This Week in Space 133 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)
I feel a red moon rising. I feel China on the way. On this episode of this Week in Space, we will talk to Greg Autry, professor, author, former NASA transition team member, to talk about the state of the US space program, competition with China and a lot more with space commercialism. So stay tuned and let's get into it.

00:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Tweet. This is this Week in Space, episode number 133, recorded on October 18th 2024, red Moon Rising. Hello and welcome to this Week in Space, the Red Moon Rising edition. I am Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra Magazine, as I hope you know by now, and I'm joined as always by the eccentric Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief at Spacecom. Hello, my friend. Hello.

00:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Rod, I feel a red moon rising. Should we sing this song? I feel a red moon. No.

01:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
No, I'd subscribe to Club Twitch just to see you saying that. Are you kidding? We're going to be joined in a few minutes by Dr Greg Autry, who's the Associate Provost for Space Commercialization and Strategy at the University of Central Florida Take a breath and a visiting professor at Imperial College in London. He is the author of Red Moon Rising and A New Entrepreneurial Dynamic, along with Peter Navarro and the vice president of space development at the National Space Society and a lot of other stuff. He even developed composite skateboards back in his misspent youth. So he's got a lot to tell us about current happenings of the space program and what we could expect. But before we start, hold on to your hats. Don't forget to do us a solid. Make sure to like, subscribe and all the other podcast things, because we rely on you for the vast riches we're not deriving from doing this podcast. And now a space joke from our old friend of the show, tucker Drake, hey, tarek, yes, rod. Why is an episode about inbound Kuiper belt objects so funny?

02:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Why? I don't know.

02:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Because it's a comedy podcast. Comedy, comedy, comedy. I got it. I got it, whoa whoa, whoa.

02:19 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That one almost whizzed over me, you know, like a near-miss asteroid.

02:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I've heard that some folks want to snip off their own comet tails and soak the wound of gasoline because it's less painful, the joke time of the show. But you can help, as tucker did, because he cares. Save us from ourselves and yourselves and put on. Put us on joke life support, send your best, worst or most indifferent space joke at twists at twittv, twis at TWITTV. Now, before we go to headlines, I want us all to take a somber moment for poor Tarek, who had a tough week this week. This happens occasionally, but here at this week in space, we know how to handle such things. So, in a move calculated to induce maximum embarrassment, I need to tell you, my brother, a bit of news. Yes, yes, are you ready? I'm ready, you are up for a national space society space pioneer award for media service this year I am not no and don't get all sloppy on me.

03:19
you got to come to the international space development conference in june to pick it up, all right, all right, and I just want you to know that I received it last year, so everything is equal but our paychecks. But I do want to point out the award has gone to people in the past like Jared Isaacman, peter Beck, peggy Whitson, isaac Arthur, miles O'Brien, frank Drake, eric Berger, anusha Ansari, jay Barbary, john Glenn, ray Bradbury, gwen Shotwell and Elon Musk.

03:49
I was there for that one, except for me, of course. So I'll see you in Orlando in June 2025. And hopefully a whole bunch of you listeners will show up to join us and help me embarrass them in front of a thousand people.

04:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, thank you, Ron.

04:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's very so, congratulations.

04:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you very much, you should. It's hard to get. My mom will be very proud.

04:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
John Glenn could have attested. Well, and you know I work hard to impress your mom because we need to keep her happy and all the other moms that think you're just the sweetest guy ever, which, oddly, I don't hear much about me. All right, so let's go to headlines. Thank you, drag those over. You bet headline news. Well, I can just rock out to that for weeks. So, hey, the mechazilla eats with chopsticks. That's right, a show show. So I actually I slept through the, the launch and landing. I'm ashamed.

04:48 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Oh my gosh.

04:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Cause I knew you'd be covering it. But I got up shortly thereafter, watched it and I have to confess I shed a couple of tears because, as impressive as it is to see something the size of a U S Navy destroyer launching into space coming home for the first stage blew my mind. Yeah, I don't have much of a mind left, so it takes a lot to blow what's there. But that coming down and the thing I guess that gets me is all the spacex boosters come hurtling back and you're just gritting your teeth until the last second. It ignites the the uh engines and then down it comes, and to make it the first time without destroying the launch pad, uh wow, just wow yeah, I, I, uh.

05:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
we're talking, of course, everybody about spacex's amazing starship flight five test flight. They launched, launched the Starship vehicle halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean, executed a soft landing over the water there. But, much more impressive, the super heavy booster came back to the landing site, to the launch site, and hovered right there next to this giant tower that they call Mechzilla. It has those metal arms, those chopsticks that they call it, and it just kind of gave it a nice little hug. I think Elon Musk even said that even rockets need hugs too to capture it in midair. And I fully expected SpaceX to destroy the launch pad, and I always have to Well, I think they did too.

06:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's why they're building the second one right.

06:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And so, yeah, they have a second one, almost fully built, next next door, so that you know they would be able to to hopefully recover if that was the case. But I mean, you can see, if you're watching our live stream, the video, uh, the, um, the, the, these amazing clips of of the landing. Is this, this huge rocket, you know, fully stacked, it's 400 feet tall, so half of that coming back, uh, hovering, uh, what, just like you know, dozens of feet away from this giant structure, uh, and as it hovers there, these two arms, you know, uh, grab, and there's, actually it's. I used to think that it hangs from the little grid fins themselves there, but no, there's these two little nubs that stick off the side. You can see it rest on the arms and that's all it's hanging from, which is absolutely insane. And so it happened at like, oh, I want to say like eight or nine in the morning, eastern time, and everyone else here is sleeping on Sunday, and I'm just screaming at this computer screen, you know, just just, in disbelief at how, how awesome that was to see.

07:32
And so I mean, this is, it's the largest rocket ever built, it's the tallest rocket ever built, it's the most powerful rocket ever built. This stage has 33 Raptor engines on it, used three of them on the way back for both an entry burn, as well as this landing burn and um, and they, they nailed it. There is some damage on this booster. Uh, follow-up photos have showed damage on the side. We don't know if it was from the catch, if it was from something else. I guess we're going to find out later on. Um, but man, uh, you know it could have gone way wrong and I think it went about as right as you could have hoped for for this, at sunrise with spectacular views during the launch and we weren't there to see it live, darn it oh, my gosh, oh.

08:17
But I don't know if I would have liked to have been on the beach, because I watched from County Park there's like a jetty there and it's very, very nice views on South Padre Island but I think I would have really missed out being up close and personal. I would have liked to have heard those sonic booms of this huge rocket coming back, though. That would have been a pretty visceral experience. It seems like from the videos I've seen, yeah, I hope to see it someday, someday.

08:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I never saw saturn 5. I saw a number of shuttle launches, but was a little too young to get out the saturn 5 on my own. Well, actually a lot too young, well. But this I do want to see and we're gonna. We're gonna rent a townhouse out there, we're gonna do an airbnb and have a launch party yeah, we should.

09:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We should because, you know, I think one of the you know, while this was spectacular, this launch and we've got views from the Starship vehicle itself too, which also did a soft landing it withstood reentry. We had a bit of burn through on the flaps we saw that last time, but this time it was much, much less. It hovered. You saw the water underneath it from the camera's live views all the way through and then it tipped over and I got a lot of comments from people saying, oh look, the Starship exploded after it hit the water. They can't even build a Starship that can hit the water and it's like they were throwing the thing away. You know, if they had a landing platform, it would have been fine at the end, which was a lesson right.

09:42
You go back and we're getting a bit into this. Maybe this is the only story we talk about uh, uh for this. But if you go back to 2015, when, uh, in 2014, when spacex is desperately trying to land, rocket after rocket after rocket, uh, with falcon 9, uh, on the ocean and it it misses the platform, it crashes into the platform, it hits, slides off, you know, or or whatever, all the way through, yeah, they learned a lot obviously and and then, in december of 2015, they said you know what?

10:11
we'll just come back to the landing site where they don't have a moving target. And then they nailed it. And now they've. They've had what?

10:17
300 rockets, something like that, something like that so um, so maybe we should lost, right yeah well, yeah, well, a couple, a couple, but, um, they just recently like lost, I think, a booster because of, I think the rough seas knocked it, messed it up, but, um, but I guess, after you know, with that that double digit success, we maybe shouldn't be surprised that this happened on the way down. You know, elon, while Elon Musk announced that they were going to try to catch it, just after flight four, so I think in May, he said oh yeah, the next one, we're going to do it, and it felt like one of those Elon statements.

10:53 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Yes, yes.

10:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That everyone yeah, we'll be on Mars in two weeks.

10:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I know it's like hearing about it for the first time on the Twitters and I thought that it wasn't going to happen. And here they went and did it. So you know you and I joke about oh yeah, we should go and record an episode there. But I encourage everyone. You want to see something special? You can just drive out to this launch site. You know, you fly into McAllen, texas, you rent a car, you drive out to the beach. It's right there. It's literally like 200 feet away from you.

11:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You know less than a football field Right when you could be involved in the explosion If it doesn't go well.

11:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I mean not while it's launching. I think the sound alone will kill you, you know, but, but. But you can drive out the night before and see it all stack. You can go. You know, have a nice. There's a, there's a hopper, a bar. That was really nice over in Port Isabel. I recommend they make a mean jalapeno burger.

11:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay you're getting carried away here.

11:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I know, I know, I know I know SLS.

11:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So we had an article that we're gonna touch on a little later by Michael Bloomberg in Bloomberg news about his feelings about SLS and the the Artemis program, which are not overwhelmingly positive, I'd say.

12:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, no. He says it's the 100 billion moon mission that's going nowhere right now. So this is kind of like an op-ed that Michael Bloomberg wrote you know the former mayor of New York City, former presidential candidate and like the overarching kind of argument is that the SLS is too expensive, is too kind of haphazard, is just not the way to get back to the moon. I have to feel, you know I can feel the frustration here. You know he's talking about how there are years behind schedule, billions over budget and it's not going to get any better. We have seen report after report from the NASA Office of Inspector General that says their own people.

12:46
yeah, yeah, yeah, their own people saying, hey, this is mismanagement, this is overspending All of the different parts. There's no spacesuits. There was a report about that. There's no the mobile lander platform. Mobile launch platform you know, too, is over budget All sorts.

13:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So we've heard this before Over budget doesn't even describe it. It's what? Coming up on $2 or $3 billion for a launch tower? Yeah, it's insane.

13:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So, but there are some points that he kind of glosses over. Bloomberg does say that commercial could get things done faster. We've heard that argument. We just saw it with Starship right, this ginormous mega rocket 2016 that was announced 2024 they've got the world's most powerful rocket that they're testing now. So, which is about half the amount of time it took SLS to get off the ground, I think.

13:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and there's been a number of people talking. You know this article isn't anything new, it's just by somebody who's prominent. But there's been a lot of conversation about look, here's how you can get astronauts back on the moon just using Falcon Heavy, for instance. Yeah, you know it takes some creativity, but it can be done.

13:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And we saw changes just this week. We didn't talk about it earlier, but NASA launched Europa Clipper on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on its way to Jupiter. That went off fine. That was a mission that was supposed to launch on SLS, and they by law, by law, and they had to get a special permission to move it because the mission was at risk waiting on the SLS rocket itself, and so there are ways to address it, like you just said.

14:27
I think, though, that saying that only commercial is going to be able to do stuff, michael Bloomberg, in this article, says well, sls can't go directly to the moon, and Apollo could, and Starship is going to be better than that.

14:42
Well, starship, he says, oh, it's direct to the Moon, it's not. We know it's not. They launch one Starship, then they launch 16 more to fuel it up, then they launch the crew capsule, then it can go to the Moon. So there's a lot more to it, I think, than that, and it doesn't seem like there's a black or white answer to do you keep SLS, do you junk it for this thing that still isn't operational yet, which is probably a mistake, at least at this point in time or some new rocket that's going to come down the pipeline, but he's kind of putting it out there that people need to start thinking about this and I guess we're gonna have to see how much does this resonate with the lawmakers that set the SLS in the law as like the rocket of the day for NASA to use, or or will it actually shake loose those fetters and allow them to start looking at New Glenn's, at the Starships for other things in the future?

15:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So yeah, a lot of hope on New Glenn.

15:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
How's that Bloomberg?

15:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
News, by the way, Surprise, yeah, yeah, yeah. Finally the Orionids are coming. It's a chilly way to watch a meteor shower and we're going to have, I guess, almost a full moon.

16:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Did you put this on just for me, just so that I could talk about the night sky?

16:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, yeah, because the Orionids is a cool meteor shower as long as you can sit out there without freezing your nose off.

16:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You are right. So the Orionids are going to peak in the early days of Monday, as we're recording this, which is October 21st, but they go kind of through the better part of next week. And it's not really the greatest because, as you mentioned, it is a full moon. Actually, the full moon was just yesterday, so the moon is really big and full and bright right now. This is not just any full moon, it's the Hunter's moon. It's also a super moon, rod. Not only is it a super moon, but it is the superest of the super moons of 2024. It's the biggest one. That sounds like like a headline. It seems like there should only be one super moon. They can only be one. It's like the highlander, right.

16:49
There can only be one yeah biggest thing, so, but anyway, it's going to interrupt it, because you do need dark skies for any meteor shower.

16:56
Uh, so well to see to see the best to see the best you'll see, you'll see the fireballs, but they'll be few and far between yeah, I mean, the nice thing about the Iranids is they are part of Haley's Comet, or Comet Haley, if you're a scientist pardon me pardon me, you're welcome and and so you can kind of see bits of that and not have to wait until 2065 or whatever it is of 2061 for the comet to come back, and you can sweeten the pot by going out a little bit after sunset and looking to the north and seeing comet.

17:39
Atlas III. You can see that there and then have some dinner, get some hot cocoa, go back out late at night, look at the Orionids and enjoy your weekend. Have you seen the comet yet? I have not. I have a giant mountain in my viewing way to try to find a nice flat dark sky, but I'm hopeful this is the week to do it. It's getting higher but it's getting dimmer in the sky.

18:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is the weekend to do it. It's getting higher, but it's getting dimmer in the sky. This is the weekend to do it, so I was down at the boat earlier in the week and I have a really clear shot West, which is great. Unfortunately, that's also where the Harbor is. There's a fair amount of light there, but I thought, you know, there might be a 50, 50 chance.

18:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I could see it, even harbor lights, but nothing. Yeah, yeah, the the. It has to get really high to get over the mountain to our west right now, so I have to find a place to go the nearest. The darkest skies in new jersey are an hour from my house at, uh, jenny jenner state park.

18:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Man, I gotta drive like three hours to get to anywhere. That's half dark by the time it gets dark by the time the lights from la diminish enough for you to see anything. You're heading into the lights from either phoenix, las vegas or central california, so there's really nowhere to go except offshore but if you, if, yeah, if anyone gets a chance, go see the comet.

18:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know they're, they're, they're amazing to see. It's a nice reminder that there's other stuff out there besides the planets and the stars. I mean just seeing those, the planets to me is always amazing. Saturn I saw Saturn next to the moon. The full moon, the night is really gorgeous to see. But, yeah, go check this stuff out, because comets, like the years, are transient and we only have them for a limited time and then they slip away. So this one may not come back Sounds like my children For 80,000 years or so, it may not come back at all.

19:24
My children for 80, 80, 000, 80 000 years or so. It may not come back at all. Actually because it's on a high, like my child.

19:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah okay, well, very, very good, mr sentimentality. Uh, let's uh take a quick commercial break and we'll be right back with dr greg autry. Hold on to your hats, all right, we are back. And we are back with a vengeance with professor author and former NASA Transition Team member, professor Greg Autry. How are you today, greg?

19:53 - Greg Autry (Guest)
I'm good. I don't know who we're getting vengeance on, but let's do it.

19:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Rod is just always vengeful against, like everyone out there.

20:05 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, fight the machine man. Oh man, oh wait, we're part of the machine. So, greg, I thought we'd start off with just kind of your take on the American space program in general, focusing primarily on human spaceflight, because I know you have a lot to say about that and I'd love to hear it yeah, and science too.

20:26 - Greg Autry (Guest)
I am so to be here and do that.

20:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Should we do some background though, real quick?

20:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, good point. Okay, you want to ask your every week question, right?

20:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I ask a question, Greg, for each of our guests, just to kind of give our listeners and viewers an idea of your road to space, how you got into it right. Did it bite you when you were like a kid? Was it something you found as an adult? And how you're kind of expressing or flying that flag, both in your professional work as well as the professorial work at UCF.

21:01 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Okay, so great question. I think, like a lot of people my age, we have to go back to July 1969. I was six years old. I was living in a very dysfunctional household with two alcoholic parents who just divorced and it's not a happy situation. Reason I found my escape from that in watching Apollo missions on TV, addictively to the point where I think it concerned people. But I just tried to get away from the world and look at that. And a lot of the time when you watch the Apollo missions they didn't have like live cameras, like the amazing stuff you see. When Starship landed this weekend they had crappy little simulations of models that they were filming over and over and over and just talking about it, usually at a pretty adult level. So I don't understand what it was about that, but my feeling is maybe it was this sense that there were people with a purpose that were working hard at doing something together and not siding with each other and achieving something bigger and better than themselves. But for whatever reason, that's when I fell in love with space.

22:21
Now, fast forward. I would have loved to have done a traditional career in space, space, become an aerospace engineering student at uh, one of california's many great schools and, uh, you know, got us in, in, got a chair that would shape to my butt, uh, you know, at a company that was eventually acquired by another company that was acquired by boeing, uh, but that happened. Uh, um, I, like a lot of other people, ended up with the software bug and you'll see, behind me I've got an Altair 8800. That's the first personal computer that ever existed. And I started working with microcomputers in the late 70s, got into software and started a video game company in high school. That kind of took off. That's a whole other story. But I had a series game company in high school. That kind of took off. That's a whole other story. But I had a series of tech startups In the 80s.

23:11
It wasn't a great time necessarily to try to get a job in the space program, so that's what a lot of us did. But I remember, even in the late 80s, going to conferences, computer conferences, you know, like the West Coast Computer Fair or at Comdex or something in Vegas, and talking to people about. You know, what would you do if you made as much money as Bill Gates over there, right? Or Steve Jobs, who you would actually see at these conferences, you know and I recall saying I would start my own space program. Can you do that? If you had billions of dollars, could you start your own personal space program? And I remember having those conversations, so it was always there.

23:53
Then when I saw in the early 2000s there were people about to do that, I said I'm getting back into this. So at that time I was an adjunct professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at UC Irvine and I just reached out to the folks at Scaled Composites Bert Rutan, who was about to fly Spaceship One and said I want to study this industry and they were like come on down. They gave me backstage open access to everything. And that's how I got started in the industry. There was a big party there at the Spaceship One flights that all the space billionaires were at.

24:27
God bless Paul Allen. Uh, branson put on the uh on the show. I didn't have a pass to the party. You had to have a little gold star. I had a badge but I didn't have a gold star. So I went into the local drug store and, uh, in in the city of Mojave, which is like just a backwater, I found a gold star and glued it onto my badge, which was pretty cool and I remember going in the tent and like Branson was there and he's like do I know you?

24:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And of course everybody does.

24:57 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Well, sir Richard, I glued a gold star. I love that. That's entrepreneurial. That was fortunate. That was fortunate. Since then, I believe, I've been studying the commercial space industry as an academic business professor for longer than anybody and eventually I went native in my field as they like to say in academia, or don't like to say and started getting engaged, actually doing things. So I made some stupid investments in commercial space. I made some stupid investments in commercial space. I started talking to people in Sacramento and in DC about what I thought was happening and why it was important that they create a regulatory regime to embrace it and not stifle it. And, yeah, ended up on the transition team in 2016, as we discussed. And here we are today.

25:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Which is where traction happens. Okay, so back to my question now.

25:49 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I was was gonna say, the space bug bites is young rod state of the program yeah so the question your question about human space flight.

26:01 - Greg Autry (Guest)
And where are we right? Uh, it's the best of times, it's the worst of times. It's the worst of times, rod Nice classical quote. Professor, we have amazing things going on. We've got bipartisan support for returning to the moon. The public seems more energized about space than they were 20 years ago and that's been going on for a few years. The commercial sector wow, I mean again Starship. You've got Blue Origin actually flying people into space fairly regularly now on suborbital flights.

26:38
Someday I wish they'd hurry up and get it to the point where I can afford to go before I die. I'm kind of accepting. Honestly, that's not going to happen. I always assumed I would go to space. I've kind of reached the conclusion I'll never get to. But I'm glad a lot of people are, because they're going to change change the perspective of the world. So that's all good.

26:56
Uh, nasa, um, I think they've got great leadership. I love what uh administrator nelson says about china. I'm a china hawk and he understands we. We've got a race going on and Pam Melroy has done a great job there. I like what Nikki Fox is doing in science, but it's also the worst of times. So everything in my opinion is also kind of coming off the rails. Artemis program, we're returning to the moon, but every single component of that thing is behind schedule and in trouble, right, and you know, that's the launch system and the capsule, the landers, the spacesuits none of them are on schedule, right? They all have different reasons, right, sure, for why that's happening. That could be addressed.

27:39
And my feeling is that, although the people at NASA headquarters and all the centers, karen, are working hard, they don't have the top level cover they need. We need people in Congress who care about space, and we lost that when we lost Kevin McCarthy as the speaker of the House, the current speaker, fine gentleman, but space is, is not something that's in his wheelhouse, I think. And I think that when we shifted administrations, vice President Pence got into the weeds about space and that's just something the current Vice President has not done, and so nothing's been stopped. But there's not that top-level cover that we need to fix things and we can talk more about that. But I really think that we need leadership of Congress, the White House, to get the funding where it needs to go and to force people to deliver things they promised they would deliver.

28:27
Um, science, same problem, man. Uh, so you've got the viper mission canceled after it was built and the ride is paid for and the landers paid for. We're going to put a mass simulator and it friggin rock you know it gets better and send a rock to the moon. I guess that's only. Why don't we sit back? Why don't we sit back? Some of the the Mars sample return is a cluster. It's just disintegrated Basically. The billions of dollars and a clear mandate. We're out there to do it. We can't do it. Somebody needs to roll up their sleeves and fix that. You've got JPL laying off I think it was 10%, a significant portion of their workforce because of this budget uncertainty again from Congress, but we just don't have the people out there to address that politically so tough situation. I'm afraid that the public will lose patience. Michael Bloomberg, who I'm trying to find a polite name.

29:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't know Former mayor of New York.

29:31 - Greg Autry (Guest)
He wrote an article yesterday basically saying Artemis is a disaster and we're not going back to the mayor. And he might be right if somebody doesn't get in there and fix the problem.

29:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, the article struck me as a little basic, but I take the point. So one thing that we hear often is comparisons of Artemis to Apollo, which are very hard to draw if you get into details. But in its most simplistic form, if you look at Artemis, that's been underway in one way or another really since 2004. And we've been struggling for over two decades to rebuild something that we originally built. Really in terms of the hardware and the design and the contracts and everything. Apollo took about five years. It took took eight plus years to do, but it was developed and built in about five or six.

30:25
Now much bigger budget than we have today, a much younger nas budget than we have today, a much younger nasa than we have today. Um, you know, some people point at nasa and say, oh, they've gotten old and crotchety and they move too slow. Others, I think more intelligently, point to the different terms of the time. You know, we were in a different geopolitical situation then. We had a serious enemy in the soviet union, which we don't have with china, at least not in the same way, but I do see, certainly, uh, during the trump years we saw more talk towards this idea of china as a true competitor in this arena, which brings back something that america seems to need to achieve things, which is a sense of competition against an equal part, against an equal opponent. Um, what do you think that? I know that's a very big question, but I just wanted to give you something broad and repeating it.

31:17 - Greg Autry (Guest)
I think Senator Nelson's been absolutely clear that you play, you serve. China is in a literal race with us and that it's a race for resources, that, uh, that we need to, uh, uh, get our fair share of, basically, and and for the world is is a leader of the artemis accords, uh, versus the china, russia, uh, uh, axis of evil, uh, and and so I I don't think that's necessarily just a trump thing, um, I I think you know trump was a little his president was more likely to say it than I think we've heard from Biden or Harris, but I think it's generally accepted and on the Hill it's a bipartisan understanding that China is maybe not as bellicose as the Soviet Union. Nobody's pounding their shoe on anything and calling for the death of America but they're certainly not our friends and they're they're certainly in some ways a much bigger threat because they're more capable economically and technically than the soviet union was. The soviet union could do a few things like go to space. They couldn't, couldn't build a toaster that worked right, uh, or car right. We can't build a toaster that works anywhere. I literally have a 1942 Toastmaster because I insist on buying things that are American. We can't make a toaster.

32:37
So I think it's a real competition, rod, and it's a challenge. And the reason we can't get Artemis done on time much less than five is because we can't build a toaster. So we have a lack of production engineers in the United States and students who went through shop class. We don't have shop classes anymore in this country. This is insane, right. So I honestly I run into undergrad students who are 20 and you have to explain what a Phillips head screwdriver is, and this is a real problem.

33:08
I think we've got a cultural problem in the United States and that a fundamental economic infrastructure problem. It makes it hard to do these things that we need to do. You can't have a country that that only makes rockets and F-35s, so we've got to fix that whole manufacturing base in order to execute on this. Well, that's a huge, huge challenge. But again, I don't think people get stirred up enough about China, because China is smart enough not to stir us up. It's the old boil the frog slowly, and they're taking us down culturally, economically and politically, so they don't have to fight us militarily, which I certainly don't think they intend to ever do. I don't know if that answers the question.

33:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yes, it does, tarek, it's your turn.

34:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, I thought. Well, I think it's time we have to take a break real quick, rod, before we can come back. But should we do that, anthony? Should we do that? Take a real quick one, and then I'll come back with my question. Great, well, great, you know.

34:15
I wanted to follow up to kind of a theme that you mentioned earlier when you were talking about Rod's point on the state of the program, where you said it's kind of the best of the both worlds and we've seen something that I thought was a bit extraordinary in the 20 plus years that I've been covering, a space where we saw the Artemis program at least continue amidst administrations.

34:39
And here we are four years later in another election coming up, going forward. And I'm curious if you see an opportunity to either improve the situation, like the state that you were saying earlier, with a new administration because we are going to get one either way or is there always that risk again of the incoming president just changing everything? We saw that over and over again, that kind of reset the clock and really delayed a lot of the advancements that we had all hoped to see as kids getting back to the Moon, getting to Mars, etc. And now we're kind of in this bit of an extended development period for Artemis, that the dates kept getting stretched. We've got all of the overspending and delays. I mean, is this a chance to clean house, do you think? Or will we see more of the same because it's so embedded now in these programs, with SLS, with the other things in motion yet, where everything's just not really all the way in place at this point in time?

35:50 - Greg Autry (Guest)
So, yeah, I mean let me do the disclaimer I'm clearly a Republican and received three appointments from President Trump on the transition team as White House liaison and the nomination to be chief financial officer of NASA in 2020. So I'm not unbiased. But during my best to not be political about it, a, I've always been pleased and repeatedly praised the Biden administration for their continuity in space policy and it's not just Artemis, it's the Space Force keeping the Space Council kind of the same direction with the Office of Space Commerce and in other functions. And I'm happy to have worked with people on the Biden team and provided suggestions over the years. And the appointments were good people, like I said, nelson Melroy Rich DiBello over at Office of Space Commerce. Good people, like I said, melroy Rich DiBello over in offices of Space Commerce good choices. That said, I don't think there's been the same intensity, particularly in the role of the Vice President, who is, by law, the National Space Star.

37:00
I wrote an article on this a few weeks ago in the Washington Post. You can look it up. There was with Pence, who was very personally into space. He understood the details, he listened, he showed up at the space symposium, right. So did the Secretary of Commerce at the time, and that's not happening. There's just not that same level of care, so it's kind of a benign neglect, but they didn't cancel anything. And you know, admittedly, I think that had, let's say, the Obama administration continued Bush's Constellation program, I think we probably would be on the moon if Congress had cooperated. I don't know whether that would be the best thing. To some extent it could have been a flags and footprint thing, and it could have been a flags and footprint thing, and the Obama administration made smart decisions with commercial space, particularly continuing the COTS program and funding commercial crew.

37:58
What will happen now, though? I think it's pretty clear. Trump has been loudly talking about space, with his new best buddy, elon, jumping up and down on the stage in an Occidental Mars shirt. I mean, if you're a space settlement fanatic, this is your moment. Right, the five-year-old nominee Vance flat out said conquest of the stars. Right, we weren't allowed to say conquest of space anymore. I remember people got angry about that and then we couldn't say settlement of space because they don't like Zionists or something. But anyway, space settlement is actually on the lips of a presidential and vice president candidate.

38:33
I haven't heard anything from the other side, and I honestly don't think it's one of their priorities. So I personally think if you see a Harris-Waltz administration, the best you're going to see is more benign neglect. They'll continue it. They are parsimonious, though. They're not going to be budget cutters, because that's just not in their nature. They're going to spend Republican Congress, though. If it should continue, we'll fight with them. If they get a Democratic Congress, then I think you could see massive budgets go up, but I don't see any revolutionary change or whatever. If Trump gets in with Elon wanting to set up a government efficiency council and the people that I know would be involved in that transition, I think you see a very disruptive change. I think you would see better budgets where they're needed, but you'll see some significant changes to induce efficiency into the programs and systems. That doesn't exist now and it's an attempt to create a sense of alacrity and urgency, because Trump knows he's only got one term this time right.

39:36
The first time everybody assumed we had eight years and that was deadly, because they didn't feel they had to get things done. I remember yelling at people, even in December 2016,. We've got to have the first elements of Gateway in orbit around the moon and some hardware on the moon by the 2020 election. Otherwise, the next administration might back off this right. That didn't happen. Luckily, the next administration didn't. The good thing that's happened. You know, artemis Accords provides continuity. Not all these countries in the world signed up and so, if you want to like, not go back to the moon. All of a sudden you have 42 countries yelling at the State Department that you embarrassed us Like idiots.

40:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I think it's actually 43 at this point. Estonia.

40:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Welcome Estonia.

40:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, there's a lot of of uh motivation there. I I have kind of a two-part follow-up question. You know it is spoken in certain quarters I've mentioned a few times. You know why does it matter who gets back to the pole first, as long as everybody who needs to be there can be there. I'm pretty sure you've got a viewpoint on that. And then I'm going to ask a question about space militaries.

40:48 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Okay, All right. Well, hey, as far as who gets there first, I don't think it would make a huge difference if both folks were committed to working together and being reasonable and if both governments would be willing to uh to accept a silver medal. But I I'm very concerned that uh, us white house and congress don't want to fill uh five the silver medal. I I've written a couple times I I think you could see artemis go by the white side of the chinese land. First they're like, oh, that didn't work. Uh, what gonna pay to be second? Um, and then you've got China's demonstrated history of drawing double lines along areas and saying keep out.

41:34
And it's pretty easy, under the ambiguity of the Outer Space Treaty, to set up some scientific research, whatever, put a radio telescope in the middle of a crater and then say we have an exclusion zone of X number of kilometers, because that's not defined in the treaty. It simply indicates that you've got to have due regard for other folks and not interfere with their activities. But how do you define that? Clearly, they're going to define it as broadly as possible because it's in their interest and they have a real history of doing that in the South China Sea and elsewhere. I mean literally, they've got a border dispute with every country. They border with India, philippines, japan, vietnam, etc. So that concerns me, rod.

42:18
That said, it's also good though, because it makes us want to go harder and move faster, but in my opinion, we've got to have those weirds on the man. President Trump, if he comes back, I think, deserves to have them by 2024. This pisses people off when I say that, but when a political leader steps up, you know, and says I'm going to do this, we felt JFK deserved to have people on the moon as part of his legacy. He was dead, but a real reason people worked so hard on that was because FK deserved it, and so when a leader steps up and puts his political capital under it, I think we have an obligation to try to deliver too.

42:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Darrell Bock. See, that's the issue, right, because, remember, we're supposed to be on the moon from constellation in 2020. And after making that announcement back in 2004, in the second Bush administration, you never got the buy-in to spend the money from Congress to get there in the first place, and then it just kind of fizzles out. And then the next thing you know, you're launching in what an Ares 1X rocket where it's already been canceled, and it just breaks the heart to see that now, in 2024, us looking at maybe a launch, a return to the moon in 2026, when it's it was 2020, just like 20 years ago, you know. And so we've already missed all these other deadlines that just keep coming up, uh, over time. I don't know, that's a soapbox great I'm trying to get you.

43:41 - Greg Autry (Guest)
We need leadership in the white house that either has a congress that they can work with and I pray that we get a matched white house to congress or we need a leader in the White House who is willing to make deals and capable of negotiating with a recalcitrant Congress whether that's a Trump with a Democratic Congress or a Trump with a conservative Republican Congress that doesn't want to spend money, which is what you've got now, right?

44:06
So the reason the science budget is screwed up is because of the republican congress, and I've written uh about that. Some people have been like complaining I'm partisan because I was attacking aerosun or space thing. But go back and look at my forbes article on on congress and the science budget. That's their fault. But what we don't have as a president who was willing to go hold them accountable and publicly chastise them and make what deals you have to make, you've got to give something here and there to get them to do what you want, and we've got to have that happen. So, derek, I'm hopeful we're going to have somebody who knows how to take Congress and bend the arm behind their back until it hurts.

44:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
By any means necessary, I think, was the wake up call that Mike Pence gave the industry. And then, all of a sudden, you know, you see the, the ducks in a row to say, oh yeah, we can actually develop, deliver that part and finish that rocket on time. Uh, it was. Uh, I mean, that was a really stark speech. What was that back? And that was 20, 21, 20, what was that? Oh my gosh, 2019, I think, is when that was so.

45:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So and and then, despite that Starliner, yeah yeah, let's run to another quick break, tarek, and then we'll come back for your follow up.

45:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, as you mentioned, greg, there is a lot of opportunity coming up, and one of the things we were talking about, I think, china and the United States in the future. But I think that one of the questions that we've been following at spacecom has been just the rise of new tools that we couldn't foresee to help space exploration, and one of those, obviously, is artificial intelligence, and I think we just saw new robot taxis that Tesla is unveiling and some new humanoid robots. I think China has one that can run eight miles an hour. I just saw on Life Science, actually, and I'm curious what you see as either the promise or the threat or the potential of an increase in artificial intelligence for the space program overall. I mean, it seems like it could make exploration a lot faster, a lot simpler, maybe a little bit more direct, when you can have more autonomous operations, both through construction as well as exploration. But I'm curious what your take is on it, because it still feels new to me, even though it's been around for a decade plus now.

46:28 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Well, yeah, great question. And, as I mentioned, I started out my career as an IT tech guy and programmer. I actually have 72 years in computer science, even though I don't have the degree and I'm interested in this and been looking at that interface for a long time. When you look at what Starship did, so much of that was software. Right, hardware is amazing, but so much precision is software. Uh, when I get in my tesla today and and drive from uh melbourne to orlando, uh, you know on full self-driving and I don't have to uh make any, uh any corrections.

47:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You're a brave man, those lane changes scare me to death.

47:14 - Greg Autry (Guest)
They do sometimes, but it does it right.

47:16
And so I think that when we think about particularly operations on mars and, to some extent, the man, where you've got communication delays and potential communication outages, uh, ai's got to be there and be able to be trusted to do a lot of the work for us. When you've got automated mining equipment that's going deep underground to find stuff and extract it and assay it Again, ai is going to be all over that. It's going to make a huge difference there. I also think it's going to make a difference in areas we don't understand, in human habitat and spaceflight yet, where we monitor the actual outcomes for people and the environmental conditions they were in. Uh and the ai will probably figure out what, what's optimal as far as you know gas measures, pressures, temperatures, differences, what we can do with artificial gravity or have to do with it, so. So I think it's great. It's going to make things less expensive too by allowing us to have much more flexible spacecraft that can do more than one thing, because they won't just be hardware hardcoded, they won't be software hardcoded either.

48:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I've written a fair amount about NASA selling its mission to the public, which is a big problem, and they have to. You know, if you're talking about a country like China, that deal's closed. The populace is up for it. There's a lot of nationalism, not just in listening to what people in the streets say, but reading their white papers, you know, that are put out by the government. There's a very nationalistic turn of phrase there, much like we had in the 1960s and so did the Soviet Union. One thing China's done differently than anybody I've seen before is really weave their history and even national mythology into it. So if you look at the names of their spacecraft, most of them are out of some part part of the chinese mythos, you know. And uh, if you look at how they present it and talk to it, it's a national imperative, akin to survival of the nation. Uh, do you think I mean that's kind of unique. Should we be doing more of that or did that go away with the 60s and do we need to take the approach we're taking now?

49:30 - Greg Autry (Guest)
way with the 60s, and do we need to take the approach we're taking now? You know, um, that is a good question. Um, we still name our, our, our spacecraft, things like freedom. And the star lander was named calypso, interesting way, right? Yeah, it's really an american thing. Uh, obviously, mr custeau was french, but he was kind of a citizen of the world. When we name a vehicle, endeavour, right, we're naming it after a British ship, as well as Discovery.

50:00
So I think we've had a little broader perspective, but still a historical perspective, and that we're building on the shoulders of giants, and I think that's valuable, whether it sells to the American public, who don't, frankly, know their history anymore. We don't teach top classes, we don't have history anymore. We replaced it with social studies and then we replaced it with I don't know some gobbledygook of pure subjective, ideological training. I don't know what it is, but we don't teach the history and the civics the way we used to just try to intentionally engender a sense of national identity and cohesiveness, because we decided that was bad and it was manipulative, and it was. But on the other hand, the people who decided to do that just like the people in China are doing it understand. It has a reason because it holds society together and prevents the very, very bad times that occur when everybody has a totally different idea about what a country should be and wants to fight over it. That sense of cohesion, I think, is important, but it's beyond NASA's capability to impart that into our youth. That said, they are probably the most inspirational part of the American government. I think the only thing in my opinion that comes close is probably the National Park Service. As far as you know, I love the logo and the feel and existence of it, and so I think that NASA's done their part. Well, the rest is up to the country.

51:37
We are coming up in, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the United States. I'm old enough, unfortunately, to remember the 200th anniversary in 1976. And there was this palpable sense of excitement about a couple years beforehand and I don't feel like, yeah, I, I feel like we'll probably be in a fight over whether benjamin franklin uh, you know, was an incredible statesman, inventor and business person of our. He, uh, you know, uh, should be branded a slave owner or something, uh, which is kind of ironic since he led the abolitionist group in Philadelphia. But we're at a difficult point culturally, rod, and I don't know if we can do that same thing that you see in China. I love what I see in China from that point of view. I don't like their government or a lot of authoritarian things it does, but I admire them for that sense of identity, identity purpose and believing the future's going to be better and yet globally, you know, nasa still polls consistently in the top five brands, and that includes nike and coca-cola and everything else who actually spend money being a brand.

52:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So there's hope there. It just seems that sometimes, when I do talks internationally, that the public in europe, and especially a place like japan, is much more enthusiastic about what we've accomplished than our young people are. But that's another question which we can talk about when we come back from this break.

53:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So stand by no, I was just thinking, rod, about, uh, what we would name, uh new ships, you know, if they're not off, of old historical ships like, do you, do you name it the Constitution or the Constellation, right, you know something like that? The Yankee Clipper? Right, we could dust those ones off. Or just a Snoopy, I like that one from Apollo 10 the cherry tree, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can see it.

53:26
I can see it. Well, you know, blue Origin is doing that a bit right, greg, with the RSS first step've got. I guess the Carmen line is a little bit of a departure, but they were naming the rockets after Alan Shepard, after John Glenn. You could see that kind of a throwback there. I don't know, it was a very interesting concept that you bring up there about celebrating that kind of pioneer spirit or whatnot. But man, I would love a Yosemite. That'd be pretty cool.

54:04
Anyway, but looking to the future, one of the big questions that we've been seeing, or the the big improvements you mentioned, starship, uh earlier, and and and blue origin. But but there's, uh, you know, a good number of other uh companies that haven't risen to fill in different niches or what they hope will be uh, uh, new niches to to come up in uh, commercial space industry. In fact, um, uh, it was uh at I, at the IAC, you know, conference this weekend, milan, we saw like loads of new announcements, including vast, who we've had on the show before, with their their new haven to space station. So I'm curious, you know, what realistically you see happening concretely, not on paper, like these companies you know are gonna to tell us what they want to do in the next 10 years, but what you see as like a lock, because we know in the next 10 years the space station will retire. We know that we've got these new vehicles that are coming online in the next few years. What do you see that next 10-year milestone? What is it milestone? What is it?

55:15
2034, uh, uh, looking like in the commercial space sector, then that that nasa and the other players kind of will have to work with, I guess at that point in time.

55:21 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Yeah, um, I think that, uh, we live in an exciting time and I didn't want to just mention spacex and blue origin, because everybody does. I think companies like vast farda aren't getting enough attention. What Varda did was pretty cool, right? So nobody else besides SpaceX has built a capsule that we could re-enter and bring things back, and the capability that Varda is going to bring to the table amazing. What Tom Mueller is doing at Impulse really impresses me, and, of course, I've been fans of Tim Ellis and Jordan Moon, who founded Relativity Space and they had a rocket that made it to space, but a lot of exciting things going on broadly there. So, yeah, it's not just one company.

56:06
Now, what's going to happen in 10 years?

56:07
I think we end up, hopefully, in an ecosystem where we have a lot of different vehicles that are different but compatible, meaning you've got communication standards, airlock standards, to some extent refueling standards and such, and you've got launch vehicles and vehicles that operate in space, like the Lockheed Martin Tug that's being developed for the Blue Origin Lander, the Imp, impulse, vehicles that can move things around so that we're not stuck in one place, so that we can begin to address issues of at least cleaning up large pieces of orbital debris.

56:39
I think we'll be on the moon, hopefully permanently, and not yet extracting resources that generates money, but we'll be on the verge of laying the groundwork to do that and I hope that the space tourism business continues to grow. I know a lot of people think that's trivial, but I think it is so valuable that influential and wealthy people are going to space and coming back and talking about it and caring, because these are the people who write checks to Congress and put pressure on to get things done. They influence our media thinking process in so many ways. Please send Taylor Swift to space, okay.

57:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
No matter who she votes for.

57:23 - Greg Autry (Guest)
You better get her to space.

57:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I just wanted to follow up on that because by 2034, the space tourism industry overall will be 30 years old by then, 2001, with that first flight. It sounds like you are not as optimistic as I might be that I could log on to I don't know wwwspace. Well, no, they can't use spacecom. We have that, but go to spacecom or something like that, uh, like like I do for united um to redeem my whatever credit card miles to get like a trip, you know, to space. It sounds like you don't think that's gonna happen, but do you think there's gonna be? It's gonna be, I think it's gonna happen.

58:04 - Greg Autry (Guest)
I just don't think it's gonna happen for me, Chuck.

58:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh okay, how old are you, Chuck he's way younger than us. I am 47.

58:13 - Greg Autry (Guest)
I'm 47. You got a few more years. I'm concerned. I mean, if it doesn't happen in 15 years, it's not happening for me, right?

58:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So it's right on the edge. Yeah, I'll be watching that in diapers.

58:25 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Yeah, and I don't want to go if I don't know what the hell's happening.

58:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, but astronauts wear diapers, so we do have a chance. That's true Sometimes even when they're driving.

58:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, that's a deep cut, oh ow, as long as we're talking 10 years and possibly plus out.

58:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I'm not looking at the next five to seven years, but do you think, in the big picture, that a system like Starship is the right answer for most of what we want to do? It's got a lot of promise and it's got a lot of advantages. The one disadvantage, of course, is that you're hauling around a ton of mass to make it reusable that you can't use to get stuff places and the refueling thing is becoming a major question mark. You can't use to get stuff places and the refueling thing is becoming a major question mark. It went from a suggestion of three refueling fights to seven to twelve and we just don't know now. Um, I was given a lot of hope with the catch the other day that that could actually become something that happens, but it seems like currently it's hard to tell. Do you have any thoughts on that?

59:26 - Greg Autry (Guest)
yeah. So I love the starship idea and course the rocket equation says bigger is more efficient, but that doesn't mean it's all things to all people for every application, and I hear a lot of that from basically the Musk fanboy base. I like those people, but one solution does not fit everything and it's like Artemis, right. So for the HLS system the goal was put four people down on the moon, right, and we get Starship. That's kind of like saying we want a contract to fly four people from LA to San Francisco and somebody says here's the A380, which is the most efficient per know in the world. That's a big thing. I'm glad we're funding Starship because of all the other things that it will do and in some ways it's a much better Mars vehicle than a moon vehicle.

01:00:19
It's harder to get that vehicle on the moon with enough mass to lift off because it can't make its fuel. On the moon there's no aerobraking atmosphere. The moon itself is a smaller gravity well, and you don't get the Holman transfer orbit where you arrive. So my understanding is that we can probably go to Mars with three, maybe four refills, but the moon missions are going to take 12. That means you've got to do 12 super launches in a short period of time without destroying your launch pad on either the takeoff or the landing. And the SLS has to launch at the same time with Orion capsule and they both have to be working and the mobile launcher's got to be there.

01:00:58
This architecture scares the heck out of me. It's way too complex. So one of the things I would have a dual track architecture, a full Starship stack to the moon Amazing. And let's look at ways to simplify using the group of hardware we already have in place with the Blue Origin lander and the Lockheed tug to get people to the moon. And there's a lot of different architectural things you could do there, from putting orion with a a different second stage on on the different rocket, or putting a different second stage on the sls, or, uh, bringing the crew up in a dragon or a starliner or a dream chaser to lower earth orbit, putting them in the lander with the space tug and using that to get to the moon. That needs to be looked at seriously, because the current plan is just super complex and full of so many single points of value. It scares the heck out of me well, along that thought.

01:01:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
What about new glen and new moon? You know that does simplify things if it can be brought online soon enough.

01:02:05 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Absolutely and, frankly, vulcans are really powerful rocket. It's not human rated, or could you do that? Maybe some people don't like solids on human rockets, but give it a shot and we've got that right. So, and it's second stage is pretty cool, so there's a lot of different things you could do there. I'm not advocating for this architecture. I am advocating that if I had anything to do with the new administration, there would be a review and it would be dual track uh, so that we would have two different uh options, one of which I hope would succeed in the short run and one of which might be the best long-term uh solution and, frankly, I think it would be cheaper than than the situation we got going now.

01:02:51 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think you're right. I hope more space planes. That's what I want to see, you know, a space plane to orbit, a tug to go to the moon, tug to come back. Space plane back down that sounds like fun.

01:03:01 - Greg Autry (Guest)
I love you. Did I ever tell you guys that I put the first investment in the Hinged Earn for Dream Chaser?

01:03:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No.

01:03:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wow.

01:03:10 - Greg Autry (Guest)
I didn't know that. Yeah, before I was sitting on the runway in my space ship one with Jim Benson, who had space that, who made the hybrid engines for spaceship one, and he assumed that Branson, when he announced Virgin right there on the runway was going to buy a bunch of these hybrid engines of scale, made the stupid decision to make their own engines, which didn't turn out well and then they got outsourced and brought back in and that held up for a long time, right. But Benson said I'm going to build my own space plane and put my engines in it. So he went looking for a vehicle. He found the HL-20 lifting body. He got the actual model from Langley and he and Hoot Gibson and I met and I got to vote on saying let's call it dream chaser.

01:03:55
I wrote a hundred thousand dollar check, maybe six thousand dollars, to pay space step to do engineering for turning the HL20 into a sub-arable tourism vehicle which would have been a vertical launch, horizontal landing. Then Jim, jim, uh, jim got brain cancer. It passed and, uh, my shares of bets in space went poof and uh, uh, sierra came in and bought up space to have and acquired the uh, the dream chaser stuff that I helped people. I didn't get anything, but anyway, I love dream chaser. I love. I think we need to see that fly. I hope whatever is holding them up for them flying gets resolved in the next year, because we also need another human transport system as well as a cargo transport system, and you can do a lot of cool science on Dream Chaser. If we end up in a situation where we have a LEO gap and the station to deorbit because the Russian modules are falling apart, dream Chaser, varda, vast and Starship, as a basically a laboratory that can bring stuff back down, hopefully could do some amazing things without a traditional modular space station.

01:05:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, tarek, you got a last question for him. Well, I mean, I think that you know I did want to talk about the program that you're at at CFU I think you mentioned that you know earlier because there's not a lot of places, there's some that the future of the US space program, of any space program, can go to to kind of see like what's what. And I know that you are teaching kind of the future generation of commercial space gurus there and I was just curious if you might give our listeners just a bit of a rundown of what students can expect in that program and what opportunities you see them once they graduate in that MBA program for the future Perfect.

01:05:54 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Well, so to be clear, I just came from ASU, where I was teaching at Thunderbird School of Global Management and I created an executive master's in space leadership policy and business, which is essentially an MBA for space, and that program's in its third cohort. I loved doing that. I had such good experience with the students and the students were already very influential in many ways, including creating the Arizona Space Council which was just stood up. That said, I'm now at the University of Central Florida where I'm Associate Provost for Space Commercialization and Strategy and I am putting together new things, and so that program doesn't yet exist.

01:06:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Ah, so it's coming soon In the business school we will am putting together new things, and so that program doesn't yet exist.

01:06:33 - Greg Autry (Guest)
Ah, so it's coming soon. In the business school, we will be putting together programs both at the graduate and undergraduate levels for space leadership and business, working very closely with our colleagues in the engineering department and sciences to make sure that it's grounded in hardware and reality. To make sure that it's grounded in hardware and reality. I've also got a broader position now to help take the SpaceU brand, which UCF uses in its football games and has used since 1963, when we were founded, to develop workforce for NASA and the Cape, and make that more of an enterprise-wide reality by making sure that we are connecting with our external stakeholders and our internal stakeholders in a cohesive way. So stay tuned. You're going to see exciting things coming out of the University of Central Florida as opportunities. Whether you're a student, whether you're a business or a policymaker, we're going to be the leading institution for space leadership.

01:07:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I like it. And, of course, my last question is something near and dear to my heart, all about books. You've just published a book called Red Moon Rising and we're going to appropriate the title for the episode, and I'm sure you've got others planned. Can you tell us about that? Here comes the promo. It's a good book and it's not no Barnes Noble and it's not. You know, lest people think specifically of Fish Shake at China, it's not. It's a very broad and contemporary look at things that really need to be discussed.

01:08:09 - Greg Autry (Guest)
No, and I praise the Chinese space program and the competition is good, good, but it's real, all right, and I talk a lot about the history of space, uh, how we got to where we are, particularly in the commercial space industry, which a lot of people, I think, will be surprised by some of that. Um, yeah, so, uh, next book, um, the next book? I'd like to look a little deeper at, uh, at everything, everything that MASS is doing, and particularly look at the siloed nature of the Science Mission Directorate, the Human Exploration Mission Directorate, places where they've overlapped and how that works together, like CLIP. I'm a great admirer of Thomas Zubrick and I had the opportunity to speak to him and to John Culberson, the congressperson who made Europa Clipper a reality. Really, we were at the Europa Clipper launch on Monday and started talking about those things. That's really interesting, that interface between where the robotic stuff and the human stuff and they should probably be less separate Now that we're looking at Mars, sample return.

01:09:13
Maybe that should be a Starship mission to some extent. Right, that's an overlap between what's going on with HLS and what could be going on with science. A lot of interesting things to look at there. Redmond Rising just came out. It's written very readable for the average person, so even if you're not a tech nerd, you can read it. Even a congressperson could.

01:09:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's very approachable and I assume it's available in softcover, kindle and audio.

01:09:44 - Greg Autry (Guest)
It's not in audio, which is a frustration that I'm working on with the publisher. I was going to record it all myself, but I don't know if you've seen some of the recent AI voice training systems. I am amazed they are good. I think I might be able to do it automatically, so I'm going to test that very shortly.

01:10:05 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right. Well, you know we're behind you and I hope to see a lot of good things happening. You're definitely one of those 50 over 50 that we want to keep an eye on, or however you want to phrase it. So thank you today for joining us on Episode 133. Greg, where's the best place for us to keep up with your peripatetic lifestyle?

01:10:29 - Greg Autry (Guest)
You can find me on LinkedIn if you want to hear just what I'm doing professionally. If you want a gloves off bare knuckle, look at space politics. I'm on X, greg W Autry. By the way, there's a Greg Autry assignment, greg W Autry, and you can find me at my website, gregautryus.

01:10:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, I'll have to check that out. Tarik, where can we find you being overworked these days?

01:10:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
well, you can. You can probably take it a nap somewhere, but no, you can find me at uh atspacecom, as usual, also on the twitters, or uh, pardon me the x at uh tarik j malik. In fact, this weekend, if you're in new york tomorrow, you will find me at new york comic-con because there's a great big star trek universe panel there and I'm really looking forward to it. So I'm gonna go and uh and check that out and then go to the lower decks after party. That'll be really great. Uh, season five coming out next week it's gonna be exciting serious nerdom.

01:11:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh, by the way, greg, I almost forgot, you're also the Vice President of Space Development for the National Space Society. You got any words to give us about the NSS?

01:11:35 - Greg Autry (Guest)
I don't know when this airs, but the Space Settlement Summit November 8th and 9th. I know it's short notice. We'd love to have you. It'll be out at Kennedy Space Center, the Visitor Complex, which is an exciting place to be. If you're lucky, we might get a launch to see even while we're out there. But I guarantee you'll love it because it's a small conference full of uh, the best space professionals and a lot of one on one time, a lot of interactive workshop sort of things, instead of just sitting in a big room with people you we're never going to talk to. Talking at you, right?

01:12:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I can guarantee you that if some people come out for that that conference, they'll get at least one rocket launch if they stay for more than three days because of SpaceX.

01:12:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, the workshops look like they're going to be really interesting, so I meant to mention that. So thank you for bringing that up and, of course, greg, you were central in putting that on. So many thanks to you for doing the heavy lifting, because it's a big chore. And, of course and I'll put a link for that in the show notes for anybody who's interested and of course, you can always find me at pilebookscom or at astromagazinecom and you can find Space Settlement Summit by Googling Space Settlement Summit 2024. Remember, you can always drop us a line at twist at twittv that's T-W-I-S. At twittv. We welcome your comments, suggestions, comments, suggestions and ideas, and we answer all our emails.

01:12:52
New episodes, this pop podcast published every friday on your favorite podcatcher and, as I always ask, please subscribe, tell your friends and give us reviews, because we rely on you. Speaking of relying on you, you can get all the great programming with video streams, ad free on the twit network, as well as some extras that are only available there, but you have to go to find out For just $7 a month. What else can you get for $7 a month? What a deal. So this is your chance to stand up and be counted. Join us at Club Twit. Finally, you can follow the Twit Tech Podcast Network at Twit, on Twitter and on Facebook, at twittv on Instagram. Gentlemen, thank you, it has been a pleasure and we'll see you in the funny papers. Take care.