Off-Nominal - 92 - We Should Buy a Bar

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Jake and Anthony talk about the state of smallsat launch and tell some stories from Anthony’s trip to Virginia to see an Electron launch.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 92 - We Should Buy a Bar - YouTubeTwitter thread of our tripMain Engine Cut Off, Spacey Space: “Pretty great day trip down to Wallops to see the Rocket Lab flight! Electron really has a kick, I was impressed. Beautiful and delicate second stage plume, too. A+++++ would do again.”Caleb Henry (@CHenry_QA) / TwitterRocket Lab launches first Electron from Virginia - SpaceNewsABL Space Systems blames RS1 launch failure on loss of power - SpaceNewsVirgin Orbit blames launch failure on upper stage anomaly - SpaceNewsFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine start. Hey, Jake. Hey, buddy. Just me and you, man. Just me and you. Just the duo. Just the gang. It's been a while since it's been just us.

Right? Has it? I thought we did this like a couple weeks ago, didn't we? I don't know. Feels like it's been a lot longer than that. Maybe you're right. All right. Maybe you're right.

I don't know time anymore because I've time warped my way through Delmarva. Do you know about Delmarva? So I'm going to guess Delaware, Maryland, Virginia. Yeah, that's what that little sense called. That's because the peninsula sticks out. And then for some reason, inexplicably, they just like change states a few times as you go down the peninsula. That's why? Yeah.

Yeah. And depending on the route that you drive, you could enter and exit a couple of those states while on the same drive to where you're going. Like our friend Pat, our friend Pat, who was down at the launch as well, lives in Maryland, but left Maryland to go back through Maryland to get to Virginia. It's a very confusing stretch. Yeah. Yeah. Delaware's weird man.

We need to chat with people that drove maps, man. People that drew the maps. Delaware. Who knows? Delaware is a real vibe. Delaware is where all the companies are. That's what I heard. Delaware is potentially where the company is that technically

handles the money for this show. Delaware is like this big empty space in the United States and there's one building that just has the registration for every single company. That's my understanding what Delaware is. Yep. It's where we keep the companies. And it's the first state. Yeah.

I think. It is. That says it on the license plates, yeah. That must be why they store all the companies there because it's the most important thing for the United States is where the companies go. That's what we got to solve first. State number one, that's where the companies go. Yeah.

I've solved it. I figured it out. So you know all about Delmarva, I guess. I guess, yeah. I don't really know when that name came about. but it kind of annoys me. I mean, isn't that kind of like a thing that's anytime you got a triple area like that, I don't know, I feel like we do that with every, it's not like a special, let's do a cool,

unique, well, we're going to take three acronyms and smash them together. No one's ever thought of it. Well, I think the thing that's weird to me is that, and this may be my living on the outskirts of Delmarva in that, the importance that I see of that, maybe I should pull up the map so people understand what the hell's going on with this conversation. Let's make this a visual show. I mean, this is what this whole show is about. Congratulations.

I went to a Rocket Lab launch, and what you get is local references at this point. But just when you look at this map here, Delmarva is this peninsula that sticks out between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay, right? Delaware Bay up here, near where I live, Chesapeake Bay, the one that everyone knows about. The importance of these areas is defined by the bays, not. not the peninsula. Do you see what I'm saying? That's the interesting part of this,

is that this peninsula does not matter to any of the importance of this geographic region. On the Chesapeake, you've got major cities like Baltimore, you know, D.C. area. On the Delaware side, you've got Philadelphia and then the populated section of Delaware and Delaware shores, Jersey Shore, et cetera. So it's funny in this case that like this peninsula

feels like it owns its own identity when the rest of us that live nearby are like, oh, that has a name? That's weird. Its job is just to provide more coastline for your days. It's just an annoying division between these two very important bodies of water. So, anyway. That's funny. Just to really enunciate where I went.

So here's where I live in Philadelphia. This is the drive that we're doing. So you understand just exactly how far this drive was. That is the drive we're doing all the way down to. Virginia, the weird little part of Virginia that is not connect to the rest of Virginia. So it was a fun trip. Okay. I'm excited to talk about it. There was a lot of interesting things that happened on it, so it's going to be good. All right, all right. What are you

drinking today? Um, I don't, this is not thematic in any way, but there was a a high lie mixed pack at the beer store that had some high lies that I have not had before. I've only had titular high lie. Um, this one's the high lie hazy. double dry hopped IPA. Wow. I'm expanding out in their, yeah, George in the chat from Florida is loving the high lies.

Yeah, it's a Florida thing, isn't it? It is. Cigar City. Yeah. Tampa. Cool. That's fun. If you told people who are Cigar City,

no one would ever say Tampa, but that's what it is. I was like, Havana? Yeah. Yeah, so I made an old Western Canadian classic that I know the listeners love a lot on this show, which is paralyzer. I put it in this tall beard glass because it was the only one that was clean, which tells you what kind of weak I'm having. And yeah, and I added a little bit of a Mexican spin on it by using this straw made out of avocado.

Oh, I do like those. Of all like the let's not use plastic straws, that's the best one because it actually has structural integrity. Like, and I've had it sit in this drink for like 10 minutes, and it's totally solid. I enjoy it because it scratches the part of my brain of like, what do we do with things that seem useless otherwise? And avocado pits are one of those, you know? Yeah, they are kind of useless. They're just like big and in the way. It's a thing to jam your knife into to pull it out of the rest of the avocado.

Yes, yes, that's it. That's all they're good for. And straws. So, okay, so I have a question for you. Not many Americans have seen an electron yet. So what is like special? Yeah, and it was not a very well attended launch. So I'm one of very few Americans that saw it from up close.

Yeah. Yeah, what's interesting about it? I know, I know all the rockets you've seen. Yeah, I was actually thinking about what are the rockets I've seen. And I feel like it's most of the U.S. list. So funny thing about that conversation. So I went down to the launch with our friend, Caleb Henry, who lives in Philly now, so I convinced him to ride with me.

So picked him up in the morning. We drove down. And on the way, we were discussing what launches we've been to or what vehicles we've seen fly. And he has only seen foreign vehicles. Soyuz, Proton, and Ariane 5. Those are the vehicles he's seen, which is an awesome lineup of things that you've seen in person. Like, he's seen a proton launch. And when he told me that, I had forgotten that.

And I was like, Jake is going to be eternally jealous of you for having seen Fracton in real life. I really wish I could have seen this. And I've only seen the purest of American rockets. Like shuttle, atlases, deltas, falcons, you know, only that. So we just had a nice pairing. And I felt like this one was a good mix because he's like, this is sort of my first U.S. launch. And I'm like, well, this is sort of my first foreign launch. So it's like the perfect Venn diagram of the rockets that.

Caleb and I have seen. Rocket Lab is definitely that company. Are they American? Depends what stats are trying to run, I guess. It depends on what kind of regulation you need to get through. What was funny, what was interesting about this launch? Well, it is shockingly tiny, this vehicle. You get out to the press site and usually when you get to that close to a rocket,

you can look in the distance and you're like, oh, There is the grand thing that is about to take to the sky. And if it's a night, there's the big lights projecting on it. And there's that feeling of grandeur that you have when you're near it. None of that is present with Electron. You're like, I think that's the one, right? It's the black one. Yeah, because there's some white on it.

They're fueling it now. But I think, okay, but is that the end? Is that the lightning tower for the thing? So it's very, and it's also. Did we take a long turn and get to Joey B's launch site somehow? Like, what's going on? it's not helped by um honestly i don't even have a good photo of this because i didn't bring like my big camera i just brought my phone and it's nothing i show you would be of interest but it is dwarfed

by the water tower that is out at wallops which is a gigantic water tower uh i forget how tall it is but i there was some stat like this is the tallest structure for you know hundreds of miles or whatever um for all of del marva yeah basically which is like okay Sure, like, what is the stat on this water tower, Jake? I think it's like, does anyone know about this water tower? How tall is this thing? I don't know. This is, this is, I don't know, this is super local.

They make it a thing. That's why I'm asking, right? They, like, they brag about it to you when you're there. And so every tiny little community United States has a thing they got to try to make of. And the wall of the water tower is the one? biggest thing. Stop by and get some steak and eggs next to the, the,

the, the fattest, uh, tractor wheel you've ever seen and, and like, you guys are great at little things like that. Is that what you grew up? The fattest tractor wheel.

Yeah, I mean, that's true. All right. So here, I pulled up a photo. A giant cow made of butter. So this is the,

this is the launch site. This is an old photo before the rocket lab pad has said. set in here. This giant water tower is right next to the Antares pad. The Rocket Lab pad is built right on the other side of that. So that thing even makes Antares look small. And Antares is small, but it has giant engines on it. You know, it's basically

got an Atlas 5 engine set on it. So that's the weird part, is that it's a small vehicle, it doesn't have a huge payload, but it does, like, work like a big rocket. So it's kind of odd. This has none of that. This is just like, It's exactly what you would imagine. So, you know, Wallops, cool.

Wallops is minor league Cape Canaveral. It's like, how I feel about the French-speaking area of Canada being minor-league Europe. That's how I feel about Wallops and Cape Canaveral. Like, oh, you get a little of the flavor of what it's like to go to the big one. But, you know, and it's thematically similar, but it doesn't have quite the same thing to. it, you know? This is a little emptier. All right. It's, this one's way harder to get to.

This one is four hours from any, anywhere that's like got a lot of people. It's a really long drive. You can live in D.C., you can live in Philly. It's about the same distance away. Is this like going to Disneyland Paris? Is that what you're saying? I guess. I don't know. It's like, but that's, I think that's probably way better than going to Wallops, to be honest. I haven't been to Disneyland Paris, but I've heard it's like kind of low rent. So I know. It's just, yeah, it's, it's really tiny. I don't know. The proximity of rocket launch areas

to national seashores is also part of the thing, right? Canaveral national sea shores right there. You got Cape Canaveral. This has Asateague. There's a town called Chinco Teague, which is like a summer destination. I've never been in there in the winter. I have no idea if anything's open. I assume there's some things. But like in December when this launch was happened, I was trying to find potential meetup locations if I was able to swing like a two or three day trip. And there was like one place that's called a brewery in chinkotique that's about it which caleb was disgusted he was like man i he was like i went to huntsville a couple of months ago and i there's breweries everywhere there's like five on a street and i'm like yeah it's a college town like that makes sense you know

so but honestly that is that's one of the things that we were just talking about on this trip is that for rocket lab who's building out a big presence here uh anyone else that wants to move in and make use of this like you have to convince people to go move here and work here. Yeah. And there's not a big draw. And, you know, SpaceX has that same issue with Boca Chica,

but they also have like the, the, we're going to Mars. We have the big vision. We're, you know, barely not a cult mentality. Yeah. Honestly, though,

that's like part of the thing. It's the same reason that people go, you know, maybe not so much now, but used to go work at Apple back in the day. It's like, you know, the famous line from Steve Jobs, do you want to make sugar,

water, rest of your life, or do you want to come work on something that matters? Like, there are companies that can say that, because of the position that they hold in any given industry. I'm not quite sure that Neutron for Rocket Lab has that thing. So that's a problem.

Hmm. All right. Okay. So anyway. Yeah, it's a talent's always a difficult thing, I guess, right? But I mean, but so here's the question, though. Like, isn't, I don't, I don't know in New Zealand that well, but the Maya Peninsula doesn't strike me as like in the way area either.

That's totally true. I have no idea what it's like to get out there. Yeah, you're right. Maybe they're just like really good at this. That's true. Maybe they're better at it than we think they are. That's so true, yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I know that one's pretty remote too because the nearest public viewing of that launch site is like 15 miles away or something. So which is what we talked about is like not a lot of people have been this close to an electron. So let's talk about that part because, you know, I mentioned we roll up the press site and we're all underwhelmed by the site's tiny black rocket,

hard to see. this thing lit off and I was blown away. Like, legitimately blown away. I was expecting to be even more underwhelmed than I was when I got to the press site by what this thing sounded like and felt like in person. And I was 1,000% completely wrong. It was amazing. It was an incredible rocket launch. It had the same rocket launch vibes as, you know, not as extreme as some of the giant rockets.

But, like, I have the audio, if you would like to hear my reaction. this rocket launch taking off. So I'm going to turn it on. Who's going to say no to listening to Rocket Launch audio? I mean, that's what we are here for. So that is, yeah. I'm turning it up. You're going to hear my, everything that you hear from when I finish the sentence on out

is me in rocket launch mode after four-hour drive-through farms experiencing a beautiful rocket launch on the second that the launch window opened. So I would like to preface it with that. So here we go. All right. Part that Jake loves. Once it starts. It's clipping.

It gets real low. It gets real low. I'm telling you, man, this thing, this is real time, Anthony again. It's fantastic. Like, it was a real rumbler. It had that same kind of, same kind of atmospheric clipping that you get with the giant rockets. It had a real cool trajectory.

The way it kind of just went a little bit north of where we're standing. So it was like right through Orion on a nice cold winter night. I would 100% go watch more electrons. So if you're anywhere close and you want to go see an electron, the public viewing site that you can go to this thing is, I think the one that they keep open for, they close one for Antares, but they keep it open for electron, I think.

And it's a little bit closer than the actual press site is. So. Oh. Yeah. Okay. Tweet at me or mastodon at me and I'll tell you where it is. So then the diverse. it is, does it kick or not?

Is yes, it kicks. Oh, it kicks. Yeah, yeah, that was, so I was standing with, I guess I don't know, I don't have clearance that I should tell anyone who I was standing with, but someone who works at a nearby facility was standing with me at the Raghontas. And it was, he was comparing it to Antares and I was comparing it to the overwhelming expectations that I had. So we had maybe divergent experiences, but what was cool, we did, we did get to see

this photo is slightly blurry because night mode but we did once it got high enough this was like a just after sunset launch so we did get a little that plume action from you know once it got fairly deep into the second stage burn we started seeing some plumes we could see

the farings as they separated and then tumbled we were seeing them get illuminated by the plume as well or by the plume plus the sunlight and all that so you could track it for pretty long time which has been great. The one really unique thing about wallops

is that it is possible to be freezing cold watching a rocket launch, which is a fun uniquely not Florida experience because it gets cold in Florida sometimes, but it doesn't really get that cold. So I don't know if that's what explains the lack of press attendance

for this launch or what, but there was like not that many people at this launch. Hmm. Interesting. Under the radar then, hey? Yeah. I guess I didn't realize. I didn't put it together, but I was looking at your photos and you guys are all in your

tukes and jackets and stuff. And I was like, oh, that is kind of a... I don't think I've ever seen anything like that, right? We were in your tukes. What are you in your net beanie head scarf things or whatever you call them? Oh, I do have one other picture. Hold on. Well, I have other pictures from the trip, but I have this set of pictures,

which shout out to my mom. took this photo of the rocket launch from Jersey outside of Philly. Oh, nice. So they had a nice little view of the plume with epic zoom slash night mode smoothing on this one. She took this and I was like, wow, that was a great shot. And we're all like passing around where at the press site we were talking. I was like, wow, your mom got a nice shot of that. And I talked to her later and she was like, it looked nothing like that in person.

It was really dark. Like I could barely see it. And I took the photo and it looked great. It's like, oh, darn it. Maybe it didn't look like that in real life. Chuck one up for Apple, I guess. But I don't know. There is something cool about the fact that there's, like,

there is a novelty to launching out of a place that not a lot of people launch out of. You know, I enjoy the uniqueness of that. And they get to kind of start setting the character too, right? So if Rocket Lab decides they want to launch there quite a bit, they could pretty easily become like the company that operates there. You know, like sure North of Grumman's been there for longer, but they don't fly that often. And so if Rock Alad is there often, they're going to be the people. They're going to be set in the tone.

They can kind of make their own, you know, they can play their own game there. I think that'd be kind of cool to start, you know, building some stuff up around that. Which has to be like, that's the point, right? Is that they, one of the reason they chose wallops was that they did have the run of the place. Because if they're at Cape Canaveral, yeah. They're going to get bumped off the range by so many other things that it's like, it gets hard to keep any sort of cadence. So, yeah, they said what?

They're going to do four to six this year electrons out of wallups. I think that was their intention. Neutron's going to fly out of here. We did see the neutron star base tent. Let me pull that photo up. So it's a completely unbranded tent. Where did that picture go? Here it is.

The barn. They only posted about this recently, so I don't know if it's, I don't know if there's much going on in there yet, but we did drive by it on the way into the site. So there's the unbranded tent. You might have gone right by that if he hadn't known to be looking for it, huh? Yeah, I would assume it's some North of Grumman thing, because North of Grumman does have a pretty big presence out in that area. Yeah. You know, Wallops itself does a lot of, like, radar, and there's like a big Navy installation or something out there, too. So there's like other things that would happen inside tents.

But I don't know. It looked like a big tent, but it didn't look like that big of a tent. So I'm wondering if there's more tents. Is like the local community like, you know, picking up on the rocket lab thing? Is that like a thing? Is it the sort of thing where like the representative like shows up to cut the ribbon kind of situation? Like are they excited about it? That stuff definitely has happened.

Yeah. Yeah. There's, well, so it's funny to like watch this, though, because when the first time I went to a launch at Wallops, it was the return to flight for Entaris after the explosion out there. And that was a hugely attended launch from a press perspective. Not only was it, an ISS launch, you know, Cygnus, there was most of the media that was with us was local media from different TV affiliates across the state because it was a huge local story of like, why did Virginians just spend however many hundreds? of millions of dollars to repair this pad because it's a state state project at that point,

like the Virginia space, whatever it was, that was funding some of the repairs. I don't know of all the repairs, but some of the repairs. It was like a huge, I remember many questions in the press things that was like,

why does, it sounded like a local political town hall. Like, why should the taxpayers, you know, Bob or Bach, Northrop Cremond, just like general misplaced civilian anger. So knowing that that, knowing that this

does or it can rise to the level of like capturing local press and political attention I've always think about that when I watch Rockalab announce these kind of things because they do always have

like the representative for Virginia space is kind of the space Florida equivalent I think yeah yeah so yeah they're going to be at the openings of these facilities they did one for a payload processing facility that Rocket Lab has that they're going to use to process like the national security payloads out at wallops.

So they're putting the money into the area. It's just a matter of, you know, is Neutron really happening as quick as they wanted to? That's the, because they're only two years away from what they originally said. That they said sometime, even less than two years, I guess, they said 2024 when they first announced it. So, I mean, if Neutron beats New Glenn to the launch pad, it would be shocking to many people. would be exhilarating for the wallops area. Oh, man, yeah. Although I kind of, I'm sort of like visualizing Neutron, though, at the same place where

Starship was when they showed the picture of the big carbon fiber tank and then blew it up on, you know, like, it felt very real. Like, oh, there's a tank. They have hardware. Like, it was very much like a, oh, they have hardware. They have tooling. They have tooling. It wasn't even that.

Yeah. They have tooling. So, so like, you know, it felt very much like that. everyone was very excited and then that was what six years ago when was that like that was a long time ago um that we had probably yeah five years ago yeah maybe more than that you might be right it might be like 2017 right because he was 2016 and then yeah it was probably the year after and then it was scrapped the year after that yeah it's been a while you're right so yeah so yeah there are moments that neutron is like that that update that happened a couple of

months ago at this point at Investor Day or something, they did announce some updates that was like, we're doing a regular faring instead of that weird hippo fairing. We're changing some of these, like, they're hitting that moment when the renders are getting refined down to realism, you know? So that does give me hope, but it is, you know, it's a rocket development program. So it's going to be late.

It's just a matter of how much. A huge part of it is going to be this spring. we're going to get the proposed draft of the Space Force acquisition for the next round of National Security Space Launch stuff. And that's going to be hugely indicative of this kind of market because the Space Force is, like, can we do it different this time and not just pick two winners that fly everything? Can we, my reading between the lines is like, can we do that for some payloads, like the ones that need to go directly to geostationary orbit and need a Falcon heavy or a Big Vulcan?

but can we do like a clips style task order based award system for the lower end where neutron would be a huge part of that or would like to be a huge part of that I should say because that's gonna... Neutron is up into that lower Falcon 9 range right? With the weirdest quirk though

is that they are flying from wallops so geostationary stuff is kind of right out unless it's really tiny like that's just a huge amount of work to do to get from there to geo so you're like mid-inclination stuff and there is a polar route that you can fly from wallops i've seen one map of it so it's hypothetically you could do it

yeah i was gonna say you could you could kind of do a sun sink from there right if you just like pitch straight south right away and and and went kind of back down the coast like towards florida i've seen a map of it once here's the one here's the one here's something's like 90 98% or 98 degrees of them virginia space has taken down this map so i'm going to have to show you a low-res version of this. Trying not to read into that too much. There we go. This is a very

detail-free map. I mean, they say it's possible, right? This unsynchronous trajectory down the side. So, I don't know. If you can do it from the Cape, you can do it from Wallops. Yeah. Okay. You may destroy an Outer Banks house or two, but.

So that's the NSSL 3 proposal. Is that what you're talking about? Yes. Yeah. This is now the time that we can talk about this because you've been asking if I can talk about this with you. So congratulations. Here we are.

Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't know, it's important. I don't follow the, you know, like the military space acquisition that much. But I do recognize that that's a lot of money that gets thrown around and it's important. It impacts everything else. So it's kind of important, right? It does and it doesn't this time, though.

Like, I think it does for the neutron and below category. And it does not for... But that's important, though, right? It's super important. I guess that's the point is it shifting, though. It used to be important for the basic survival of United Launch Alliance. They just sold like 40 to Amazon. So they're okay.

I wonder if they can even, like, can they even like, how much can they actually offer to? take? Is there some Vulcans lying around that we don't know about that they're going to be able to deliver it? Yeah, just add some more of the manifest. This may be interesting, so I don't know. Well, yeah, especially because the Amazon deal was like,

yes, we'll build a second mobile launcher. So, yeah, they're scaling up, like, ground ops to do that. But that's interesting, though, that, you know, and it's not just Amazon, but it is primarily Amazon that is bought out, you know, the rest

of the capacity of the industry. Between Atlas V's and Haryon Sixes and Vulcans, and I'm blanking on what else they bought. They bought something else, too. New Glens, too. Obviously, new glens. That's funny. So, you know, five, ten years ago,

the industry needed the Space Force's acquisitions more than the Space Force needed the industry. Sorry, I said the same thing in backwards ways. The industry needed, the Space Force, acquisitions the most of all priorities. And now it is inverse in that this large launch section in the industry would be fine without the Space Force as an anchor tenant. You know, ergo the existence of other heavy launch lift providers that are coming into the market,

but that middle section is in an awkward spot. Small launch generally is in an awkward spot. Not sure you noticed, but it's not great times out there for small launch. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I almost makes me wonder if like the Space Force were, you know, behind the scenes like kind of nervous about the Amazon acquisition. Like, oh, man, they just bought all our rockets. Like, now what are we going to do, right?

But I don't know, maybe it's not that big of a deal spread out over more time than we think it is, I'm sure. Most of the launch industry is operating with the monopoly that is SpaceX at the moment. So the Space Force can be fine with that too. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Right. Yeah. All right, we'll keep an eye on that. So I want to ask about that. You know, we kind of hinted the small launch being a little weird. That's on a little bit of a tough go.

We had not a great showing the week before. Abel had a struggle with their first launch, which, okay, whatever is first launch. It's kind of normal to have some problems. But then Virgin Orbit, which was not a great look. How are we doing? You put it. a show about this recently. I want to pick your brain on where you think of that. Those two are highly divergent. ABL, I bet on them making it to orbit on their first launch on this very podcast. I put that prediction out there and was immediately wrong, but I was not shocked to be wrong by that one, right? Like, that was the expected, it was weird that I bet that they would make it to orbit, and that's rightly so for a reason, right? No one ever does. I didn't

think it would go wrong so quickly. And it sounds like they had some sort of fire that spread that cut the power to their whole vehicle and then it was like 10 seconds and they were done. But they already have other hardware and flow. The biggest question mark with them was going to be, so they're one of the companies that has that containerized launch system thing going, which is we can fly from any concrete pad where you can get rocket fuel to. So like, we'll bring all of our stuff, we'll set it up on this pad, we'll fuel the vehicle

and we'll fly. So we can fly from Alaska, we can fly from Canaveral or Wallups or. anywhere in the UK, like any of these space ports that are developing. So that was their whole idea. And then their first launch ended with them potentially destroying all of their containerized ground system. Like that was a major question mark, you know? Yeah, yeah.

In the update they put out, they didn't say like our whole ground system was dead, but they did say the second ground system is almost done, which I don't feel like you would say if you didn't need to. like all right that's a weird note to make oh okay I love the handling of that ground system too is

that's nearly complete so I'm like okay so the whole thing was blown up a pat on the back for that one yeah you've never said that you blew up your entire ground system so I think that's fine

and they always AVL's been a little mysterious because they seem to have big funding behind them and obviously they've signed this giant contract with Lockheed Martin, they bought like 50 launches from them to be sold in the future. How much of that money they got up front, TBD, I guess, but they're in a fine shape to have

like a second launch. They, they, I seem, I feel very hopeful about them and their application to the launch market generally. None of that is true with Virgin Orbit. And you know, my history with Virgin Companies, I've never been the biggest Virgin Company fan, like Galactic or Orbit. I've never been a big believer in either of those strategies. And then all of their strategies are unraveling at the same moment.

So, yeah, they might be out of business within, you know, by summer. They might be gone. Yeah, because they've had a couple fail on them now, right? Well, the first one and then this one. I'm trying to think like that. I don't think they had like a big manifest. So they and they're publicly traded. Are they one of the SPAC?

They're one of the SPAC people, right? Yeah. So they have to like go quarter to quarter and all publicly traded companies have to do this. Every quarter they got to step out in front of everybody and say how much money they don't have, right? That's the thing you have to do when you're a publicly traded company. And it doesn't look good for Virgin Galactic ever. No. And now it's not going to.

And so when you have a, this, this is a weird, like, I don't understand why a lot of these small companies did this. I guess because you need money and what choice do you have. But because if you have a launch every like nine months, it's like three quarters you have to go with zero revenue, you know. Three quarters, you have to say like, we lost this much money. We lost this much money. We lost this much money. It's like, it's hard. That's hard to, it's hard to drive any confidence.

I don't know. Like, it's weird. Well, especially because in space. everything has always been like, oh, we're six months away from the launch pad. But you can't do that when you're publicly traded because you have to give updates every three months. And then every three months, you're saying we're six months away. So people have said the same thing with Virgin Galactic. And every time they have an announcement, they're delaying a thing by a quarter. Yeah. And I know you can like, you can be a little cagey, but the general rule is also you can't lie on your filings. Like, you know, you're not a lot of lie. You can. not say some things. Like you can sugarcoat it, but you can't lie, you can't outright lie.

You could get, you know, investigated for that and that's not good. So, yeah, at least with, you know, SpaceX can say two weeks and like nothing bad happens when they're completely, completely wrong. Right. Right. Yeah. That's 100% true. Yeah. The problem with Virgin orbit is that, so

they have, like, I think people were able to track down. They basically had on record enough money to make to like March. And there's some arrangement that they had with a hedge fund that may give them

more money than that but it was unclear. I don't know. I don't understand that arrangement enough to know if they actually can get that money or if they needed

to hit some other metrics before they did. But they have to not only make it a couple of months, they have to make it through an investigation and a resolution of the issue and to their next launch.

And like you said, they don't really have that many things manifest. So a couple years ago, do you remember that they had like 30 some launches with one web on the books? I don't remember that, no. They had a ton of launches with like two satellites per launch or something. And one web was like, this is going to be great. We'll send all these satellites up with this company. And then that eventually broke down. There was a huge lawsuit about one web pulling out of that deal. And they're gone off the books, right? One web

decided it makes more sense to launch things like constellations are launched, which is get the biggest thing available, launch as many satellites as you can at one go. So that was all off the books. And after that, smart thinking, imagine. Yeah, right? What if we did math? But that was like Virgin's whole manifest, you know, all these launches have been like a couple of cube sets here and there, a NASA venture class launch services mission, educational nanosats, nothing like, nothing, nearly as impressive as what electrons putting up, which is, you know, the one I went down to see was a couple of satellites for Hawkeye, who is like a legitimate business with revenue and they're making money and they have a good product and they're selling it. They're able to

afford electron launches. It's a very established business and none of that is flying in Virgin orbit right now. What I don't understand about small launch is that, and yeah, I'm not a, propulsion engineer. I'm not a rocket CEO. So like, throw away my opinion if it's shit. But the thing I don't understand is that like it doesn't strike me as like significantly cheaper to develop a small rocket compared to developing like a medium or large size rocket. Like you still have to go through all the same steps. You know, you have to develop an engine. Maybe it's smaller, but you still have to invent an engine. You still have to build a rocket at facility.

You have to get all the proof. Like all the stuff's the same except your revenue is like way, way smaller. So like I don't know. I can't quite figure out why we have small launch. Like, what is it for? Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Maybe that's naive, but an electron's easy pulling it off.

Like, they're selling stuff, right? Barely. Like, they got a couple of year and they're all inventing big rockets now. So I'm right. They're all working on big rockets. The costs of the small rockets have grown substantially. So, you know, Rocket Lab back in the day was offering $4.9 million for a launch. And then it was up to like 5-6.

And then, like, the last one I've seen quoted was like 7.8 or something. And I would not be shocked in today's economy to see that grow to 10 million a launch. So, yeah, yeah. 10 million launch for, what, three, 400 kilograms? Like, it's not great. Yeah. The cliche that they use of, like, hiring a ride chair service is exactly the right analogy because, like, sometimes I just want to take a lift somewhere.

I don't want to deal with anything else. I just want to walk out my front door and get in a car and go to the place. And that is the exact right analogy as, like, kitschy as it sounds to apply that to launch. Like, that is exactly what Hawkeye just bought and launched this week, you know? The crazy, like, bundling of small sat ride shares that SpaceX is doing and Spaceflight had done before. I don't, I haven't heard a lot of details in the inside of SpaceX stuff, but something's going on there, right?

Back in the day, do you remember Space Flight had that SSOA launch where they launched 64 satellites or something on a SpaceX vehicle. Do you remember this launch? No. It was like a big deal at a time. It was a big deal at the time. I remember a space slice relationship with SpaceX, yes. It's been tumultuous. After that launch, there was some message board that I received a couple of links to that was people talking about like everything that went wrong in that mission and no one knew where their payloads were. They were bumping into each other when they were deployed. Nobody was talking to their payload. They didn't know which one they were so they couldn't send communications. It was a mess, because everything just deployed all at once.

And then, so I don't know if the transport emissions on SpaceX, Falcon 9s are doing any better in that department. But at the same time, the idea with the transport emissions was, we're going to fly on a particular day, and if you miss the bus, you get on the next one. The most recent transport emission was delayed several months. So they're not doing that. So I have no idea what's going on. Like this is what Caleb's job is that Quilty Analytics is to actually do research and figure this out. So I can just sit here and say, I have no idea what's going on with this section of the market.

I have no idea if any of it makes sense. And you're right that maybe the best signal we can take is Neutron exists and Terran R exists. And like, Firefly and ABL are the ones that started with a substantially bigger rocket, so maybe they're fine, you know? Terran 1 had that too We both believe that Terran is not Relativity is not a rocket company at heart

No we don't They're looking for a big 3D printing patent cash out At some point that's my prediction That's all they can do if they've taken a billion 1 point something billion dollars in Like launch services are not that good of an economic return They're not What are they selling?

Terrans for $8 million? They're only going to fly three Terran ones and then they're going to move on to Terran R anyway. So they're not even selling them, you know? It's a weird thing. Hmm. What's going on, everybody? I don't know.

Now I'm trying to think, let's make a power ranking of the small rockets that confuse us most. Okay? Is going to do this? Yeah, okay. So are you more Virgin orbit or Taryn one? it's got to be Virgin Orbit yeah

yeah because like even forget the the like the technical issues they had just like even when it was working it was like half the payload capacity for twice the price

and with all the complication of an airplane in the in the launch procedure right like it just didn't make any any sense ever to me Virgin Orbit and spin launch are in the same category in my mind and that sounds so mean and let me explain

That's really hard. Let me explain. Let me explain. Let me explain. Let me explain. If you and I, let's just roll the clock back. It's IAC 2019, okay? We go to that Planet Society meetup,

wherever the drinks are flowing, okay? It's late in the evening. We sit down at the bar and I'm like, hey man, I got a couple ideas on how we could get the space better. Like, what if we just, what if we took the rocket but started from a plane? You'd be like, that, you know what? Like that, that's awesome. And then I'm like, well, wait, what if we didn't need a plane?

What if we just flung it really fast? Just went really fast. And you would be like, wow, that's even better in one idea. And then you start to implement either of these and you're like, what the hell are we doing? Like, none of this works, none of this makes any sense. None of this is better than what we have. In one case, it's physically impossible. The rocket equivalent of we should buy a bar.

It's totally true, though. Like, they both sound great in that context, and then, you know, yeah, so, I don't know. Yeah. The only thing that Virgin Orbit has going for it is that I think they have a sellable idea. The whole, like, we'll fly to you and launch your satellites from where you live. But nobody seems to care except them. But can't, yeah, theoretically can't ABL do that too, though? Yeah.

Well, sort of. Yeah. Can they just put it all in a container and ship it to, You know. You still have some geography to depend with. Like, I don't know what the range of that 747 is when it has a rocket on it, but it's pretty far. So even if you're like, you know, if you're Belgium, they could take off from there and fly

far enough into a body of water or north enough into the North Pole and launch from there. And you're like, technically we launched from Belgium. But like nobody really cares. Yeah, because, but I guess then it's like, is it the incremental addition of being able to defeat some of that geography. Is that worth it compared to the extra cost and trouble? You'll sell a couple that way, I guess. Like there's a couple of, I mean, listen,

there are higher ups within the Department of Defense that are actively interested in spin launch. So somebody would buy it. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. All right. So Virgin orbit and then are we saying, then we're saying Taryn?

Is that where we? I think Taryn won. because is relativity not just doing complete sunk cost fallacy at this point? Well, not when they can just use the exact same tooling, Anthony. That's the whole business plan. You just go on the computer and you backspace out the two meter diameter and you put in 5.4 and hit enter and then you're rocking. You just made it make sense to me.

They needed a thing to show that their printing tech could put. print more than one thing. They turned rocket manufacturing into a reusable function. You just put in the parameters. I know you think you're joking right now, but you're making this make sense. Our thesis is that that company

is about additive manufacturing, right? And if they went and tried to sell that to somebody and say, and they said, great, what have you made with it? And they're like, this one rocket. They'd be like, how do I know it works for anything else? So now they can go, these two rockets, you're exactly right.

They're going to sell it to other rocket. They're going to sell the technology. to other small launch companies for when they realize their small rocket isn't good enough, they can really easily pivot to a large rocket. All you do, you go in your application, you hold shift and then you drag this one corner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your proportion is the same if you hold shift on the corner. It's really important, guys.

Okay. All of a sudden, Terran 1 has plummeted off of this list and it is no longer confusing to me. All right. Okay. Astra. So then it's got to be Astra, right? Yeah. Astra confuses me because they,

Astra is hilarious to me because they for so long were like, we're going to be the stealth space company. And then when they unveiled their plans, they were like manufacturing a bunch of really cheap aluminum rockets that barely work. And you're like, okay, was that a secretive endeavor? Okay, great. That's the idea.

What I don't get about Astra is, said they did the same thing everybody else did and realized that the small rocket's not going to work or make money. And then they're like, what if we invented a rocket that is 102% the size of the next one? Like, it's not even really that much bigger. Like, they didn't go and make neutron or they just went and made like, where does it? It got an extra like 100 kilograms of pay like something small. I don't understand what the effort's worth.

Like, why I don't get it. Anyway. Yeah, Astra. That's number two. Number two, okay. That might be it. What's left? Everyone else is out of this.

I mean, Firefly confuses me, not because of a technical sense, but because of what the hell's going on over there. They had the Poliakov situation, then they got him out, and then Markuzik got kicked out. Yeah, yeah, there's some fun drama there. So the only thing I'm left with is that, so I've made my prediction a couple of shows again. that Rocket Lab will be bought by Lockheed Martin, right? And I said, I was expected to get more tweets and emails about this. I said taken private, but bought by Lockheed Martin, they'd still be public.

I know. I understand. It would be a merger. That's my, I'm sticking with the thesis that Rocket Lab would get bought by Lockheed Martin. That's interesting. The only other natural pairing we have is Northrop Grumman buying Firefly because of their Antares Firefly beta collaboration. So are any of these other ones going to get bought by anyone?

Like what happens in Virgin orbit goes out of business? Nothing? That's it? Does Boeing want to get back into the game somehow for rockets? It would be the one that does sound like a pairing that makes sense. Right? Wait, hold on. It's a rocket that launches from a 747?

This is speaking our life. language here. It's already a Boeing launch system. We just got to buy it back from them. Unfortunately, that makes a lot of sense. Fantastic. Okay. All right. And that would be the funniest thing if Virger Norby gets bought and the only idea that whoever buys them had was like a different carrier plane. It's like, actually, it's just going to be an Airbus this time. Oh, yeah. Huh.

That would be really funny. Okay. Tweet us your funniest, or Mastodonus, we're on the Spacety. Spacey. Space instance. Yes. Send us messages about what your funniest version orbit exit strategy is. Does Asthma get bought by something?

My theory would be on Astra. So they had, they bought that propulsion company, right, Apollo Fusion. Yeah. Which seems like a legitimate business. Yeah. So I would assume that they go the way of Mastin and like sell for parts. And Apollo Fusion is one of those parts. Right.

You know? And somebody like one of the small sat manufacturers, like York or somebody wants to make an acquisition, they buy that. That makes sense to me. Yeah, that makes sense, I guess. Yeah. It's not a good of the story. I don't know who buys the other part. No.

We got way too businessy here. A.B.L.'s like, you got any cheap containers? any ground systems. I heard you have cheap aluminum. I heard you got a great price on bulk aluminum. Where did you keep it? And you bought it all before the prices went wild? Oh, man.

Yeah, I'm still, that still cracks me up that they're like, this is our, I mean, Astra is the living embodiment of why NDAs are so stupid because execution is what matters, not the idea. Like, they are the embodiment of that, you know? That was not the thing that you need to do. to keep secret. There were a lot of other things you should have locked up other than that concept. So that's where we're at. This is exactly what the drive that Caleb and I did on Tuesday sounded like for about eight hours.

He has to say, not a short trip. We had a lot of time. Oh, man. It's pretty far. I'm glad you were able to go down there. That's a cool experience to be able to see the first. It was totally worth going to see. I don't need to go to every electron launch. I don't need to go to everyone. But I'm going to go to the big ones. And I'll hopefully get to see some neutron stuff going on down there soon. Yeah.

You know, like four hours is a non-trivial amount of driving. I have to do that. That's how long it is for me to get to Cancun. And I had to do that like five times last fall. And I'm like so done with it. I don't like ever want to go to Cancun again. I don't want to drive anywhere ever. And, you know, I grew up in a place where you.

drove everywhere all the time forever. Like it was a long drive, anything. Right. I was three hours from the airport. Like it was, you know, it was crazy. It's a big flat, nothing, just driving. And I still hated this. So I got it.

I got it. Don't need to go to everyone. It's a fine drive. It's more like the schedule of a rocket launch doesn't always work with that long of a drive. You know, you commit to it. And then it's like, oh. Yeah. Like, how many days do I want to spend down there for this?

Now, it will work out if it's like a conveniently timed rocket launch and we can all, A whole family goes down and we see the little ponies and all that would be fun. But you know, there's about these little ponies that live out there? No, no. Tell me about the Cinco Teague ponies. You think this is a joke? I don't think it's a joke. You do.

I can tell that you think. Both of tractor tire. Biggest vat of mayonnaise this side of the Mississippi. There you go. The Asatig Wild Horse, Wild Horses. They just hang out on the beach. Feral animals on the beach. Yeah.

Just another invasive species. Yeah. And there's, aren't these the ones, the ponies that are, the little ponies with the tiny little pygmy ponies? I'm thinking of something different. Maybe there's just horses out there. It's great. They just run around the beach. I mean, if you're going to be a horse, you know, just go hang out on the beach, I guess.

I mean, like in the grand scheme of horses, those guys have made it. Right. They are living Everyone else lives in a barn So yeah They totally made it They've retired on the beach Yeah

Those are free horses Well, let's take a guess What the title is of this podcast I don't know There's a lot of good ones You have to listen back Tudus are your favorite titles Tudus

I'm not doing the Tud Do they actually use Toot? I think that's what they use, isn't it? I don't know. Because it's like a master one. That is technically what it's, what it is, but I think most people just say post. All right. Spacy.

You don't want to hang out there too much, but I am. At Offnom on Spacey. I want to hang out there more because I'm like really not super wild on Twitter right now, but I'm just like having a hard time mustering the energy necessary to like embark on a new social media journey. It's like been really hard for me. You know, it's like I show up there with 12 followers and like, oh. The climb, the climb back.

Yeah. My problem is, well, good, your thing that you should know, we already have 39. So. Oh, yes. It's great. My problem is that I should love Mastodon. Like it is so of my interests, like the weird little craft kind of thing, right? but it is so dumb at some parts of what it does.

Try to search for anything. It's so dumb, right? Like, it doesn't make sense. I mean, Twitter search was never good either, so. No, but it did exist. So. It did exist. If you went to the advanced search, which didn't have a link anywhere,

you had to, like, Google it. I've never used that. If you fill out the form very, very, like, very detailed, then you can achieve greatness with it, but it's hard to use. You can achieve greatness. Yeah. Well, we're on there. We're seeing how it goes.

If you go on there, you can see at Miko. I've got some picks up from the trip. Wallops was pretty. There was planes flying every direction. You probably, having grown up out in the sticks, Jake, you probably... Yeah, I'm not used to that. I was going to say that you recognize this sign. This is a sign of no one is going where you currently are.

Everyone's just flying over where you are at the moment. Well, I mean, I was going to say that unlike where I grew up, you are in a place where every flight in the world routes through your part of the back through your backyard. That's so true. Any given time, there's like a thousand airplanes. And where I grew up, every hour, one flight from Vancouver to Toronto would go over and I was all get. So you're like, there they go.

That's the plane. That's the, that's today's plane. We're spoiled. But hey, wallops, I appreciate that you exist. And as much as I hate your name and wish it was named after me, I will not protest too much. Should have brought some stickers and slapped them up there. Yeah, you should have. Anthony Calangelo flight facility, ACFF.

ACFF is a pretty good. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. All right. I'm going to work on some AI generated versions of that. We have a last minute thing to plug, Jake, right? or to pre-announce.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, generally we're just going to plug some of our membership stuff because we're terrible at talking about it. We're just like so incredibly bad. So here, let's do with the last two minutes of the show. Yeah, yeah. So, of course. So if you want to help support us, do what we do, you know, sit here and drink and shoot

the shit about rockets, you know, you can support us a couple different ways. So you can go on to YouTube and do the membership there. So the five bucks gets you into. to our Discord, which is a fun, fun place to hang out. They are, they're in the chat right now in our Discord, making fun of other people in the Discord because they're real good at, you know, chiding each other to having a little bit of fun there. They're suggesting titles for the show.

They're waving at us now. That's good stuff there. So there's some fun stuff happening there and you can participate. We're trying to get going a new way to join it, though. So we know that not everyone is like wild about just, going on to YouTube and spending money. I'm not even wild about it. We just try to.

Yeah, we're not wild about it. Yeah. And we're not going to take it down or anything. Like, it's going to be there. We want to make lots of avenues into this. So we're going to be adding, there's a new thing that Discord is doing, which is like direct, direct through Discord. So instead of like going through some other company, other platform, Patreon, YouTube,

to get access to our Discord, you can just go to Discord. So we're pretty excited about it. We're going to be setting that up really soon. So keep an eye on, on the old tutor and I have the page slash offnom.com slash discord is the page that we will update with info probably by the time you listen to this we'll have something on there about how this works now. Yes. So yeah.

And if you want to sign up for all of them like George wants to then just do it. That works too. I do have a PO box. Yeah. So yeah. So whether you're doing on Patreon or you do YouTube or you do discords, it's going to be lots of ways you can support us who want to make it easy for you. That's it. That's the pitch. The last thing before we leave is that offnom.com slash feud. I mentioned this like two or weeks ago,

but go in, do this Google form. I keep doxing myself with my email. Great. Go in and sign out, sign up with this Google form or sign up. Fill it out. Fill up this. I'm so bad at this plug jake. Answer these questions. Damn it. We need your answer for a future version. We do already have a bunch, but I feel like this is, this is a game there where sample size matters. I opened it up. I'm going to block out all the answers so I don't cheat, Jake, but I'll tell you how many we got. We already have, uh, we already have 100 responses. Okay, that's pretty good. That we are now able to make legitimate percentiles of that, but please keep filling it out off nom.com slash feud. Yeah, yeah. So yeah. Yeah, it'll be awesome if we get at like two or three

have it out there. Next week, what are we doing? Yeah. Inside baseball. Next week, inside baseball. You're just saying that word. You don't know what I mean by that? No, I don't.

No, I thought we were going to do some inside baseball. Of like, you know, like, what are we working on and how are we feeling about things? And then also some other assorting space topics. Yeah, we've got a little popery planned. A popery. Great plug. I hope you come back for the potpourri, people. It'll be fun. It always is. It always is. All right, everybody.

All right. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Ciao. 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1.