 That's not the scene I was expecting to show up on screen. My name is Jamie Eganbotham. I am joined by a Jared Head, let's see if we can do this correctly, a Jared Head and a Ryan Caton. And I am coming to you from, where am I? I'm at the Courtyard Marriott at Kennedy Space Center, which is my favorite place to say when I'm down here because it's on the north side of base and so it makes it much easier to get into base. I'm sorry for being vacant for so long. It's been a hot minute. Just doing stuff down in Starbase. Also, we're trying to broadcast on X today. In theory, it should be able, if you comment on X, I think we can bring your comments into the show. I did try it right before the show and it failed. So I'm not sure if it'll work or not. On that note, let's get straight into it. Who do I wanna start with? Do I wanna start with Ryan? I feel like I should start with Ryan because Ryan is in a windstorm, much like Starbase and he may literally blow away at any moment in time and so if we lose Ryan in mid broadcast, that LOS may be expected. So let's start with Ryan this week. It's been a very exciting week if you're a fan of Hopper vehicles. Star Hopper, many people's favorite. However, there's a new Hopper being introduced to the club which is called the ZUK3 VTVL-1 which is essentially the Antspaces version of Grasshopper but for their new vehicle, which is the ZUK3, which is essentially, you don't really have to squint at it, it's a Falcon 9 kind of copy, very heavily inspired design, which is probably the most polite way to put it. But this vehicle, as you can see here, I actually kind of like the look of it. It's quite a nice Hopper. And it successfully performed a hop, it flew up to a decent height and then it also translated across a little bit. So it launched from, it's kind of, hang on, let me see if I can go back to that. So it's kind of, this is after it landed here. So it launched from this stand. It's got like these yellow kind of plinth things that it was standing on. So it launched from this stand and then it translated over a few meters onto its landing pad, which is a slab of concrete. So it successfully flew up, moved over just a little bit and then landed again. So yeah, we can say this is a pretty good, successful hop for Yan Space's first Hopper. This is now, I think the third private Chinese Hopper which has flown at this point. So China's private space industry is very, very clearly moving towards the Falcon style of reusability and they all seem to be doing a rather good job at it. So fingers crossed it's not that long until we start seeing more rockets doing RTL SL landings and drone ship landings because I think it's probably fair to say that the US space flight industry, your ULA's, your Boeing's, your NASA's working on SLS, that the reusability isn't really, this kind of thing isn't really, you know, what they've been working towards. So it's exciting to see them working, see China working towards the future. A very proven method of reusability, not only for bringing the vehicles back, but also for driving flight costs down because as soon as you get the rocket back, you can turn it around, you want another payload on top of it. So this is very, I'm personally very excited to see this happening and hopefully it's a little bit of a kick in the butt for US aerospace organizations which haven't been working towards this and maybe even Ariane Group as well, they've just been throwing out renders and not actually really showing any recovery hardware. But you know, I just, I hope that this inspires more of the Western world to follow this proven route if SpaceX already isn't enough of an inspiration. Well, Ryan, it feels like it's not really a East versus West thing, but a private versus commercial company thing, right? From what it sounds like, right? Because the US is developing additional landing systems, Blue Origin, their whole thing is reusable rockets, right? You've got Rocket Lab, well, they're technically a US company, but you know, whatever, they're working on reusable rockets. So we've got a bunch of reusable rockets kind of in the works, right? And that are not necessarily coming out of China. I think the difference here isn't whether they're US or China or anything else, the difference seems to be, in my mind, are they a new space company? Are they taking a new approach to things and trying to change and shake up the industry? Or are they a legacy space company who it's just, you know, they've done this for a hundred, well, that's too long. They've done this for 56, I can do math, but they've done this for over 50 years or they've acquired companies that have done it for over 50 years. And they just like the status quo, they're fine with the status quo and they have no incentive to try to do reusability. And, you know, to them, I think maybe reusability still is not proven well or fully proven to their liking, I guess. Because I feel like, what did Falcon launch 96 times in 2023, something like that? I feel like that's proven, right? Like if you're a legacy aerospace company, I feel like that's proven. But is that not the line of demarcation? Not like, isn't it really just like new space mentality versus legacy space mentality? Yeah, and that's kind of what I was trying to talk about, but I guess I swerved it accidentally. Yeah, the person, as being from Europe, I just want, I want all of these new space companies to kind of kick Ariane space and try and force them into doing more reusability stuff quicker instead of saying we'll do it in 10, 20 years time. So, you know, and Ariane space is very much a legacy space line after being formed out of an organization which was formed in the 1970s. So, you know, that's where my main passion is driven for trying to get Ariane space to do some more reusability things. So, Mari Marskal has a really great comment as well, which does kind of undo what I was just talking about, which is how private are private companies in China, right? Because don't they all have to be tied to the Chinese government in one way or another? I believe that is true. However, there is certainly a difference between some private companies which are primary contractors of the government space agency, and there are different companies which are developing their own hardware which aren't taking hardware. So, there's kind of three steps. You have the main contractors of the government space agency. You have other companies which are taking already developed hardware by the agency and putting it on their own rockets. And then you have a third group of companies which are fully developing their own hardware flying it on their own rockets. So, even though, you know, the organizations within China have to be part of the government just because that's how their country works, they are developing their own hardware. They're not taking hardware that's already been developed by the government. I think then the other, so that's a good comment too, but the one I wanted to talk about was from JTTV, which is, can they take about our SpaceX, right? We're looking at all of these companies doing what SpaceX did a decade ago, but if you're chasing SpaceX from a decade ago, are they ever going to be able to catch up, right? Because if you're chasing something from the past and not accounting for the present or the future, like how far are they actually going to get? Like, are these other companies not just going to continually outpace them or is it you got to start somewhere? You've always got to start somewhere. So I think my opinion on this is that all of these companies developing reusable vehicles can take the lessons learned by SpaceX and kind of, they're not developing this for the first time, right? SpaceX developed this for the first time and they proved it worked. So I think that they can take the lessons learned, apply it to their own vehicles and then maybe not fully catch up to SpaceX, but at least get a lot closer than where they are right now because right now there's a massive gap. I think they can close the gap. I doubt anyone will be able to overtake it, but I think the gap can definitely be closed. This is also a great comment from AeroVail. Chinese companies are competing for an almost entirely separate market. That may be true. I guess I'm not familiar with what market they're competing for then. Is everyone not just competing for putting satellites up? Right? Like there are only so many payloads on the planet. Most of what China is going to be competing for will be internal because obviously export controls and other things, not just from the United States, but from a multitude of other regions around the world are basically like, no, you don't put your payload on a Chinese rocket. You'll put it on this certain group of rockets that we have officially designated that you may do that. And if you don't want to do that, you can get into a lot of trouble. And a lot of that comes back from Boeing and Hughes launching on Chinese rockets back in the 90s and those designs for payload integration actually being taken a little too far in some instances and some technology crossover occurring that was not necessarily wanted in that time period. So really, I think what you're saying is China has their own version of ITAR in ear, which makes sense, which makes sense, sorry, which makes sense, right? Everyone wants to protect their information. They want to protect their assets. No one trusts anyone else. Fun, good times, but like, yeah. Yeah, I feel like the most recent comment from Mr. Huggy also, I think says a lot too about China being its own best customer, which is that they have a large workforce that can literally throw more resources than all of the United States rockets together. So it's not gonna be quick for them to catch up in terms of things like that because they've got the people power in order to put behind it if they really wanted to end up catching up. Is it a people problem though? This is problem solving problems, right? You don't need a lot, you don't necessarily need a lot of people to solve tough problems. You need one smart person or like a very small group of people who can think differently than everyone else to figure out how to solve these problems. Do they have that mentality? Maybe yes. Maybe they have a greater chance of finding people with that mentality. I feel like traditionally in traditional aerospace, it would have been a very smart person and then a small subset of people below them that worked within that. But I feel like with a lot of modern aerospace companies, you're seeing a conglomerate, a very smart people at the top with a large number of people who may have very select expertise. Back in the day, people working on rockets, it was just purely people who had aerospace backgrounds and other things like that. It's not like today where you see people who have aviation backgrounds or even like some people I know who worked on race cars that are coming in now and helping fully assemble and get these rockets together and ready to go. So it's a lot more than just like the traditional idea of what a person working on a rocket's gonna be. And I don't see why that would be any different in China than it would be here in the United States or in Europe. I feel like the difference is, so Mr. Huggy brings up another good point, which is take BYD, a company that started after Tesla and now outsized Tesla. The difference is electric vehicles, we didn't really invent anything there, right? Like we changed perceptions and we changed what happened with reusable rockets. Like we don't know what we don't know. Like we're trying to figure this out. There is not a reusable dual stage rocket on the planet that I'm aware of today, right? SpaceX is learning how to do this. You have to invent the future, not just, I think there's a fundamental difference between Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla is changing perceptions of what a car is. SpaceX is inventing the future as it goes, right? And I think they're equally important but very different. So I don't know. It takes a certain mentality to invent the future, right? Like be like, no, you know what? We're gonna do this completely differently. We're gonna try this whole new thing that hasn't been tried before. Let's see what happens. And I guess my point is to Ryan's story and Jared blew away. We all expected Ryan to be the one that would blow up but no, no, Jared's the one that went first. Welcome to the show everyone. Anyhow, okay. I guess my point is like, it feels like China is just trying to copy what we've already done. You can find what you have in your car somewhere but if you're not trying to invent the future, will they ever be able to catch the next one? The person who's inventing the future will always be the next one because they're the ones creating the future, right? Or am I just thinking too deep that the next one is going to be the next one? Who's Shane, man? Who's Shane? Well played. We all stand on the shoulders of the client. That's another very cool one. By the way, brother, they do not speak on behalf of SpaceX, right? These are all, this is just me asking questions. Sponsored by Sandisk, exactly. I wonder if Jared knows that everything's gone sideways on his system. Can we go full screen to the Sandisk? I'm just curious. Like what do we have going on there? Oh, no, we can't. All right, Ryan, did you? There's another vehicle which launched for the first time over the last couple of weeks and it's an actual orbital class launch vehicle which was Orion Spaces Gravity One which kind of destroyed its barge a little bit. It's not really a barge, it's a fully blown ship when it launched. This is a fully solid launch vehicle. Every single stage is a solid rocket motor and it's more powerful than Vega which is also a fully solid launch vehicle. This is the most powerful solid rocket launch vehicle ever launched, right? This is like insane power and apparently, unconfirmed numbers and they may just be put that thin air but apparently the cost to launch something on this per kilogram is cheaper than Falcon 9. Now, I don't entirely buy that but if they can make rockets for really cheap and not have to bother with reusing them, then I don't see why that would be an unrealistic kind of idea. But anyway, open to discussion. Rocket that destroys its barge, good or bad. This is incredible footage. I love this rocket so much because it's just ripping the ship apart. You see pieces of ship flying away at lift off. Also, I love that shot. That's a drone icing that they had. Yeah, they had loads of drones up. This is really cool. I think we are scared of solids for no real good reason. I mean, a few good reasons, but like I'm not anti-solid. We've had this debate for years. I ain't scared of solids. Look at that, look at that. Oh my God. This is insane. In the best possible way, I love this rocket. It flies through its own plume. It flies through its own plume. What? It flies through its own plume. It exhausts, creates steam, destroys the boat, and then it just flies through what it's created. It's insane. The boat, I just see that boat limping home. Oh, it hurts. Why did you do that to me? It was, so, and it might just have been the shot, but I kind of expected, it didn't lumber off the pad, but I did expect it to like shoot a little, look at that. That's so awesome. Oh my God, Ryan, this clip made my week. This is incredible. I love this so much. Oh, this is awesome. Who made this? So this is yet another private Chinese company called Orion Space, O-R-I-E-N Space, and they have been developing this vehicle for not that long, and they managed to successfully launch it on its first attempt, and apparently it's even Falcon 9, so. They need a water deluge system. If only there was water nearby. Yeah. That was really cool. That is interesting because you just kind of broke my own point of like, hey, you need to invent the future. Well, that, I'm not gonna say that's not something no one's ever done before, because like we have seen all solid vehicles. Vega, Aries One X, probably the dumbest rocket ever launched. Just trying to start a war, just trying to start a war. It's all right, you can hate success. Was it successful though? Was it successful? What was that second stage? What was like the only thing that was actually Aries One was in a parachute, and how'd that go? How'd that go? Anyhow, sorry, sorry. Mark has called NASA Space Flight for debate. Let's see if he turned up. How do you call Chris again? You just go train, train, train. Is that what it is? Something like that? Okay, anyhow. Yeah, I mean, that goes, that flies in the face of the point I was just making, which is they are trying something different. Like, I don't think I've really seen a vehicle quite like that. Like no one seems to be going and trying to solve the problem using solids in that way. The problem is like lowering the cost of orbit, right? Part of what holds space back, in my opinion, is simply cost of orbit. It's so frickin' expensive. If we can get those costs way, way, way, way, way down, we can start to do really cool things. And it starts to enable different types of satellites and different types of payloads. And they're solving in a different, unique way. So all right, thanks, Ryan, making me my words on air. It's fine. I gotta say it's really interesting to me that this company, Orion Space, they've got another rocket that they're building right now called Gravity 2, which is basically going to be a Falcon 9 because its core stage is gonna be powered by nine Keralocks engines. Oh, I already got that. And hold on, hold on. It's gonna have two solid motors with it as well. So it's like they're taking a Falcon 9, they're upgrading the Merlins on it to like twice the power. Having them run on, you know, working that way. And then like, okay, that wasn't enough. So we're gonna stick two solid boosters on it while we're at it. Hold, hold, hold. Why is the power of a Merlin on a Keralocks engine? That's what it says, about a hundred tons each. So that's just about twice the power of Merlin, right? I think I'm declaring shenanigans. I'm making it possible. I'm making sure to pull it up here. It feels like it's, if you take a Falcon 9 and an Atlas V and convobulate them together, you end up with this rocket, right? Nevermind, it's just a hair more than a Merlin is going to be. Okay, I'll buy a hair more, but like double the performance. I'm like, on a Keralocks engine? No, I read it wrong. It's okay, I read it wrong, as usual. But no, it's a Falcon 9 with two solid motors on it. What a great, it's that thing that everyone on Reddit was clamoring to happen, but there you go. I guess we'll have to see. It's supposed to be semi-reusable, so I don't know how that's gonna work, so. Well, I mean, the shuttle was semi-reusable, right? The solids came back, they refurbished the solids. Yeah, they refurbished the shuttle too, so. Yeah, I mean, it was semi, it was refurbishable, right? Like, we've had this debate for years as well, right? Shuttle was not reusable, it was refurbishable. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right, you couldn't just change the tires again. Well, there was no, none of the intended 96-hour turnaround on Shuttle, so. But that was a good vision, right? That was them inventing the future. They didn't quite achieve it, but also they didn't have the technical, I mean, they didn't have computers like we have today, so it's still an amazing accomplishment. I don't wanna belittle the shuttle, it just never met that particular goal. I feel like, did Falcon 9 reach, and it hasn't reached that yet either. 96-hour turnaround? Close, isn't it? I think the shortest boost to turnaround is still over like 22 days or something. Pad turnaround has gotten down to under three days, but actual vehicle turnaround is still well over three weeks. But that's still- I'd imagine it's actually probably not had turnaround, that's the limiting factor now. I would imagine it's probably drone shift availability that might be the limiting factor now. I can tell you here at Vandenberg, it definitely is with things like that. So, but I'm not sure if that rings true with the Cape, since y'all got two on the East Coast, we only got one here. What was the- Yeah, but you also have RTLS, right? And that reduces that time greatly because it's like, especially in Vandenberg, because it's like right next to the launch site. So dumb question, what was the fastest turnaround on Shuttle? What is the fastest they turned the same orbiter? It was quick, right? It was moderately quick. I wanna say, we talked about it on the show too. Train, train, train. Where's Chris? Train, train, train, train, train. Someone get Chris Birkin. Oh, holy smokes. So, it's actually Space Shuttle Atlantis that did it. STS-51J to STS-61B was only 54 days. Okay, so slower than Falcon 9, but still, again, back then, pretty freaking good. Like they were making good progress that was Atlantis. Was that prior to the Challenger disaster? Wait, 51, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yeah. And then the Challengers would change everything. So, I mean, two months, yeah, yeah, exactly. Two months, like they were making good progress. Aerospike has a really good point about Falcon 9s, which is that they've had a booster on land a few minutes after launch. So, that's a fast turnaround, I gotta say. So, you've had a booster on land a few minutes after launch. Yeah. I don't understand the- No. RTS. Sure, I mean RTS, but you're not launching- 54 days? Nah, just wait eight minutes. Please, boo. No, that's not what we mean. Mike makes a good point. They didn't even have the boosters back with Shuttle in 96 hours. Yeah. Yeah, the solids, the solids we mean, right? Like, I mean, that's, I feel like you can't exactly include the transit time. That's not really the point, right? There's transit time to get it back to where it needs to be. And that's not really what we're talking about here. We're talking about like kicking the tires and letting it go again, right? Yeah, like the whole enchilada is flying again. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? So yeah, of course it takes transit time to get it from where it's going back to the launch site, but imagine if you could just take a rocket, it lands on the drone ship and you just bring it straight back to the launch pad and launch it off again, right? I think that's the vision, right? That's where we want to be. Question mark? But when you include solids, that time becomes longer because you would have to, unless you have a multitude of solids lined up, ready to go for the next one, you've got to take those reusable casings, clean them, refill them, the propellant has to cure, et cetera. And for a shuttle, that was a very, very long process. I feel like to your point, the only way it works with solids is if you have a rotational cycle of solids that you can just attach back to the vehicle and go. You're right, the solids would be the long lead time item. What I'm trying to say, like critical path almost, but you could design around that. So you're still reusing it. Anyhow, we're going way off the rails at this point, but it's fun to go off the rails. Ryan, thank you. Those were amazing stories and I love that second rocket so much. It's like, I kind of want to make that my background, like the dark, black plume that comes up off the ship. It's so incredible. It's so incredible. By the way, at the Marriott, this is an actual, like, this isn't a green screen or anything. I just have the blur filter on, but like, this is actually what they put in the above the beds. It's pretty cool. It goes all the way over. And every room has a different like vista and then I have these little astronaut hang on, hang on. Wow. Look at that. There's astronomy there. Oh, you got the astronaut nightlight. Yeah. They put these in all the rooms. My kids have one of those. Yeah, right. And so then you turn it on. I've never really figured out how to turn it back off other than doing plug it. And then it does like a little night show up on the ceiling, which is pretty cool. And they also like a planetarium. Yeah. They include Spacecoast Star newspaper. That's fun, right? If you're ever down at Kennedy Space Center, this is my favorite hotel to stay at. This is the, no advertisement or anything. I just enjoy it here. It's the Marriott Courtyard Titusville, I believe. And it's right next to, like, oh, and they've got a bar up top called the Space Bar. And whenever there's a launch, you've got a beautiful view of pad 39 and 40. And you can, and they'll pipe in like countdown net audio and you can just go up to the roof, have a drink and watch the launch. And it's actually a beautiful place to watch launches. So again, if you're ever down at Kennedy Space Center and you wanna watch a launch, you can buy tickets at KSC. I would argue on the Space Bar, I think is a better place because you get a little bit of music, you get a little bit of vibe, it's a little bit of fun. You're not quite as close, but you're only like a mile further away. It's not that much. So anyhow, there you go. Jared, how about you? What got you excited this week? Oh, boy, we had a lot going on with the moon over the past couple of weeks. Not necessarily good news, you know, but hey, at least folks are trying. And that is certainly what's been going on with it. So we had- Is that the title of this episode? At least folks are trying? Yeah, I feel like that's a pretty solid, oh, hey, solid title for our show coming up. But, you know, first one I want to talk about was the first attempt at a landing from the United States since 1972, which was Astrophotic's Paragon lander. That was launched on the debut of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, which for all purposes appears to have aced its first launch with that there. So that's off to ULA for doing such a good job on that there. But Paragon, on its way to the moon, getting ready to prepare itself for its first set of engine burns. And they ended up finding out that there was some sort of propellant leak that ended up causing the spacecraft to get out of its orientation, which I thought it was really funny that a spacecraft from Pennsylvania was having a hard time finding the sun, which makes sense considering Pennsylvania's weather and things like that. Then in addition to that, whatever, hey, you know what? That was a friend of mine from Pennsylvania that made that joke. So as far as I'm concerned, that was a homegrown one. So there were obviously a lot of problems. We're trying to use the attitude control system in order to correctly aim and then also kind of guide the vehicle, something that it was not designed to do. So they were asking a tremendous amount of that attitude control system to both stabilize and essentially change the orbit of Paragon as it went around. It went as far out as the moon. The moon wasn't there when it arrived because it no longer had the capability to actually burn its engine to put itself into that transfer orbit to get itself to the moon. But Astrobotic, to their credit, they kept finding ways to maintain power and maintain the orientation of Paragon there and keep it going for longer and longer and progressively longer. They originally thought, oh, we're only gonna be able to have it for about maybe 12 more hours. And then they were finally able to get it so that it could end up spending nearly a week operating with that there. Eventually, they did burn the absolute control system once it was at its apogee, essentially, from Earth and its highest points that they would re-aim it to enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up safely, which it did so over in the South Pacific Ocean just a couple of days ago. And it was basically to make sure to keep things nice and tidy while up in space. They actually worked with NASA and the United States Space Force in order to figure that out, work with that there. So hats off to them. It did not at all go like it was supposed to. But they were at least able to get a tremendous amount of engineering data, which is extremely important when you're trying to do something that nobody has really done in over 50 years. And in addition to that, some of the scientific payloads that were on board, they were able to actually use them and take data with them and get them back to the customer, which is very, very happy with them. And as the thing, yeah, Arvail is bringing up a really, actually Arvail and Mollymar's got, I want to start with Arvail though, which is that one that there was an engineer that was there on his day off, which just happened to be, yeah, it really does sound like something absolutely wild, which is that they had someone who knew the code that could fix it, they uploaded it, they had just a handful of minutes before loss of signal and they had no idea if it was even gonna work until the acquisition of the signal after that. And it did work, thankfully. So that's how I'm able to keep that going. And then also Mollymar's got, which I think is bringing up another very impressive point, which is that astrobotics transparency in PR was unbelievably impressive. There are a large number of space flight companies and agencies, might we say, that could learn a thing or two from being as vocal and as open and as straightforward as astrobotic was. I feel like you're saying this till we're blue in the face. You know, it's almost like if you tell everybody what you legally can, that people end up appreciating it and you actually don't look as bad in the end. So like, did Paragon work? Absolutely not, this one just botched itself, but did they do like an incredible job in terms of demonstrating the technology, getting things right, learning how to fix broken things in Cislunar space? Like, that's incredibly important. Success is great, but if you've got a lot of problems with it, that's how it goes. Oh, yeah, okay, well, thank you, Eduardo, on that little correction. The engineer was just about to start his shift, but arrived earlier and happened to know the code, so he just jumped right in. So, very, very cool with that there. Either way, that's a story. He's gotta be one of those hacker movies where they're just doing this and like random, like, matrix-like things are flying up on streams and just, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, we've got a crash. A fire wall. Oh, no. We've got a statue of Liberty hacked. So, yeah, that's just kind of how it goes. That's how it does be sometimes in spaceflight. Sometimes you've got a hack in as hard as she can with that. And then also with the moon, I did want to talk about JAXA's own land or Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. They're a lander, the smart lander for investigating the moon or slim. Also had a little bit of a problem. It landed, it did land successfully on Friday. And Japan became the fifth country to successfully land a vehicle on the moon. It's the United States, the Soviet Union, China, India from last year. And now Japan has successfully soft-landed a vehicle on the surface of the moon. You need to swap US and Russia. Russia was first. What's up? Russia was first. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, the Soviet Union. Yeah, did I? Well, I was just reading them off at order. It didn't, if we want to go chronological order here, fair enough, we could go Soviet Union, United States, China, India, now Japan, with that there. But, the, there's something happened to slim, which is that it appears there was some sort of glitch to some sort of glitch somewhere in the power generation system. So something controlling the power distribution from the solar panels just didn't work. And it ended up causing slim to run on battery power and not use its solar panels at all once it landed. There's a lot of people saying that it was the orientation that slim landed at, that slim actually landed in a way where it was off angle and the solar panels were in the shadow of the spacecraft, which meant that it wasn't generating power that way. But that was something that was based on telemetry that was coming through a visualization. And if there's anything that we've learned about telemetry through visualizations, it's that it's not always accurate. So I'm not willing to trust that 100%. It makes sense, obviously, because if your spacecraft is blocking your solar panels, you will not get power. And that's kind of important on the moon because a day on the moon, last 14, or a full day, day night cycle on the moon is 28 days. So you get 14 days of light, 14 days of night. So if you're waiting for the sun to move into the path of your solar panels, you might be waiting a week, a week and a half in order to get something depending upon which way the solar panels are pointing. And that is certainly well beyond the limits of Slim's batteries, which was just a couple of hours. So Slim was able to deploy two very small rover hoppers that it had and the signals for those rover hoppers were actually picked up here on Earth as were the signals from Slim. So there is data and telemetry analysis that will be occurring over the next couple of weeks to see what we're gonna get out of Slim and the two little rover hoppers that it deployed. But unfortunately, not a 100% success, but it did reach a point. Yeah, there's the rover hoppers that were on the moon. That's the thermal detonator that we all remember if Java the Hut was threatened with there on the surface of the moon. So yeah, that's the biggest of the rover hoppers here. I love this little thing. Look at it, it just bounces. That's how it goes across the surface of the moon. And it just kind of bounces itself around and works with it. And then again, there's that other little one that sort of opens up and then roves around. And that's the one I say that looks like a thermal detonator from Star Wars. And then there's Slim, which is how it's supposed to sit on the surface of the moon. But if the telemetry is to be believed, it's actually sitting not in that orientation. But imagine that side opposite of the engine is actually the way that it's sitting on the surface of the moon. So it rotated about 90 degrees too much if that's what actually happened. So we'll have to wait and hear from Jackson about whether that is indeed what actually happened or not. So yeah, so those are my two mooner stories that were quite exciting to me, even though they were failures, they were still very important. Very good. I don't want to necessarily say good failures because failures are bad. But they're failures in the sense that a lot is going to be learned from those. So then was it a thing? I mean, that goes to the question of failure, right? Like these were tests, weren't they? No, so with Astrobotic and Slim, these were both missions. This Astrobotic mission was a part of the commercial lunar program services through NASA. So that was a contracted mission and they didn't work. So yeah, that was some money that ended up not going where it was supposed to. It taught us a lot, but then again, the results are what you're gonna wanna get from the money that you give to an agency typically. And that's typically how things are going to be judged in the eyes of the people who dole out that money. It's all like us who are in industry and we understand the concept of you got data back, that's good. So, you know. But hang on, but under the clips contract, I'm sure they got some of that money, right? They, I'm sure there were milestones under clips that they had to hit and they hit, I'm sure they hit many of those milestones. They just missed a big one. Yeah, on the moon. Right, but I mean, kind of like Boeing with Starliner, they can try again on their own dime, I assume, right? Like there's nothing preventing them from going again, assuming they've got the ability to do it. No, and they'll most certainly have the customers to do it too, I would imagine. The moon is so hot right now. So that it is the place everybody wants to go right now, both from a scientific perspective and a resources perspective as well, a use perspective. So we'll have to see what ends up happening in the long run with that. I think they all just need to start bringing Tesla Powerwalls with them, they'll get a lot more power. Wait, the weight doesn't matter, it's just space. Weight doesn't mean anything in space, it's fine. Yeah, I was gonna say, Artville actually had a really good point, which was that Jackson, the main objective was to land. So they did hit their main objective. Another bunch of other objectives were the test systems that would be used to land a larger lunar lander on the surface of the moon. And no word on whether those systems worked or not. So one of them that was very interesting to me was that they were actually using a system to determine where they were while coming down towards the surface of the moon by using basically commercial facial recognition software in order to see if you could literally simplify it that much in order to land on the moon. And of course we don't know if that was part of the issue or not, we still have to wait because this has been less than 48 hours since it happened so if you could find any info about anything within 48 hours of failure as to the accuracy of it, I would often question that. So right now we're all just kind of waiting to find out. I don't know, let me challenge that a little bit. I think once you have a failure, oftentimes very quickly you've got suspects. Now you may not have root cause, but usually there's like data's pointing you in a fairly specific direction, right? And so. Oh yeah, internally. Usually whittle it down fairly far. You may not be able to get all the way to root cause. I would agree that if you're saying, hey, I've got root cause in 48 hours, it's like, but do you? Do you? But like. Oh well, I'm saying most of the time when you see people speculating, at least online, there will be people claiming root cause within six to eight hours after something. And then also that is often, even the beginnings of something like that at this stage, 48, 72, 96 hours after a significant anomaly, it's still mostly internal at this point, even the suspects. The suspects are internal at this point. It is not often that you get a, again, with the transparency in things, which is something that we saw that was complete opposite of what we usually get from companies with Astrobotic keeping us updated hour, it seemed like hour by hour, they're giving us updates about what was going down. So yeah, just like that's, I don't really know of, I'm really honestly trying to think of a situation where an anomaly has happened and a company has done that in recent, at least in recent memory. So I can't, I can't think of that. So. Fair. Yeah, all right. I mean, it's really cool that everything, everyone's trying to get back to the moon and just do really cool things at, at on around the moon. I'm really excited for a cis-lunar economy to happen. And I think this is the stuff that we have to do if we want to enable cis-lunar space, right? I mean, not fail, but we got to send missions to the moon. We need to learn some stuff. Like we have not really spread our lunar wings. This is terrible, whatever. No. Since, you know, this early 70s, right? For the most part, ish, ish, right? I mean, we little spot missions here and there, but like, Yeah, like we've done, we've done the basic robotic exploration since the Apollo program. So, you know, a lot of it really started with Clementine, which was a early 90s mission that was a NASA, US Navy, common NATO combo mission where they worked together to try to develop a spacecraft for navigation and things like that. And then they're going around in orbit around the moon, did a mapping of the moon and basically found those permanently, like we knew that there were permanently shadowed craters, but we didn't just know the extent of them. And then it was lunar prospector in the late 90s that went into orbit around the moon. And it found hints that there might have, that there might actually be water ice in those areas. And then we finally got into things with lunar reconnaissance, orbit, or another stuff. So it's, I feel like, hang on. I feel like, was it the 90s or aughts? I feel like the early aughts is when we discovered water on the moon, multiple times in a row. Like we kept rediscovering water on the moon and everyone's like, oh my God, there's water on the moon. I'm like, didn't we already learn that? Like, didn't we already know this? Oh my God, we just found water on the moon. It's like- I think it was different countries that were finding it and confirming it. So that's why it seems like, oh, hey, we keep rediscovering water on the moon. Then we already know it's there. Well, it's one that, you know, in science, if you discover something independently of each other and you start all finding it together, then I think you might have something, you might be onto something, you know? So it sort of reminds me of like quantum mechanics from the 1910s to the 1940s. Everybody ended up just kind of discovering the exact same things. And it's because it turns out physics works the same for everybody. So if you all go all in on it, you end up finding the same stuff. And that's what happened with China, with Europe and then the United States as well. They weren't necessarily working together on the same missions. Like I think China, I want to say it was one of like Chang'e two or something like that. Man, it's Chang'e one or Chang'e two. That was in orbit. European Space Agency had smart, smart one. And then the United States was a combination of data from lunar prospector in the late 90s and then lunar reconnaissance orbiter once it got there. So- My point was kind of like we would send onesie twosies, right, as a species. We'd send onesies twosies since the 70s to them, right? Like maybe a lander once from the U.S. and wait a few years and you get another one maybe or not even a lander, just even just anything that was going around. It was somewhat sporadic for a while. And now we're at a point where we just had two missions. We're going to have, as Aravail says, four to five more missions this year alone, right? I don't think we've seen this level of activity since the early 90s. No, no. We haven't seen this level of activity since a Gerard K. O'Neill book, honestly. So, yeah, it's really exciting. I was going to actually say the next one that's scheduled to go is Intuitive Machines Nova Sea lander and I'm very hopeful. It would be nice to have at least one win this year. Let's have a win, you know. I feel like a football team, that's gone like 0-3 at the start of the season and it's like, yeah, if we could just get one, then the momentum will change if we could get to the playoffs, you know, kind of with it there, so. Thanks, Cadlaso. So, yeah, in case anybody's wondering what it's been like to be a Mercedes fan for the past two years, there you go. Just no wins over the past, you know, just kind of, man. Also, 10 question, are they landing on the moon or are they regalithing on the moon? Who, Nova Sea? Just in general, like, wouldn't there just not land as regolith, right? Litho-breaking is so early 2000s, Jamie. Like, come on, get on with it here. The only people that are still interested in litho-breaking are Russia and that's typically not by design. But, but I'm still sure, you know, all joking aside, I'm still sure that Ross Cosmos got data from that mission that they're gonna be able to use for the next lunar mission and that would be great to see them succeed at that. So. This was a fun show. Thank you both. I think it was, it was interesting to see Ryan have basically two stories about two new rockets out of China. So very similar stories about, but like, and then again, epic desktop background with the solid plume going up. And then Jared had two stories, similar stories about the moon. I don't remember the last time we had like, Tuzi's Tuzis where they're like, very similar to each other. But it's actually kind of a cool thing that's happening in space, right? Because space is just building up. There's more stuff happening. There's more companies doing stuff. Not all of them will survive, right? Yeah. I got one more, which I think I don't think we can see that. Forgive me, forgive me, I'm sorry. Which is the one that our thumbnail about the show is about. But I mean, nevermind, talk about burying the lead. But we got to talk about ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, because we just recently found out that on its 72nd flight just a couple of days ago, that it was going good, everything was fine. It flew to 40 feet, or excuse me, 12 meters. Sorry, I forgot about our use of units here for a second. It flew to a height of about four elephants. And then it continued on its flight. And then during a period where it was descending back down to the surface, communications was lost between the helicopter and the rover just before touchdown. So there were some, obviously people were a little frightened by that because ingenuity was a tech demo. It was basically like, can we actually fly something in the atmosphere of Mars? Turns out we could. And genuity was really only made to last for five flights. It wasn't made to last this long. We're asking, every time we do a second of flight with ingenuity, we are in bonus mode at this point. Anything is gravy at this point. So JPL was working very hard to try to get back in touch with ingenuity. And I'm very happy to say that as of last night, they have been able to get in touch with ingenuity. So we do know that ingenuity can talk to the rover and the status update yet as to how ingenuity is other than that it is capable of talking to the rover. But I feel like if they're talking to it, then there's a good chance that it's probably doing just fine on the surface of Mars. So yeah, we got it. Celebrating over here. And the best part is I can do the hand gestures off camera. And so you can't see that I'm doing them. What's the hand gesture for it? Cause maybe I can get it to do it too. Well, you've got to have the latest version of Mac OS. You have to have reactions turned on. And then if you do like two thumbs up, that'll get you the fireworks that I just did. Really? Cool. Okay, that's not working. Everyone's trying to do it. Oh, you did it! Go team! Oh no, I can't do it. Oh well. Congratulations everyone. Yeah, good job JPL. Excellent job. We're just, yeah. Two comments here on this one. First, JTTV is wondering what that is in Freedom Bananas. Oh my gosh, like 40 Freedom Bananas tall? I don't know, I'm not near banana. I don't have enough bananas around me, that's for sure. So I'm not a banana person, so. My second point is I feel like every NASA mission is like, oh, it's only designed for three missions. See it now, showing them how to do this and all we're gonna get for the rest of the show is stuff like this, right? Oh no, it's not gonna work for me, whatever. So we always hear like, oh, it was designed for five missions and we got 300. Oh, it was designed for 30 days and we got 10 years. It's like, okay, okay, okay. I hear you, you're getting extra time, but if you're consistently and always getting so much extra time, someone's analysis is wrong, right? Like you're overbuilding it and that's fine, you can overbuild it and you say, don't say, oh, it's designed for five missions. Say, no, no, it's actually designed for three years. Like it's, we need it for five missions, but we've designed it for five years. That's fine too, but this whole like, oh, we're gonna get three days out of it and 10 years later, it's still running. It's like, okay, you can do that a few times, but when it happens every single time, I question your analysis as to how you're doing this stuff. And then at that point it's like, okay, well then, how much weight could you have shaved off? How much more of a mission could you have done if you had actually allocated that weight that now went towards extending this life of this five day mission to 10 years? Like, what could you do? JCTB basically has it right there, which is that those kinds of things are typically budget related. They are not necessarily design related. So you've got to basically be able to do that. And that's not fair. Us saying, hang on, but then that's not fair. Then us saying, oh, it's only designed for two weeks because of the budget is not what the vehicle is actually designed for then. That's just like, that's how much funding the vehicle has to run the program on the ground. And then once it's working, you can go back and ask for more money to keep running the program, right? Is that what we're saying? Okay, cool. Essentially, yes. It's not designed for two weeks, it's designed for 10 years or whatever it is, right? Well, they designed it to last as long as it can. Of course, what did you do to not do that? Tata, would you ever design something to be like, I only want this to last a week, right? Like, wouldn't you do that? That doesn't make any sense. It depends on the circumstances. If it's legit only gonna be used for a week, then yeah, you need a buffer, but a week. And then that saves you money. You can put that money into other things that saves you weight. You can use that weight for other goals. Exactly, right? And if you were told, I need you to design something for a week, and you do this several times, and consistently your stuff lasts five years, wouldn't you go to the engineer and be like, hey man, you're overbuilding this, I need you to design it for a week, sure, make it two weeks, fine. But like, save that weight, save that money, save that everything else, you're overbuilding your product. Yep. I feel like, we all get excited about this. Sure, once, if it happens once or twice on accident, just because like, oh wow, it really works, that's one thing. But when it happens over and over and over and over and over and over. Eka actually has a really good point here, which is that many companies do with planned obsolescence. Are we just so used to the concept and the experience of planned obsolescence that when something actually works longer than it is supposed to, we become paranoid and we become like extremely like, wait a second, this is a grand scheme. You know, what could possibly be happening here? No, it's not that. I think I'm just, I'm officially declaring shenanigans on this whole. No, oh, there you go. For X and Y. Therian has another one there, which is it's also about the science objectives and how long do we need to achieve them. Interesting thing about the Mars exploration rovers, those were designed to last for 90 days, right? So we're gonna try to knock out all of our science objectives in 90 days. And the biggest science objective of the Mars exploration rovers was to find evidence, past evidence that water had been present on the surface of Mars. So spirit landed, opened up the pedals, found it was in the middle of a big old rock valley crap. Now we've got to drive and we've got to find a place where there may possibly be evidence of that because we are very clearly in an area where this is not where it's at. So we need another 89 days to try to find it. Then you get something like opportunity, which literally rolled into a crater called Eagle Crater. They opened up the pedals, they took the images around and on the side of the crater, there's bedrock, which is geological, that is the foundation of geology. If you've got bedrock, that is exactly what has happened in this area. Went up, analyzed it, found it right there. So within first two weeks they got it right out of the gate. They had to drive like 30 feet to go get it. So it's all just a roll of the dice. And you have to make sure that every time you roll the dice you hopefully have a spacecraft or a vehicle or something there that's gonna allow you to actually do that. All of that is fine, I have no gripe with any of that. My gripe is saying we designed it for 90 days and it's going 10 years later. Okay, fine, you can have that happen once or twice. Like that's just going to happen once in a while where you just get lucky and it just works forever. But like when it happens every single time, it's like you design this to work longer. There's no way that every single time you designed a thing to work for 90 days and it goes 10 years that like, I'm declaring shenanigans. Okay, well if you wanna go argue with JPL, have fun. I'm going to go argue with JPL. I'm not gonna go argue with JPL. I'm gonna put up, I'm 50 times, 50 times. So all I know is I'm not gonna bet for you to win that fight, Jamie, because you never bet against JPL. Jenna, I feel like you have something you wanna say. Yeah, the claim that it was designed to last for two weeks, I think just has to be around budgetary concerns. If you were on one of these programs, there is no way that you would wanna design this awesome vehicle that's gonna do all these amazing things and discoveries and it only lasts for two weeks or it only lasts for 90 days. You're going to design it to do the very best job that you possibly can within your budgetary and time scale and mass targets that you have allowed to use. Every rocket that they're planning to use, they've got a total mass. All right, cool, that's what you got to work with. Whatever you can use and whatever little pieces you can use up of that mass and still be able to get to your target on time, you're going to use. You're going to divvy that up and oh, you need more mass for a higher torque motor so we can climb mountains. Cool, like you've already paid for it, that's what you've got to work with. You're not going to make it lighter because it only needs to work for two weeks, especially if you can get a 10 year mission out of it and think of all of the science that we've gotten out of all of these 10 year long, three month missions that we wouldn't have previously if they had actually designed it to work for 90 days or plus tolerance. Good data, that's my point. They're not designing it to work for 90 days. There's no way they're designing it to work for 90 days. And we keep repeating that, being like, oh, it's designed to work for 90 days and work for 10 years later. That is not how this goes. It is not designed, they may have budgeted for it to work for 90 days but that is different than designing it to work for 90 days. Angry noises. I think the chat's fundamentally disagreeing with me, but whatever. I was gonna say, so for the Mars exploration rovers, vehicle, rover and launch and development of spacecraft and other stuff like that was about $750 million for that, right? So it was pretty expensive. The 15 years of mission operations was almost $400 million. So I'm sure it was a lot cheaper to go with that initial 90 days of budget need as opposed to saying, hey, can we get $400 million for 15 years of budget need? Because there's a difference. There's a difference in saying that this program was budgeted to last for 90 days versus this lander was budgeted to only work for 90 days. Was designed to work for only 90 days. Only designed to work for 90 days, right? There's a fundamental difference between those two. I agree with you wholeheartedly. It was only budgeted for 90 days. The chat room's like, it's easier to ask for, that's cool, that's all great. We all agree on that point. What I'm saying is the spacecraft, these crafts are not designed to work for 90 days. They're designed to work for as long as they possibly can. In all the, like what engine here is going to design it to only work for 90 days? You're just not gonna do that. They're designed to work for as long as the program will allow and then they have to go back and ask for new budget to actually run the program. That's fine. So it's like, oh wow, we're on flight 75. Well, cool. Like of course they designed it to work that long. It's not like the helicopter was only, like it was gonna, like after flight six, they had a button that said destroy, right? Like, of course, of course. And I just feel like this is a false narrative that we have of like, trying to be like, oh, look at how amazing all of this stuff is. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. You just didn't have the money for the project. That's very different. It's very, very different. It's a different story. Anyhow, that's Mike, right? The chat room just, again, the chat room is unalimentally disagreeing with me. I get it. I get it. You're all allowed to be wrong and I can be the only right person in the room. That's how this works. Jamie, I just find it really funny that you're like, that you're like, oh yeah, 15 years on Mars. So, you're like, well, why did you say 90 days is the first place if it was going to be 15 years? So, we don't know how long it's going to last, right? It's a false narrative. That's the thing that gets me, is I just don't like the false narrative part of it, right? No, I watch TV. The 90 days story tells well in news, right? It's a narrative that we're trying to sell people that is not entirely looking at the bigger picture. I think that's Mike Wright with it, right? Like, it's not, it's making it sound like... It's disingenuous. It's disingenuous, exactly. I think that's what it is. It's disingenuous. All right, we've harped on this for way too many minutes. Yeah, I was gonna say, you're probably... Most everyone seems to be with me, so it's fine. I'll lay off this particular one for now. I'll wave my hands in, I surrender. I surrender. About half a minute, sorry. Do you want to thank everyone? Whoa, that was interesting on my side. Everyone who helps to make this particular show happen, you can head over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join and contribute to the shows of tomorrow. Be it live, on demand, whatever it is we happen to be doing. Every single dollar helps to make these shows happen. Like, as you know, it takes money to do things. It takes money to do the show. And everyone's names that you see on the screen have contributed. Also, there is a level that you can contribute at it's like $1 a month. Now you don't get your name in the show, but you do get like, I think you get like emojis and you do get like a whole I've been a member. I like you get perks for every single different level. And so again, thank you to every single person on this list for helping to make these shows go. I really do appreciate it. That is our show this week. Am I forgetting anything? I feel like I haven't been doing this for long enough. 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On that note, for anyone who was a member, we are going into our post-show where y'all can rip me apart even further if you want to. We'll talk about anything, maybe it's space, maybe it's Disney, maybe it's politics, who knows, maybe it's this little astronaut guy. I have no idea what we're gonna talk about. And if you are a member, you can, oh, I broke the astronaut. You can just head over to the membership channel on YouTube and we'll meet you right over there. Thank you all so much for joining and we'll see you next week.