Off-Nominal - 95 - Horsesh

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica, to talk about Super Heavy’s static fire, Progress doing its best Soyuz, and to somewhat randomly argue about Commercial LEO Destinations.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 95 - Horsesh (with Eric Berger) - YouTubeLast year marked the end of an era in spaceflight—here’s what we’re watching next | Ars TechnicaSpaceX completes a hot fire test of its massive Super Heavy rocket | Ars TechnicaAnother Russian spacecraft docked to the space station is leaking | Ars TechnicaFollow EricEric Berger | Ars TechnicaEric Berger (@SciGuySpace) | TwitterFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-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. Hello, happy Thursday. Hello. Jake, you thought you were going to do the intro because I told you I'm low energy this week. Yeah, then you just went right into it. I went for it. You just stole it.

Well, because right at the last second, Eric Berger's camera snapped back into perfect clarity. It was a little dicey there for a second. I thought I thought what's going on. You're all right? You're good. This is it. Everything's here, but this is the show.

Welcome back. This is the show. back, Eric. Glad to be here. It's been a while. It's been a couple months. That's a while now for Eric on off phenomenal. It's a long time. It's been too long. Yeah, there's always a lot going on, right? There is. That's the understatement of this decade. Jake, quit a podcast because there was so much going on. I just couldn't handle it anymore, too much. And now I got like a little checklist in front of me of like all the things I want to ask Eric and it's like it's yeah I need a whole sheet now so anyway what's up what's going on with you guys uh not the best week and in Philadelphia here

yeah let me tell you how my week started it was Monday right I'm a general Monday fan I'm not a Monday hater usually as most people are um except this Monday where the Eagles lost the Super Bowl and everyone was walking around super depressed and it was also my birthday. Yeah. And then so my birthday was just walking around looking at people going, yeah, that sucked. I mean, this is sort of the curse of being

a football fan born in the middle of February. Like, you're either going to have a great birthday or a bad birthday, right? That's just going to be, like, there's no in between for you, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm still just paying back what I received the year that Falcon Heavy launched

in which we won the Super Bowl. I stayed up on Broad Street till like 3 a.m. I got on a plane two hours later. We saw Falcon Heavy. I flew home and immediately went to a Super Bowl parade. That's never going to be beaten. Yeah, that'll be tough to be. Yeah.

And then you had your birthday. And my birthday was after that. Yeah, that was the worst birthday because the week before was so good. And now this is the opposite. I mean, you should just stop having birthdays. Yeah, I could try that. I'm old enough now. Yeah, you're in your 30s now.

That's when you get to start just, you know, trying to cancel them. You said that as if I just turned 30. So everyone thinks I just turned 30 now. I know. This was the birthday that did it. That was my. That's how I took it. I should have let that myth last.

Wikipedia, whenever I finally get a page will have been totally wrong. My Wikipedia page says 48 or 49. Oh, that's the best. When it says not sure, because like they know a year, but they don't know when it is. Like that. Because it makes you feel like it is. someone born in the 1800s. It's like, I don't know, we found two pieces of paper and you can't figure it.

He's got his first certificate and he's got his driver's license and they don't add it. Oh, man. So, anyway, so I'm drinking a nice sly fox hell's logger, Jake. Okay. Look at that thing. Hells logger. Helleds. Helleds.

What's with the extra E in there? What is, hellas? I think that comes from the Commonwealth. Somewhere over in London. I don't know. There's a London. in hell's logger too, isn't there? I don't know.

No one's everyone drinking in London before. No. Last time I made, what did I drink in London when I was there? It was, uh, it might have been like the Australian beer. It might have been like Fosters or something. I don't think I had a very authentic experience. I don't know. Breaking news in the chat.

We do have somebody that works for the Wikipedia conglomerate and is ready to cite this podcast if Eric Berger wants to tell us his exact birthday. It is a dude wonders for the show. show, by the way, Eric. April 19th, 173. I will have my 50th anniversary here in a couple months. I believe this is going to be our second footnote. First being the time that Jim Brynstein apparently killed the idea to fly Tom Cruise to the space station,

because there's been no news after that. Yeah, here I am. Eric, what are you drinking today? What do you got? in honor of the best Super Bowl commercial this time. And New Glenn's historic contract win. I'm trying to dream of Blue Moon. I got to be honest.

What was the commercial? Was it good? I literally saw no commercials. It was just sort of like a Bud Light, Coors Light battle off. And sort of this is a Coors Light. This is a Mill Light. And at the end, it's sort of the bartender compels. It's actually, this is a Blue Moon commercial.

It was really pretty funny. I thought most of the. this year were pretty bad, like not entertaining at all, but that one's great. Not having a direct rooting interest in the game this year. Sorry. Philadelphia people. But it was, you know, it was a little disappointing. I've got a, here, I'll turn it this way. Rio de Lumber, it's an IPA de la Costa Oeste, West Coast, Ipa from Golima. So I guess they live near a volcano and they made a volcano beer. I'm trying it up.

I'll see how it goes. Never had this one before. Cheers. Good packaging. I'll give it that. Yeah. I did get a little nervous that you opened it before you turned it sideways. No, I didn't. Hey, this is good. This is the first, I think this might be the first, like, good IPA I found them. They're not great at the IPA thing. I'll just straight up. excited about a beer since you've moved there. So this is great. I'm like, nice. That's great. All right. We're just. Do they carry it at the beer company? A beer store? Well, so the beer store is too far from me now. I'm moved. So, but there's another, there's a brand new grocery store in my house that has like a great like one of those like hipster whole foods,

craft beer kind of sections. And that's where I found this. So it's for you. Literally for you. They're like that one guy keeps coming in. Yeah. Yeah. That beer fan just keeps driving past this place on the highway. We got to trap them. That's how it goes. All right. What are we talking about today? Because we have,

gosh, we have a lot of stuff to ask Eric about. Where do you want to start? Eric even gave us a little teaser list himself, what he wanted to talk about. So I don't know where you want to start. Especially absent on the list was Anthony being right damn near five years ago that we should have bought out the Russians.

That's what we're getting into first. How long ago was it that we talked about? It's been a while. I looked for it the last time that this happened, which is a couple weeks ago at this point, and I feel like it was 2018-ish when we were having a discussion about bouncing up from the program. Yeah, I mean, this is very concerning. We're talking about the progress vehicles. Coolent leak issue, which is shockingly similar to what happened in December with Soyuz,

MS-22 vehicle attached to the station. I have a really good conspiracy theory. I'd love to hear it. And it's going to, I think, I've been thinking about this for a couple of days, and I thought, this is what I'm going to roll out as the opening segment of an off-nominal, Jake. I didn't even tell you about it. Oh, no. So, I use MS-22 leaks, right?

We see the coolant spraying everywhere. Yeah. And they're like, we're going to figure this out. We're going to do some investigation. I'm pretty sure they used one of their robots. arms to go investigate this first, right? They used the European arm on the Naoka

module. And then that's the picture that they released this week. Well, was that that picture? No, that was a shockingly good picture. That was a Canada Arm picture. Okay, that was a Canada Arm picture, which they took after they used the robotic arm to go investigate originally. So I'm going to say that there's a drill bit on the end

of the robotic arm and they drilled a hole in the Soyuz. And this time, they were the ones that did it on orbit. And then they took a picture and they went, oh, look, there's a hole. Look, everything's fine. It must, something must have to hit our Soyuz. This is my horseshoe theory conspiracy theory in response to Dimitri Rogosin. I agree it's a horse theory.

Different letters you would end with, yes. I would end with different letters on that. You know, it's, I don't know. what's going on. Honestly, the imagery that they released for me backed up the idea that it was a micrometeerite that damage the soles. I mean, it sure looked a lot like the shuttle dings we saw back in the day. And so I kind of believe them when they say that. But it's awfully strange to think that something very similar happened two months later, the same kind of vehicle, same kind of cooling system. You know, it's a big mystery.

NASA has not really addressed this publicly at all. And so, you know, I don't know what it means, but it's very concerning. And this is, you go back to 2018 and there is a long litany of technical issues with Russian vehicles visiting or docking to the space station. And it's very concerning. I mean, it's a serious quality control issue, most likely. They pay their workers terribly. They're probably losing out on important supplies from the West that they need to keep those vehicles up and running, although this progress was probably built mostly pre-war because it got there in October of last year.

It's just the Russian space industry, sorry to say, is 60 years old, 7 years old, and is still running on technology that's 50 years old. And it's just, it's fading away. This is exactly the kind of thing I think you would see from underpaid workers who don't have the tools, materials, facilities that they need to build spaceships. And I don't see it getting better. And so it's, you know, NASA is probably going to continue to sort of say, try to be a good partner and say it's fine, you know, yada, yada. But it seems to be an accelerating cadence of failures. And it's a real serious issue. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like it's, I was saying in our Discord that it's, it's, it's starting to feel like we're really on the precipice of some pretty like serious stuff because as serious as it's already been, the trend line is just not good. And, you know, we, so Anthony, I were talking, you know, they're, they're, they're moving the seat over for like the, the sole you seat over to the dragon.

Seat liner. Don't push and Jake. considering, well, still, but like they're considering home on the floor in a sleeping bag. That's where we're at the moment. But the fact that that's even on the table really tells you how serious it is, right? So here's how good of a partner of SpaceX was to NASA on that. I have it on good authority that within 48 hours of this incident happening, SpaceX had a plan to NASA, whereby not just Frank Rubio, but the two Russians could come back safely on that crew dragon. And they sort of had it all engineered out how it was going to happen.

And we're like, we're ready to support this. NASA eventually, I think, went to Russia. And Russia, I think, for political purposes, does not want to have that sort of, does not want to have those seat liners moved over because it would look pretty bad, I think, to the home audience. But, you know, they've got options for getting the crew home safely. The fact of the matter is, you know, there is, there still is no easy way for the Space Station to break apart if the Russians were to be jettisoned or the relationship to be ended.

You know, everyone talks about the Axiom module, which is going up, which could replace the Russian service module in terms of functionality and so forth. But, you know, they recently delayed that to 2025. And as much as I like what Axiom is trying to do, I don't think they're going to be ready by 2025. And so you're going to need Russia for at least three more years, two and a half, three more years. And to my knowledge, I could be wrong about this, but, you know, there were suggestions back, you know, when the tensions were really high last spring and summer, the NASA ought to be

putting on a crash course to build some kind of functional module to, you know, provide power and propulsion or to provide, excuse me, propulsion services. And to my knowledge, that hasn't happened or isn't happening. It could be, they could be doing it in secret somewhere, but I haven't seen the contracts or anything for it. So, you know, we're still kind of in this situation where space station probably could live. I mean, I think that between North Grumman and SpaceX and potentially Boeing, they could sort of come up with a plan to keep

things going. But the easiest and most straightforward road for NASA to continue to try to make this partnership work, the question is, does that become untenable now for technical reasons rather than political ones? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's sad, though,

that like this has, like the final years of the space station have to be in a way that's like kind of limping across the finish line. It's such an undignified end for it. Like this partner has done. In the history of spaceflight, the ISS will be a foundational thing, right? So it's really depressing for me that this is kind of where we're ending up with it. I think, you know, it's, I think the history of the space station still has yet to be written.

It will be the longest flying space vehicle ever, right? I mean, there's nothing that comes close. with the Russian space stations. I mean, ISS has been flying now for 20, 23 years, 22 years. Right before my birthday.

Yeah. It all comes back to you, doesn't it? So, and I think, but I think the biggest historical legacy of ISS is going to be the fact,

actually, that it enabled commercial spaceflight to take flight. I mean, if you don't have ISS, you don't have, you don't have cargo delivery, you don't have crew delivery,

and you don't have sort of really the opening of a frontier for commercial space activities and low with orbit to take place. So it's been very important in that regard. And we'll see. I mean, it's not an undignified way to go. I mean, it's an old hardware. They're sort of trying to keep it flying. And frankly, they need it because these commercial space stations are not going to be ready anytime soon.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like it's going to get worse, though. That's kind of what I mean. The trend line is either we have to take a whole bunch of risks with these vehicles. And if something tragic happens, that's really not going to be a good way for the last years of the space station. Or something doesn't tragically, it doesn't happen tragically because they just have to stop doing stuff. They just descope it until it sort of withers out, right?

Like you send fewer crews, maybe you leave an empty seat so that you can always send one crew back. on the outer vehicle. There's things like that you can do to mitigate risk that just pull utility out of the station. And that's, that's to me probably the likely thing that we're going to see. And it's going to be not very good, not great. I was having a hard time with this.

I was trying to find it. Katya, who's on Twitter. She's like amazing source that knows all sorts of stuff about the Russian space program, right? I think she lives near Moscow. I think so. Yeah. She had a tweet a couple, maybe last week or something. something that there's an upcoming meeting where they're going to discuss whether or not they are

going to extend their side of the ISS beyond 2025, that that hasn't been officially signed off on or whatever. And the way the tweet was worded, if I could remember from the depth of my memory, it was more of like a, is this technically feasible versus the political side. So that coupled with the fact that, you know, the post-Rogosin era of Roscosmos is trying to not be such shitsters that they used to be, that they're actually, you know, having these joint press calls with NASA. It's like, wait, the likelihood that they come out of that, like, I don't know that we can fly beyond 2026, has to be increasing every time we see one of these issues, because the Vest is not leaking any less. I always felt like those kinds of discussions were basically an effort to get NASA to kick in more funding to the partnership.

to sort of, you know, they lost the Soyuz seat money, which was a lot. It was, what, 240 million or something a year? Yeah, it's not. And this would sort of be a way to kind of cover that shortfall where they could do maintenance and things like that. So, you know, I agree. Technically, it's a real question of whether station can keep flying, but the NASA people sure seem to think that everything is going to be okay. and are pretty confident in that.

And so I kind of tend to trust their judgment on it. But, you know, these vehicle failures, you know, we've seen them need to do manual dockings quite a bit lately with Soyuz and progress. And the coolant system failures. Now, these have to be very concerning to NASA despite what they're saying publicly. Yeah, yeah. Or what they're not saying, because they haven't, you know, they haven't said anything. And, you know, there's, there's,

now this Starliner teleconference tomorrow. And that's the question I'm going to ask because no one has, you know, they have no NASA officials to have been publicly available since Saturday when the progress issue first came up. Yeah, yeah. A related national policy failures, I see it, is not using this opportunity to fund the shit out of commercial Leo. As you're saying, Eric, the, you know,

not a lot of great signs that the commercial alternatives or the commercial follow-ons to the ISS are or can be ready on a timeline that really matters for what we're seeing in the ISS program. There's a budget request that's going to come out next month or so based on the most recent. Oh, it was almost a beer spillage. It was almost spillage, yeah. There was some weird, like, procedural stuff that I saw Marsha Smith posting about that indicates that the budget request for the next fiscal year won't be out until March. usually is around now. Like, at what

point does NASA need to have a line item that is actually serious about ISS transitions? You know, they've kicked in $150, $200-something million on the last couple budgets. Like, what does that number need to be for us to consider it a serious effort? And is that ever likely?

I don't know what the number is. It needed to be there a couple years ago, I think, for them to really be moving forward. And there's a real concern at NASA. Brydenstein, you know, your buddy, Bridenstein talked about this a lot before he left. And he was right. They needed to be planning these follow-on commercial space stations.

This development is really a fascinating one for me to watch. I think it's one of the most interesting storylines in space of this decade. Because each of the participants, I think, so there are four, right? Four. There's Axiom. Attached and three free flyers, yeah. Attached and then three free flyers. Free flyers.

Free flyers. Free flyers. Say three free flyers three times fast, right? It's better than C did. Yeah. Okay. My wife's a GI doc. That's a totally different thing.

Northrop Grumman with a modified Cygnus. You've got nanorax and Lockheed Martin with an inflatable and blue origin with Orbio Reef, which is kind of this palatial station. I think all of them have question marks, pretty big question marks. I've heard that one already has looked at the. the market and decided that it wasn't there for them. Like there was not much private market so that they probably couldn't close a business case without side of full funding from NASA.

NASA's not interested. The number I've heard bandied about for NASA is that they'd be willing to spend about a billion dollars a year. So if you're Northrop or whoever planning for a budget in 2029 and you're the only provider, you could count on a billion dollars a year in revenue from NASA. So if there are two providers, it's half a billion or so. something like that. So you've got to go out and find out whatever it costs for you to fly and operate that station. You've got to go out and find that other money. And, you know, I don't know.

And I don't know if that billion dollar number from NASA includes transportation to and from, I suppose it does, but I don't know for sure. So it's, it's really hard to build a space station, right? Because it's a spacecraft that has to survive for a long time. And, and, and, And it's got to work, right? I mean, you know, it's not simple. And it took a long time for SpaceX to build Dragon. It took a long time for Boeing to build Starliner and test it. And we'll see in a couple months if they're ready.

And so the idea that these companies are going to sort of pop something out in three or four years, it's hard for me to see that. Yeah. You know, Axiom is furthest along. They're starting to build some modules and sharing images of hardware from Talis and Europe. But they still got a long way to go. And that one's just as much at risk to the ISS stuff as anything else. So the action one has no place in the conversation about what to do about the ISS failing because it is going to be a victim of it as well.

That's right. Yeah, if ISS fails, then that module's not independent until 2030, right, their whole station. So it's a difficult situation. And, you know, I'm really interested to see the budget for that reason. number one, what's the number for HLS? And number two, the human landings is number two, second most important for me is what's the number for the commercial Leo destinations. And, you know, and we'll see.

We'll see how much Nelson can get out of the OMB for that. Yeah. Your buddy. Your buddy, Mel. You can have him. Hey, hey, he's been great. I'm sorry, he's been great. Oh, dear. Okay.

That was the last episode. We're not doing that one again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so this is a really great point. He just said he just said the success, the World Spaceflight Enterprise runs through SpaceX. Of course he did. He's a politician. He knows how to take credit for shit he doesn't have to do it. What do you want from him? That's exactly what he should do. No one ever plays. He also said he was the one that championed commercial space back in 2010.

So we did say it. Yeah. Run on the mill. I'm getting triggered. So Eric, what do you think about the market for these space stations? Because this is, I mean, I always have the question about these markets too. Because like a lot of these, a lot of these cool new space ideas are often like dependent on creating new markets and not just, you know, cutting into existing ones. Like, are you feeling good about that?

Or do you think, you know, these commercial Leo, these commercial Leo destinations are just going to be commercial in that the, contract type from NASA is different, but they're just NASA stations. Like, what do you think? I think if there was a robust, quote, tourism market, we would already be seeing it on crew dragon. And have you heard any analysis of any additional crew dragon flights beyond Polaris missions? No. What is that? And my understanding is that there are no sort of secret trainings going on in Hawthorne for future missions. Now, I could be wrong. I certainly don't have perfect insight there, but there has not been like lots of people lining up and saying, oh my gosh, I want to fly on Crew Dragon. And my understanding is that, again, imperfect information, but what I hear from people is that they're not like long lines of people for these Axiom missions, the International Space Station.

So I don't know how robust, like rich people going to spend a few weeks on these space stations is. right now. Maybe they just need to see it in action before they'll sign up. And so the question then becomes how many Saudi Arabia's are out there that want to send their own astronauts to space for a few weeks? And like, I'm not sure there's no... And have resources to part with to do it. Have resources part of an astronaut, but Saudi Arabia is like, oh, we'll throw some cash that way. And like if you're Japan or Europe or a country with a launch industry, or a space industry, are you going to want to fund SpaceX to get your people up there? You're going to want to write a check to SpaceX for a couple hundred million dollars for transport.

So I don't know how big that market is. I've never seen a study that said it's huge and bountiful. So that's what these companies are looking at right now. And I don't know what they're finding. But there's certainly the only reason, the only way these things really exist is, A, if NASA decides it has to have it. And so instead of spending a billion dollars a year, it commits to spending 1.5 or 2 billion a year. Or B, there is some killer commercial application that requires people living and working in space and in microgravity. And unfortunately, after 20 years of operation on

the space station, about 10 of which have been devoted to sort of science and with limited commercial activity, we haven't found anything yet. I mean, I can't think of a good reason for a company to spend, I don't know, like $100 million to send Joe scientist or Joe engineer or Sally, whoever, to a space station for a month. I mean, what's the business case for that? Yeah. I almost wonder if there's like a... Do you guys have any answers?

I don't have answers, though. Not only not. I have a conjecture. I have a theory. So, I mean, I wonder if there is a way to, like, if there is a career a job of a professional go-to space and set stuff up for people, you know,

and these stations could be these platforms where there's a hundred long-term automated test things running, some sort of device that you need to go in, set up with a person, turn on, and then leave for six months, and then come back and pick it up.

And so you'd have like, you know, one, two, three people that would go up on a flight, set up literally like hundreds of experiments for this long-term batch, bound. And so it's like it's almost like a ride share, but for astronauts, you know what I mean? Like a whole bunch of companies are buying some, some amount of time from one person to go and do a thing. And there's like this mercenary that goes up. I don't know. This is an idea. Can't you do that on the International Space Station right now? If you're, if you're 3M and you've got an idea,

you probably could get on the manifest in 18 months or two years, right? And have an astronaut. You can probably even get astronaut time for free or for pretty low cost. We just haven't seen the commercial potential yet. And everyone always talks about, well, they could grow organs in space, or maybe they could do semiconductor manufacturing. You hear all these ideas, but you know, maybe I'm too narrow-minded, but it's just, I guess until I see that actually happen, it's hard for me to believe there's a whole lot of industry to be done in microgravity at the prices we're talking about. And when that happens, it won't need NASA to urge it along. NASA is no longer supporting the semiconductor industry.

You can look historically and say like, oh, Apollo inspired all this. And it's like, well, that's not the case anymore because it's overtaken. And this conversation, I had Lori Garver on Miko last week, something she said about the fact that commercial Leo destinations are actually not racing the end of the ISS, but they're racing the start of Artemis Surface operations.

Because once that happens, there's no more interest in Leo. Over the last week, I've come to the realization that I no longer support commercial. commercial Leo destinations as a national program that NASA should undertake. Because we are falling victim to exactly the same thing that the Russian space program is doing, which is this is the only point of pride to continually fly people in Leo. So we're going to just pay whatever it is to keep doing it. If no company can come up with a business model that works and NASA doesn't want to fund their own,

like, okay, let me flip this around and say, if no commercial company was interested in the commercial Leo design contracts that came out, in 2021 or whatever it was, would NASA have undertaken a program in-house to build a new space station? I would say no and point to the fact that they're going to let the ISS fall into the ocean before they fund a propulsion module to take over for the Russian half. So if NASA itself is not incentivized to build a space station to continue a Leo presence, how are they going to motivate any company to do that when there's clearly not a gigantic market here that's rare, like at some point will there be? Probably.

is there right now? No. Why are we going to continue to support that? They have four companies that are interested in it. And if you take Nass out, how many are left? One? I think one. Maybe zero. Who's the one?

Blue might just keep doing it because they care about doing it. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. I know that's 100% sure. Well, then there you go. They are not, they are not. Here's what I've been told. I've been told by people I trust that Bezos, Jeff Bezos is not particularly interested in

low with orbit space station. If he can get government money to help fund its development, great. Keep going. If not, he's going to move on to all the other things he's working on. Great. Skip it. China's getting stuck at their station now for the next 10 years. That's been my thesis about their station since they put it up.

Russia's clinging onto it because it's the only thing they can do right now and they're struggling at doing that, flying stuff to Leo. Let's just skip it and not put the budget line item in for commercial Leo anymore. Artemis looks like it has some promise politically and technically. Let's move on. I think that's a wrong-handed approach, Anthony, because I would say that Artemis, initially at least, is happening one time a year for a week or two. And if you're going to be a space-faring nation, you really ought to be a space-faring nation. So if you have a budget of one to two billion a year to maintain a presence in lower orbit, I think that's well worth the 7 to 8% of

your space agency budget, civil space agency budget to maintain it. Forever? You got to prime. NASA should prop up the horse industry. We should ride more horses in this country and NASA should keep us doing it. What if we don't care about Leo? What if we do care about Leo? I mean, I care about Leo.

I mean, I think we ought to preserve it. And I think we ought to be figuring out what to do up there. I mean, it's, you know, what if we'd had the same attitude toward launch 20 or 30 years ago? Only the government, you know, I mean, the government did it until the private sector came along and did it. There were doing stuff in launch outside of the government anyway. There was like satellite telecom industry, which is the one killer app for space that always has been. And now it's like a purely commercial enterprise, right? Precisely my point.

But I don't think just waffling at a station is going to develop. up that in 20 years. You don't get there overnight. It's getting hot. It is getting hot. I did not have on my bingo card that Anthony would become the number one fan of the Lunar Gateway. I just did not have that on my list today. I flip back and forth so violently, but I just like how many decades are we going to spell? And nanorax and Lockheed Martin and Northrop and Axiom do not come on Anthony Colangelo shows. He's a hater. Had them all on. Talk to them all. Still I'm unconvinced. Like, that's my point, though. Like, how, I just don't know how many decades we need to spend.

Like, let's try the lunar surface. It's within our grasp at the moment. Let's just try that one for a little bit and see if there's more, if there's at least as much interest as going there as there is going to Leo. Because other than the businesses running the place, the operators, I'm not seeing a lot of interest, you know, even if, even on the ISS, like, if you didn't have that subsidy program to develop. Every major U.S. aerospace.

company has an interest at present in commercial Leo destinations. Exactly, but they are really struggling to find these customers at the end, you know? We don't know that. We are making suppositions here, but maybe we're wrong. I'm going to rely on my vibe checks, which I did to suss out the astrobotic launch date, and my vibes are not good on finding customers because they're all just pissy about NASA can't support us all, and they need the downselect to less of us sooner. One quote from Maryland.

No, no, no, no, again. We've had all this on the show and none of them have good vibes. That's one data point. I mean, I'm not an optimist either. Look what Bob Bigelow said he was going to do a study on the market for commercial Leo and then like a year-half later's company went backgrows. He was like, what about UFO research? The vines aren't great.

But I mean, I think we've got to do the experiment to get the results. Yeah. You know? I think that's where I fall too. I think I agree with Eric. It's like maybe it doesn't like make sense to do it. But just the if NASA can get away with only spending one billion a year to incentivize a company to go at it and go hard at it, maybe two companies.

Yeah, man, a billion dollars in that. It's not that big a deal. We've waste way more on crappier stuff with NASA. So I mean, it's, I'm fine with that. There's an elephant in the room here too, right? I mean, okay, so you got these companies that all. except for Orbel Reef are relying on Crew Dragon to get people up there, right? Because it's the reliable system.

It's the one that's going to be flying often. It's by far, it's the lowest cost. But when it's SpaceX decides, well, you know what? Whenever the operational commercial Leo destinations contract comes out and says, you know what, we're going to put a starship up there. And we're going to provide all of these services, plus an airlock, plus, you know, we can bring our people home. You don't need transportation up and now.

where the transportation up and down. I mean, if I were a business person at Axiom, that's what would concern me. It's like, okay, well, we're going to spend six years building our space station, but SpaceX in six years will have launched Starship 200 times. And, you know, all of a sudden, they can take people up for, well, you want to go for two weeks, you want to go for six months, we can customize your order. And so I think that's another. a threat to the business model. I just think, Anthony, fundamentally, you don't abandon the territory

you've claimed, and humans, excuse me, have sort of put down a marker and lower Earth orbit, and I don't think we should step back from that. My general thesis on your most recent point about Starship going up there and just flying some short-duration missions or whatever it is, is that that would be a response to demand. And even, you know, launched as an example, did NASA will SpaceX's launch industry into existence, or did SpaceX start banging down the door and take good opportunity of commercial cargo and crew

when it came about? I would say that's a complicated story in a year or two, you ought to buy a book about that. Always be closing. I mean, it was a, NASA had a need. and SpaceX met that need and they went above the genius of SpaceX and Elon Musk, you know, for better or for worse, you know, what you think about him. But the genius of him is that he saw beyond the contract from NASA, the government opportunities

and sort of had his own vision for what the future would look like and was willing to invest money and time and personnel into bringing that about. So he, you know, it's some of both. Like, NASA had the opportunity, but SpaceX seized it and built upon. And Jake, what is our current SpaceX thesis? Oh, which one? That they are the extreme outlier of all outliers. And furthermore, all of this continues to make my point.

NASA's commercial cargo and crew programs did not bring about a huge commercial market. It brought about SpaceX being the dominant. And it also brought about Antares. And it also brought about Starliner. And it also, you know, like there is not a huge. of successes here, of NASA being able to will a market into existence. And if that's my problem. I agree. I agree. But, you know, you've got to look a little bit further beyond the

companies like Planet, which have also sort of, you know, there is a commercial ecosystem coming. The commercial space industry today is SpaceX, like the big sort of giant elephant in the room, and then some other companies that are starting to have success, like Planet. And then a lot of promise and BS on the other side, which may or may not come to come to fruition. It's still so early in the game. I mean, I actually, you know, I think CLDs, commercially the destinations are important

because it continues that experiment. And as you sort of broaden the commercial access to space, maybe some really important ideas do fall out of that. But it's sitting here in 2023, it's hard for us to see them. But I think as you broaden access and opportunity, some will fall out. I mean, it's a quick kind of a thing like it's like, field of dreams.

you if you build it, they will come. And you've got to have some faith in it at some point. Do we beat this one to death enough, Jake? I think we may have, yeah. Should we dub tail? I think Eric and I need to go out for drinks in person soon because. Yeah. It's been a long time.

It turns on. So maybe we should talk a little bit about Artemis then, which is the other alternative here. We have static fire, done. Pretty big news. Dunn-ish. Dunn is in SLS completed its wet dress rehearsal. 31 out of 33%. I think everything I've heard is that they're very happy with the data they got from static fire.

Nice. Okay. All right. So do we dare make revised launch predictions? Wait, I just have a question about that. Are they happy as in this went great? Or if we put any more thrust into this launch matter,

it would have blown to pieces? No, I think they're happy in the sense that they got, they felt they got what they needed to press ahead to an orbital launch dump. Perfect. all right launch mount be damned I mean I you know I don't have great insight into the

ground systems and so forth that they're building and how much they're going to survive launch I mean it's it's obviously a very powerful rocket and we saw what happened to you know what happened to the SLS launch tower in Florida when they blew the doors off

and they obviously had planned and spent so much money on that that infrastructure So, you know, I think it's kind of SpaceX is like doing the bare minimum they need to to survive, and they got lots of data from the static fire test that they're going to sort of, I think, do what they need to do to make sure those ground systems are hard enough to survive the launch test, but not do more than that. And so maybe they found the line kind of on that. And I think that's really the big holdup now between the launch attempt is sort of working on the overlaunch mountain tower and stuff to make sure it's ready to go.

So are you going to be 50 or 49? when it launches. At this point, I would say it's probably before I turned 50. I mean, I would think first half of April's is a reasonable guess for a launch window. I mean, it's close. It's not like, I mean, they static fired the thing. And it did fine. It lived to fight another day.

I mean, it looks good. Okay. It's true. I mean, I guess I'm wondering how much insight we'll ever have to the launch licensing process. But I remember also when we were all hot and bothered about whether they'd be able to get clearance to fuel the whole thing. And they've done that. I mean, they got through the whole process. I think the launch license comes when they need it.

Those things kind of always come down at the last minute. But SpaceX has built flight termination systems now for Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy. I mean, they... Starship. They're not idiots, right? They know what they're doing. And so, yeah, I mean, I, my... It could be wrong, but my sense is that when they need the launch license, it'll be there.

That doesn't seem like a huge hurdle for me. Yeah. All right. So we have another lander contract coming down the pipes this year, hopefully. Yeah. Who's going to win? Who do you guys think is going to win? I think we're already on record for this, aren't we?

Yeah, we are. We put a prediction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I said blue just because. I don't think that Jeff Bezos will allow them not to win. I think after all the hubbub that we had with the last attempt, they're going to do,

they might just give it to NASA. Like, whatever it takes to win this contract. Yeah, whatever it takes to win this contract is what the Blue Origin is going to want to do. And I don't know what that means success or anything, but that's my hunch is that they're going to go for it with all the gusto you can imagine.

My counterpoint to that would be Bob Smith. But it's a great question. I'm with you, Jake. I think Blue Origin is the favorite to win. But I heard that, you know, I heard that Dynamics put in a pretty good bid. And so I'm not ruling them out. The their big issue, the huge issue that they face is that unlike SpaceX and unlike Blue Origin, they are not not, you know, they are financially constrained. They don't have a billion billionaire sugar daddy

sort of willing to underrate the cost. I mean, Bezos wants this bad enough that he's going to be willing to put in billions of private money that Dynetics and its partners I don't think can afford. So at the end of the day, that may be the difference maker for, for this. But I don't think it's, it's a fascinating contract, you know, and we'll see what. happens. I guess what was the, I knew the day. Is it, is it May or it's June or sooner than that? What's the, what's the timeline for? It's on our calendar somewhere. May sounds right. I should know this, but I think it's, I think it's June, July, June, July time frame. Yeah. But it's, it's coming. And it's going to be a huge decision. Obviously, NASA does get their pants suit off if they pick Dynetics. But if Dynetics picks the best bid, you know, then the dynamics is the best bid or the one that NASA thinks is most likely to succeed. So, succeed. They should pick it. I'm really curious because the, so the previous Dynetics bid had some mass margin problems, right? And I think. I'm told they address. I'm told they address mass margin

problems. It's a nice way of saying it was way too heavy. I think they've addressed that. Well, and I'm curious about how because I think this contract is also not just a copy of the previous one. It's got higher requirements. Doesn't it require more more surface mass to go up and down? And so like not only they have to fix the last bid, but they actually have to make it better to to match this bit. So that's going to be interesting to see sort of what changes in the design. And they have Northrop on their team now, right? Mm-hmm.

Maybe that's the trick is they added an extra tug so they can take more fuel. I don't know. More sickness. The only solution is more Cygnus. Oh, dear. Someone make the meme. I got a fever. I got a mass margin problem.

And the only solution is more. sickness. I mean, if Bowling traded Northrop for, I mean, Blue Origin traded Northrop for Boeing. I'm not sure how to feel about that trade. But it's, politically, politically, I think it improves Blue Origin's chances of winning. But it's, it's.

Have they called Doug Laverro for a referral for that one? Maybe they can get him on the team. Do we know what Boeing's doing on, on the, on the proposal? Are they building a module or is it like operational support? Like what is the, you know?

I think their contribution is lobbying, but I don't honestly. That's a bad joke. You got a great office on K Street that they can hang out in when they're waiting for the response. Yeah, they got great snacks.

You got to put your people in your places, you know, you got to leverage the strengths. I don't know what Boeing's, you know, contribution is, but I'm sure it's very important. They're going to actually buy the Virgin Orbit 747 back,

as we've discussed. Yeah. Just use that to ferry everyone around the country. Have you guys been following the Virgin orbit story? Yeah, what do you think is going to happen? I mean, I'm going to be 49 or 50. I mean, that's like I normally am like, don't really want to listen to earnings calls, but man, that earnings call is going to be must listen for me.

It's the financial smart. I'm an idiot when it comes to financial numbers, but smart financial people tell me what. So why you didn't buy lunar this week? would have made a shitload of money. I tweeted this. I think, you know, lunar stock is going to pop when they land on the moon and then it's probably a pretty decent investment in short term. But I don't buy, I don't buy, I don't buy space stocks. I write about space industry, so I think that's a conflict of interest. I have no financial interest in SpaceX or any space companies. But, you know, smart financial people tell me that, you know, that the loans, the timely

loans, the nature of the loans, the terms of the loans from Richard Branson, which the last of which have been secured loans should be very concerning. And if you were a private investor being asked to invest money in Virgin oil, you'd be like, why would I want to invest in a company where all of its assets are secured to another creditor? Why would I do that? For a $10 million investment that also included that clause, right? It was like 10 or 15 or five or something like that. It's a pretty good price on a 747 alone. I mean, it was, the last two were like 20 and 10 or something like that.

I don't have the stories in front of me. But they were small. They were small loans in November, December, and in January. It's very concerning. I think, I mean, you know, we've talked about this before. I think they spent a billion dollars developing a rocket that will never, ever possibly pay that back. And if they fly it 10 times a year, they're losing money. So where is the long-term business case?

You know, the only thing that saved them, in my opinion, would be if the UK somehow bought the assets and wanted, because they wanted a sovereign launch capability. But then it blew up, or it failed over the launch from Cornwall. So that was another sort of really pretty bad sign for them. I mean, they are in financially very, very difficult position. It would not surprise me if on the next earnings call, they entered, they sort of announced that they were sort of considering their options for what to do financially. But it's, you know, the last round of funding from Branson sure felt like that was enough money to meet payroll for a couple, for another few weeks.

Yeah. But it's a private company. I don't have great optics into it. It's very concerning. And, you know, you know this. The small launch industry, economics that are terrible. You just can't make money, much money, any money, launching. So it's, yeah. Relatedly, India's small satellite launch vehicle now has a successful flight behind it. And I still am struggling to understand that these figures are accurate, but I've seen them quoted a lot that the development price was 21 million US dollars. And the production cost is 4 million. And it can carry like 500 kilograms to sunsynchronous or something. Yeah, that sounds pretty good.

It's, yeah, that's a real barn burner. It's, it's, I don't, I, I buy that. They could be fudging the numbers and, you know, using free labor from Israel employees. And that's only like parts and time. I don't know. But I mean, you know, it's India labor costs are less. And they, presumably they use technology from the polar satellite launch vehicle or, you know. It's all solids until the upper stage, too.

So. But I can totally believe that the production cost is $4 million. That makes sense. I mean, that doesn't strike me as weird. I mean, they kind of blew us away with their Mars mission cost, right? Exactly. The M-O-M-M-M-G machine. They can do some pretty incredible stuff for a low cost.

But, yeah. Yeah, and that was cool to see them hit. That was cool to see them be successful. I mean, that's great. I mean, it's hard to do that. Hmm. All right. Well.

Okay. Well, we got some good predictions on the record again. I also have some breaking news. We have some trouble. Oh, oh. Breaking news. We have the meme. Oh, yeah.

So that's going into standard rotation for sure. That's going to be used. I had to play the cowbell video. Because I made a reference to my daughter who's in a sophomore in high school recently. I said, I got to have more cowbell to something. She's like, what the hell are you talking about? So I sat her down and I played her that sketch. He's like, yeah, that's pretty funny.

This comes from Saturday. The notable rare North American space koala is who that's attributed to on Twitter. Thank you. Thank you for your meme creation. The bio says space memes. Delivered. I have to see this. Eric, what are you working on?

What's coming up for you in terms of new pieces and stuff? What's coming down that? The burger pipe. You know, I'm trying to work up a think piece ahead of Starships launch to sort of imagine and you guys should help me write this like what

how does if Starship is successful how does that change the space industry well he got lots of thoughts

none of them were founded in any kind of evidence um it kills commercial Leo much to my appeasement um

the the ironic thing is one of the commercial Leo space stations is launching on Starship so um It's kind of like SLS and HLS and Artemis, and so it's kind of the same thing.

It's, so I'm working on that, you know, just other things I'm trying to write this second book, and it's just, it's a lot of work. Any teasers, or did we get enough of a teaser earlier? I will say, we talked about the Logan five, right? It's about the Falcon 9. But someone sent me an email Bob Smith sent to. the Blue Origin Workforce in, that was it, 2019? Was whenever Mazawa was announced for his launch on Starship, Elon and him, Yasuku Mizawa, I think is his name,

had the event at Hawthorne and Smith said, this email. Just, in retrospect, he just looks so dumb. So it's just, you know, anyway, it's going, it's going well. It's just, it's a lot of work to sort of try to capture the development of Falcon 9, the early missions, and sort of what it's ultimately yielded to industry. So I'm working on that, but that's a ways away. Okay. Sounds pretty good.

I'm pumped. If I can plug something, my friend, Ashley Vance has a book coming out when the stars went on sale, I think is the title of it. And it's about, it focuses on four companies, Planet, Astra, Firefly, and, um, uh, bird, Norman. I can't. It's thinking of a world view. No, no, no, no.

And, um, oh, rocket. Got, Rocket Lab. Um, it's, it's, it's excellent. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really who really are into the space industry. It's, it's, it's, it's really well written and it's very interesting and insightful. And it, it, it, exactly. Yeah.

Um, when does it come out? It comes out, um, um, May 9th. May night. Anyway, as I'm reading it, I'm realized that I have not paid enough attention to a company like Planet, which really has a pretty amazing backstory. And it was pretty revolutionary and what it achieved. So it's excellent. Ashley, of course, with D.Lon Musk biography has great access. And, you know, it is very shrewd in his analysis.

Well, it sounds like you're going to hook us up with the connection to have him on the show. Absolutely. He has been on our list for a while. So that would be good to chat for sure. Great guy. Great guy. Yeah. Yeah, great tweets.

All right. We've shared war stories on working with Elon for book projects. Good, good. That's ripe for content. Yeah, yeah. We need to have that show, I think. Did he make you mention him a thousand times more in your book randomly one day? This is a Twitter.

This is a Twitter thing. You didn't catch wind of this? Did all your tweets that say, Elon in it, did they get like more exposure this week? Is that something that happened for you? Eric got 500 boosted instead of a thousand in the algorithm. I don't know what's going on with that. It's just, you know, it's distracting. Yeah. Not in our job description, right? We're on Mastodon. Spacey, not space. You should get on that one, Eric. That would be good. I know

you're on that other one that somebody set up for journalists, but you probably haven't looked at it since you said it. There's a space instance. That's the term right. There's a space. Yeah. Who runs it? No idea. I think it was whoever's also behind tomorrow and the SpaceX streams or something.

Oh, interesting. Unverified. I'll do some research. Instances are kind of like subredits in the sense that like whoever is running that instance, kind of you're at their mercy. Mm-hmm. Yep. We would all get on yours if you want to run one.

That would be fun. I do not. I read a financial times piece a few weeks ago saying, we set up a financial, we set up a Twitter instance or a mass design instance. And it was a nightmare. We're shutting it down right now. It's never going to catch on outside of like dirty spheres.

Yeah, yeah. Turns out humans like centralization of communication technologies. Yeah. So, yeah. I imagine that. Anyway. Anthony, what are you working on? Well, I mentioned I had Lori Garvey.

run and we talked about, I thought it would be cool to talk to her about current space policy things since she spent the last six months just talking about what was in her book. So we kicked around a lot of the same topics we talked about here, but from her perspective of what would she do if she was back at NASA and how could she handle some of these situations? And honestly, like, we were talking about SpaceX being the outlier. And I brought that up on your wishes, Jake, to say, like, hey, this happened, you know, in the wake of policy that you were in charge of, like, now what, you know?

You've got, you've got an outlier sweeping up everything, except for apparently Escapade, which is a whole other story. We didn't get to that. That's why I, that's why I'm at my arm. Late breaking notice.

New Glenn sold an Escapade launch for $20 million, which is a number I had heard floated as a launch price before, but that's a whole other thing. So I was drinking one of those when we heard that launch price, strangely enough. Jake knows why I was drinking that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And we've got Lori on next week, right? Next week, she's coming back. So we're going to be able to talk about Brooke Owen's stuff because that's just, they got a whole new class. But I'm sure we'll get into some of this. We'll have a little bit of a through line from Miko to our conversation today with Eric to Lori next week. We need to then have Casey Dreyer on pretty soon too.

She had some spicy Casey Dreyer content. It was great. We're just going to chase the gossip. It'll be good. Yeah, Lori's great. And she gets a lot of, she gets credit for sort of fighting the good fight on commercial space and deservedly so. I mean, that was, she was fighting that fight when there were, everybody means she was

pushing back pretty aggressively against it. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Join the Discord people. Offnom.com slash discord. Offnom. That's a thing now that you can join by just going there. And you can, you can never fly ride share, Jake, if you're.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a new, we have a new never fly ride share person. It's, it offers the same benefits as the regular price, but it's just costs a lot more. So are you shouting out? Are you doing a Never Fly RideShare shout out at the end here? Yeah, we've got Ian from creator of Max Q, I guess. Oh, nice. That's right.

Yeah. Someone who's Never Fly's Ride Shire. I think there's another one too. I think there might be three now. Is there three now? There's a couple. So Eric's next. I see him dialing on and in over there.

Those two. So if we miss it, we'll come back to it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. See you later, everybody. Thanks, Eric. My pleasure, guys. Take it easy.