This Week in Space 149 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 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Coming up on this Week in Space. An asteroid is coming in 2032. Will it hit Earth? Maybe not, but we've got the latest odds, plus. Spacex lands in the Bahamas and everyone's going to the moon, but who's going to get there first? Tune in to find out more, plus a whole lot more headlines on this Week in Space.

00:18 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Tweet From people you trust this is TORQed.

00:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is this Week in Space, episode number 149, recorded on February 21st 2025. Spacex, moon missions and killer asteroids. Hello everyone, and welcome to this Week in Space, the Space Headlines edition. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra Magazine, of course, and I'm joined by my roguish partner, tarek Malik, editor-in-chief at Spacecom. Hello, hi, partner.

00:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Hello Rod, hello, ahoy, ahoy, ahoy. How was your week? Probably not as busy as it's going to be next week week. I've actually been spending the bulk of the last couple days just trying to understand what's happening next week, and I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about that. We'll definitely talk about it next week. So next time, okay, all right, but how's yours, how's your day going there in the uh, the fabulous los angeles, marina, or?

01:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
wherever it is, downtown long beach, shoreline, marina. How bad could it be if you're?

01:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
did you go to the bahamas like spacex this week? Is that what that is? No, we're gonna talk about that, that's right. That's right, oh, no, no, but before we do.

01:33 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We have to remind everybody to do us a solid make sure to like, subscribe and click any other happy podcast things that will make us look good, because, god knows, we need your help to look good. But more importantly, we have a listener joke from alec crawford are you ready?

01:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
my friend alec. I'm ready lay it on me, alec, why?

01:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
can't you tell spacex dragon jokes on the podcast uh, I don't, I don't know go why why? Because they're crude c-e-r-e-w-e-d I get it formerly manned, I get it. Yeah, okay, I get it, I saw, I saw you know a funny thing.

02:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
A funny thing that you mentioned that, because I just saw, I think, some write-up, um, about government agencies and they used the word manned in there and I thought what kind of agency is using that now in 20, what 25 or whatever it is? But no, there it was. There was clear as day and it's not part now.

02:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Actually, it's interesting. I haven't checked the nasa style guide, which is, for those who haven't seen it, their version of the associated press style guide or any other journalism style guide that tells us how we're supposed to capitalize things, us how we're supposed to capitalize things and how we're supposed to contextualize things, and all that and quote, manned unquote went out of use, I don't know what 15 years ago, 20 years ago, yeah, about that.

02:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Leonard, david, friend of the podcast, and wife Barb were big proponents, early adopters, to get us to change our style at spacecom. And then we did, and now it's it got wider, wider appeal for sure.

03:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So yeah, so that'll be one to watch, but uh. So so what are you gonna do now? I've heard that some people want to jam us into a crew dragon and set us aloft when it's joke time on this show, but you can help to keep that from happening. Send us your best, worst or most indifferent space jokes to us at twists at twittv, and we'll even say your name. So, since this episode is all headlines, let's just jump right in, because that's that's that's how we roll we should call it the space week.

03:41
That was is what we should call it, instead of just headlines, right, that's that's.

03:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's a little bit more poetic, right? Just call it what the space week that was is what we should call it Instead of just headlines, right? That's a little bit more poetic, right.

03:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Just call it what a week it was. Before we roll into that, though, I have something from the mail pouch here, the space mail pouch. Steve shared an email this about rocketlaunchlive, which lists the projected date to SpaceX and Starship launches, along with everything else around the world and I mean everything like sounding rockets and the whole deal and that was in response to Brett Wesley's question from last week about where to best track these launches. And next week we celebrate our drumroll, please. 150th episode.

04:22 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Woo, sesquicentennial Yay. The non-existent crowd goes wild. Those are real people, Real people that we paid to be there waiting for that moment.

04:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Everybody, Of course they're like the studio audience on QTV, whatever it is, where you sell toothbrushes and eyeliner and stuff, where they have that audience in there that smiles gleefully every time they announce a new kazoo or something. Anyway, next week we're going to do our first Stump, the Space Chumps episode. So if you're listening and you have a question or a comment or something you want us to talk about, send it to twist at twittv. That's T-W-I to twist at twittv. That's T W I S at twittv, and we'll do our best to come up with an answer. It may not be accurate or even true, but Tarek and Anthony ride me pretty hard right here, so we probably get something close to correct.

05:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We're very creative people, right. Well about as creative as some, some, some officials are with the facts this week, but I guess oh.

05:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
OK, let's see. Oh, look an email already. So we have a big, crazy space week coming up. Tell us everything.

05:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah Well, as you know, I didn't know if this was the best part to do this or if we wanted to save it to the end, but we could talk about it later than two. But I just wanted to let everyone know. I might seem exasperated at the end of every week when we record the episode, but much of my exasperation this week is trying to understand what's happening next week, because it's been a pretty steady month so far. But man, next week we're going to kick off with preps that NASA is going to have some press conferences about the Crew-10 mission. So they're having a press conference to announce that Crew-10 is the rescue mission to send a new crew to the space station.

06:13
Rescue To rescue the stranded crew Stranded. Yeah, I know we're talking about that later on.

06:18 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
But we're going to kick off.

06:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We're going to meet the crew, the folks that are launching on Crew 10 on March 12th, how that's going to help the Crew 9 astronauts including Sonny and Butch, on the ISS come back to Earth in maybe late March or early April. And then it just gets crazier from there. Because there are, you know, after that, that big day. The next day, on Tuesday, there's big prep stuff for both IM2, intuitive Machines' second Moonlander because they are also going to launch next week, as well as the Spherix Punch mission that NASA's going to launch, which is the next day, on the 27th. So those are launching on 26th and the 27th. Right now Both of them are SpaceX launches, so it's going to be a big couple days for SpaceX. Also, on Tuesday, blue Origin's going to launch their NS-30 flight. Why do you care? I don't know. Do you like it when billionaires pay who knows how much to fly to the edge of space and back? Well, we're going to see that happen again, and I think that includes more repeat customers. So I guess they're doing better maybe than Virgin Galactic, because they're getting a lot more repeat flights, but who knows? And then we have a bunch of press conferences next week about the Intuitive Machines mission. So that's going to be really, really busy.

07:30
The House Subcommittee on Science is going to talk about NASA's plan to go to the moon, also on the 26th, to say I guess maybe we'll find out if SLS is going to survive, or at least the first signs of it. And then, of course, maybe the cherry on top or whatnot, is a SpaceX, is Starship flight eight. You know, there's there, there, there, tracking. We hear for a February 26th potential launch window opening. We'll see if they stick to it. But but that'll be like a new, a new thing to watch, see how high they get. But that'll be like a new thing to watch, see how high they get. Are they going to go for orbit? Are they going to try to do some kind of landing? We don't know.

08:09
But it's all kind of happening all at the same time when Russia is going to launch a progress mission on that same day to the, or later on the 27th to the space station. A lot of this stuff. And if you thought that was done on the weekend, on Sunday we don't have a Super Bowl, but we will have a blue ghost firefly aerospace moon landing at 2 30 in the morning to get ready for so a lot of moving parts, for sure. So try to try to juggle, but it just, it should mean that next week we'll have a lot to talk about, even if no one decides to chime in to test us and put our space know how to know-how to the mat there. So we'll have a lot of goss to talk about, a lot of tea to spill about space next week.

08:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Should be that you'll have bags on your eyes that look like mine next week by the time we're done with you, good Lord, it's going to be big. So we're going to go to a break, but before we do, I have to tease the next story asteroid, asteroid 2024 yr could smack the moon, maybe, or it could be dangerous, maybe, or maybe it's real dangerous, or last we heard, nah, not so dangerous, but it's still a good story. So stay with us. We'll be right back with that after this break. Don't go anywhere, all right? Uh, so asteroid 2024 yr it's scary, it's very scary.

09:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's not so scary, yr4, you'll forget that it's yr4.

09:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh sorry, my bad. Uh, so this thing is maybe 180 feet, maybe 200, maybe 300. You know, we're still pinning down the size. The thing is, it's amazing, once you get all the instrumentation and the brainpower available a raid to actually check this thing out things change every couple of hours, right, oh?

09:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
my gosh. Yeah, they even changed it after you grabbed the story too. We'll talk about that. Yeah, so we know it's big we know it's a lot bigger than chelyabinsk, which was like a small nuclear weapon. Chelsea was the size of a suv, by the way, so it's a lot larger than that for people that I thought chelibin was 60 feet than a bus, I guess maybe maybe the range the range that? That ranges from suv size two.

10:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah it was a london london double bus, but, but this one has been called consecutively city killer class, county killer class. I don't think it made state killer, but it's a big mama, but only about a third the size of Dimorphos, which was the target of the uh double asteroid redirect mission test. Um, so you know, I think we should all remember that this is something we've already proved we can deflect if necessary. So, as creepy as this might be, we could launch something tomorrow that would get there in however many months and deflect it, but you don't want to do that until you know really where it's headed, so you don't end up kind of oops, I actually deflected it in a bar stove, my favorite city to malign.

11:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I just want to point out that one of our listeners, Carl Burrell, says to wake him when it's a mile across, so I was like all right, that's what you worry about, right.

11:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wow, how come our listeners are more clever than we are? How come our listeners are more clever than we are? Well, that shouldn't be a surprise. So if it's the size they estimate and as I understand it, these are all from optical observations so far and it's pretty darn small and it's very dark, so it's hard to see it could be up to 500 times the power of the Hiroshima atom bomb. So that's about 8 megatons. Hiroshima is 15 kilotons and the Webb Space Telescope, whose budget has just been cut by 20%, but we'll talk about that later- was retasked to track it during this current near-pass, which won't last very much longer.

11:55
David Rankin of the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey says this asteroid is nothing to lose sleep over, so I think you can't be much more concise than that. Last revision of the odds I saw and you'll probably update this was the impact has gone to 1 in 360 chances, which is better than 1 in 43, and then later is 1 in 67.

12:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think the highest was 1 in 32 or 3.1% that it just continues to drop and will probably continue to drop cover this one, because the you know, initially it was like, oh my gosh, it's got a one in 80, you know, chance of hitting us. And then it was a one in 90 percent chance. And and uh, and there there are all those news sites out there that were, you know, hitting every little thing at the tick of the needle, uh, and our experts were saying, hey, it's gonna go up, but then it's gonna go way, way way down. So, right, you know, cool, cool, your jets, and uh. And so we, uh jets. And so we ran with that.

13:07
Of course, I'm always knee-jerk, so I'm like, yeah, yeah, let's do everything. But I got smarter people than I am who work at spacecom and they're like, no, no, we should wait for the science. And we did, and it was really interesting. It was a big roller coaster ride over the last week since our last episode, watching this story unfold, because not only did the risk do increase, did it do increase, not only did the risk actually increase like we expected it to, but it hit a 3.1% milestone on the Torino scale, which is the scale of percent the risk of the asteroid.

13:43
So it was the highest percentage that we'd ever seen an asteroid on the Threatless reach. So it was historic. And of course it took a nosedive right after as they got some more observations, which we expected. But just the fact that it reached that level was very interesting. Now it's way, way, way down. It's 99.72 chance. It's going to miss us entirely.

14:08
And I think it's just very interesting on the process scale of how they judge this, because the odds are what they are until you know more. And as they learn more, the odds kept getting moved around. And there is a very interesting graphic at the NASA CENOS site I don't think I grabbed the link for here, but the Center for the Near Earth Observation Program that they have that shows here's the Earth and here's the Moon and here's this massive line that's like the size of the orbit of the Moon or whatever about where the asteroid could hit at any given point. And you realize that, surprise, surprise, space is mostly empty space and so the odds were really small. But I had never seen it so visualized in that one, but I think that it was a big distraction, that people were, I guess, excited to be able to think about that rather than anything else.

15:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well then, there was a moment where some of the folks and I think this was before the last data dump came out, where they said well, it might actually hit the moon, that would be quite a show.

15:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and the odds of it hitting the moon were lower than the odds of it hitting the Earth, because of course the moon is smaller. So that would be awesome to see. I mean, I guess it would be scary too, but man, I think that'd be pretty exciting to see like a big asteroid hit the moon, as long as it doesn't break it up and reveal like the artificial structure inside that we all know, is hiding in there, Moonfall because it's filled with angry robotic bumblebees, just like moonfall.

15:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, speaking of web, which came in very handy for this.

15:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So yay web 11 billion is well spent those web observations of the asteroid start uh next week actually next, so I don't know how long it'll take, but they're gonna.

15:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That campaign starts in march well, but as oppressive as that might be, let's cut the budget. It's four years old now. Why not chop the budget? 20 now, we spent a lot of money getting this thing up there. Somebody quoted it about the same cost as a modern super aircraft carrier. Hey, I wrote this story. Oh well, then somebody was you. Regardless of how much it costs, it was a lot, and the thing works, which was kind of a miracle in itself. So, gosh, partner, why are we cutting the budget? 20%?

16:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, so this is a story that I wrote yesterday. Also, I think Jeff Faust at Space News wrote his a bit faster than I did, but it came from the American Astronomical Society meeting last month that I attended for spacecom, and at each of these meetings they have these town hall events where they talk about the state of something. So there's a NASA town hall where they tell you what's going on. There's this James Webb Space Telescope town hall that tells you what's going on with the telescope, etc. Etc. So in this town hall, the people at Space Telescope Science Institute that's the group that runs the great observatories for NASA, hubble, james Webb said that they have been asked to prepare a plan for 20% across-the-board budget cuts. Now, to put this into perspective for 2025, the fiscal year budget request from NASA was something like $371 million for all three of the great observatories Webb, chandra, hubble all together that's like the budget, but, of course, webb was pretty expensive to develop something between $8 and $10 billion.

17:28
It was a very pricey telescope, but it is the biggest, the most powerful, the greatest observatory that NASA has ever launched, along with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. That all being said, they were still asked like in December or so, to prepare for these cuts, and the cuts would take effect in October if they in fact end up going through and this is kind of across the board, where NASA didn't get as much money as they really were hoping to be able to request in 2025. They're facing all of these challenges, all of these delays, and, of course, we see what's going on right now in the government in terms of fiscal cutting. That all happened after this request came, so this request came before the current administration took charge. I want to make that really clear. Oh, really.

18:15
Still. Yeah, it came at the end of 2024. They said, look, the budget's tight, you have to find ways to cut 20%. If we need to ask there, have a plan ready. And I talked to Tom Brown, who is like the program manager over at STCI a bit, and he said that there's nothing that it's not going to touch 20%. 20% of that means operations, time, the time it takes to review the applications for time. They're going to try to keep it away from the grants because they award something on the order of 60 million I think I got that right um, uh, in in grants to fund research on the telescope itself and they're trying to keep the cuts away from that. But it's possible that they could. Uh, but no matter how you slice it, uh, it's. It's less money for operations and less money for operations and less money for operations means less science, less discoveries, fewer discoveries and less according to it.

19:12
And this is at a time where the space telescope, which a lot of people didn't know was going to succeed, has been far outstripping all expectations on what it's been able to do, pushing back to like within 300,000, 600,000 years of the start of the universe, that kind of thing, exoplanet discoveries, our own solar system. They get their last round of observations for one year. That's the one year that they have to schedule. They got nine years worth of applications, rod, nine years worth of time for one year, right, and they're not even halfway through their primary mission. They're about four years old. I guess this December they'll be four years old because it launched on Christmas in 2021. So the scientists that were in the crowd were just kind of beside themselves when they were discussing these budget issues and it was just one of a lot of things they were talking about. But you see these cuts because the Hubble Space Telescope, according to Space News and Jeff Faust, is facing the same request plan for 20% cuts. The Hubble Space Telescope turns 35 years old this year.

20:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and that would argue for wanting to in my feeble mind, wanting to allot more money to that, because it's just about used up right.

20:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah. Well, what I'm trying to say here is, I understand, saying, hey, we're going to cut back your budget because you're well past your prime. You finished your primary mission. The Chandra Space Telescope is just about almost as old I think it's about nine years younger than Hubble but it's facing the potential drawdown, you know, by the end of the decade, where they're just gonna cancel it all together even though it's still working. It's just not doing as well as it was.

20:52
I understand, at least, what the rationale might be for those kinds of things, but Tom Brown and some of the other scientists they're saying this is a mission that hasn't even finished its primary phase yet and you're talking about cutting it. Not only is it not finished yet, but there's nothing wrong with it, it's wildly successful. And so it is something that we're going to have to track, because we are seeing, since that ask to SCI yeah, now we have doge, now we have this whole cost cutting thing, uh, going on, these people that are getting laid off, and then they're gonna try to find them, to hire them back, because they didn't they laid off too many people.

21:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
you know that kind of thing, um oh you mean like the ones that manage the nuclear stockpile of weapons?

21:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
yeah, yeah and the cdc too, you know, like all of that stuff. So that can have an effect. And now they haven't gotten to that point yet, we haven't heard any of that yet. But it has me thinking about what are those ripple effects going to be and how will it affect? Not just the science of it, because it's not just about science, it's about the leadership, it's about the expertise that the country has in this field and using what we paid for. I don't buy a, I mean, I don't have a Porsche, but I wouldn't just buy a Porsche and leave it in the driveway because gas is too much, I'm not going to drive it. I'd want to drive it around and get the most out of it.

22:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I just pull a Porsche out of my. If you bought a Porsche, we, if I I don't know if you bought a porsche we'd have words, because I would, I would you're a jaguar man no, no, no.

22:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know, what I would really like is a, an orange and white. Uh, what is that? Um, it's like. It's not like a travel wall, it's a. It's a oh my gosh, it's like an old 50s car that'd be nice to have. So I can't remember it now you think? I was so I was so I was so into it way back when.

22:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh the chevy nomad station wagon, just for you. Um, I do want to make a quick adjustment here. It's actually, uh, as far as the oldest stars we've seen, or how far back we've seen with the, uh, with the web, it's 300 million years, not 300 000 300 million, 300 million, my apology, which is still amazing, though. We're talking about, you know, 10 plus billion years, not 300 000. 300 million, 300 million, yeah, yeah, which is still amazing, though we're talking about, you know, 10 plus billion years.

23:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's pretty close what's an order of magnitude between friends, rod?

23:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I mean, come on, really you know so I'll remind you of that next time I'm looking for a paycheck. Okay, standby, we'll be right back with uh, with more of our own observations. Don't go anywhere. Tell me about. Well, actually, I'll tell you first about firefly aerospace. Blue ghost moon lander yeah, that's launched just weeks ago is now in lunar orbit, which is cool because we we keep waiting for one of these private missions to have success there's more than one moon lander.

23:36
I guess we're gonna talk I know, but we're talking about this one now Give me a break. So it's scheduled to land on or about March 2nd, barring any complications, we're hoping, praying, it works this time, please. And it has 10 experiments on board and it's headed for Mare Mare. Did you hear that Mare Crisium, which is the Sea of Crises?

23:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Is that really how you say it? Mare Mare, yeah, not mare, mare, no mare is horses, mare is big stony pits.

24:06
No, this is exciting. This is exciting. We've been getting steady images from the spacecraft since they launched. I guess was it it was last month now, yeah, or earlier? Yeah, I guess was it it was last month now or earlier, yeah, and on the 13th, so just about a week ago, they arrived in an elliptical lunar orbit. We got video of it for folks on video watching it right now. And there it is.

24:31
I mean, so far things seem to be going really swimmingly. So I really hope that they've got all the I's dotted, all the T's crossed for this one to see how it goes. Of course, the landing is entirely different. I mean, you can drive 99% of the way there. You run out of gas before you get there. You know you're still not on the moon, but they have to stick that landing, or it could be all she wrote. So we'll have to see how it goes, but it's really a bit of a heartwarming success story to see Firefly, this relatively small company, really knock one out of the park with this first mission. Clps, of course, is the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program that some of the NASA payloads are part of on this mission, and so far things are going really well Now.

25:21
You might have heard me feel a little snarky earlier. There is another moon lander that people should be thinking about. Japan actually launched. The Japanese company iSpace launched their own moon lander and I think it's called Resilience, along with Blue Ghost on the same SpaceX Falcon rocket, and it just passed its own milestone with a lunar flyby as it's getting ready for its own landing. But resilience takes a lot longer to get to the Moon than Blue Ghost, and so it's going to take a little bit longer to get there. So not so much a race, but I-Space is trying to come back from a failure. You mentioned that if Blue Ghost succeeds with Firefly, if everything goes well, like 100%, they will be the first to actually nail it 100% across the board.

26:13
Im1, I think it kind of landed and then fell over. They got some science back from, in fact, american Astronomical Society. I think one of the radio telescope was facing up for a little bit. They were able to get some science, but then it just got too messy. But they had something like five minutes worth of data and they were salivating over it. What can we learn about the universe with just this? And so they're hoping to to be first, but then I am, too, waiting in the wings too. So we've got a moon landing this week, another one on the way and then another one that's getting ready to get off the ground with intuitive machines number two that we talked about earlier and just a quick side note, there are two I spaces.

26:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
There's I capital s space, which is the japanese company, and there's I small s space, which is the chinese company, so that that can get confusing for us. Yeah, not looking at it, you'll have to pardon me. There's somebody hammering in the background here. Um, next up, ballistic of the bahamas spacex is talking to the bohemian government about launching and landing. I thought it was just landing, but launching and landing rights and uh, hey, if you've got any contacts over there, brother, I have land. I have two lots in the bahamas that my parents bought in 1965 with a coupon for the back readers digest I find it. Nobody's ever seen it in the family. I've been to the bahamas but I haven't been to the property. But I'm pretty sure, looking at a map, one of them's a mangrove swamp and the other one doesn't have any road access.

27:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But hey, perfect for rockets but there's more to this story than that you have land in in the bahamas or at least your family.

27:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yes, sir, yes, so we could go there with like tents or whatever and just camp out and sit there with the sand fleas and the crabs you bet Because mangrove. Have you ever been to a mangrove swamp?

28:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I have only seen them. I've seen them in Singapore.

28:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you're looking at a beach and the tide's in. You see these trees kind of popping out of the water. It's like well, that's kind of cool, you know so forth. And then this tide goes out and their root balls are like paradise for flies. These swarms of black flies come out. So you're sitting on the beach swatting and snapping and thinking why in God's name did I ever come here? That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about SpaceX.

28:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I like how you got Caribbean life to contribute a story here. This one's from Caribbean.

28:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, I saw it in. But why the Bahamas? And why? You know he can at least as far as landing goes, he can come down on a barge international waters offshore. Yeah, it just doesn't seem elon style not that I'm an elon basher, although it's tempting but it doesn't seem his style to say, hey, can I get a license for this? When he could just be offshore. So is he really thinking of launching from there?

28:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
well, you know, the launching thing I'm I I'm unclear on because, like you, I had inferred from SpaceX's announcement and it's not just that they wanted to do it, they actually did land the rocket off the coast of the Bahamas the week that we're recording this video was the first time that they'd ever done it as we're recording this, about three days ago and the whole idea is that being able to do that to land the rocket there rather than bring it back either to the launch site in Florida or offshores in the Atlantic is that they can. As I understand it, they can burn a little bit longer, land basically kind of where they are over, and reach a wider variety of orbital inclinations, of orbit destinations now, and that gives them a more varied portfolio to offer their customers about which orbits they can launch into. Now it does seem like and this is part that I'm not very clear on it does seem like and this is the part that I'm not very clear on about what you're going to do with the rockets after that, because you would have to bring them back and ship them back, or do they just have enough of these Falcon 9 boosters that it doesn't matter anymore? In fact, they just flew one for the 26th time. It's another record, I think, if memory serves time. It's another record, I think, if memory serves.

30:22
And so they've got a really solid stable of these in hand, and you could see that they might set up some kind of rotating delivery system where they're just kind of launching them and then bringing them back over time, like they kind of do now, but on a longer scale. Or and this is what I was thinking about when you mentioned bringing up this story is this the beginnings of some kind of Falcon point-to-point transportation system? Because wouldn't that be interesting? Spacex has been shooting for that kind of a thing with Starship and in fact I believe the US military has been asking for at least for uncrewed ones for cargo right now ideas for similar types of technologies. The point-to-point delivery system via space, and their illustrations of it look a lot like Starship itself. So that's what's got my juices flowing about that one. Could this be the beginning, so that I don't have to fly for two days to get to the other side of the world.

31:21
We could just hop in the hop in a rocket, hopefully, for you know the steerage or whatever the equivalent will be, uh and and get there, but we'll have to see if that's what's going to happen singapore in two hours, my friend yeah, I tell you wouldn't that be nice I mean you might be standing up and hanging, but at least you'll get there but they'll charge you for for for the luggage weight, they'll charge you for everything you'd have to ship your luggage, I think, so you don't have to take it on the rocket for you okay.

31:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So big sigh here we're going to talk about when are we going to bring the iss back or down yeah, I shouldn't say back, but before we do, let's get this break out of the way, because this one's going to be a bit of a scene chore.

32:04
So standby, we'll be right back, okay. So Elon Musk wants to deorbit the ISS, and I quote, as soon as possible. He wants to bring down a still functional national laboratory and of course he does have a stake in this decision because the contract promises SpaceX to nudge it out of orbit and his stated goal is to head directly to Mars with human crews as quickly as possible. Also, and more specifically, he suggests a two-year window for de-orbiting the ISS. Now, it is worth remembering that the, the uh space station costs about three billion dollars a year for nasa to operate, and that cost goes up over time because it's getting older and they need to replace things and repair things and, of course, part of what butch and sunny have been doing up there when they were abandoned on the space station, left there they left them in space, they left them there and they weren't ever going to bring them back.

33:03
At least, that's what we okay, take it easy, partner, take it easy. Uh, but they did, you know, among other things, they helped in research, of course, but they also helped on maintenance and they you know, you and I discussed this a little bit earlier off the air, but they need as many hands as possible to keep that thing going. It's not easy, it takes a lot of work, uh, but but the must. Here's the, here's the rub. The smaller successor space stations under a nasa contract for private industry to go up and take the place of the iss to some extent in terms of continued orbital habitation and research facilities and so forth, aren't going to be ready that soon. Now, vast, with Haven 1, will have a prototype up there, maybe in 2026, but that's four or eight people max, and the other companies that are looking at this aren't going to be up until a couple of years later, maybe as late as 2030.

33:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I like how you said four or eight people max, and there's only seven people on the space station right now.

34:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm hurt.

34:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

34:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
True? No, I think it's four. I think it's a crew of four. I wasn't sure, but I'm pretty sure it's four Because Dragon is the vehicle.

34:25
It can only carry, okay, but it's really small and it's very streamlined and in comparison to iss it's tiny and and pretty scaled down, but in any event we're not. So we'd have a gap in orbital habitation. Does that matter? Well, here we go with geopolitics again. China has a modular space station up there. They'd be in orbit. We wouldn't. Does that matter? Uh, that's a longer conversation, but the bottom line is uh, we might not have a replacement up there until a real replacement, operating, functioning, serviceable replacement until 2029 or 2030, maybe 28. Last part of this complicated calculus is that the various partners for the ISS, which include Japan and Europe, Canada.

35:04
My things are missing in canada. Thank you, um uh, our our fine with the 2030 date, which is what we all agreed on, but uh, russia wanted out in 2028, they said I think, I think I think you hit the nail on the head.

35:16 - Tariq Malik (Host)
there is already, there is already a plan to de-orbit the space station, and it is to de-orbit the space station by 2030. Not only is there already a plan to do it, but SpaceX has the contract to do it. They have to build a new space tug. They agreed to do it and Elon Musk should know this right, that there is already a plan.

35:39
I'm sure he does, and one wonders if maybe he just wants that contract to pay out sooner yeah and so, uh, so this this is probably the first of two stories involving Elon Musk that we're going to talk about this week because at least yeah it, it was a bit of much.

35:54
So it was just a bit of a surprise, um, to see, to see of much. So it was just a bit of a surprise to see that call, because Elon says we want to go to Mars, we should just get out of orbital, out of the thing right now that it's a big money. So he is right, it costs so much 3 billion a year. You just said it is nothing to sneeze at, but there is a plan already for it, and expediting it and changing that plan will be more expensive and a little bit more complicated, and then you lose a resource a lot earlier, not to mention affecting international partnerships, as you already mentioned. Now, one thing that I can see is that he said within two years, and within two years is 2027, and that is within the current Trump administration. So there's a very visible milestone to say we're gonna do this and now it's done and it will not be outside of the administration, which 2030 would be beyond the current administration type of a thing. So-.

36:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, excuse me, Are you saying this could be politically motivated?

36:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Political reasons, rod. Political reasons. Reasons. All right, I'll take that. I just, I just don't, I don't, I don't, I don't get it, you know, I think that I think I get the frustration, though you and I are frustrated that we're not on mars yet.

37:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We are right uh, well, we are, but but I have to say, from what I know about it and I it, it's been a few years since I wrote the book, but when I was writing, god, I can't remember which book it was. It's a very deep dive into radiation mediation and I hate to keep saying it because it sounds like loser talk. But we're not ready. We don't have bulletproof life support systems that can last for the entire trip out and back. We don't. We have not solved the radiation mediation problem and okay, you can send guys my age so you figure out. You only got 20 years left to live. What's what's? What's five years off of that for cancer? Because you got saturated radiation on the way to mars. The radiation shielding is very heavy, although we do have a story coming up that may address that. Um, so you know, I I don't want to say we're not ready, but we're not ready.

38:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well and.

38:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Elon oh and Starship doesn't work yet.

38:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I was going to say Elon and SpaceX has been saying that they. Well, elon has said that they want to launch SpaceX or Starship to Mars next year, uncrewed. Fine, pardon me. I think that the plan would be to launch two to Mars during that time frame to maximize whatever they can get to, and then launch people on the next window, which would be 2028. Again, within that four-year stretch. So we'll have to see, we'll have to see. See, I I'm just um, there's a lot happening from from, from, from from that particular source in in the in the nasa sphere this year, the this week, and that was just one that I just like. I don't, I don't get it, I don't get why. I think part of it like making these decisions now when there is no actual nasa administrator, like in charge, right, there's an acting administrator, nancy petro uh, sometimes that's when you want to janet, petro, janet janet, yeah, yeah, um, I did a whole google search trying to find out why I couldn't find the acting administrator yesterday going.

39:12
I know we even wrote a story about who is nancy petro and then I found it and I was like, oh no, it's janet, see petro. And then I found it and I was like, oh no, it's janet, wow, it's been a week and a half oh wait, we're not recording right. I didn't.

39:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh, we, we weren't live for that part not only are we alive, but I just caught. Uh, talk about breaking the fourth wall I. I got a look at anthony when he took off his glasses and started cleaning them. He was staring at us like what are you guys prattling on about? Now? It's like we got caught by dad so it's so.

39:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So it just seems like, hey, let's get someone steering the ship first, before we're throwing the deck chairs overboard, or, uh, or, or, you know, running it into the earth's atmosphere at that point in time.

39:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, that's true, but you? But if you're determined to make a big, major course correction and you've got an acting administrator in charge, depending on who they are it's probably easier to do before you have formally appointed your permanent administrator. So who knows?

40:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, and Janet Petra did say at the Commercial Space Conference earlier this month that Mars is the goal, goal that we should be trying to really get there. We should use the moon to test technologies, which is what the whole plan is anyway, but that is clearly on the agenda in terms of things that are coming to switch around. So Okay.

40:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, this is a hard one as the time come. Stranded astronauts. Well, this is a hard one as the time come, stranded astronauts. So trump and musk.

40:41
And you know I I don't like getting terribly political on this show, but trump and musk have been, neither do our listeners this narrative, yeah, about these two boeing starliner astronauts, sunny williams and butch wilmore, being stranded on the space station, which I kind of, you know. I swallowed hard at that but I thought, okay, you know, if you want to contextualize it that way, I'm not going to push back too hard. But then they went further to claim that was a political ploy by the biden administration. Yeah, horns, uh, no evidence was offered, of course, beyond elon's claim that he offered the biden administration to get them down sooner, and he claims they said no. So that was immediately interpreted as a political move. Could have also been a money-saving move, by the way, but the current schedule for return was set months ago.

41:27
You know, crew, crew, uh, rotations are a very complicated thing, delivering payloads a complicated thing. And oh, by the way, the very person that's making a big deal out of this, mr Mr Musk, is the one that's late on delivering the new Crew Dragon capsule, which was supposed to be part of that rotation. So there's a bunch of moving parts going on here and it does feel disingenuous, especially when you see Trump and Musk and Fox and I don't have a particular thing against fox, but using words like strandon or, my favorite, abandoned, which both trump and sean hannity said left, and they were never abandoned. If you abandon astronauts in space, you shove them out the airlock without a helmet or life support. You say bye, see you on the next orbit, and that's not what happened. So you know this. This really sticks in both our craws and um, they've got a capsule up there. If they have to come home in an emergency, they're covered yeah what's going on I?

42:27 - Tariq Malik (Host)
don't know. I wish I could explain it to you, rod, I don't. I don't understand a lot of it. Aside from there was very clear, just kind of rewriting of what happened last year.

42:42
Is it an optimal situation that NASA was in last summer when the Boeing Starliner astronauts couldn't get back down because they weren't sure about the spacecraft? No, would it have been better if Boeing had a spacecraft that worked with significant NASA confidence that they could put their astronauts on on the way back? Yes, but all of this other stuff about decisions and assigning political machinations, when there were a lot more complicated discussions about when could astronauts be ready to fly, when could they get spacesuits up there, when can the space station be ready to receive vehicles, when can they have crew transfers A lot of that stuff has to be taken into account and this was the plan that NASA came up with. Now, if Elon says and he said this on Twitter on X, pardon me afterward that he went up and said yeah, yeah, we can do it for you, we'll go get it, we'll go get the crew" and he said, because you mentioned saving money like a cost issue, he said that they would work within the available annual budget.

43:49
That I guess would go to SpaceX's missions, but we don't know what the trade-offs were to work within the budget. Is the trade-off that you replace one of the crewed missions, the crew transfers for that and therefore don't have any American astronauts on the space station? That's possible. It's not optimal, right, but it's unclear what all of this means, and we did watch the Fox interview with Hannity. It was really full of a lot of that kind of rhetoric that was really just reshaping what had happened to fit in an agenda. The facts are NASA said hey, we can't bring them back. What's the next rotation that we can bring them back on? We'll move the crews around so that we can do that. The astronauts are okay with it. That's the decision that they made. They were going to bring them back earlier. They were going to come back in February.

44:37
Spacex's Dragon, in December, before the administration took charge, said that that spacecraft, which is a new version of the Dragon crewed vehicle, was not ready. They weren't ready, SpaceX wasn't finished with it. They needed to do more testing or it wasn't working or whatever it is that they have to do. Or whatever it is that they have to do, the spacecraft wasn't ready and that created more delays and of course, those delays now because SpaceX already has the plan to bring them back. The delays are on SpaceX because they were going to bring them back in February. Now they have to bring them back in March because their spacecraft isn't ready. So the president said bring them back earlier or ASAP. So NASA said go ahead and swap to a different dragon spacecraft, One that was going to launch the ax4 crew, a private mission to the space station that has flown before. I think it's called, I don't know Is it also called resilience?

45:29 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
No, it's got a name. I remember yeah.

45:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So they decided to do that, so they don't have to fly on the one that's delayed. They can fly on one that's ready or closer to being ready and they're able to, I guess, move the return up a bit earlier. And there's other things that are involved. If they wait for the thing to be ready, then the crew has to. If they wait for the one that's not ready to be ready, that means more time for Bochy and Sunny on the space station.

45:57
The station has its own red lines that they have to adhere to. I think Eric Berger has a really great story at Ars Technica all about these red lines for supplies, for food, for water, for air, that kind of a thing that they don't want to encroach or get into. So the longer you have them up there, the closer you get to those lines. It's a big mess and I think assigning shenanigans and calling shenanigans on something that was already really complicated and that NASA was dealing with with their partners, it doesn't seem like it's a worthwhile thing. Should they have? They don't have an. I'm sorry to cut you off, but they don't have a rescue ship just standing by. Maybe they should now for these things, because SpaceX has enough of them. They could just have one in the barn on standby and that would have solved all these problems. They did that with Hubble, remember they had the shuttle on standby and that would have solved all these problems.

46:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
They did that with hubble, remember, but they had the shuttle. Yeah, but, but. But partially because of this and certainly before this, there were contingency plans in place to make sure everybody could get home. Yeah, there's sufficient spacecraft and sufficient spaces. Even if it means wadding up a bunch of dirty laundry and lying on the floor under them seats, you'll get home at one time.

47:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
At one time, there was a period in the summer where there were not enough boats, there were not enough ships, you know, uh well, at the station to handle them back, there weren't enough seats seats, yeah, but they could have done it.

47:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's what they were working on. I have to say, in summary and and you know, just for full transparency, I was a nasa contractor for a years, but that doesn't really change my output there are creaky timbers in the agency. We know that they're having it for a long time. There could probably be some streamlining, there could be some reorganizing, may lose a field set or something, but this does feel a bit like a smear campaign. Bringing the Biden administration into it confuses the heck out of me, because it's pretty clear he's not going to run again, so you don't have to keep pushing back, pushing back, pushing back the administration's over. It's in history, it's staying. But beating on NASA for this just feels a little disingenuous. But you know what? Most importantly, we have one more break, so let's do that. I need it now back, we'll come back with a happy story.

48:16 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I have a. Yeah, I hope so, okay, so all right stand by. All right, I'm gonna rescue this show, okay, yes yes, from all the from all, the all, the all the people we just offended, you know well, and you know, let's just say we don't mean to offend anybody.

48:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We're trying to call them as we see them and I really like you I know because you run spacecom, for gosh sake. You know I want to keep as balanced perspective as possible, but when people start saying things like these people were abandoned. You know, if you know anything about nasa, crew safety is paramount. Sometimes there are people NASA crew safety is paramount. Sometimes there are people that think crew safety is too much of a consideration and that we should take more risks, like we did in the 1960s. Not a big fan of that, but I understand their point of view. So we're trying to keep balanced everybody.

49:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's what came up during the whole Boeing thing.

49:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I mean, the ship came back down, Fine you know, but it could have been spinning and the heat shield could have been aiming the wrong way, which would have been bad. Okay, but let's move on to happier things. So, as I mentioned earlier, radiation protection in deep space is tough.

49:21 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So this is better.

49:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Deadly radiation is better when you're in low earth orbit? Uh, you're. You're beneath the shielding that the natural shielding the earth has, and and not much of that radiation reaches you more than on the surface, but it's diminished enough that you're safe for fairly extended periods of time. Then you get above the van allen belts and the magnetosphere and all that and it gets ugly. Now, during the apollo program, which is the last time we went out into deep space to the moon and back, those guys were it wasn't mentioned much at the time, but they were flying through dangerous territory. We had had a major coronal mass ejection at that time. They could have been radiation saturated sorry, that was the queen mary blowing its horn and they would have, you know, could have been in very poor condition when they got home. And at this point radiation shielding is primarily aluminum hulls and whatever is between that and the interior of the pressure vessel. And aluminum is bad because when a high energy particle hits it it can spall and actually create more particles than the original one coming in to the pressure vessel. So there's a lot of problems with it.

50:29
Many things have been explored. They've talked about polyethylene that was Wernher von Braun's favorite solution big sheets of plastic, but they're heavy. They've talked about water jacketing, which is very effective, but even more heavy, and various other materials. There was a project at JPL, when I was writing for them, that had these big, very low mass. They were like like styrofoam blocks. They weren't styrofoam, but these big blocks of material that could be folded and reconfigured, but they were rigid and really bulky and hard to work with.

51:01
So now we have a story, thanks to un life science, about 3d printed hydrogels. Yeah, hydrogel is the kind of stuff if you remember I had them as a kid, you had them as a kid. You know a little plastic dinosaur that you stuck in water and it blew up and became a big, foamy, gushy plastic dinosaur. That's because this polymer accepts water very well and holds its shape. So when you think about that an extension you can use these, if you 3D print them, on a spacecraft, to line the pressure vessel and then saturate it with water and the good thing it does, instead of having water slosh around, which it would normally do, of course, in microgravity, you now have a 3D structure that holds it in place almost as a foam foam, kind of like a big sponge, but actually holds the distribution of water static, so you've got evenly distributed protection, so that's very handy.

51:59
Also, by extension and this was not in the story, but, um, you, actually this this one part was in the story you you then have water you can use when you reach a destination, if you choose to, for drinking or creating oxygen or whatever let's bring it out something that also occurred to me is you know, say this was something the size of a starship.

52:19
Water's heavy, you know it's. It's eight pounds to the gallon, it's heavy stuff. So you could say launch a starship lined with this hydrogel to the moon, fly naked out to the moon in terms of radiation and then, on the moon, tank up with water to saturate the hydrogel.

52:37
If you're continuing on mars, water, that's a lot right, you water, you would mine for the moon or get from the moon, and it's a lot cheaper and easier to get that water from the mail maybe not easier. It's a lot cheaper and mass effective to get that water from the moon to carry it out of the Earth's gravity well. So there's a whole bunch of advantages to this. And who doesn't want to travel in a spaceship surrounded by little inflated watery dinosaurs?

53:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I mean, how cool would that be. By the way, that gif, the little video clip that the scientists released with the announcement. I told this to my team. Julian Dossett wrote the story for spacecom and I was like I could just watch this. This is the most calming thing I've seen all week. Is this hydrogel just expanding to fill up the whole space and it's just kind of like serenity. Now it's gold to people who aren't watching the video.

53:28
It's like squishy, it's like jello and it makes me think of summer and you know the going on vacation and a nice summer day.

53:36 - Rod Pyle (Host)
God, listen to you. I think you're leading a too compressed a life. If it had been purple or pink or something like those dinosaurs, I would have liked it better. All I saw was gold goo that got a little larger in the frame, but you do.

53:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It makes me hungry for Jell-O. My mom makes this Jell-O dessert that looks like this, but it is pink. It's like a pink Jell-O and it looks like what's that meat product, that byproduct, the?

54:05 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
pink slime.

54:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It looks like pink slime right and it's real squishy and it looks like it would taste awful. It looks like, uh, like baking soda mushed up with pink toothpaste, but it is the most delicious dessert ever excuse me.

54:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm gonna go lose my lunch right now it's good. It is good you put bits you want to know about something that tasted bad. When I was a kid, jello actually experimented with celery flavor celery wow, it was supposed to be the next big thing for thanksgiving celery flavor jello. I don't even like celery when it's made by nature. What were they thinking it's like? Next it'll be kid liver flavored jello or something anyway all right.

54:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So when we go to space, so hydrogel is cool on the Ellery Jello L-O-J Wow. I just fell out of orbit. On that one, let's move on.

54:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Where, oh where, are the aliens? Astronomers working on SETI-related projects have been diving into AI and more traditional processing methods to seek out signals from the vast amounts of data they get from things like the BLA, the very large array that might indicate alien civilizations. And you know we're looking for radio signals in certain bands. Be nice if they're focused towards Earth, because then that shows intention, although the odds are pretty low. But sorting through this data is very time-consuming.

55:30
So a project called cosmic talk about tortured acronyms, listen to this commensal open source multi-mode interferomic in interferometric cluster, which worked with the setup of the very large array telescope to seek out highly focused radio transmissions or frequencies that might be generated by alien civilizations. And specifically one of the things they were looking for were doppler ships in that signal. That would indicate it was coming from a planet, because it's, you know, going around a star, moving away from us and towards us. It also filters out terrestrial radio signals. But once again, no real results, nothing like the wow signal of years gone by, and no signals of interest survived scrutiny. So the search continues, but with AI we have more hope. Yeah.

56:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I don't know what to tell you. I want to know where the aliens are, and I'm glad that they have this. And I'm still trying to figure out what the word commensal means, because I know what I think it means working with the array.

56:39
I know what all those other words mean, but not that one. This is interesting because one of our experts, paul Sutter astrophysicist Paul Sutter astrophysicist has a piece out that is very similar to this about how all of these searches keep coming up empty handy, and I guess it's good that we're crossing things out right so that we know where the signals are. I guess that'll help us winnow down, but it does feel like spitting in the wind trying to find these signals and you kind of wish that they would just send us a sign from on high or land. In what? Fenway Park or something? A note in a bottle at least? Yeah, but still, it's a big space, the universe is a big place. It is nice that SETI is able to do this and can keep that search off.

57:35
Actually, at AAS I met a lot of scientists that are working at the SETI Allen Array, listening for technosignatures, and it wasn't so much that they weren't finding any, but it was that they had taken this search, which has a very public-facing and public-friendly aspect to it, and using it to teach a new generation of radio astronomers, high school students and whatnot, how to actually do the science.

58:07
Yes, they're looking for something really, really fun, but at the same time, they're learning how to do the science. Yes, they're looking for something really, really fun, but at the same time, they're learning how to do the science, and I think what we need, now more than ever, is that kind of expertise getting into the upper sciences and then continuing going forward so that they can figure out another kind of cosmic array to send a message to ET, and maybe something that doesn't turn up empty-handed. I think that'd be really, really great to see. So I think, even though they're not finding anything, I think that they're laying the groundwork so that when we do find something, we'll be ready to deal with it.

58:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I think we should just send out a very powerful radio message that says hey, humans taste like pork, Come on down. Well, they don't know what pork is.

58:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
How about a discount? Some kind of mathematical formula that says that the moon is on sale, right? Hey, you know what? You know what Sell them Pluto.

59:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I know.

59:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Hey, we've got nine planets, but you can get the small one for a discount, right they?

59:06 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
don't know that we call it a dwarf planet that we got rid of it.

59:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They don't know that we call it a dwarf planet, that we got rid of it. They don't know. We'll just tell them we had nine, mike.

59:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Brown would jump on and tell them let's send them a message that they left one of theirs behind and Elon is here waiting to be picked up. Okay, last one NASA jobs are safe for now. There was a recent announcement of a major reduction to workforce by NASA. It has not happened. An announcement of a major reduction in workforce by nasa that has not happened. The first round was expected to be release of all probationary employees quote, unquote which are people who are, you know, in their first years they're still under scrutiny before being permanently hired or people that have moved into new positions or changed agencies. And it wasn't. You know, this was not going to be catastrophic in my opinion. Maybe you'd feel differently. It was about a thousand people but I think those people would feel differently.

59:55
Well, yeah, but I mean, we've already had that at jpl and it was more than a thousand, so you know when you're talking about across all the remaining field centers. But yeah, there's important work being done by these people and this is the next generation of nasa people, so those probably aren't the ones you want to cut. Now there have been what you call them voluntary early retirements Maybe forced retirements is a better word at some of the field centers. What was weird about this was that Goddard and the Marshall Space Flight Center were to be excluded, but there was no explanation as to why. Now, marshall, I get it because they're building SLS and that hasn't been canceled yet.

01:00:33
Um, goddard was a little more of a puzzle. Unfortunately, national science foundation got a similar memo and they did lay off about 10 of its staff, which was 168 people, which was, uh, laudably protested by representatives from both sides of the aisle in in uh Congress. Um, and to date, they think about maybe 750 NASA employees have taken deferred resignation, ie early retirement, which means they that could walk out next week and collect money until September. But in personal opinion here, but in an era where we're concerned about Chinese technological ascendance and maybe losing the foot race back to the moon and all that. It's a weird time to be cutting staff, unless you've really researched it to death and they haven't had time to do that. So what's your take on this?

01:01:22 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I'm at a bit of a loss because, as I understood it, a lot of the deferred layoffs were deferred until, as we're recording it, today is the 21st of February. Those were recording this episode were deferred until today, and today is not over, and so I was wondering if there was going to be like a 6pm news cycle drop of layoffs.

01:01:43 - TWiT.tv (Announcement)
Oh, one of those.

01:01:44 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and I'm wondering if that's what was going to be the case, because I had been hearing from sources that they were still very much on the table even if they had gotten through a reprieve. Cnn has a story that seems to have a different statement than the one that I received from NASA yesterday, which was saying that NASA is complying with all the ongoing work that the White House is directing and they are looking at the workforce and at exceptions where it is warranted. You know that had come down from the headquarters. The CNN has one that seemed like they were really getting a bit of a reprieve across the board, that it was a little bit more definitive. So I am interested to see like what happens.

01:02:29
But you do raise a really good point that at a time when there is a lot of discussion about competition from China and not wanting to lose, then you are kind of chipping at the foundation of that science infrastructure with these kind of layoffs and the people that have been targeted for the most part both at the National Science Foundation, the people that have been targeted for the most part both at the National Science Foundation as well as at all the other agencies that are facing the similar comebacks are these probationary police, these new people, this new generation that would become the future leaders at NASA, the future leaders at the Science Foundation, et cetera, across the board.

01:03:05
And you kind of don't want to lose those people because once they're gone they're probably not going to come back, especially if they get really soured on government work when it used to be a bit of a lock, maybe in a previous generation. So again, I am waiting to see how it develops. Because you mentioned it earlier, is there room for more efficient improvement about how we do things? I think yes, so that you don't end up with a Viper moon rover and then no way to launch it, so just throw it all out. We've talked about that ad nauseum. That is not an efficient use of anyone's time, and how that happened I don't know.

01:03:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well and Mars sample return, of course.

01:03:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Mars sample return.

01:03:49
Another one right, but let's not go down that road yet Okay yeah, but the point there is I want to see what happens and again, it just seems very strange to me that a lot of this infrastructure decisions we talked about the space station one as well are being made without a firm leadership captain of the agency to say this is actually what we need to fulfill, what mission. I know that this is all coming out of the Doge stuff that Elon Musk is leading, and it is very much how he led the Twitter transition too and the ownership there, where he cut everything and then slowly added things back. But on a government scale it can be harder to get the things back. In fact, we mentioned some of that earlier. They can't find some people in one of the other departments because they didn't really want to lay them off when they found out a little bit too late, and now it's hard to find them, and we don't want that to happen with all of our talented people. So we'll have to see when or what goes on.

01:04:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, speaking of the less talented people, I just want to say as a personal aside that when my assignment at JPL got cut and that was not under the current expensive person on that on that at that facility, and I think my yearly take on my contract might've been less than their sweet low budget for coffee, but that's just a guess. Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us Just before.

01:05:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I did want to say if anyone is out there who was affected by all this. First of all, I am sorry about it all, but if you do want to say if anyone is out there who is affected by all this, first of all I am sorry about it all, but if you do want to talk about it, my DMs are open and I've got signal and all of that, Just let me know. I'm very easy to find on the internets, so we just want to make sure that we're getting the whole story of what's going on.

01:05:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Easy to find Okay.

01:05:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Easy to find, not easy to get to.

01:05:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, I was going to send you a test email in 10 minutes to see how long it takes you to get back to me. I want to thank everybody for joining us for episode 149. I think we got almost up to 150. We actually got through all the headlines today. This is a first and this was the all headlines all the time. Edition. Tarek, where can we find you covering Cool Space News these days?

01:06:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, you can find me at spacecom, as always, trying to wrap my head around the week that's coming and how we're going to all survive it, because it's going to be an amazing one. Uh for sure. What? What does SpaceX always say? Excitement, guaranteed, I think, is what they say uh for. For that, let's hope uh Starship gets off the ground and does something new and and amazing. Next, that'd be kind of fun to see. You can find me on the Twitter, at Tarek J Malik, also on LinkedIn and a few others, and tonight you will find me playing Fortnite, because it is a new season and I want to find out if there's any space in it. There is a guy who looks like a pickle, but I'm not sure if he's from space, and we're going to find out and I will let you know next episode.

01:06:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Your life must be a very strange place. And, of course, you can find me at pilebookscom or at astramagazinecom and you can find the National Space Society. My primary gig at nssorg Membership includes a full subscription to the print and digital editions of Ad Astra the best, because it's almost the last space magazine on the rack, always remember. You can drop us a line at TwistedTwittv and, of course, if you're going to send suggestions for next week or questions or comments or insults or whatever, or space jokes, it's TWIS at Twittv. We answer all our emails and I do keep all the jokes online for future use.

01:07:28
New episodes of this podcast publish every friday on your favorite podcatcher and on your less favorite podcatchers, most of them. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, give us reviews. We'll take whatever you got and don't forget, we're counting on you to join club twit in 2025. Besides supporting twit, you'll help keep us on the air, which we think is a good thing and bringing you great guests, good commentary and horrid space jokes. Where else can you get that in one place? And you get all the great programming with video streams on the twit network ad free through club twit seven dollars a month. I ask you, brother, what can you get for seven dollars a month? That comes close you know.

01:08:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So let me see what.

01:08:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
What can cost seven okay so we appreciate it and it keeps keep the electrons flowing your way.

01:08:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I got my line wrong.

01:08:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm sorry everybody all right, and you can follow the twit tech pot tech podcast network at twit on twitter and on facebook and twittv on instagram. Thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you for those who joined us live. It's great to be here and we couldn't do it without you. See you next week.

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