Off-Nominal - 99 - Open-Box Protons

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Jake and Anthony are joined by Mark Albrecht, executive secretary of the National Space Council from 1989 to 1992, and President of International Launch Services from 1999 to 2006, to talk about his career in space and space policy, the new era of the National Space Council, and more.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 99 - Open-Box Protons (with Mark Albrecht) - YouTubeDiggnation - WikipediaNational Space Council - WikipediaInternational Launch Services - WikipediaRD Amross - WikipediaFalling Back To Earth: A First Hand Account Of The Great Space Race And The End Of The Cold War: Albrecht, Mark: Amazon.com: BooksFollow MarkMark Albrecht (@MarkAlbrecht68) / 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, Jake. Hello. I am very excited about this show, Jake. Can I give you a little intro on this? Yeah, I want to hear why you're excited. Because this is a full circle moment as we have here, Mark Albrecht, the original executive secretary of the National Space Council.

How's it going, Mark? It's great. Great to be with you. So Jake has not have as much of a history in the podcast space as I do, apparently. It's true. I had to explain this all to him, but there's a reason, Jake, that our podcast is structured the way that it is in which we talk about beer that we're drinking, vaguely talk about news items while making jokes the whole time. And that is the masterpiece of the early aughts internet, which was Dignation, which Mark's son, Alex, was one of the hosts of. It was a quintessential part of my early internet fandom.

So this is like, and I think even Mark identified that when we finally got to be. in touch of like, hey, we have this show that seems, because our pitches are always like, I don't know, do you want to come drink beer on the internet and talk about space with us? And it doesn't always land. And he was like, oh, yeah, this is dignation for space. This is great. Exactly right. Exactly right.

Well, I'm excited. I'm excited to experience what this is, you know, what this culture is supposed to be from the other direction. But also like, so the other side of it is that as I started learning about space and getting into space and start reading about space policy stuff, I discover. This guy who was working in the National Space Council sold proton rockets for a while and then was like, they're the same all bricks? Like, what just happened to my life?

Everything collided at the same moment. The world's very small. It is. And I feel like we've got tons of stories to get to from all that experience. So we should talk about if you brought a drink, Mark. Did you bring anything fun here? Of course. Of course.

As a long-term Dignation beer fan, I brought a. Lovely Southern California favorite Corona. So it's a little early, but never too early. It is a little early out there. Although it's earlier for Jake this week than it usually is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm on the non-daylight savings time anymore. So I slipped over to mountain time for the next eight months, apparently.

It's interesting, but we'll see. What you got? Did you make something fancy? I did, yeah. So I invented a new margarita today. So I found this I found this liquor at the store. This is a very Yucatechan liquor. So here in Yucatan, Mexico.

This is, so this is, where am I pointing here? Naranha, that's orange, right? This is an orange liqueur, but it's Naranya Agria, which is like a special kind of orange that grows here. We have a, I literally have a tree in our backyard. They're like, they're green when they come off the tree, and they're like, but they're oranges and they're sour. So you can almost use them like limes.

Oh, you posted a picture of this before. Yeah, yeah. Some pre-evolutionary lime or lemon, right? Something, yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we discovered which are the tasty parts and could breed them together. Exactly, yeah. So the local place here in Merida makes a liqueur out of it. So I made a margarita that has that instead of the orange, you know, like the coin

trow that you would normally put in there, whatever. And then, of course, I had to add my habanero liqueur, which is also Yucatechan. And so, yeah, I have a spicy yucatec and margarita with a haines on the rim. No wonder you were a little late showing up today. This is what you were working on. It's spicy. I'm getting into like spicy alcohol. And I don't know why, but it's like starting to become something I like.

Changing up your lifestyle a little bit. A little bit. I like it. Yeah. What are you got? So I couldn't, I'm a couple ounces short on this. But in honor of Dignation, I did bring an extremely big beer. And I did bring some duct tape.

Because if there's one thing that Dignation was known for, it was Edward 40 Hands. Unfortunately, I only got a 20 ounce can because that was the biggest I could find at this store down the street. So I'm going to do it, Jake. Oh, wow. Edward 20 cans, I guess it's like kind of a half-assed version, which I guess is only right for this half-ass version of the show. It's not a great ask. We only do in one hand, right? Well, that's a good point.

I'm doing it. So you're going to have to run with the early part here while I attempt to do this without spilling it all over my laptop. Well, at the risk of making this episode entirely about Mark's son, let's maybe pivot to a little bit about him. In fairness, I believe he's watching, so he may show up on the chat line. All right, shout out to Alex. Great, great. Mark, so I'm really excited to talk to you because you were really deep into this kind of space policy world in a time that I find very interesting.

It's like this, I guess, correct me if I'm wrong. We're kind of like, you know, the highlight parts of your career were sort of Bush 1 administration. This is when you're executive secretary and the Space Council. So this is like post, you know, return to flight for shuttle. That's an interesting period in history. We've got the space exploration initiative, which was like a whole thing in itself that we can talk about. And then you kind of come into the Clinton era, which has, you know, more pivoting changes with faster, better, cheaper and all this stuff. And I don't know. So I'm just super excited about that chunk of history. And you were like an expert, I think, on that area.

So maybe maybe just start by telling us a bit about what you did. What was your job? And what did you get up to? Well, thanks. Actually, the journey, this journey started when I was working for U.S. Senator Pete Wilson from California. And Pete was on the Armed Services Committee, and he was on the Science and Tech Committee. And California at that time, believe it or not, had like 75% of all aerospace was in California,

whether it was Rockwell, whether it was. Boeing was. a notable exception and McDonald. But Douglas was there, Northrop was there, Lockheed was there. So the state of California really had all the defense industry in the early 80s. And it was during the Reagan buildup, so they were doing a lot of excite Hughes, space, and calm. And I was working for Pete, and we, he, were very, very convinced that the strategic defense Initiative was the thing that would likely topple the Soviet Union. And 95% of the work on the Strategic Defense Initiative took place in Southern California.

So it was right in our wheelhouse. And I, with a number of other people up on the Hill, really was at the vanguard of pushing SDI. And there was a political pull on the other side against it, to dangerous, provocative, going to add another rung on the Cold War, on the arms race. We don't want an arms race in space. So anyhow, that was my launch pad. I became very good friends with one of Senator Wilson's colleagues,

Senator Dan Quayle. And once he was named to be the vice president for George H.W. Bush, the portfolio, the year before, Congress had authorized the National Space Council, which had ceased to exist at the latter part of the Nixon administration. And they said it's time. And in fact, we'll talk about this a lot. But it really was time for bringing the whole U.S. space program together. And so Quail called me up and said, come down and talk.

We talked. He said, you know, you can either be the national security advisors or vice president of the United States or executive secretary of the space council. And I said, hmm, let me think about it. I'll be the national security advisor. That sounds a lot more fun. Yeah. Well, at least I knew what the hell it was. I said, what is this thing?

The other one does sound like the assistant to the regional manager. That's like, all right, okay. How many steps away am I here? And so he called back later and said, you know, I've decided I want you to be the executive secretary of the National Space Council. And I said, okay, after what is it? So what do you want me to do? And he said, fix space.

So, that's a deal. Just, just fix. Fix it. Just fix it. You know, we're coming out of the whole Challenger situation. We've got these Titans that are in weird spots. Yeah. And, you know, so let's just review the bidding of how broke space was in 1989 and 1990.

First off, we had the end of the Cold War, which no doubt is the animating feature of civil space program in NASA. All of it was the unclassified, safe world way. World Way to compete with the Soviets. Second, the entire defense budget on space, well, entire defense budget was being slashed by 40% because of the quote unquote peace dividend. You know, what do we need this monster defense department when our main adversary has just collapsed? So you can imagine what the reaction was among those who worried about our industrial base

and said, wait a minute, we're going to get rid of all this stuff in the defense department. NASA is flat on its back. The shuttle had been grounded for nine months because of, quote, unquote, mysterious hydrogen leaks after the failure. Oh, by the way. Still haven't sorted that one out, by the way. No, it's still happening. Jake and I were drinking on the beach early one morning when a bunch of mysterious hydrogen leaks started up. So that's great.

Well, and then the crown jewel of the NASA science program. The Hubble Space Telescope, it's launched. Everybody's cheering, and it's broken. So you have a science mission that was the flagship that was a bust. You had the space shuttle, which is costing billions of dollars a year, which is a bust. You had at the time a plan for something called Space Station Freedom was going to be everything to everyone. It was at $35 billion, 10 years late and counting, sound familiar. And so that was really, you know, that was, the space was broken in the United States.

And so the first job at the Space Council was to try to bring things together, organize it, and say, what do we need with a national security space program after the fall of the Soviet Union? What do we need from a civil space program after the fall of the Soviet Union? How do we get these departments and agencies to work together because we had basically four separate, and we still do to a large extent, space programs? So that was the challenge when we came in, is to how to create a new course for space, which President George H.W. Bush, Vice President Quayle, me personally, all absolutely believed it. We thought space is a vital new. At this point, we were beginning to talk about commercial space.

which was large multinational corporations like ComSAT, etc., which would run like a public utility. But it was very clear that there was a growing commercial interest in telecommunications and direct-at-home TV and maybe even Internet, even at the time. So all these things came together. The space program for the United States was at a pivot point. It could have easily toppled over and become, you know, GPS and weather satellites for the military, maybe some Comsats.

And NASA could have just been a shuttle, which was, again, a platform to nowhere. Space Station Freedom at that price tag in that time was not going to happen. So the space shuttle had nowhere to go. In fact, we can talk about this at length. The real tragedy of Columbia was that it was on a mission to nowhere. The only reason that mission for Columbia happened was because Columbia was the oldest shuttle and it didn't have the energy to get to the international space station. So it had to do just low Earth orbit kind of fall to raw.

And it was where we put all the, you know, the, how should we call them, international astronauts, which was one of the currencies that the U.S. government had was they're like, hey, we're doing some stuff here in Argentina. How did you guys like an astronaut? Really? Oh, yeah. And we flew them all. We got to fill them up. We got seven of them. Yeah, and we got Columbia, which never has a mission other than flying internationals.

So that was the time we tried to do as much as we could to write it in the case of civil space program, as Jake pointed out. We said we really need a new initiative and one that's not based on the U.S. Russian space race. It's based on technology development. It's based on opening up space for commerce, et cetera. And that's where the strategic exploration initiative came from. And then in defense side, we said space is just a place. And sooner or later, it's going to be a contested place. And we need to get about the business of setting the policy and developing the programs

that allows us to have a capability to defend our assets. on space. So that was the mission, that was the injunction, and we spent four years hacking at it as hard as we could. Can you fill in for people like us that don't operate in these levels of government? Like before

or in the years without a National Space Council, because it's had an on and gone again off again relationship with the administrations. That coordination between all those different space programs, as you're putting it, like did they just never talk and there was no coordination, or was it just like,

if they got a dinner invite, they'd talk about this stuff over dinner, but there was nothing formal that was bringing people together? Well, of course, they all came together when they did their annual pleading in front of the Office of Management and Budget about their budgets. So even though those budget meetings were not collaborative, the OMB people would see all of it and say, well, why are you waiting outside the door and arguing over why they should get more money? Why are you doing this? Like people waiting for a job interview?

So there's a point of tangency there that the NSC had something called the senior interagency group for space, SigSpace. It was a subdivision of the NSC. So it was deputies and deputies meeting deputies. So the state department could work with them. So they worked together, but they weren't getting any direction. No one was where it came together. So like in any other department and agency negotiation, they would have their positions on things. Take, for example, Lanset.

So NASA built Lanset, NASA launched Lanset, but the Interior Department had to pay for some of it. You know, DOD had to pay for some of it. That was typically where the interactions were. So they weren't at the policy level, which is what is the country's purpose? space, what is your role in it, what is their role in it, how do you keep people in your swim lanes, when do you cooperate when we want you to cooperate? And so, you know, technically there's a lot of interface between the departments and agencies before the Space Council, but there's never a place or an organization or a person who said, this policy is set by the president of the United States,

here are your orders, go execute. Thank you. And by the way, without criticizing, although, you know, I've had two sips of my corona, you know, it's not always functioned that way. In my time, when we had the Space Council, and because all these departments and agencies were in real need of help. Of course, they always defined help is give me more money to do the things I want to do. but they were all flat on their back.

For example, Admiral Watkins was the Secretary of Energy. Well, he had these national laboratories that really were looking to go out of business. I mean, Los Alamos and Livermore Labs, because we weren't going to be making a lot more nuclear weapons. Soviet Union was gone. I can't. It's hard to tell people of your generation what it was like when the Soviet Union collapsed in terms of, well, what do we have to do that for? Why do we have to have nuclear weapons at all? I mean, right?

We don't need them anymore. At that time, China had none. I mean, there were some really crazy talk about the world of the future. And Admiral Watkins said, hey, we've got a lot to offer space initiatives. We've got a lot of technical expertise. We've got the greatest laboratories in the world. Put us to work. So not only did we have the authority from the president go fix this,

We also had departments and agencies who normally were like, I got mine, I don't need to talk to you. I got my own committees on the hill. I'm set. So if you say, hey, would you help me out with a little of this or that? Maybe it will. Maybe I won't. Now they were going to the White House saying, can you help us stay viable and vibrant? So we also had demand and supply of initiatives from the White House.

I'm curious because the way you describe it, it sounds like the Space Council. was definitely needed. Like, you know, it was the right time for it to resurface and become a relevant entity again. Do you think that the same circumstances exist today because we've seen it now come back again, you know, with the Trump administration and carried on now into the Biden administration? Do you think that the right cocktail of circumstances is now present again and that's a good idea? Or is there something different going on with this resurgence? Well, each era has their own set of challenges.

challenges, and this team has their own set of challenges in space as well, and we could talk about those at length. I think a couple of things. Just to be honest, their challenge seems to be scheduling meetings because it's not happening a lot right now. Well, you know, that's a story. I don't know if I'll finish my corona and tell you that story. But I had a strong disagreement with Vice President Pence. I was on the transition team, and I was responsible for all the space stuff. And obviously, the Space Council, they'd already committed.

to halfway through the campaign, which is okay. I thought it was a good idea. And he had this idea of this user advisory group. I said, hmm, okay, what's that all? What up with that? And the idea is, well, we want to get all the stakeholders so that they kind of feel that they're part of it. And I said, okay, I think that's just dumb as dirt.

I mean, basically, you know, we had an advisory board, And the advisory board was made up of famous formers in industry and universities. They were not CEOs of existing companies. They were like Edward Teller and they were like Pete Aldridge and maybe these names are. You know, these were people. We've done our reading. We're good. Ed Freeman, you know, these were great scientists, industrialists, but they're not currently in place.

and we used them as a sounding board. Never had a public meeting. We just call them in and say, hey, guys, we need your advice on something. Anyway, so I said, what are you going to do with this? I said, we're going to have public meetings with these. And I go, man, public meetings with CEOs of company that currently do business with the government. I mean, what the hell are you thinking you're going to get out of that?

He's like, Mark, do you see this ring? Mark, no one's been kissing this lately. And it's just like, what on earth could you get out of this? I mean, oh, yeah. Hey, cancel SLS is the Boeing CEO, you know. And then he goes, his cell phone is blowing up going, what the fuck? I said, you know, and then you have the, and then, so you have user advisor group made up of the CEOs of the companies that do business with you. And you want to have a public conversation about advice.

and then you have the associations that are made up of the companies that do work for you. I mean, anyway, I thought it was dumbest dirt. So, uh, we, that was actually, I'm glad that you, this was, this, you already answered a question I was going to ask later, which was like, the tip of the iceberg that we see, which is the stuff that they stream online, like, what are all the actual things that happened? But apparently there used to be a lot of things that happened, and now there's a lot of these public meetings and we have no idea if there's more than that happening.

Is that kind of the vibe? Well, I'm not on it, and they don't call me for advice. But, you know, what we ran national space council meetings were like NSC meetings. Do you know when NSC meetings occur? Nope. Do you know what the agenda is? Nope. Do you know what the outcomes are?

Nope. And that's the way we had space council meetings. We had Defense Department, Intelligence Community, NASA, Commerce, Treasury. And we'd have meetings and we'd have an agenda of things that the president wanted their advice on. wanted direction on, and out of it came what we called National Space Policy Directives on all kinds of things, commercial launch, exploration, international cooperation. So it's a different model. We deliberately wanted it to be like the NSC, which is a nor or the domestic policy council. Do you know when the last time the domestic policy council met? I don't. Because it's an internal government

function. And that's the way we viewed the Space Council. The idea of it being some sort of public performances, I still don't get it. I've watched a couple of them. And in the end, I will say this. One thing, it's like your homework in elementary school or junior high. If you've got to read your paper on Friday, you will have a paper on Friday. So if you say I want to eat once in the departments and agencies and the Space Council to report on what they're doing, then you set in motion a whole bunch of crap that will happen because they're not going to let their secretary sit there and go, hey, you know, it's a quiet quarter. We didn't. Or worse, I'm good. Oh, Mr. Secretary of Commerce. What's going on to the Commerce Department? I'm good. Yeah. So other than that, I really don't see the

the utility of that way of functioning. Honestly, you sound like you're just a little mad. You're not getting invited to dinners. Yeah, well, I guess. Me too, for the record. Yeah, I would like to go to one of those things. That would be good. I mean, we are as much of a user as any of the users on the list, Jake.

I don't know if the last time you've cruised that list, but, man, we could fit right in there. We use the space all the time. Every week, we're using it. You're using it actively. We're using it for content. We're constantly using it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No call, no phone call. Yeah, yeah. Jake's a foreign, Nat, though. So he's a Canadian living in Mexico. He's never getting a call. I tar problems for me. North American. Yeah, yeah.

I just flew right over the big one in the middle. That's what my plan was there. Yeah, okay. So, I mean, that's really funny. I think it's interesting just to see how, much these problems are different and yet how much they're like exactly the same because like you're describing this situation and it's still it's like it's very much okay that's exactly what was happening in the late 80s and early 90s but also thinking of today all those same kind of issues

a changing relationship with Russia causing us to reevaluate our priorities space is a place and it's going to be contested that's super relevant right now new kinds of satcom like now it's constellations rather than just geosats you know yeah yeah just like all these different things you know, the space shuttle is changed. It's not here anymore, you know? So now that's, and it's also like kind of coming back a little bit. And there's this like all this kind of stuff that's just like still relevant. I find that, I don't know, sometimes it's like kind of comforting to know that things are

consistent and that's what we do. And also like kind of sad that things haven't changed. So I don't know. I don't know what you think about that. You know, and personalities matter. Personalities matter. People gravitate to what they feel comfortable in. and what needs to be done. So, you know, I would expect that in our day and age, that the

Space Council would be much more vocal. I haven't heard, and I'm not being critical here, I just haven't heard anything of the Executive Secretary of the Space Council. I mean, space news, which used to be, you know, with boys standing on the corner of Space News, get your Space News right here, executive secretary of the Space Council was a big deal, because what you said, moved things. And I, I haven't heard anything about what I think of the big issues, which is, what are we going to do about China and space? What are we going to do about Russia in space? And that shouldn't be under a blanket of secrecy.

We should have a declaratory policy so that people know, countries know, where we stand. And it could be anything. But you get these sideways things now about debris, debris. I mean, the Russians conducted a direct cent ASAT three months before the invasion of Ukraine. And the response of the United States government is, well, that's a big debris problem. We got to talk about debris. It's like, what? Debris?

So, you know, you go where your comfort zone is. Anyway. Yeah, yeah. As you were just talking, I was like, I actually don't remember who the current executive secretary is like Amber Scott Pace is out I have no idea who it is right now like I could not remember that at all

I only have one hand to type with Jake who was it I couldn't type I don't know if I don't know I feel bad because we might know them but like I really can't remember I know the name and I sent him an email never heard anything back it's like Chirac or something

Shirog Parikia I remember that now yeah no that's exactly as you was saying that I haven't heard anything from the secretary I'm like, who is this? You're right. There might not be one.

I might be it. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but also it sounds like that might be a good thing, though. Somebody's got to take a leadership in this. I mean, come on. I mean, again, I'm just telling you the way it is. You know, there's nobody who talks about a national security space.

Jay Raymond did a great job. Jay Raymond was out there and he said a lot of things. And I know that it wasn't exactly embraced. but the current NSC advisor, I've never heard him say anything about space, Lloyd Austin. Apparently, he made a couple of comments related to the budget release on space. General Salzman's a great guy. He's been giving some talks and speeches on space, but everything very carefully crafted. There's nobody out there.

I've never heard the president. I've never heard the vice president for crying out loud, head of the space council. You know, a tour-to-four speech on whither, weather, U.S. space, writ large, in the year 2023, would be important, useful. I think it would help internationals. I think it would help the departments and agencies. But there is no sort of comprehensive statement about what are U.S. objectives and space and how are we prepared to make those happen.

that is interesting too to put in context of the war because from before the invasion all the way through right we've times and time again shown like the commercial industry has been they they showed us the russian convoy on the way to ukraine in excruciating detail for weeks ahead of the invasion starlink has been used heavily in ukraine during the entire war it's been interesting that so much of the the space focus on all that has been like the new commercial companies that that are just providing data and services and how impactful that has been to the flow of the war and the information that we know about it.

And then, yeah, to have like, the ASAT test is really one that became instantly reframed a couple of months later when it's like, wow, that was weird. That's at exactly the Starlink altitude. Weird. Super weird. Yeah, that thing really hit different once the Ukrainian vision happened. And of course, if you're a military strategist,

there's something called reconnaissance in force. We used to call it when we were kids that running the picket line, you know, they used to do in the Civil War when guys at night would go to see where the weak spots in the defense was. You know, literally they would go out and in the dark of night and look and say, uh-oh, between this rock and that rock, there's no sentry. That's a weak spot. So that's called reconnaissance in force, assuming you're doing it with guys with guns.

So as soon as this ASAT happened, my view was, This was a reconnaissance. What do you think the balloon the Chinese balloon was? It was a reconnaissance force. It does two things. It actually does something. They test their ASAT, which they knew they was going to work. But also they go, hmm, wonder what these guys are going to do?

Because when we do something really nasty, we know it's going to be a dial-up of what their standard protocol is. So the Chinese go, hmm, let's fly a balloon over the United States. Let's fly right over the strategic triad of the United States. see what happens. And the answer is, whoa, nothing happened. You know, what lesson is, you know, this is what these things are all about. They're doing these things all the time, these reconnaissance and forced testing to see what the response will be to decide whether ratcheting up to the next step is going to be worth it. Anyhow. It's very much like an ask for forgiveness, not for permission kind of reconnaissance.

Yeah. Let's see how far we can go. And there's always the, oops, we're sorry. But I mean, look at, I mean, look at these things. I mean, you don't need to be, you know, a war person or military expert to know that, you know, the balloon, the direct descent or ASAT, the taking down of the drone over the Black Sea. I mean, these are not accidents and they're not strategically important in and of themselves. They're a test. They're like, well, what are you going to do? Anyway, I'm curious to kind of back off this to talk about the other end of international policy that's been going on recently, which is the Artemis Accords and

what you make of that effort, because it's different. It's non-binding. It's pretty amorphous. It's like kind of the shuttle thing that you were talking about earlier. Like, hey, would you like an astronaut on the moon at any point in your near future? Great. Sign on to this long list of things that we all agree to. It's got a lot of signatories at this point, but I'm not really, I still don't really know what to make.

of it. So I'm curious what your input is on it. Well, I think first off, at the top level, it's a great idea. We ought to commit in our civil space program to go with allies to bring people along. It cements our relationship with them. And when they have, they're humans that are involved in safety. That's all goodness. The problem inside Washington is these things become what I call self-licking ice cream cones. So, you know, who else can we sign up? Well, we're We haven't signed up the Tongans. Let's go sign up the Tongans. You know, it becomes an end of itself.

So in the end of ends, you go, wow, whatever happened to that Artemis space program? I don't know, but there are 240 people who are on board. I mean, or countries that were on board. So it's a good idea. I think we should not go alone. We should go with others. There are all kinds of important rules. Like you never want to put them in the critical path so that you go, ah, the Brazilians

are late on the Falman Dicker, so the entire program has stood down. We'll let the Italians do the suits. You can design the suits, maybe the color scheme, but nothing that's really. They would look great. They would be absolutely. They would look way better than the axiom suit. Let's be real. I actually don't know what it looks like, but I assume it's better.

How do you know what the axioms do it looks like? So I think it's a good idea, but I think you can get to the point in particularly NASA, can lose the bubble and all of a sudden it becomes the objective. Getting people to sign on to Artemis Accords becomes the objective rather than it's a facilitator to moving the country and the world the way you want it to go. I mean, if the answer is, yeah, sign up to the Artemis Accords and, oh, by the way, your bill is $32.7 billion. I mean, that's what it costs to join the team, right?

I mean, no. I'd be nice, though. It would. I would fund the moon base. It's a good business. But they don't want to do that because if you say you're going to pay for it, then no matter how little they pay, they believe they are part owners now. Believe me, I've lived this. You know, go, let me get this straight.

We paid, we paid $10 billion and you paid $10 million and you want to vote on everything. You bet. I'm a partner. I'm a member. My $10 million, is my $10 million not good? Oh, yeah. The customer is always right, Mark. Oh, dear.

Okay. Yeah. Hmm. I'm surprised you didn't want to go more into the Mars aspect here, Jake. Yeah, I know. I was like, do I want to bring up space exploration initiative? Because there was like that, that was, I mean, that's a famous, like, pivot point in, like, If you're tracking like humans to Mars, the 90-day study is this infamous thing in your brain that lives forever.

You're just like, oh, my. Right. The groan from Mark. We might just move on to a topic at this point. That's a very telling run. Just to, you know, for context, for those who don't know it. So the space exploration initiative was this big plan to do everything in space, basically. And then there was a study to examine how much it cost.

The price date came back. Some, I remember some, like, it doesn't matter what the number was. It was just so high, half a trillion dollars or something to, to, you know, go to Mars. It's a change today. Yeah, jump change today. Nobody liked it in 1989, though, I guess, is the real thing. So, I don't know, tell us one story from this, at least. Like, we want to hear something.

Every one day late, Jake, the whole name is a ruse. Yeah. They, yeah, never one day late. Well, you know, the whole point of the space exploration initiative was to bring faster, cheaper, better, innovative technologies to use what we've done in SDI. There were numerous examples, the Delta 181 experiment that was done in 90 days. They actually launched something and demonstrated a key capability in 90 days. So we said to NASA, look, you can't keep doing things the way you've been doing them. We can't afford it.

We need to use. You're going to be the engine of U.S. technology innovation. So get ready. And what they did is they said, well, give us the ball. Don't, don't do an independent architecture. Let us take a first crack, which is a mistake. I made plenty. One of them was, Quail said, we really can't say NASA.

We don't trust you. So we'll give 90 days, just give them 90 days to knock their socks on. Well, what do you get? And of course, it was cover the football. We'd like to go down to Johnson Space Center. We'd get briefed on the team. How you doing? It's still very formulaic weekend.

So it was just big reveal on the day of rather than working with us. And the reason is it was do everything that was on NASA's wish list, finish the space shuttle, finished a space station freedom, exactly as it is. Build an SLS-type space shuttle derived, big BAMU, and thence onward. Oh, and then build a space station freedom kind of twin around the moon. I mean, you couldn't have...

This list of things that you're listing out there. It's super weird sounding. I've never heard them all in a row before. You open it up and you go faster, cheaper, better, you know? Push technology. I wanted to see, you know, nuclear rockets and blah, blah, blah, nope. It was just the next 40 years of space history linearly. Exactly.

Turns out. Here we are. Yeah. So that was the 90-day study. And, of course, the press was eager to slap the half a trillion dollar number on it. And, you know, sometimes you can't talk fast enough and say, no, no, no, no. That's not what we're talking about doing. We're talking about a completely different architecture.

scrap the space station. There's no need for it. And I certainly don't want to build a replicate space station around the moon for crying out loud. We want to be on the moon, you know. But everybody has their battles. Still do. Same battle. Still the same battle. Still the same one.

Although I will tell you this, and I will take credit for one thing. And this is just, it's just between us and the people on the podcast. Just between us, yeah. You know, one thing that is different is before. George H.W. Bush, the NASA administrator worked for the NASA administrator. After George H.W. Bush, the NASA administrator worked for the president of the United States. And unfortunately, there's only one way you can demonstrate who works for whom. And that's when you walk into the office and say, I want your badge. It's ugly. It's unpleasant. But thereafter, every single NASA administrator,

when they go, oh, the president's on the phone. It's like, I'll take that call. And I'll do what they want. In fact, there was John Loxson, my friend John Loxon wrote a book about Kennedy in the space program, one of his first in that. And unbelievable, there's this little two pages in there when Webb comes to the president. This is after the president, after the president makes the congressional speech about we're going to the moon, right? 10 years. Web comes in and says, and Kennedy says to him, well, so how are we doing? And Webb says,

we're doing great. He goes, so tell me about your priorities. And he said, well, our first priority is the NASA people and the second one of the field centers. And Kennedy goes, whoa, go into the moon, right? And he goes, well, it's honestly, you can read the transcript. It's a transcription. Webb actually says to the president of the United States. Oh, yes, Mr. President. It's a very high priority. Kennedy stops and says, what? He said, it's among our highest priority. And Kennedy says to him, he says, I can't believe you're saying this. I want it to be the only priority.

When you get up every morning, I want you to think only about one thing, which is the Moot Project. Everything else is secondary. And God damn it, Webb says, the final quote in their web says, well, Mr. President, I hear you. I understand. We promised, I promised to make it among our highest priorities. I sent that to George H.W. Bush, God rest his soul. I wrote him a note. I said, well, Mr. President, it looks like rank insubordination from NASA is a longstanding tradition. Well, anyway, so that's a change. All I'm saying is, one of them's got a space telescope, controversially named after them at this point.

And it's the one that told the president, just take a chill pill. Take a quick minute. I'm working here. I don't think the first lunar colony is going to be named all Breckville, but, hey, you know. Still time. There's still time. There's still time. There's an election coming up.

Alex, you're listening. You go get with Elon. He'll buy it for us. I'm in full support. Oh my goodness. Okay. All right. This is going places, Jake.

Yeah, yeah. We should talk about selling proton rockets. I was going to say, ILS. Because there's got to be some crazy stories from this. Can you just describe? Because ILS still, to me, is like, the fact that it exists is still weird to me, that it's like a whole thing at all. And I don't know if everyone even knows about what it is.

Jake's asking, Mark, what the hell was this? How did ILS happen? What was its deal? Well, here's the deal. So here's the deal. Again, you got to dial back to the end of the Cold War. the Soviet Union was no longer the Soviet Union. It was the, what do they call it, the Russian government of Russia, the Russian Republic, I guess.

So the view of the Bush administration was we need to bring what's remaining of the Soviet Union into the family of nations, right? We're going to nation build them. We want them to have free elections and free markets and blah, blah, blah. So one of the things in a space council meeting, again, behind closed doors, CIA director said, hey, one thing we need to recognize is that there's a huge industrial base in Russia that can make nuclear weapons and make rockets to deliver them and guide them. So if these people start starving, like a lot of people in the auto industry and this industry are starving, and they're trying to figure out how to feed their families, they're going to go around the world and try to sell this stuff. And by the way,

Iranians and the North Koreans and the Chinese will be very eager to buy them. So the edict came down. So we should buy them. It's the only way out. Well, and again, there was an emerging commercial market. And there was just at that time, Arian, and of course the Arian story is interesting, there wouldn't have been an Arian without the Challenger accident because the Europeans couldn't get access to space.

So they built Arian as a response to the fact that obviously the U.S. space shuttle, which was going to be everything for everybody, typical NASA, wasn't going to be there. So they built Arian, nevertheless. So we have defense industries that are trying to get into the commercial space business. We have rocket launchers that are all former ICBMs. The United States had Titan and it had Delta and it had Atlas. And the Clinton administration said, I was then at Lockheed Martin, said, we want you guys to go buddy, Boeing, Lockheed Martin. We want you to go partner and buddy with Russian counterparts do joint ventures with them so that they learn how to do good, honest business. And they have enough business that the engineers and technicians that can actually build rockets and build nuclear weapons are gainfully employed. and they've got the big brother of Boeing and Lockheed Martin who are keeping them on a straight and narrow. So that was the impetus of it was to take this very big rocket proton

that was very potentially useful in the commercial marketplace and to partner it with Lockheed Martin, which also had its Atlas vehicles for NASA and DoD, and created a joint venture company, really it was a Lockheed Martin company. It was totally owned. by Lockheed Martin, to sell Russian protons for commercial purposes. So the ILS was created to sell atlases to the government, DOD, etc., and NASA,

and sell atlases commercially, but also to sell protons commercially to commercial vendors. And that was the impetus for it. And yeah, you're exactly right. taking a bunch of very, very senior DoD Aerospace executives, all of whom have had clearances since there were 18, have been polygraphed at a jillion time, and dropped them in the middle of Russia and say, keep these guys on the straight and narrow. I mean, the stories are wild and hilarious because they are wild and crazy guys. They certainly were in the year 2000.

Russians were wild and crazy guys. And we learned a lot about them. But I will say this, in the period of time that we had that partnership, there were no escapements. You know, Russian technology stayed in Russia. The programs and plans went off. And we made a lot of money. They made a lot of money. And so it was good until Putin, I don't want to blame it on him, but until they reverted.

It was fair game in today's day and age. I don't think anyone can be mad at you for that. No. Yeah. Yeah, we lose any listeners. No. Yeah. So anyway, it was really great.

And we did a lot of crazy stuff in the commercial marketplace because big constellation fenders like SES, these guys, they wanted to buy constellations. They were launching so many com satellites. They wanted diversity, but they also wanted a steady flow of launches. And one of the things we at ILS introduced is we said, well, you sign a contract for an Atlas, which was much more expensive than a proton because, well, again, Russian slave labor. And we said, hey, if for one reason the Atlas can't launch you, there are a process in the contract to move over to a proton. If a proton can't launch you, there's a way in the contract to move it over to an Atlas

with some equitable adjustments. And the customers, the big customers, really, really like that because they got launched diversity in one company with one contract and they were able to move. And we did have a couple of instances where we moved payloads from Proton to Atlas. And so it was a great commercial idea. It will come back again, not necessarily Proton, but the idea of having multiple vehicles in one stable that will offer customers the ability to move from one to the other, that will come back again.

Yeah, we need the retail launch broker, just like the best buy of rockets, basically, just going to one store and just pick out whichever one they have on the shelf. Yeah, it's like booking. It's like bookings.com, you know, a little lady with a headset, and she's going, I've got an availability, how big a satellite? Well, I've got a little stuff. I've got a vacancy. It's pretty cheap.

It's like, but we can get you there March 12th. Okay. I'm not a hundred percent sure it'll make it to orbit, but it is pretty cheap. It says Astra is an Astra rocket. This is exactly what we did at Best Buy when I used to work there. Whatever we sold you was what we had open box in the back warehouse that we had to get rid of. That was the laptop you were going to walk out the door with.

So we need some open box protons for sale here. Real cheap. I think that might be a thing, Jake. There's a couple left in the stable. I think they're all pretty much open box. don't they? I'm not sure. I'm curious if you, there was a similar organization that I feel like I've only read a couple of vague things about, which was the company that technically bought all the RD-180s for use on Atlas 5. It was like RD. M. Ross or something. Is that, do you know anything about this? Because I can never find anyone that knows anything about this. And I feel like if anyone, you know exactly everything about it.

Exactly. It turned out that, uh, it turned out that, uh, Once the decision, well, this gets very complicated back at the end of the 90s. Again, peace dividend, cutting money, DOD decides in 94, 95 that it needed to have a follow-on launch system called the expendable, evolved expendable launch vehicle. And it went to Lockheed Martin Boeing. And they were also in a world like we are today with Starlinks and Kipers, et cetera. The sky was going to be used to joke. The sky will be dark with small sats because, you know, the Leo will be just filled with small sets doing all this communications in the internet, et cetera.

So DOD said, you know what? We're not going to just have winner take all. In our case, it was the Atlas 3. In the case of Boeing, it was the Delta 4. Those were the two competitors. So all of a sudden, again, the market, just like you guys see all the time, these crazy market charts with these small launch vehicles, you know, tens of thousands, thousand launches a trillion dollar industry next year, yada, yada.

Oh, yeah. We're launching daily and next week. Yeah. That was happening in 1994, 95. So DoD, a lady named Darlene Drew, you knew actually went to jail, but not about this. All right. Nice. Said, you know what?

We're going to award these to both of you. We're going to split the award. And we go, hmm, why? we're investing so much money. The answer is, well, there's such a huge commercial market. You guys are going to be making so much money. We want the government to be the beneficiary. Again, we're trying, again, in that period of time, we're still in the quote-unquote peace dividend. They're trying to figure out how to squeeze more juice out of the DOD budget. The answer is, well, we'll have two launch vehicles that will compete and grind off one another.

Well, so Lockheed Martin, and then the waivers started. Once they said we're not going to award a winner take all, then we're going to start having waivers. So Lockheed Martin had, there's a long-winded answer, but it's complicated. So Lockheed Martin had decided that it was going to use RD-180. Again, it was in the 90s. Russia was a free country. There was no stigma attached to it. And they made super engines and they were cheap.

So Lockheed Martin was going to use the RD-180 for the Atlas. once it was decided that Lockheed Martin wasn't going to build RD-180s in the United States. And there were plans for that. And if it was a winner-take-all competition and Lockheed Martin had won, the government would insist that they made RD-180 engines. But because they split the award, Boeing had its asks, Lockheed Martin had its ass, and they said, you just had to prove to us that you could build them in the United States.

So what do it mean? It means you had to stockpile them. you had to stockpile them. And so it turns out that Lockheed Martin didn't want to invest that much in a stockpiling of engines. Pratt and Whitney was the company that received the engines, tested them, qualified them, and said, yeah, it's ready to screw onto an Atlas. And so Pratt and Whitney formed a joint venture with an Ergamesh to build and store

rockets and then Lockheed Martin would buy the rockets from R.D. Amross, which essentially was Pratt and Whitney. So that's everything you want to know about R.D. Amrodrots. Lots, lots more. Jake, this is our going to be our third Wikipedia citing on this podcast.

This is our thing. We're trying to get one Wikipedia citing per episode. And this is the one. What a weird situation. So the funny thing is, we're running out of time, but like the the moment of which you, so Lockheed

got out of ILS and then like months later ULA was born. And I don't know if there's any relation to that but what a chaotic year. Absolutely. It was a chaotic year and here's a sequence of events. Lockheed Martin made a decision that it wanted to get out of

the space launch business. So it had ILS, it had atlases. The government, the defense department at that time, it was not a big moneymaker. You guys still there? Okay. It was not a big moneymaker. And Lockheed Martin and Boeing both threw in the towel on the EELV. Both of them said, we don't have enough money to finish this contract. And so the government goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So remember, we went from winner take all to you're

going to have two to both of the two guys completely independently walking in and saying, you know what, we're out. So the government said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what can we do? And they explain what it was going on. So they said, well, if we form a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, ULA, and the government puts in a bunch of money, then can we go forward and it's fully financed? And Lockheed Martin and Boeing said, yes. Well, once ULA was established or was going to be created, Lockheed Martin said, we don't want this. We don't want a Russian partnership. The only reason we did that is because the Defense Department told us you got to do that. So they went ahead and sold that in both of them went their separate ways.

So that was the birth of ULA.S. We're shadowing. Yeah. It's a shotgun wedding forced by the Defense Department. And in the same year, we're running out of protons and ULA is about to maybe be sold here. Shotgun divorce. Yeah. Yeah.

You got anything for us, Mark? You got any scoops on that one? No. No, I do not. Are you getting back in the game? No, I don't think so. It's pretty pricey. Before we're out of here, tell everybody about your book.

I see it behind you there. I've read it. It's awesome. Where can they get it? Oh, thanks. Well, you can get it on Amazon, and I can get a Kindle, and you can get a hard copy of it. And, in fact, I was just talking to Alex last weekend, because people have said, why don't you have that on audiobooks?

I don't do audio books, so I said, well, I don't know. And they go, well, you know, people are clamoring to get this book on audio, so Alex might help me fix it up so that we can get an audio version. But basically, it's the story that we just recounted here today, which was the end of the great space race between Russia and the United States, which the United States won, and the sad conclusion that the whole human spaceflight program had started as a competition between the two. And when the Cold War ended and Russia withdrew, both of our civil space programs took a huge nose dive.

And it was kind of a, hey, we all thought that human space exploration, going to the moon, going to Mars, was, you know, that's what we're going to do. And the answer is, no, it was part of the Cold War. And when that went away, it kind of lost its mojo until China entered the scene. and of course, Elon and Bezos, who are not confused about what they're doing and why. And so, God bless them. We would have been flat on our fan. Can you imagine if we hadn't had the space station stuff and Elon and now Bezos? I mean, imagine what the civil space program would be right now.

We'd have one flight of an SLS. Yeah. That's, yeah. And Antares. Don't count out Antares. I'm an Antares hater myself, so, you know. Well, you know, it's my least favorite rocket that flies continuously. So, yeah, you know.

Yeah. They do sound nice. Those are nice engines. Yeah, they are. Russians make good engines. Yeah. They do. And when you ask them, and you ask them, why do you make such good engines?

The answer is because we were so far behind an electron. We were so far behind in materials that we had no choice but to build bigger and bigger engines to compensate for the fact. I mean, you know, the Atlas, the skin on the Atlas is so thin you could take a pin and stick a hole in it. And that's only to make it lighter so that we didn't have to have as powerful engines to get it to orbit. The Russians had no choice. So they just said, our competitive advantage is going to be engines. make them big and they make them heavy and they make them unbelievably powerful. A perfect ending.

Mark, thanks so much for hanging out with us. This has been awesome. And people in the chat are saying you have enough stories for five episodes. And I feel like that's probably true. So we didn't even get into any modern day stuff, Jake. That's really, we didn't do faster better cheaper. We didn't do. All right.

So two. Anyway, to come then I guess. Recycling them on the schedule for sure. Yeah. Well, thank you guys for having. having me. It's been great fun. Awesome. Jake, you got anything you've been working on lately? Not right now. No, I'm getting prepped for a vacation, so I'm kind of winding stuff down right now. That's right. Yeah, yeah. So I'll be here next week. We've got Chris Davenport is joining us to be back on the show. So we're very excited about that.

And then you'll be without Jake for a while. So you'll have a Jakeless month, which is going to be interesting. It'll be an all-anthony all the time situation for a little bit there. Totally is going to be interesting because I haven't really done a lot of planning for it either. So we'll see what happens. You've done quite, don't be mine. Come on. Yeah, I've done a little bit. You've done some planning.

Yeah, it's pretty good. I put out a show this morning, Jake, with Casey Dreyer, by the way. We talked about the budget requests. Mostly, Jake, you will be thrilled because it's about planetary science, hot drama that's going on with Mars sample return, eating the budget, and Veritas getting sort of canceled, mostly canceled in a really weird way. So there's some. I asked him the question that you were wondering. which was like, is this just one of those things that they zero out and then Congress brings back?

And he said, no. So, unfortunate for you. Uh-oh. So if you're a Venus lover, it's bad times out there. That's all we got. Mark, thanks again for hanging out. And everyone else, we'll see you soon. See, everybody.

All right. Bye. Add Astra. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,000, 2,000, 2,000, end of death.