And so the open question period of Xag was spicy.

It was definitely everyone had all of their feelings ready to go for what was happening there. And it's like, you know, why is why is Veritas the one that has to suffer all this and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, so it was an interesting meeting. And I will give credit to Lori Glaze for going to that meeting. She went in person to the Vexag meeting and stood in front of everybody and took all the bullets. And I don't know, I felt I felt bad for her, but also like kind of proud of her. She did a pretty good job of that. So.

You know, and it's especially tough for Lori because she is a Venus scientist before she was a bureaucrat. So like she probably just laid off all of her friends, you know, in a sense, which like not, not ideal. But they are, thankfully, they're going to try and keep up the, they're going to try to keep funding for the science team to like still do their preliminary work and their, you know, their, their baselining before the, the mission. So at least some of the science communities can be able to keep working through through the three year period.

But anyway, and then it got worse, though, because in the Vexag meeting, so Friday, the story was Veritas was delayed three years. And Monday, the story was Veritas is delayed at least three years. And if the funding comes through, we'll reinstate it. If. So it's much more of a kind of like a temporary cancellation rather than a suspension. And so, yeah, there's still a possibility that, you know, two, three years from now when they're looking at the money again, if it's not good enough, they're going to just

not fired up again. And that would really suck. So it was more bad news for them. Okay, so I want to like understand. You don't know how satellites work, and I don't think I know how the science directorate works in many respects. So, which is why we're friends and we do this show together. Yeah.

So, all right. So the report says like JPL, here's a list of grievances. Your Christmas party sound like it was banging in 2021. And everyone talked about the project for the first time ever at the Christmas party. And you maybe were super drunk so you don't remember it and whatever. It got into like some real low-level workplace details on this report, which I find hilarious that like the Christmas party is mentioned. Number two, I'm wondering what they're planning for this year's Christmas party based on that. Also, interesting that it says Christmas party in 2022.

The whole other conversation. So this report gets delivered and like who is the recipient of this? So this is a report to... To Dr. Z? Was the guy getting this letter? To NASA. So NASA stands up the report by an independent community to deliver a report to them to tell them what was wrong with the project, right? And then from there, they get to decide what they want JPL to do with these missions? Yeah, they respond. That's their job to respond to it, right? So they agreed with a lot of the assessments and said they're putting some things in place. Some of the stuff has already been resolved.

Like, he has a chief engineer now. They moved, I know they moved Matt Wallace to, like, a project manager position on Psyche. Matt Wallace is a pretty big, big name. He was the project manager for perseverance. And I think he did, like, Atlow for Opportunity and Spirit. So he's been there for a long time and, you know, did a lot of pretty heavy work. So he should be a good guy to kind of get that going.

but yeah so then they have to go and kind of take all these different recommendations and do stuff with them and so well that's and this is the part i want to drill into like how does it basically they anything within the directorate was up to their disposal right they could have said like you know we're going to go cancel this other thing and like i guess i'm wondering if they are like disciplining jPL right but they could have if Veritas was going fine they could have been like we're going to put Dragonfly

on hold for three years they could have put you know something else on hold for three years like they could have they had bandwidth in their disposal to say like which things should shift

and then they but they decided like it's the JPL this is like the smart decision I'm just trying to work through the process here but like they decided the next JPL thing

down the line should be the one that that gets canned for three years so that we can like they can fix their shit. Which JPL project that is currently active is the farthest away? That's, I think that's probably what the logic ended up being.

Yeah, because Dragonfly is APL, I think, right? So that wouldn't really help JP. But no, that's what I'm saying. Is that like, the report though wasn't about, it wasn't about JPL, right? It was about psyche. But the report team found out a bunch of stuff that made it about JPL. So the response action, like I'm just wondering, because if you're on the Veritas team, I get it.

Like, if those are distinct teams and distinct sets of individuals and, like, the report does not include the word Veritas. So this report does not say that the stuff going on that made PsycheLate is also going on with the Veritas team. That was something that NASA added on top of this as another layer. And so I'm just curious how like, how do you feel about that sort of like, you're all grounded for a little while? Well, you know, it was just your one friend who did something. It's like, no, you're all getting disciplined. Yeah, it's hard. And like, it's not fair to Veritas.

Like, there's not a, there isn't a redeeming justice to it in any sense. And that like, the team, especially because like Veritas as it has a, as a process. project is bigger than JPL, they just outsource the spacecraft creation part of it to JPL, right? And so the people on the science team and the people leading the mission are not, they're not involved with JPL. They were just, they were doing fine, but the spacecraft was not going to get built. Well, actually, it may have been fine, but they, they couldn't risk the, the two flagships that are happening at JPL right now. And, you know, because that would have been infinitely worse if Clipper or sample return had a big delay, right?

But I guess that's so, and so the decision that like something has to get delayed is because they have fully figured out the cost of getting from from here to next year for Psyche? I think it's more that like Psyche's basically done. Like it's ready to go, right? And so if you're looking at JPL's workforce and you're saying like, okay, where's the risk, right now because JPL is understaffed. The risk was sitting on Europa Clipper, Mars sample return, a little bit of NYSAR,

and Veritas and whatever other maybe some Simplex mission. I don't know if the lunar Trailblazer was on there, but some other smaller ones. But that's kind of where all the risk was spread across those projects because JPL as an institution was understaffed and kind of has more work than it can do right now. And so you have to decide, like, where,

how can we shift resources around? round to fix that. And if there aren't enough reasons, versus that something has to get cut. So then you have to decide, like, okay, do I delay your Opel clipper? Which is, like, brutal because it's a really expensive project. I think I'm struggling with the fact that, like, shouldn't this have been, to some extent, JPLs call themselves? And maybe it was.

And that's like, I, I, I'm sure it was done in partnership. I'm sure it was not a, yeah. Yeah. And because JPL has a new director, remember, so this is also a new thing that's happening. JPL's new director came in and I want to say May and basically she'd been there for 10 minutes and they're like, yeah, it's like it's not working. And then she does like the first thing she had to, you know, put out kind of like a fire to put out. So I imagine they have been working with JPL to figure out like what can we do that's not catastrophic. And I know NASA's like implanting people in on the project too. They're putting staff into the building. building from NASA because remember JPL is not a NASA facility.

Right. So that is happening. And then they're outsourcing a lot of work. Like I think they're hiring contractors to do certain things. But there just, it wasn't enough and something he had to give. And I think, I don't know, whether it was JPL's idea and NASA approved it or NASA dictated it and JPL had to agree. I'm not sure.

Right. But I'm sure they were all. that if like JPL had another option, right? If they were like, oh, no, you know, Jared Isaacman wanted to also fund this other thing. So we've got this new, you know, new stream of money to support the changes that we need to make from this report. You know, like I guess I'm wondering that would have been an option. That's an interesting question. And I think maybe, however, NASA also has its own problems with costing in the planetary science department right now.

despite planetary having the best budget it's ever had right now, they've taken on a lot of projects. They're book admissions and all the COVID supply chain stuff is now piling up. And there's like all the long lead items for projects that are way down the line. They're having to order early because of supply chain delays. And so all of those costs from future years are piling onto right now. And so like they're kind of out of money. So this might have been the situation where it helps JPL to cancel Veritas and helps NASA to cancel Veritas.

I'm kind of guessing there, but it might have been a, this is good for both of us. So let's let's go. As much as it's bad for everyone, it's also the best thing for everyone. Yeah, yeah. And then remind me this other Venus mission, Da Vinci, right? Yeah, Da Vinci is continuing because it was, you know, the later one anyway. I think it was launching in

2031 already. So it was pretty far out there. But one of the considerations, one of the fallout from this is that, because Europe has a mission as well in Vision, so there was the three VAS missions that were all going together. And originally,

Vision was going to come after Veritas. So all of the European partners to Veritas, and there are a few, I think a couple of instruments and things like that and science team members and stuff. Now all of those people that were planning on working on Veritas and then moving over to Envision over in Europe all smashed together. It's all happening concurrently.

And so they need to make decisions or split their time or whatever. And Europe is not a part of this decision making a mess. This is a massive call. And so they have to get a wall out. Yeah. And that are European. It's exovenus is the new name for this mission. I'm trying to see who was in charge of Da Vinci.

Where was this one? Who was doing this one? Da Vinci P.I. You're quizzing me. Welcome to off-nominal Google stuff. Where Jake and I don't say anything and we Google stuff for one minute. I remember. Oh, it's Jim Garvin.

Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, that was. It's a little easier. Yeah, because it's at a different center, and it's, you know, it's got a little probe that goes in and then it's kind of done. So they're on their way. That doesn't have a long operations phase to also consider. No, no.

And the spacecraft doesn't have to be tested to last for a long time either, right? So what does this do for the planetary program in that time period, right, where it does it mean that JPL is just not going to be able to support whatever missions are coming up in the near future that that would be up for bids or would NASA basically have to shelf a mission because shelve I don't know what the verb of that is shelf I guess because that money just got shifted to three years later and why three years I think launch windows if I ever call it's always launch windows it's though. It's right there.

Yeah, but there's seasonality stuff that they got to think about and whatever. Yeah, so it's a great question because New Frontiers 5 announcement is going to come out, well, the draft is supposed to be out this month. And so if any of those proposals or JPL run proposals, that's something they have to think about. I suppose they could, you know, if JPL can mitigate quickly, if they can hire up and fill these things and then prove to NASA that they're ready to take on another mission. It might be fine. But I don't know how long that takes.

Hiring is not always the easiest thing to do, especially when they're big-time engineer people. So, yeah, it's tough. It's an interesting one. You know, and it's, there's a timeline question here, too. So this is my big outstanding question because, you know, this makes it sound like JPL accepted the job and then started working on it. And then things changed and they weren't staffed up.

And then NASA had to make a tough decision. But Veritas was only selected in June of last year. So June 2021, right? That's when at that point where we can be sure that NASA was like, we believe JPL can do this, right? Because they selected the mission. Yeah. The cycle problems manifested as early as fall of that year,

like November, maybe December or sometime in there. that at that point psyche was under the gun in trouble. It was the Christmas party. That's what everything came out. It was at the Christmas party. So you have to ask yourself, did things degrade that quickly?

Like in June, everything was fine and then something happened and all of a sudden JPL's in trouble by December or did JPL misrepresent how ready they were to take it in June? or did they not misrepresent, but NASA failed to notice? Like, there's a lot of different permutations of what happened here. And I don't know which is true.

And that's the one I got... All I'm saying is a Fourth of July barbecue would have gone a long way to solve this. Like, we could have got a couple of months at start. Outside, it was fine. Like, it was only 2021. Outside was fine. We already knew it at that point. Just cook some burgers, is all I'm saying, JPL, you know?

Yes, yes. That's my independent review of this situation. Nothing than a good old American hot dog can't solve. Yeah, fire up a smoker, you know, a Coleman full of beers, and we would have known about this right after we awarded Veritas. All right, so now that this is happening, is this APL's chance to rule the world? Well, hey, they got Bobby Braun now, so they're, they're clipping real good. He noped right out of JPL and he was like, nope, nope, not the one, wrong PL.

PL. Wrong lab. Yeah, I mean, hey, that's always been a rivalry that has, that's been, you know, one by one side and not so much the other. APL's not in the movies. I want APL in the movies in five years. Like, that's my vision for APL. Bobby Braun, give me a call.

This is our plan. I mean, if they nail Dragonfly, then B, right? They got to prove that they can do the work, I guess, is the question. We know you're biased. We know. Longstanding bias against Dragonfly. I'm not actually biased. I just like where the missions are.

That's all that means. Let's go. Let's go explore. Dragonfly was great. Love it. I have a... I have an interesting note here. Sure.

For a couple years, every other show was about space policy on this podcast. And we just had... a midterm election and no one's talking about space policy which is interesting in how settled things currently are and I would like to ruminate on that for a minute it's funny because I was like maybe a couple hours ago I was like should we talk about the election

like is anything I wonder if Anthony knows if any of the key people have changed maybe I'll ask them like what's up with the open term like what do we know so far but there's not like a lot out there's not really a lot that's up for discussion at the moment. Like nothing, in the last couple elections, there were huge moments where there were like

brand new, part of this is that Bill Nelson is just doing his thing, right? And it's like also continuing on what the Trump administration was doing with space. Like the continuity of space policy, I think, makes this less of an issue, whereas

the last several times, that's not been the case. But even the last election cycle. Once we knew that the Biden administration was like down for current iteration of Space Force, down for Artemis, keeping the branding. There was very little, the biggest thing was probably the Lunar Lander, the second Lunar Lander thing. And given where that's at, I don't even know that this current, I mean, it could, I guess if if it does, obviously, we're not going to know the makeup of Congress for like a month because of runoffs.

insert rank choice voting rant here, I guess, because that would just be more efficient. We would have done that part already. But like, we're not really going to know how divided things are or if it's, you know, single party rule or double. Like, I don't know. But there's just not a lot going on. That's like a variable element of space policy right now,

which I find interesting. That is interesting. Because Shelby's out, but his like second in command one. And who's the other guy that's at? Is it Mo Brooks has gone now? Is that Moe out of there? I thought maybe he was going. But yeah, no, it's interesting because it is very stable.

You're right. There's not like a bunch of, for a while we had a whole bunch of like drama about, well, of course, SLS, but Landers and crew and even JWST was like a spicy one for a while. And yeah, there's lots of big, big ticket stuff up for grabs. but not much right now. All right. Interesting. Mo Brooks ran for Shelby's seat, but I forgot lost in the primary. Right. But the Katie Britt is who won that seat,

and she was Chief of Staff for Shelby from 2016 to 2018. And, oh, here we go. This will get everyone hot and bothered. After that, after 2018, she was the president and CEO of the Business Council of Alabama from 2018 to 2021. So take a guess what she thinks about SLS. Yeah. Great.

So let me ask you this then. If things are stable right now from a space policy or even implementation of space policy perspective, so include all of Congress and stuff with that, what is the next big element to be? Where is the next battlefield? field. Is it going to be, like, is it going to come from China stuff? Is it going to come from, I don't know, like, is it going to be SLS stuff? Is it going to be, you tell me, Russia is probably

a big one for the boat? Yes, S is the leading indicator of that. Like, I assess. So I was, I was out at a dive bar in Philly last night with an anomaly, who I will not name, and we got into several different rants. And a rant that I got on probably too loud at this dive barred Philly where no one was interested in hearing this. People were playing pool. We had to keep standing up because they were trying to do pool shots and we were in their way and we're arguing about space policy. So this is kind of funny. I think if Jim Bridenstein, this is like the what if Steve Jobs was still alive kind of thing. If Jim Bridenstein was the head of NASA, I don't think he would have passed up the opportunity to get a billion dollars for commercial Leo development.

And Bill Nelson seems totally fine with letting that one pass on by. Because, like, of all the existential things in space, like, that is the one that NASA should be concerned about the most, that Russia, like, do you think that Russia is going to, this is the last stupid thing that Russia is going to do between now and 2030? I have a hard time believing like this is it so looking at that future you should be prepared for something else

you know happening and instigating another round of like should we close the hatch and push the Russian segment you know out of orbit so I think that is an obvious one that is a reckoning that's coming whether we like it or not because the ISS

is failing. We're going to have to figure that out. CLD, the commercial Leo providers, like there's photos of axioms, pressure vessel elements being made, but that's still years away from that, right? They don't have a power situation. Like, there's how far as Orbital Reef, how far is, I don't even remember the Star Lab, how far is the unnamed North of Grumman thing? That's a reckoning. China, I feel like, is going to get boring for a little bit because they just did their space station. We can stop talking about how they're building their space station. and now they're going to get stuck at their space station for longer than they think. You're still on that.

You know my bias, yeah. Now they're stuck in Leo forever, just like we were. Yeah, welcome. Just don't, you know, again, if Russia wants to go launch out of Chinese spaceports because they can't launch out of their out of Iconnor because it's too high of inclination, go ahead and attach something to the Chinese space station and bring them down with you while you're at it. Yeah. So I feel like that's going to cool off a little bit.

And then on the Artemis side, it's still unclear to me, you know, the Casey Dreyer perspective of like, well, like, it doesn't matter, you know. It's kind of the program of record. It's got a lot of broad support. I think the only risk is the timing of this gap between Artemis 1 and 2. It's going to be a three-year gap, right? Two and a half, three years at best. Yeah. The later Artemis 1 slips.

That gap is getting more awkward by the month. So, you know, between, if it launches in November, December, the next one's in November, December of 2025, right? Like, how many, there's going to be 18,000 Falcon 9s that launch between then and now. Yeah. It's an interesting one because, so I kind of agree with you on that delay being really awkward, and it's just going to get more awkward. But at the same time, like, that three-year delay or whatever is the, the delay. of record, if you will.

Like, it is on the book right now. It's what everyone expects. And it's what the funding is set up to handle. Like so the support is already there for the three-year delay. So I almost wonder if it's better for the program to not have to bumble through a launch campaign for a while. Like they can just go back to what they're used to of setting up a webcam and Michoud to be like, look at this friction sterwell.

That's amazing. And then, and that's the, that's the program again. know, like we're just, we can go back to celebrating the 17th anniversary of Orion driving at KSC for the first time. And, and, you know, just be happy with that. Like, I don't know. I just, I think it's not going to be a surprise to anyone, right? Like, that's the thing with it. It's not going to.

It's not going to allow Congress, right? They're going to notice when New Glenn launches and ask questions, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Hey, where's my Artemis 2? I thought this was like, no, no one's The other aspect is every time a Starship launches like whoever's running NASA can tweet

there goes our Moonlander again. They can see that every time, you know? Our program is strong. Yeah. It's true. It's true. They almost, here was the deal for NASA

was almost like, pay $3 billion to never hear what about Starship again? It's like kind of the idea. Well, and like they paid three billion bucks for it. They can take all the credit they want. Good for them. I'm glad. Nailed it.

You invested your money in the right spot. Like, good for you. Love it. Yes, I don't know if that's one that matters. Here's a little teaser for you, a brain teaser. I feel like there's a some sort of chart I could make for this, which was like the chart of likelihood of any given party bailing out of the ISS. right and early on it seemed like Russia

was going to get kicked off the ISS and then potentially bail off the ISS and they still keep saying that but the longer they go the more likely it is that we're going to want to kick them off the ISS or detach our side like for a while I was like let's buy you know this is three years ago

I said there's no price too high to pay Russia to get them out of the ISIS like I wanted to wholly purchase we already owns Zarya, just buys Vesda, like, come on, a couple billion, just cash out and take our space station. Now I'm like, I don't know, man, let's sell our space station to them. Let's do it. Let's go. I'm in the space station selling market, you know, sell the space station for like a billion dollars, take that money and do commercial Leo with it. That's my plan. Dude, the rubles are worthless now, though, so they're not going to be able to. The inflation.

They would have had to make that purchase in 2018 or 2011. Week before the Crimea invasion in 2014, would have been a much decision. Yeah, to not to spend a bunch of roubles on a space station. If you're saying sell to Axiom, no, man, sell it to the Russians. Because the Russians aren't going to want to leave the space station at a certain point, because it's the only thing they have, right? They already don't want to. They just were talking about it.

Yeah. So just realize that and and take some money from the Russians. Like, sure, let's do it. You know, they'll use it as propaganda and whatever. They use everything for propaganda. Let's just keep going on with our life and get cooler new space stations. Yeah, it's true. I like it.

Yeah. That's my theory. That's my theory. I dig it. There it is. We got a couple drinks of this dive bar. These are the conversation

you got it to. Yeah, dive bars. Been a while, been a while. It's like one of those hip dive bars, though, you know. Okay.

It's called Good Dog. It's great. I think Guy Fieri's done a show there before. It's a great spot. Good burgers, great drinks. Third floors are pool table. It's good.

Yeah. Anyway, what else are we doing in our life here, Jake? So next week, we got a fun show lined up. We are going to be hanging out with Matt Kaplan, who is the host for now, for a little bit longer, of the Planetary Radio Show at Planetary Society, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this month. So 20 years of Planetary Radio. And Matt's retiring. And so, you know, he has been sort of a mainstay in planetary podcasting.

he's the pillar of planetary podcasting. A big inspiration for me. You know, I listened to him for a long time. And I learned a lot from him on how to do my shows myself. And so I'm very excited to hang out with him for a little bit and talk about his career and what it's been like covering space for that long. So, yeah, it's going to be a good show. I'm jazz for us.

Especially because we talked to everyone else at the Planetary Society and became close friends with them all before we even reached out to Matt about it. yeah it's been a long time coming we are like infiltrating the planetary society and there's a couple couple faces left that we have not yeah like i would i would watch any of their dogs if they needed it at this point right like we're that close to friends and yet we've never talked to matt yeah it's been it's been uh it's been a long time coming for sure so yeah i'm just for that it's gonna be good yeah uh we got anything else You got anything come out?

You know, you know, I don't know what I'm going to talk about. I don't know what I'm going to talk about Jake. A bit of funk. I'm a bit of a funk too. I had an episode coming and then I got sick and I had to cancel it. And the schedules just don't line up again for like a very long time. So I don't know where that was going to go. I will see.

But yeah, I'm going to figure it out. I want to do here, I'll tease this. I want to get a, it's time to talk about insight. So. What does that mean? It's time. It's time to get ready for the end of that. Yeah.

It's the moment. So I'm, those motions are, those plans are in motion to do the final insight episode. Did you watch the prime video thing, the opportunity thing? I haven't yet. No, because I've been just sick and busy and catching up. So it's, it's queued up for sure. I'll be, I'll be watching that. I only recently found out about it.

I feel like everyone started talking. about it all the same day. And did we know about this in advance? Because I feel like I should have been aware of this. Yeah, we knew about it. I did. I didn't. I had no idea. What's the gist? I guess it's a documentary on the people who ran the missions and stuff. And so it's supposed to go over a whole bunch of different things. I think both rovers. And my understanding is that it's a focus on the team, so the humans rather than the spacecrafts, which is always good. I guess I'll have, I have some homework to do because I did not know about this until this moment in time. So, let's do the last two minutes.

Let's do a couple of wagers here. Okay. Ooh, okay. All right. Give me a ranking of which of these happen in what order. I don't know why I said it. I phrased that so badly. Order these space events.

Artemis 1, Rocket Lab out of Virginia, Starship launches off of a launch mount. Let's do Rocket Lab, SLS, Starship. Exactly where I'm at. Yeah. Rocket Lab looks like it's, did I see like December 7th right now? Yeah. So you're thinking that Rocket Lab will launch and SLS people will have to be doing some paperwork about the Solid Rocket Booster.

lifetime. It's going to have to do some paperwork. They're not going to make November, I don't think, no. And so it skips. At best, it's December, whatever that window is, but that's a brutal window. So we'll see how that goes. So Rocket Lab flies early December. SLS is December at best.

Starship is still starship and along. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how close they are. Everyone keeps saying they're ready for this year and I'm just still not feeling in it. No. Number one, the later that SLS goes, the more I just want that Eric Burger shitpost to be right. I'm sorry, I really do.

I'm going to reach that tweet that tweets freaking hard on January 1st. It's going to be like to smash that. But I think I was also like suspect about this tweet in here. Like I think I was trolling him and suspect about it. because I asked if he was drinking so yeah yeah look at that tweet so I'm just wrong in public also

like I'm not I'm not you know weird about that I just now I want him to be right the second here's my second thing to French goodbye on I my theory for the last we haven't talked about the whole Twitter thing because it's not going to be interesting to talk about my only thing that I will mention about Twitter

is that I think if Bocachica was going well Elon would not have bought Twitter is like my single theory about it all. It is a leading indicator to me that Boca Chica was not going well for a couple of weeks or months there. Yeah, he had time to do that. So, yeah, I don't know.

Everyone I've talked to in and around Boca has went like whisper quiet for the past several weeks or months, and I find that interesting as well. So. Yeah. Yeah, I think they're dealing with something. I don't know what it is.

but like you know SpaceX likes to move quickly so if they're not there's a reason yeah that's really what it is well someone on Twitter recently reminded me of my theory that I think I spitballed on this show that Jared Isaac been really good person to run SpaceX and I just

I would here's a little off nominal challenge for everyone was that your theory yeah yeah yeah I was postulating that he was being groomed as a successor someone told me as my theory and the podcast Fugstay, I was like, yeah, I buy that. That sounds like a thing I would have said some months ago.

Oh, no, no, that's me. It's me for sure. I let you take credit for that one. Off nominal challenge. Everyone that's listening to this, go out and find me the most recent quote attributed to Gwen Shotwell that you can find. That is what I will do with. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's it. Love it. I love this theory. This is a good one. Let's go look. What's the most recent quote? It's not great. It's not a good one.

That's all. That's all I'm saying. Tweet at us. Yeah, at Offnom. But do it, make it funny. Make it a funny tweet. And we only accept responses from verified accounts. Although we are not ourselves verified.

No, we're not. Oh, man. What a time. All right. All right, everybody. What a time. Thanks, everybody. See you next week, I guess.

It'll be a fun one. Bye, everybody. Bye. One, two, three, four, five.