This Week in Space 128 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space. We're talking about Starliner. It's back. What now? Stay with us. Podcasts, you love.

00:11 - TWiT (None)
From people you trust.

00:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is Tolt. This is this Week in Space, episode number 128, recorded on September 13th 2024. Starliner is back. What now? Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of this Week in Space, and this time it's the Starliner Comedy Hour edition. Okay, that didn't work With your host, that egregious expert tarik malik. Hello, hello, hello, everybody who knows all about boeing and starliner I got my starliner shirt on I think we should just let him do the whole episode today.

00:54
I'll see you later. Oh my god, are you sad man? Um, but uh, welcome, tarik. It's good to see you today. You too. You too, rod. How's it been? Somebody has to defend the fortress of boeing, it's? It's okay. We're surrounded by fires, as you can see in the background, those people I.

01:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I thought yeah, that's the dedication that you show to this, to the podcast rod. Is that the real-time news?

01:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
the wildfires are at your gates and you are here to talk space, so so for, for those who may or may not know, um california is burning down. We have, I think, I don't know 38 wired fires of different sizes, three large ones in la county which, at this point, if I probably 70 000 acres, 80 000 acres, that's a lot.

01:38
Oh my gosh with. Last I checked, something like 30 000 structures threatened, although that was before the wind shifted away. Last I checked, something like 30,000 structures threatened, although that was before the wind shifted away. So fortunately it cooled down and we got a little bit of humidity with these fire crews. So, for instance, Tarek you know Southern California, the Bridge Fire, which is the one closer to me- is probably seven miles, eight miles away.

02:00
But you know we live in the concrete flatlands so there's no way it's getting here, Because there's nothing to burn in Southern California at. We live in the concrete flatlands so there's no way it's getting here, because there's nothing to burn this other california, at least not in the city but up in the hills there above altadena and those those you know foothill communities um the forest between there and big bear and arrowhead lake, if you remember those mountain towns up there we used to go skiing at big bear, so I was looking for a house up there a few years ago, a second house and uh, I did a little bit of research on fire insurance.

02:29
Like, oh, oh, you want fire insurance. Well, that's a little problem. So you have to go with a california fair plan. And it's gone in the last few years from something like 1800 a year to 10 000 a year year 10,000?.

02:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh my god $5,000 to $10,000.

02:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And that's because that forest hasn't burned in 110 years and there's about five feet of fuel, dry pine needles and stuff lying on the ground. So it's terrifying. So my heart goes out to those folks and it's not a good time for them.

03:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Please stay safe everyone.

03:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
When they say evacuate, please listen.

03:06
Okay, but enough with the flames, yeah. So, all kidding aside, oh, and I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Bad-Ass Magazine, yawn, yeah, all kidding aside, though, we're going to talk about Starliner today because it's back. It's bad, it's badder than ever, and with only one additional thrust or failure it's bad, it's better than ever, and with only one additional thruster failure. But I'll try to be kind now, before we start, I just want to say a little bit of a not even a mea culpa here. It's actually kind of it's culpatory, but uh, I talked about this a few weeks ago. I posted a little snarky.

03:40
I posted an image on you know snarky no of a starliner attached to the space station, backwards covered in vines and looking all old and grungy and stuff. And I got a little bit of pushback from people, more than I expected. Actually, you were saying you don't understand how hard it is to build a spacecraft and boeing is awesome, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And how could you? And all that. It's like look guys, you know this a first of all, it was just for a gag, right? I make fun of spacex too. We make fun of everybody at one time or another. But I mean it was like touching this hot button of these people mostly armchair engineers or retirees just went off like skyrockets and I want say you know, this is just me editorializing a bit, but, and you know, if you want to be Boeing fanboys, that's fine. I understand they got quite. I used to be a Boeing fanboy before you know, their airplanes started falling apart.

04:37
But let's just step back for a second. As I've said before, you know, they were there at the beginning of the space program. They, you know, built a big chunk of the Saturn V. They've been a part of everything. But in addition to that I just want to mention they absorbed North American aviation, which built the Apollo command module and the S-2 stage and the space shuttle. They absorbed Rocketdyne, which built the F-1 engines for the shuttle and the for the Saturn V and the RS-1 engines for the shuttle and the for the Saturn 5 and the RS-25 engines for the shuttle. So they've absorbed just about every contractor that ever was part of the space race, except for Lockheed Martin, a handful of others. So they ought to have the institutional knowledge and ability to build I don't know rockets and stuff you know, and things like space capsules. Is this is not.

05:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
This is the case to not get canceled? Or is this a preamble to say, hey, this is our opinion?

05:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
this whole episode, the latter, I mean, it's just, you know, there are reasons to there's justification, I think, for a little bit of looking askance at an arched eyebrow. So that's all I'm saying now. I I make some jokes about it. That's okay, all fair and good, but just relax a little bit and let's just give us a little bit of slack for us having some justification, because they really kind of screwed this up, and again with twice as much money, almost as SpaceX got to do the same thing. So I wish them well, but just know, just give me a break, okay.

06:08 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'll start. Are we doing headlines? Are we going to go?

06:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
straight into the headlines Hello, what's that new Boeing CEO? Oh no, I was just kidding. Okay, sorry, I called in on the red light.

06:19 - Tariq Malik (Host)
All right, I didn't know we were supposed to have props Rod or I would have prepared a skit and a script and everything.

06:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh next week okay before we start, please don't forget, do us a solid if you're still listening, and make sure to like, subscribe and other uh podcast goodies, because, uh, we, we live and die by your, your love. All right, yes, it is time. It's time for our space joke, which this week isn't actually a joke, it's a limerick. It's time for our space joke, which this week isn't actually a joke, it's a limerick, a limerick, our first limerick in 128 episodes from Jonathan Waltz. He says via AI, I feel like I should have a music bed for this Boeing Starliner.

06:59
Oh, dear faced gas leaks that caused quite severe With each flight delayed. Their nerves were all frayed, but they'll fix it and launch by next year. See, the audience liked it better than you, partner. All right now I've heard that some folks want to jump in the family car and hide in the garage pretending they're on Starliner for a few months when it's joke time on this show. But you can help save yourself from being stranded by our humor although I I really did enjoy that limerick and send us your best, worst or most different space joke at twist twittv. Okay, I've managed to gobble up seven minutes just introducing um and with your disclaimer about don't come at me br bros.

07:46
So, speaking of bros, let's do some headlines. Yes, this week.

07:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Headlines oh we got, oh, there we go.

07:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Music. That's new. So for those of you too old to know, that's what a manual typewriter sounded like in the horrible old days. Did you ever use one Tar?

08:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I used an electronic manual typewriter. Does that, the horrible old days. Did you ever use? One time I used an electronic manual type. Does that make sense? Like like IBM Selectric, yeah, yeah, but it had like the, the actual little things that go in, all that stuff and you had to use the little things that went you know the teeth, the keys, the words, type typewriter keys yeah. Words their letters the the words type typewriter keys.

08:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, words, they're letters, all right, well, that's good. I used a uh remington rand back of the day with the and man, you had to have strong fingers if you were anything other than two fingering those things they were. I don't know how people did that. Anyway, moving past typewriters to something a little more high tech, for the first time in history we have a commercial crew flying above what we traditionally think of as low Earth orbit, the 180 miles or so that the space station's at up higher than Gemini 11 did, which is a record yeah big, big milestone, an orbital record, they say the highest since Apollo, but Apollo left orbit.

09:04
So if you're just talking about Earth orbit, this is big milestone, an orbital record, you know they say the highest since Apollo but Apollo left orbit. So if you're just talking about Earth orbit, this is a big deal, not a place you want to get stranded down at 870 miles altitude, at least for the Apogee and first commercial spacewalk and what else.

09:21 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, you got the highest spaceflight by female astronauts, you got the first commercial spacewalk by a female astronaut. I mean, you got all these things. There's all these things uh in this which we're of course talking about, polaristan spacex's latest commercial flight and the latest uh flight, uh, brokered by brokered, fine, financed by bought uh by, by tech, by Jared.

09:44
By the way, this story is space calm, but everybody and their mother were covering this story and it was a very long day yesterday because they did the spacewalk. You know whining? No, I'm not whining, I'm just saying it was a long day, it was great. It was great, yeah. But you know, since, since we last spoke, since our last episode, spacex launched this mission earlier this week. As we're recording this, they reached that highest altitude that Rod was talking about. That was like on their first day in space. Then they did some kind of earth to ground tests. They, you know kind of they, let's see, they write a book from space that one of the crew members wrote.

10:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But we've got Excuse me, but, but we're. If you're on the video stream, we've got this great, ghostly silhouetted shot. Is that Isaac?

10:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
that is Isaac min when he first went outside stand-up EVA yeah, and so stand-up EVA.

10:37
This is really important. They didn't float all the way outside like the astronauts on the International Space Station when they do work and whatnot. They stuck most of their upper body, so they were kind of standing on little foot restraints sticking out of the hatch of Dragon. And this was a feat in and of itself, because it wasn't just the spacewalkers who stuck their heads outside that were at risk, it was the entire crew of this four-person team. It's Jared Isaacman, the commander, who is the first person out the door, Sarah Gillis, mission specialist and a SpaceX engineer, who also went outside after Isaacman. Then you had the pilot, Scott Poteet, who was the I guess, the mission director of Inspiration4, Isaacman's previous flight. And another SpaceX engineer, Anna Menon, who is the one that wrote the book Kisses from Space for her kids that she read as well. But they were all in these brand new SpaceX suits which you can see if you're on the video stream. Isaacman about to run. He actually tested all the flexibility. Can they stand on the footrests with their hands free?

11:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
and doing things. Can I just jump in with a point, these eba suits. So the main reason, the main difference being, until now spacex and now boeing have used pressure suits which are designed in case there's an emergency. These are designed specifically for going outside the spacecraft, maintaining pressure, being nimble as much as possible. And given the bulkiness of the boeing suit and what we've seen from nasa and space station days, these things are very svelte. I mean, like he looks thinner than me in street clothes.

12:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It looks like a site like in science fiction.

12:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, it really does like it actually looks a lot like the uh spacesuits from the star trek motion picture.

12:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Anyway, yeah, including the helmets. The helmets it's the same helmets. They've got different tents on them to keep the sun and other, I think like UV out and everything. But it was pretty amazing for an hour and 46 minutes and that starts from O2 flow. Basically is how SpaceX measured it, not, for when they opened the hatch this crew was exposed to the vacuum of space. Isaacman and Sarah Gillis spent, I think, on the average of seven to 10 minutes apiece. This is Sarah Gillis as she's climbing out, if you're on the video stream. As she was climbing up out of the hatch, they had this new kind of handrail thing they called a Skywalker, that kind of juxtaposed Wait, what's the word?

13:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It stuck out, oh jutted.

13:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Jutted, jutted, that's the word.

13:12
That jutted out from the hatch that they could stand on, and then there were foot restraints as well that they could beat their feet in so that they could stand and test all the mobility.

13:23
It was very interesting to watch because it was very methodical. But Isaacman did say one thing. He said to SpaceX that we have a lot of work to do at home, but that Earth, from his vantage point, looked like a perfect world. And I thought it was a nice touch because most of their 10 minutes ap piece was really focused on the mobility tests of it, so they didn't really wax poetic very much about the experience. But this proved that SpaceX can do spacewalks, that a company can build a space suit that can perform in space and, while it might seem like a stunt, a tourist trip, this is a skill that not just SpaceX but Axiom Space, sierra, space VAST we were just talking to Max Hout in our last episode. They need these skills to build their future space stations, to build their future commercial bases or whatever, and this is the first step to show that it's possible and it seems to have gone off without a hitch.

14:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I just have to say again you know cruising social media last night and when I say cruising I don't mean you know, I was looking for people that have a similar interest in poodles or something.

14:40
I was looking at space stuff and there was a surprising amount of snark and pushback and lack of charitable discussion about oh, all they did was stand up oh all they did was this, all there was that, and so I finally you know, I try not to jump in too often because I really don't have any interest in arguing with most of these people because they're dingleheads.

15:02
But in this case, you know, I said look, um, you might want to cut the guy a break he built the world's first private air force which he leases out. He has engaged the first two private space flights of their type that didn't go to the space station. And in this particular one, you know, let's look at the record book Altitude, the women book, altitude, the women the size of the crew first exposed to a vacuum since sky lab. You know on and on and on. And this is a lot of stuff for just some dude to do, because normally you have a government behind you, these things, and he's doing this as his hobby, which is very impressive and and and he's raising money for st jude children's research hospital to fight pediatric cancer, so that's like a whole other thing.

15:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But we really need to put this into perspective because it I it's very easy to see how some people can just look at this billionaire uh uh, you know, you know space fan and think that this is a stunt. Uh uh, you know, you know space fan and think that this is a stun, a spacewalk. And I credit jim banky for telling me this as a cub space reporter. All those decades ago he told me that when any astronaut goes out in a spacewalk, you get your feet off the desk, you put your pepsi down and you pay attention. Because and that's a direct quote, by the way because spacewalks are the most dangerous thing an astronaut can do in space, because there is nothing between them and that vastness of the vacuum between them and instant death. We've seen close calls right, luca Parmitano almost drowned in his space suit. We've seen people have emergency pressure issues and rips and they've had to go back inside. This is dangerous. These are brand new spaces. They tested everything that they could on the ground in vacuum chambers.

16:48
They built like that, but still stuff happens.

16:50
You don't know, and it was four people, not just Isaacman sticking his head out. There's no airlock on this spacecraft. They depressurized the whole thing. It was empty. If they couldn't get that hatch closed again and sealed, that could be all she wrote, right? And the whole thing get back down in time, and I'm sure they had an emergency plan for that. So it looks, you know, oh my gosh, it's SpaceX. Look what they can do. Oh, it's a big stunt. You know, meh, no, this is like a dangerous thing. And he did it and it was amazing and it and it looked spectacular because, man, all of those views, yeah, and so we have to acknowledge that, because okay, this is a capability.

17:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We're in 18 minutes and we just finished story one all right, I'm just I'm sorry.

17:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm sorry, but it's a capability that, if you want to have that sci-fi future in space, this is the capability that you need. It can't just be nasa and russia and, uh, and the agencies of the world, china. It has to be the company and China yeah that's right.

17:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
China's doing more than Russia is now.

17:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And so it has to be. This is just. It's a tool. This is now a tool that these companies can use, and maybe SpaceX is the first one to be the contractor to do it, but someone else is going to do it too.

18:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, speaking of being a tool, off my soapbox, the FAA says it won't clear Starship Flight 5 out of Boca Chica until November Because we have environmental concerns. Now let me just say you know, we are environmentally aware on the show, we're both generations that take this kind of stuff seriously. But at a certain point and now this is my point of view you you may feel differently, tar, although you know who would care if you did. But my point of view you know, coming it came, anthony shaking his head, I, we came. I came from the space race. Right, it was a very patriotic, nationalistic time because it was us versus russia. It's kind of fun, kind of scary sometimes, certainly with the Cold War and all that. But you know, the name of the game was America first to the moon. Now we like to think we're past that. We're clearly not with Congress and so forth.

19:01
You know, rising to nelson at nasa, rising to the bait, for we're in a race with china, um, but as I've said before here, I'm I'm personally confident that china is going to do anything short of a suicide mission to get at least one uh chinese taikonaut on the lunar surface by the end of 2029 for the the uh, anniversary of the revolution. So mark those words. I'm willing to take cash bets, um, but you know. So where I'm going with this is it's not like we're on a war footing, but it's kind of getting urgent. And starship, which is supposed to be the first lunar landing vehicle, this semi-truck-sized thing that's going to land on its tailgate, has got to get flying and got to get refueling testing and got to get going, or we're just not going to make it. And so what's stopping us? Birds and turtles and fish.

19:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And you know I'm all for the environment.

20:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, go ahead, go ahead, rip enemy.

20:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, so a lot of stuff that came to a head. It came to it in three different places this week because spacex put out a pretty lengthy uh, uh, what do you call it? Yeah, screed, uh, you know, like, like a, they're really. It was very clear that spacex is really upset. You know, they got fined for um I think it was for water pollution, right, or something like that for the off flow of the runoff from the local environment agency.

20:36
And the EPA yeah.

20:40
And they posted this big thing on X formerly Twitter about how they were really upset about that.

20:45
And they were also really upset after they heard from the FAA that they weren't going to be cleared until November.

20:50
After their clearance for Flight 5, which we're all waiting on because they're going to try to land the Super Heavy Booster had already been delayed to September, like they were expecting to get the clearance in September and now they get this two-month delay and they were very upset about that and I can understand that as well.

21:07
But a day later or so there was a big hearing on the Hill where government it was about commercial space flight safety and House lawmakers asked the same issue to the FAA. And the FAA is saying, look, a lot of our processes depend on decisions that SpaceX makes, like if you're going to do water runoff, et cetera. And they also said that SpaceX changed their flight profile for this Flight 5 in mid-August, which was after they already had been approved for a different flight profile, and to do that over and over again so they could fly as many times as they want or whatever that license said after Flight 4. And so that requires extra review and I do know that they canceled a lot of public comments to the FAA did about Starship launches. They cancel all these public meetings after they heard about the fine that SpaceX was at the time facing and then later received for this this runoff issue with the EPA, and so they had to look at that as well.

22:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And so they had to look at that as well. Now, excuse me, was this a runoff from the Deluge system? I believe so.

22:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I believe so, but I could be wrong about that because I've been, you know, my head has been on Polaris Dawn this entire time and Starliner Excuses excuses. So the scope of the environmental impact for Flight 5 changed, according to the FAA, because of changes in the flight profile which require extra time. Should it really take two months? I don't know, I'm not a regulator and I understand the frustration, but this is a new system and I don't know why anyone thought they're going to be launching every month from the get-go, in the beginning, and so-.

22:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, the same reason we're going to be sending an uncrewed starship to Mars within two years.

22:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, I mean the rocket is coming back. The rocket is coming back for Flight 5, and it's going to come and if it goes off course, anywhere near there, there are other towns that if it misses by a bit that could be, or other land that could be in danger. So I understand what they're talking about. About the scope has changed, okay for it.

23:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So we have to go to a break. Yes, so uh, I think we're gonna. We're gonna bag the super harvest lunar I'll mention something at the end, I'll mention it. All right, okay, all right, let's go to a break. Very exciting we get to come back and continue the starliner comedy hour. Stay with us, don't go anywhere. So this hasn't been very funny so far for a comedy hour.

23:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't know why you called it that. I thought we were just going to have a good discussion about all this back and forth and everything that's going on.

23:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Because it's kind of funny, all right. So Starliner finally came home on September 7th to lovely, blustery White Sands, new Mexico, after three months in space launching on June 4th, and you know, we were waiting to see how that would go. At first blush it looked like, oh, the astronauts could have come back on it, just fine. I just issued a press release with the space society on this, you know, lauding nasa for their, their uh safety forward thinking. Because you just don't know right, you don't know no. And then we found out that it was only one out of uh 2012. 12. One out of 12 thrusters also failed, but it could have been 11.

24:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know, there were other heaters. There were other other heating like. Some were hotter than normal, but they didn't fail yeah, down too. So and uh, at least briefly, there was navigation dropout right there was a gps system dropped out, yeah, so, which is kind of a problem, it would be, it would be.

24:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
However, you know, in my day they came back without gps.

24:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But yeah, we just looked at the big blue dot right and just like, aimed ourselves at that, aimed down.

24:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So better than some predicted. You know there were people predicting, oh it's going to burn up and all this kind of stuff. But again, you know, a plagued program with far more trouble than we'd like to see. Now Is it important to continue? Yes, will they? Nobody knows. There are some writers out there and think tank people saying they think Boeing is going to either sell the program or fold it up and just stop, because they're upside down in it to the tune of, at this point, probably about $1.7, $1.8 billion, which is a lot for a company like that. And you know pretty clearly they have not figured out a way to make money doing this right, because they have.

25:34 - Tariq Malik (Host)
There were plans, we can talk about that.

25:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
They were playing, yeah so they were gonna do private and all that kind of stuff and so far, other than maybe work of orbital reef, if this program lasts as long, that's the only external to NASA thing that they've at least publicly admitted to. On On the other hand, as NASA will tell you and as our position paper said, you know, it's important to have more than one system. You don't want a spaceflight monopoly which, at this point at least for the West, and crewed spaceflight SpaceX effectively is yeah, there's good reason for that. Their equipment works and they're the most affordable thing. That's a good reason for that. Their equipment works and they're the most affordable thing that's ever come along for getting off of Earth, across many different definitions.

26:17
Nonetheless, you want as we saw, you know, when we had the flight stoppages with the shuttle that would go on for a year um, you want to have an alternate system, but you want an alternate system that's affordable and robust, and so far, far we don't have that and that includes Soyuz, by the way, because neither is that affordable. Everything's more expensive than SpaceX. So it's important to forge forward. Boeing, if you're listening, you're probably not at this point, but if you're still listening, we support you going forward. You got to do this, but you know we should put it in perspective.

26:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
what's happened in the last three months, though?

26:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right.

26:51
No, I'm just.

26:51 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm just going to say we've seen the reasoning for why you want at least more than one provider on two, two different occasions this summer alone. Spacex lost a mission. They lost a rocket flight right. Uncrewed, uncrewed, but they still lost one right. Polaris Dawn was the first crude flight, uh of okay wait a minute, though, would you say they lost one.

27:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This was not a rocket explosion. This was a stage that failed to read it was. It was a second stage failure, but you know they put dragons on top of that on that, yeah, but that's what abort mechanisms are for, and they work, we know well, I'm just, I'm just.

27:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm just saying that you had that happen, and then you had this issue with starliner, and both of them prove why you need a, a backup. Yeah, and and, and. If you only had one, you'd be stuck like we were after the shuttle was retired in 2011.

27:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right for well, or nine years after either one of those accidents, with the shuttle too, exactly exactly so.

27:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So, uh, we should probably say what happened for the most part, because we're just assuming that everyone knows about starliner but it, our audience is smart, but yeah, go ahead shortly after our recording our last episode, uh boeing starliner undocked autonomously from the international space station. Like uh.

28:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That was friday night, friday evening, september 6th, and can you remember what the day night cycles are at this point with your schedule over the last? I know, I know.

28:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That was actually a 21-hour day for me covering that landing, but you weren't spending a 21-hour day, so if you were doing it together, then we could hey excuse me, when I worked in production, I used to pull. Yeah, but that wasn't Friday night, right 36-hour days.

28:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Don't whine to me, but go ahead.

28:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So then, after six hours, it landed at 12.01 AM we do Eastern time because I'm in New York but it landed back on Earth. We've got video of it coming back now and NASA tracked it both from above and from below. In fact, I think that the astronauts on the space station were able to see it as well and, by all accounts, overall the reentry and landing was fairly nominal, aside from the fact that during undocking they did some tests and there was one of the 12 thrusters that failed and it never came back on. They did see, like you mentioned earlier during reentry, this GPS dropout. Steve Stitch, the commercial program manager, said that it wasn't that big of an issue because it came back and astronauts would have done procedures to bring it back, to boot it back up if they were on board. And they did see, however, some excess heating, not to the point of failure, but some higher than expected temperatures in some of the thrusters which they've been monitoring for the issues that they've been facing the whole time.

29:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Can I just insert a quick point here? This Starliner is the first American system that is designed to carry a crew that's landed on dry land. The shuttle landed on runways, but this is the first under parachutes. Apollo never did this. Dragon doesn't do this, although it was supposed to, but they decided not to for various reasons. So Boeing took a chance on that using a system, I think, fairly similar to soyuz right breaking rockets at the last minute, and all that it has airbags too like.

29:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So the soyuz doesn't have the airbags. So this one has airbags to cushion it so that it's, I think you land at like 10 to 15 miles an hour, something like that. Much so, uh, I've been told the soyuz landings feel like a car crash. That's how gentle it is. So this is a little bit better than that.

30:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's why they bring the vodka over to the hatch as soon as they're done.

30:16 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Okay, sorry, but you know the parachutes was a big deal. People might forget that when they launched the last orbital flight, the reflight basically the Starliner to the station, that uncrewed flight used a parachute system that wasn't rated for emergency loads, which means if one of the three parachutes was out, uh, it wasn't rated to land safely with just two parachutes, uh, and that was assuming that the wire wrapping wasn't on fire exactly, exactly and so so they redid it, they redesigned it, they did more, more tests and and it worked.

30:44
It worked fine, uh, to the point that steve stitch we talked about him earlier actually said during the press conference after the landing that if the astronauts were on board Starliner they would have been fine, despite the thruster stuff. Now, hindsight is always 20-20 and they don't second guess themselves when it comes to safety. They say you know what is the safest option? We're going to do that, and in this case it was keep the crew on board, bring them back on a on crew nine, the spacex dragon in february. So that's um, uh, six extra months, maybe four, uh, five extra months.

31:18
So the eight, oh, from here, yeah from now, from now uh and um and then, and then see how this goes, and then the the next flight of starliner has been delayed to august, at the earliest right now of 2025. While they fix. You know what they have to do for the earliest right now of 2025, while they fix, you know what they have to do for the thrusters, so. But it landed and now they're going to study what they've got, but they can't study the thrusters. They were on the service module that was jettisoned during re-entry, so so let me just step back for a quick overview.

31:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I can't imagine there's anybody listening that doesn't know the drama by now, but just so. It said, boeing was selected along with SpaceX in 2014, although the contract was discussed well before that. For the commercial crew transportation capability, each provider was supposed to provide six flights, at least At least six flights between the US and the ground and the International Space Station, ground and the international space station. Now boeing got 4.2 billion for that. So you know a bit less than a billion per flight, versus spacex is 2.6 billion, and we've seen the results of each company.

32:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So go figure, yeah well, as you'd like to point out. Yes, she had known what the bid was, she would have been more, um true, but they didn't and they didn't, and look what they turned out you know.

32:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So good credits to them for that. So spacex has flown eight so far right, eight crew rotations they have flown eight crew rotations.

32:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
crew nine launches later this month. As we're recording this, they've also flown three private axiom space flights. They've flown Inspiration 4 and now Polaris Dawn. So that's like another five missions, that's 13 different crewed missions, with a 14th on the way. So the crew dragon, oh, and one test flight for NASA.

33:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So fully 14 with a 15. Feeling pretty solid. So that's where all this started. Both programs were late in delivering, but SpaceX finally got going in, I think, 2020. 2020. Yeah with crew.

33:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
2017 was the target for both of them 2017. Right.

33:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And Boeing blew past 2017 by seven years for crew, yeah, and now the clock starts again. So, snarkiness aside, that's a lot of time, that's a lot of money and, as I said, boeing's at least a billion six, if not, at this point, a billion, seven billion, eight and above that, with reflights and fixes and all that kind of thing these are fixed cost contracts.

33:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They're not getting more money right. This isn't the old cost plus thing which brings up an interesting point.

33:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You know, can shareholder owned companies like boeing and lockheed martin and so forth compete with companies like spacex that are? You know, it's not all elon's money, but it's private investment, um, and we don't know the numbers because it's not a publicly owned corporation, you know, can they compete in general? Or is it just that SpaceX is so weird because it's owned by an alien, that he's got all those Alpha Centauri secrets and nobody else can keep up? Companies, ula, boeing, some of the small startups are trying to assault the shores of SpaceX, which, let's bear in mind, you know, up until the mid 20 teens, wasn't what it is today. I mean, it was only, I think, 2012 that he had to sue the Air Force, so the Air Force was spending upwards of half a billion dollars to do large satellite launches with the United Launch Alliance.

34:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
With blanket contracts.

34:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Like you know absolutely what's the word, I'm looking for Proprietary contracts. Nobody else could do it and ULA was very comfortable doing that. Spacex came along and said hey, we can do this for $80 to $120 million. The Air Force said right, kid, go away. So Elon did what any smart businessman did he sued his future client and said you have to let me bid. And once they did, I think they were glad they did, because it saved the taxpayer two thirds of the cost you know, roughly.

35:26
So you know, this company comes out scrappy, hard, fighting and, to the surprise of some and the relief of many, revolutionized launch. Oh, and let's not forget, they bring their rockets back and hose them off and fill them up and use them again like a water rocket. So there's a whole bunch of reasons to be impressed by this. So I guess my question and then we got to go to a break before you answer it.

35:49 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Thanks, Rod.

35:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, I'll give you a chance to think about it. Why the hell is it so hard for anybody else to come close to this? And that includes Europe, russia, china, india is just getting into the cruise space flight game, but you know, we would expect China, with their quote, private, unquote vendors, also working on this, you know, with government military involvement, as we know. Um, you know, he's just running circles around all these people, and then there's starlink and all this stuff.

36:19 - Tariq Malik (Host)
so, anyway, think on that, if you will, my friend, and we will be right back I think that for this case in particular, your argument about the pace for SpaceX versus Boeing, I mean, elon Musk didn't succeed the first time, spacex didn't succeed the first time they had failures.

36:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, I'm sorry. Wait, hold on, hold on. This is the armchair Facebook crowd. Just one more time. This is where you're going. Boeing's been at this since the 50s.

36:51 - Tariq Malik (Host)
What I'm saying? No, you're not. You got it. You got to let me, you got to let me finish all right so they lost. They lost what, like they lost in the very beginning, when they were trying to figure out their rockets. They lost a bunch of rockets and then, and then you know, elon kept putting money into it. Um, and then this, the the same thing with um, uh, with the big ones. They lost how many rockets while they're trying to land them?

37:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, 20 or something Before they were able to nail it yes, a bunch.

37:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And then I think that Blue Origin stole their thunder and landed like a month before they did, in that December of 2012.

37:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But the key that I'm trying to make there you mean with the toy rocket right.

37:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, the key that I'm trying to make there is that there was an iterative approach, but also a very high threshold of failure tolerance at the beginning, of failing there, and I think that that kind of approach to developing what is, all things considered, like a personal space program at that point in time, um was very unique and it's very difficult to replicate because because companies like Boeing companies, uh uh, or or even countries like China, et cetera, you can't have that kind of failure. You know you can't have that and uh cause you have to answer to uh shareholders, not one person that has a bajillion dollars or that black man that pulls up in front of your house, exactly, exactly Right, and so I think that it makes it.

38:13
It's a fundamentally different approach. No matter how much expertise internally you would have and the expertise, rod, I get what you say every time about Boeing, about this but that was how many decades of turnover and churn and brain drain right there comes a time where you have to start over again, and it's why, when the space shuttle was retired, we had to wait nine years to have anything you know, and it's why there was never any space shuttle too.

38:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's part of the reason? Yeah, well, it's part of the reason. There was also a lot of congressional interference and underfunding and administration changes and all that. Okay, I take that point, you know, because there's a dying of intellectual background, and we saw this when we had Rob Manning on talking about Pathfinder in 1997. They wanted the throttleable landing rockets that they had on Viking, and there was nobody that knew how to do it anymore.

39:05
Now, that said, boeing is responsible for knowledge retention of everything they do and every company they acquire, and I remember being down at North American I think this was after they had been acquired they were shutting down the Downey plant, throwing out literally tons of documents. Now how many of those were critical, I don't know. They didn't know either, though, because they were just literally shoving them with a skip loader off the floor of the factory. Now it's expensive to save that stuff, but if you know you're going to stay in the space flight business, boeing, it might not be a bad idea to keep the paperwork so you know how to build things and it's expensive to keep the expertise like on call for how many years you know, while you?

39:47
develop. Okay, so that's true, but you're as usual with with public-owned corporations like this, you're minimizing expense on this end of the teeter-totter, knowing that it's going to go up on the other end if you. You continue that program. So they're very optimistic. Let's keep the shareholders happy. Ooh, I want to maximize by bonus this year, so reduce costs and we'll pay for it downstream, which they're doing over and over again.

40:15
Now, that argument that you're saying holds some water. However, software design everybody basically started from the same gate, let's say 2010, trying to design the kind of software, advanced software, to fly these systems. Again, boeing had advantage because they had a hand in designing the space shuttle and its information systems and all that. Uh, spacex is starting from scratch. However, spacex seems to they have a very software-driven capsule, much more so than boeing. You know, spacex has, I think, five switches stop, go up down parachutes, you know. And the rest of it? Think? Five switches Stop, go up down parachutes, you know. And the rest of it's a glass console. Boeing is much more traditionally designed and yet here we saw in their test flights the failure to match up with the space station.

41:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
The clock settings. Mistakes were made right. They didn't do end-to-end testing from launch.

41:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, and that's kind of a big deal.

41:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It is a head-er like why you wouldn't do that and it's it. That is a culture issue and it's one that has been called out corporate culture issue, and it's one that's been called out time and again in the development of this vehicle, and I think that's the difference. They are culturally, uh, at their, at their core, very, very differently structured corporations.

41:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, you're being kind. They're being run by the boardroom in Chicago that's got a flinting knife out and is cutting costs, potentially at the cost of a crew.

41:43 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And that's not okay. I don't think that they're doing it like with oh, you know what, we're gonna shortchange the astronauts.

41:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I don't think that that's the case at all no, but they're saying we're going to shortchange the astronauts. I don't think that that's the case at all. No, but they're saying we're going to try and make more money on this federal program because we already lost a billion six.

41:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Because, well, I just don't think that the people involved in building the spacecraft would let it get to that point, honestly. But I mean I say that, Do they have a choice? And then we watched the first uncrewed test flight failed to reach the space station. And then we watched the second one launch. With how much flame, flammable tape and parachute issues with it.

42:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, and as we discussed before we went on the air. Now those very caring people you're talking about, for understandable reasons, have gone on. 34,000 of them have gone on strike. So to add to Boeing's woes, they've got to picket lines surrounding the plant. Yeah, and we don't know. Neither of us know yet whether that includes the space division or if it's just the aircraft side. I suspect it's both, because it's machinists.

42:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think and we've talked a lot about the corporate side of this and I know that we're going to talk about the actual vehicle stuff and the futures and the origins of it in a bit but I just want to make it really clear that I think that I think that the fundamental issue that for what we're seeing when we compare it to the SpaceX which is of the world, is that there it's a very different company.

43:00
They had a different process. Yes, I have said they had to start a bit further behind because they had to build a new capsule, they had to find a rocket for its basics, had to find a rocket for it. Spacex had things to work on, but they did that by design because they were trying to get to where they are now already. They were already planning to try to get to a crewed flight option, and so I think that those play a really strong part. But I do believe that at the end of the day, there was an assumption that if we have trouble, there will be government money to bail us out, right, and that's clearly not the case.

43:33 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, that's certainly a learned behavior over the many decades.

43:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and there was also an assumption that there would be a market for this vehicle beyond NASA, and we might talk about it earlier on. But their first partner for boeing and starliner and the atlas 5 that they used was going to be bigelow aerospace, which dried up and disappeared, and now there is no like, like tenant partner, whereas spacex has their axiom space partnerships, their uh, national, uh partnerships where they're flying other astronauts, they're um, uh, they're jared isaacman's of the world, uh, and up until recently you know they were selling private Starliner flights. I think they have one on the books with somebody.

44:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I don't think so.

44:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They had two, they had sold two trips around the moon, and then one of them Starliner, yeah no, starship, starship.

44:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, Starship, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they had sold two Dear Moon Collaps. They had sold to deer moon collapsed and there's a.

44:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
there was well that second was a multi-passenger flight, but I think so far only uh, tito, right, tito and his wife, that is tito.

44:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, signed up so, you know, and who knows, maybe, uh, the guy who was doing deer moon will end up going on that flight. Um, we're gonna go to a break in a second, but before we do, I see anthony fidgeting around in the background. Who's our producer board op that got an eyebrow. Raise, anthony, from, from the perspective of a guy so much younger than tarik and younger than myself and, uh, you know you live in northern california, I know you're very tech savvy you follow the news from the perception of a lay person. I mean, we all are but Tarek and our wacko journalists. What does all this look like to you? I mean, what do you? What are your perceptions of this whole grant?

45:22 - Anthony Nielsen (None)
uh, I mean I haven't been paying too close attention, but it like you know what you're saying about, like the brain drain and everything you know tracks and uh, yeah, you know maybe there are in the pre-show I kind of like brought up. It's kind of similar to intel right, where they like you know they were the leaders. Then you know you tell chip maker yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah just kind of really is got overtaken through. You know, hubris, and that's it.

45:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think that they that's. It's the hubris part of it. You know it's like you think you're the best and you're always going to be the best and no one's going to be the best and no one's going to come and drink your milkshake and all of that stuff, and then you take your eye off the ball. That's what it is.

46:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right, Well, we're guessing. I mean to be fair. We don't know how they're, that's what it looks like to us Because I haven't paid enough attention.

46:16
I don't know how their financial fortunes were running when all this ramped up. I mean, it's been 10 years, so a lot of changes have taken place, like airplanes that have trouble flying and things like that, and the moving of the headquarters, which from the industry observers I read. They love to put that at the foot of blame and say it's because headquarters separated from production and you can't run a company from across the country at least not something.

46:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Aviation, though, like space, a little bit of a separate animal, would you not agree? Well, I?

46:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
wonder you know I mean so yeah, and I give this talk on on the lunar module sometimes to to corporations. It's like you know, here was grumman back in 1962. Thank you for weighing in, anthony.

47:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
By the way, I didn't yeah, I don't think you cleared that with anthony before the episode started. No, I didn't. That's why I enjoyed it, because I got this look like wait, wait what you're talking to me.

47:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I gotta wake up now. Um, so here's grumman. In 1962. They've been building fighter planes. You know they, they won the pacific war with their fighter planes. Now they're building these sturdy not the fastest or sexiest jets, that's North American and others, but you know they're. They're very reliable major contractor, building on cost plus contracts, I guess, building these military machines that uh, have to be tough, robust and fly over and over and over again. And now suddenly they give them this contract to build this thing called a lunar module that's gonna fly only out of an atmosphere and once. That's it. Each one flies once. So it's a huge cultural shift. So where I'm going is was this, despite their 60 years in space, just too big a culture shift? Talking really here about the fixed fee contract for Boeing to step up and embrace and succeed?

48:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think that they had to learn it, and I think that they learned a hard lesson that they have to be faster on the uptake for this one, and whether it goes beyond Starliner we'll have to see. We should point out that Starliner is supposed to be reusable and in fact they did reuse the chassis for this one from the last test flight. That's why it had a big scar on it from the last re-entry.

48:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So yeah, I saw somebody post huh 10 times a. I'm sorry, let me. Let me just jump in here because I said we're going to go to break. Let's go to break and hold that thought we'll be right back.

48:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
All right, pray continue, my friend well, no, no, I think that was what I was trying to say. Is that I think that, at the, at the core, the lesson that comes out of this is that you have to learn faster, you have to change faster and then you have to iterate to make sure that you get where you need to be on time. If these are going to be the contracts du jour for the foreseeable which it does appear that they're going to be for the future and it isn't just for Starlander and Commercial Crew. We saw it for Artemis II, where there was very clear saber rattling from the government several years ago, where you had the vice president at the time, mike Pence, saying that if you can't do it, we will find someone who can, and I think he said, by any means necessary.

49:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, now they're doing the same thing with Mars Sample Return, exactly, exactly. And I think he said by any means necessary. Well, now they're doing the same thing with Mars sample return, exactly. Hey, jpl, if you can't cut costs on this to something that we think, arbitrarily, is fair and effective, then we're going to send it to private industry.

49:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And they've tried and as far as I know so far private industry has gone Well. And look what else is going on. You had NASA pull the next mission to Mars Vipers. No, the next mission to Mars off a brand new rocket, the first launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn, because they-.

49:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, you're talking about Escapade.

49:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm talking about Escapade yeah, the Escapade mission. Because they're not sure that New Glenn can launch in the window on the flight and they don't want to take the risk of extra cost for that. So they're showing, hey, you got to be there, you got to be able to deliver, or they're going to find something else. They swapped Clipper from SLS to a Falcon Heavy and now that's going to launch next month on time, like when they wanted to, instead of waiting what? How many years for the next SLS, Because they're all earmarked for Artemis missions.

50:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Anyway, we're getting a little bit off the point, and that is a cost plus program, by the way.

50:27 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, yeah, so we're getting a bit far off, but I think that there is a larger trend, like you're saying, where they're going to like NASA as the tenant government, the US as a tenant customer sorry, tenant customer, we'll, we'll cut them loose if they're not going to deliver now, and that's, that's a new lesson that these companies have to have to have to answer to so we we have to make sure we save time for we're going to talk about more Starliner stuff, so to head here.

50:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But yeah, you know, speaking of Starliner, one weird thing for a media perspective, which is what you and I do, you, you more successfully than me is, you know, boeing stopped coming to the press conferences.

51:08 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That was interesting.

51:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We're watching these briefings and it's like wait, we're at the two chairs on the right where the Boeing guys are supposed to be. And that continued up through the post-landing press conference, which is where I was sure they came back, but supposedly at Boeing's request. They said NASA, you handle it, we're busy turning screws on the next Starliner or something. What's that all about?

51:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't know what to say about that. I can say that from my armchair it's not a good look, right, I can understand being tired of answering the same questions all the time, right, but at least at the landing you would expect that they would say, yeah, did it go exactly like we had thought? No, did we learn a lot about the vehicle test flight? Yes, Are we going to learn what we can out of this and apply it to the next one? You would think that there'd be someone to be able to weigh in on that, and it was disappointing to see that responsibility get shifted to the side because we're not going to get answers anytime soon. That was one of the biggest fears about the shift towards commercial crew is that you will get less transparency and less information on that regard.

52:21
Now, this was a really difficult mission because it was very difficult to understand what was happening on any given day once it became clear that it wasn't going to be an eight-day mission, and there was a lot of hammering trying to figure out exactly what was going on there just to get the updates over time. I think that it got better near the end, but you would expect at least more than it. It wasn't really even a press statement, it was an update. I think we have a link to it An update on the Starliner updates page that had the quote from Mark Nappy.

52:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, so sorry, but I wanted to. That was the next point I was going to bring up. So Boeing skips these briefings, they skip their victory lap after the landing because I mean they could have taken a partial, they could have they you know what?

53:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
wait, wait, wait. Okay, I'm sorry, so so they skip those things.

53:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Then you think, gee, I'll go look on their website see what they said. So you go to the starliner part of the boeing website and the updates there stop in like mid-june. So you got to dig a couple pages further in to find further mission updates and they are are the most terse, non-informative, sterile, neutral. You know we are investigating problems with the thrusters and so you know they really somebody got the idea that good PR is no PR. Instead of the usual all PR is good PR and they just backed away from it like it was a toxic thing.

53:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think that my takeaway. First of all, they had a separate website for the Starliner update, so that's why you didn't find it on the Boeing website itself.

53:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
No, but I got to that and it was still extremely terse and brief, that's what I'm saying and you should be able to get to it from the Boeing Starliner page which is just a storybook at this point.

54:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think for those three months that they were on the space station, the answer was always the same we're still testing XYZ. Should they have gone into more detail about how they were testing it? Yes, that is my complaint. You know a little. This is what we did.

54:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, look there's spin and then there's corporate honesty. I don't expect them to be completely honest, because very few corporations are, but at least get out there and and have some kind of public contact. Yeah, so they left it all in nasa's lap and, as we've discussed before nasa comes these press briefings. It's all about, oh, working with the team and the team is doing great work and the thruster team is looking at the thrusters because they're the thruster team. The thrusters are very it's a complicated thing and you really don't know, but the team is doing great work. It's like, guys, you know we're 20 minutes into this. Can you tell us what you're gonna do?

54:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
yeah, well, they need to know, I think, what, what, what the nasa is going to do. I think that what we heard uh, from again, we didn't hear from bo, but from Steve Stitch and the other NASA experts is that the early approach to deal with these thrust switches because we haven't talked too much about it. But they get too hot, that overheating leads some seals to inflate and then it chokes off the propellant flow into the thrusters. That's why they fail and the initial description for what they could do is change how often they fire these thrusters together. That means that they don't get as hot, that means that they don't mess up the seals, they don't choke off the flow and everything is fine.

55:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well and possibly redesign. So they don't want to redesign the thrusters because that's Aerojet, it's a contractor. God knows how long that would take or cost. I mean, you know spacex would probably do it in a couple of months, but you know that's. I don't know, man, but they know. But they are talking about redesigning and replacing, or at least, uh, altering, not just the software but the doghouse, which is the little, the containment area in the trunk where the thrusters are. We got a at least taking of the huh.

56:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We got a picture of that on line 52. Well, if you want to show it?

56:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
yeah, so at the very least taking out some of the insulation because apparently, rather than keeping those things the proper operating temperature, they were retaining too much heat and, you know, maybe that'll solve some of the problem.

56:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They're going to have to vacuum test it to see if they have it already and if you're watching our video stream, that doghouse is that white vertical strip, that that's one of them.

56:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh, on, the service module is a big and if you're not watching our video stream, why not? You can't see tarik malik who my rugged good luck. So many women everywhere who said I could just eat him up.

56:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh my god oh I've oh anyway, I'm never gonna live it down all right. I appreciate everyone's admiration, so yeah, it must be nice.

56:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I haven't heard that for 25 years all right, but you know it's happens. You get old and homely, let's go to a quick break and we'll be right back with our wrap up. So the assumption moving ahead, is that we're going to possibly have another crude flight or, excuse me, uncrewed flight test, although Steve Stach, your friend at NASA, said not necessarily. So do you know, where they're landing on that right now.

57:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I think that there's still like a waiting period. You know, boeing has a new ceo. I'm sure there's going to be leadership decisions that come that come out of that. Um, now, uh, boeing, uh, their starliner team has to study what they can out of all of the data they collected, uh, and decide. But we should also just take another look at, like, what actually went right on the mission. Right, we talk, we talk a lot about this kind of debacle, about how it was. Oh it's eight days, and now it's three months. Oh, the thruster is this. And yada, yada, yada. They launched two astronauts to the space station. Was it fully smooth? No, but they got there safely. They're up there right now. They didn't get to come home Again, we've talked about that. The spacecraft survived that, not just an eight-day trip, but it survived a three-month. That's half of a typical space station increment. So they know that there's longevity to this spacecraft. Now, if they solve the thermistor issues.

58:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And.

58:16 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I guarantee you they will solve those issues. I don't expect personally. I don't expect them to need to do another uncrewed flight test.

58:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But will they fly out their contract?

58:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think that they will.

58:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
There's too much some, which some are prognosticating might actually end up extending beyond the life of the space station it's, it's possible.

58:39 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I mean, if the space station comes down before their contract's over, there must be a clause to say, hey, you got rid, got rid of our destination. But I don't know, I'm not a contract lawyer, I don't know what's in that, what bylaws and fine print is in there. I think that if a new market, if VAST or Orbital Reef or Sierra Space or those people that are building private space stations, get something going and someone wants a ride and SpaceX can't do it and they have an extra Starliner available, I think that they… I'm sure they'd find a way to figure out how to do that. If Northrop Grumman can figure out how to launch their cargo ship on a SpaceX rocket right, because they don't have one right now I'm sure that they would find a way to fill a need if they get a market, if someone wants to buy a trip on Starliner.

59:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, and, as I did mention earlier, they've talked about working the orbital reef. So who knows, maybe NASA would use one of his contract flights to fly some of their astronauts up there to do research or something. They could fly them on Vulcan, wouldn't that be?

59:40
cool astronauts up there to do research or something. Fly them on vulcan wouldn't be cool. So, oh, vulcan. So, but if they're going to do all that, maybe we ought to talk about, which we will in a future episode standardizing spacesuits. Yeah, because the one thing we haven't talked about is we've got this crew stuck up there and they're big, bulky blue boeing suits which are cool, they don't have them anymore. They're gone but oh, did they go back they came back.

01:00:01
They came back on starliner yeah, okay, um, so they're up there without spacesuits, that's even better I think sunny sunita williams has.

01:00:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
She has one uh spacex crew suit and they're going to launch another one up for butch wilmore uh for crew 9.

01:00:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
but see, the thing is, they have to which is weird so, on the one hand, nasa had said uh well, you know, we we didn't want to interfere, wanted to let these guys have maximum freedom to design their own suits, but what they ended up with is suits that required different seats to fit in, suits that required different fittings to hook up to the environmental control system on the spacecraft, and suits that have different gas mixtures and mechanisms for doing so, and suits that have different gas mixtures and mechanisms for doing so in a place that's the most dangerous thing you could do as a human being in the cosmos, because, as we know which I wrote in space 2.0 2019, but still available in a bookstore near you, space hates people and it will kill you any way it can, and you know, by golly, one way.

01:00:58
I mean. We saw it, hell, we saw it marooned in 1969. Gene Hackman, great film, forgettable movie, why astronauts cry. Give me a break, but you know you've got to have the. It's like being a diver, right? If you're down, you're in trouble, your buddy diver comes over and takes out the respirator and sticks it in your mouth. You need to be able to do that with a space suit, at least in an emergency. And, as it is, if a SpaceX astronaut and a Boeing astronaut are side by side out in space with one of the suits failing, the other one just watches and says, "'Gee, I'm glad I'm not working with your manufacturer".

01:01:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Or, as we saw in Marooned "'Our hoses are not compatible'".

01:01:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, well, which is exactly what happened here.

01:01:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I like that we're quoting like a 1970s Gene Hackman movie yeah get over yourself. So I love it. No, I love that movie. I have it on VHS.

01:01:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So it was the last crummy studio visual effects movie made in that genre, but anyway, you know you could see the wires kind of stuff.

01:01:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's me that you can launch a rescue mission in the middle of a hurricane.

01:02:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's because you were a child. So what happens? Moving forward with this? Is there going to be a move towards compatibility, or do we just say?

01:02:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
oh well, I think overall, you will likely see something like that. I mean, think about when you take an airplane ride. You do not wear your jeans to fly on an Airbus and then wear your slacks to fly on a Boeing. You don't need to wear different pants to fly on different airplanes.

01:02:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So eventually Sorry, that metaphor got stretched so thin, I could see through it.

01:02:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm trying to make some kind of mass transit comparison. Well, but to Like we talked about.

01:02:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm sorry, but let me flip that. You shouldn't have to use a different seat belt arrangement to fly on one jet instead of another.

01:02:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Okay, there you go, that's better.

01:02:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
They're compatible, they're universal. You know we need that in space flight for the safety of the crew.

01:02:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, I thought you were going to say you shouldn't have to need pants to fly anywhere. What do you think I am? I'm just saying you got a track record, rod, and I thought you were going there, but I'm glad that you didn't. So we're on the air, we're out there, but no, no, the point you make is valid and I think that that is the world that we will be getting to. Are we getting there fast enough? No, obviously, when you have hurdles like this one, you did that. There was a time where there were there were industry support to develop private space, uh, spacesuits, um, we're, I think it kind of flashed out and you're seeing a bit of a shift back to it. Nasa I think Axiom is building a spacesuit for NASA for the moon.

01:03:29
You have the other company Collins Aerospace is building another one as well.

01:03:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Are they? I thought they were, they were. Yeah, that contract got canceled.

01:03:38 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They backed out of it. Yeah, and there were other attempts. Orbital Outfitters was another one, Final Frontier Design by Teddy Southern. They're in Brooklyn. That's really cool that they're there. You need to get that market going. But then you need a vehicle. You need a company that just wants to outsource a spacesuit and these two companies just wants to to outsource a spacesuit and these two companies don't want to outsource a space suit yeah so, uh, because I believe that spacex doesn't want to out suit anything, outsource anything anymore.

01:04:10
No, yeah, but maybe they become the, maybe they become the suppliers, and it's just all. Everyone's using spacex at this point.

01:04:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You know, I think there are a lot of people when the when the job was given axiom saying Maybe I'll talk to SpaceX about a lunar EVA suit, and now they've designed and fielded an EVA suit. No private company has done that on their own before ever another ever.

01:04:33
So I should. We need to wrap up because once again we've blown past the hour, but Before I give you your final word, I just want to read this quote. I think this was from Kelly Ortlly orkberg, the new ceo at boeing. I would say we've done a great job at fielding two transportation systems. Oh, wait a minute, maybe that's nasa two transportation systems in fairly record time.

01:04:57
You're starting to see the market get fostered with non-NAT submissions, which is what we want. It's promising, but it's going much slower than hoped. Yeah, I think that was Bill Nelson, sorry, and Nelson said of Kelly Ortberg although we did not get the quote directly that in a conversation after the press briefing he expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work on Starliner, work the problems once Starliner is back safely, not, you know, not filling me with confidence, but at least they appear to intend. With the new CEO, which could be a game changer, we hope to move forward with this and fix the deficiencies and get going with it Because you know, all the other belly aching aside, it's a pretty solid spacecraft.

01:05:46
You know it's it's a much more of a legacy design than SpaceX is, but sometimes that's a good thing If they can work out these issues and get it to fly 10 times. At the very worst, maybe they end up selling it to another company like um uh, voyager space or or one of the others, and say, okay, here, here's your program, go what boeing did with the x-37 and they sold it to the space force, and the space force runs that.

01:06:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Now you know, um, that that's a private space. I think one of them might even still be up in space right now.

01:06:16
Yeah and it works really well it does, it does, and, and so I mean I think we're going to get there and I think that they will get there. This is, there's a lot of questions to be asked, rightly so, but I think there was a lot that also went right and I think it really is important to remember that and they will learn from it. I think Starliner 1 will fly. Bill Nelson has said he's 100% confident that that's going to happen, that they're going to fly out their contract and deliver, and um, and then we will see what the next contract is going to be. If it's a different kind of commercial crew thing and it's different companies that are involved, at that point, is it? You know, commercial trips to the moon? I don't know. Rod, um, I hope to be there to see it and, uh, we can.

01:06:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
What are you planning? Are you planning to die of scabies before that happens? Scabies that is really specific to pull out anyway, I've been looking at your medical records, but go ahead so no, okay, I know that everything.

01:07:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I just know that everything takes a lot longer than we like it to do, and so I have to plan for that.

01:07:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, you've done it again. You've spent over an hour with us. Well, if you're still here, on episode one 28 of this week in space, the star liner comedy hour Tark.

01:07:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
The laugh track just seems like so like we're not here for it.

01:07:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's kind of old and rights cleared. Where can we find you bearding for Boeing these days?

01:07:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, you can find me at. It took me a while to figure that out. You can find me at spacecom, as always this weekend. You will find me waiting on bated breath to see what time Polaris Dawn and Jared Isaacman and his crew will return to Earth. We think it's going to be sometime over the weekend and on September 17th. Everyone mark your calendars because we're going to get a super harvest. Moon, lunar eclipse, eclipse, eclipse.

01:08:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And what else do you get on September 17th. I ask you.

01:08:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
What the eclipse. What Rod's birthday.

01:08:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Rod's birthday. I become an even older man on September 17th.

01:08:30
I know. Have you ever written me a song? I don't think so which I am the only person you will ever meet who was born twice. It's a long story, september 17th, so yeah, good, happy birthday, rod. Great in advance, not quite yet, was that? Was that a party horn or something more personal? Oh dear, did you notice? He lifted out of his chair a bit when we heard that.

01:09:00
And, of course, you can always find me at pilebookscom or at astromagazinecom, because why not Remember to drop us a line at twisttv? That's twistv witha space joke, or we're going to come and get you. We welcome your comments, suggestions and ideas and we do answer our emails. New episodes of this podcast publish every Friday, aren't you glad? Episodes of this podcast published every friday, aren't you glad? Because that's, this podcast is date night material for some people on your favorite podcatcher.

01:09:27
So be sure to subscribe, tell your friends, give us your views. Five stars, thumbs up, five party horns, whatever works for you. And you can always fit, of course. Always go, of course, to our website at twittv, slash twis. And don't forget, you can get all the great programming video streams on the twit network ad free, on club twit, as well as some extras that are only available there, like the fact that we snuck out some live content today on discord uh, for only seven dollars a month, which, really what else can you do with seven dollars a month? I mean, can you, can you feed a hamster for seven dollars a month? I?

01:10:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't. How much do they eat? I don't know. What can you do?

01:10:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I don't know what can you do for seven dollars a month for I for seven.

01:10:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I can um. I can subscribe to moth hater on twitch, I think for my fallout 76. For For my Fallout 76 content. I knew you were going to go there.

01:10:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, well, whatever your passions may be, we would appreciate if you'd direct that $7 per month to Club Twit, because it keeps shows like this available to you for a very low cost, because it ain't cheap to do so. Step up and be counted. You can also follow the TwitTech Podcast Network at Twit on Twitter and on Facebook and twittv on Instagram. We thank you for the bottom of your hearts, of our hearts, for spending 71 minutes and 18 seconds with us, oh my God. Well, we talked about Starliner, because it's important.

01:11:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And it's almost an entire private spacewalk. Look at that.

01:11:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's a good point. A little cheaper on our side, though, All right. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next week. Take care.