This Week in Space 163 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.

0:00:00 - Tariq Malik
Coming up on this Week. In Space. There's a new dwarf planet out beyond Pluto. I-space is closing in on the moon. And what's the deal with Starship? Why does it keep exploding? We'll find out with space.com's Mike Wall, so tune in.

0:00:22 - Rod Pyle
This is this Week in Space, episode number 163, recorded on May 30th 2025: The Trials of Starship. Hello and welcome to yet another episode of this Week in Space, the Trials of Starship edition. I'm Rod Pyle, still editor-in-chief at Ad Astra magazine. I'm joined by my fellow space thug, Tariq Malik, who's still the editor-in-chief of space.com. Hello, partner Space thug.

0:00:47 - Tariq Malik
Well, I don't know how I feel about that Rod. How are you doing today?

0:00:51 - Rod Pyle
Oh, I'm okay. I've been a thug for a long time and today we have the very good fortune to be joined by Mike Wall, the Sam Spade of space reporting. How are you, mike? I'm doing good. How are you guys? I'm good. I was looking up ace reporter names from the pulp era and Jimmy Olsen's all that came up and I thought, well, Sam Spade sounds cool.

0:01:10 - Tariq Malik
Jimmy Olsen is a photographer. He is not a reporter. No, he was a cub reporter.

0:01:16 - Rod Pyle
I thought he was a photographer. Ai said he was a reporter. Anyway, before we begin, as if we're going to, please don't forget to do us a solid and run away right now or as soon as the show is over, and make sure to like and subscribe and do the other things that will keep us on the air, because we love you and we know you love us, at least until what you're about to hear. And now a space joke from David. hey Tariq. Yes, rod, what happened after doge audited NASA?

uh, I don't, I don't know, I don't know they launched a new wave of space x employees oh, that's too soon, I was gonna say is that too soon? Yeah, hey, this is the. But you know, as a person who was laid off in the round of layoffs prior to that for JPL, I feel like I have the right to make a joke.

0:02:13 - Tariq Malik
He's done. Now We'll see how the hate mail comes in. Elon is out at the White House. Today is like the last day.

0:02:19 - Mike Wall
Only, it takes until he takes a dose of ketamine and he's still staying on as an advisor. They are careful to say.

0:02:27 - Rod Pyle
Now sigh. Now I've heard that some people want to blow our flight termination system when it's joke time in this show, but you can help by sending us your best, worst or most indifferent space joke to twis@twit.tv. Until then, we're going to continue on. And Mike, do you have any space jokes?

0:02:47 - Mike Wall
I do not, I, I don't wanna, but can't kind of get on your corner at all. Right, it's not gonna rain on your parade?

0:02:53 - Rod Pyle
no, it's. It's a lonely corner. You're welcome to it down. Now I got it. Scooter x tells us uh on the discord, that elon's on live tv right now. What?

0:03:13 - Tariq Malik
yeah, he's talking to the president getting the big sign off that. That that's, that's oh that thing.

0:03:19 - Rod Pyle
Oh, kiss, kiss, hug, hug thing. Okay, you on, all right. Well, instead let's go to a spacecom story, which is probably written by one of you two guys, about a new dwarf planet, but it's not planet nine no, no, no, this is.

0:03:33 - Tariq Malik
This is actually written by keith cooper, who's a uk-based space reporter. Uh and uh and this one is pretty interesting, by the way, he has a new book coming out. It's really exciting about sci-fi um but um, uh but yeah. So the scientists have uh I think they're in, they're at the advanced study um uh, institute for advanced study in princeton uh, found what they say is a dwarf planet that is 16 times in an orbit that is more than 16 times the size of the earth's, so it's like way, way. In fact, the closest it gets to us well, to the Sun is 44 and a half times the Earth's orbit, which is like Pluto's orbit. So the closest it gets is like Pluto's orbit and it's even further out there. So it's like way out in the Oort cloud and they call it 2017 OF, and then there's like a number at the bottom of it. We can call it bob. I think that's fine, uh, but um.

But this is like an exciting discovery because, you know, is it a planet, is it not a planet? Is it a dwarf planet? We, we went through all of that back in 2006 when they demoted pluto, but the fact that they're still finding these new kind of roughly spherical bodies out there? Uh, you know bodes well for, uh, for the search for other planets. Now everyone wants to find planet nine, and they said that it's out there. You know bodes well for the search for other planets. Now, everyone wants to find Planet Nine, and they said that it's out there beyond Pluto somewhere. But it sounds like this, isn't it? Because the masses don't really add up. But at least they can rule this out as not Planet Nine, because it doesn't explain the perturbations that they've been seeing in some other objects.

And we can look elsewhere. We know where else to look, so it is.

0:05:09 - Rod Pyle
I got your, your perturbations pal. You know, as a show that I think that's very appropriate as a show that's hosted by two roughly spherical bodies.

0:05:16 - Tariq Malik
So there we are speak for yourself, my friend. You know, although I'm a giant ball of gas, there is that, so Is that an overshare. Should I not have said that?

0:05:27 - Rod Pyle
Mike is looking at us, thinking you know, I could have gone out and cleaned up after my dog in the backyard today. Instead, I came on this show. Mike, feel free to weigh in on any of these, by the way, if you like.

0:05:38 - Mike Wall
Yeah, no, I was just thinking. I mean, I'm excited about the whole Planet 9 story is a pretty cool one and I've kind of followed it from the outset. It's been a number of years now where they've been looking for it and it's still just really crazy to me that there could be this giant planet that's like the size it's basically thought to be about, like Neptune, sized in our own solar system, and we can't find it Nibiru.

0:06:04 - Rod Pyle
It's Nibiru. It's hiding behind the sun.

0:06:06 - Mike Wall
Yeah, it's going to cause the apocalypse in 2012. Oh, no, wait, that came and went. But yeah, I think it's just another reminder that there's just so much cool stuff, and usually when we think about the sort of mysteries of space, we think about far away space, but there's even a lot of stuff on our own solar system that we don't have mapped out, which is just really, really cool, I think.

0:06:26 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, I think that, just to put this into perspective for people, the orbit of this object is something on the order of oh, I just had it up here it's like 26,000 years. That's how long it takes to make an orbit.

And we were talking about Planet Nine earlier 24, I was wrong 24,256 years. All in that case it's as far out as 157 billion miles, as close to the sun as 4.14 billion miles. And the issue you asked earlier about Planet Nine is that the existence of this kind of all, by its lonesome, seems like it's not in line with the model of what Planet Nine would dictate, that there would be these solo super extreme objects all on their lonesome, because the perturbations of that planet would have those things get a little bit clustered, and so that's what they're trying to resolve right now. You love that word, don't you?

0:07:25 - Rod Pyle
Clustered or resolved Perturbations. Perturbations, that's twice yeah.

0:07:32 - Tariq Malik
Alright.

0:07:32 - Rod Pyle
And by the way, you say it three times, it appears, guys since it's a friends and family casual Friday with us, I think Tariq will just continue through the headlines after the break. Okay, yeah, sounds good. Okay, psyche switch NASA. Okay, yeah, sounds good. Okay, psyche switch. Nasa has confirmed that it had to switch to a backup propellant line which I didn't even know psyche had. Yeah, um, to restart its hall effect thruster, which is a an electric propulsion system which they had to shut down in april due to low fuel pressure. It was being starved of its xenon fuel, or at least the the pressure was getting down low enough that it was a problem.

0:08:06 - Tariq Malik
But it'll still arrive at psyche in 2029, yay, yay, so, uh, no, this, yeah, this comes straight from, from NASA. You know they've been trying to figure out what the issue was with this kind of fuel pressure glitch that they had on, uh, on psyche. This, this mission to a super it's like metal, right, it's a metal uh asteroid. Uh, that is, uh, uh, a really valuable target. I think it's like metal, right, it's a metal asteroid. That is a really valuable target. I think it's like billions of dollars worth, or hundreds of billions of dollars, anyway.

0:08:32 - Rod Pyle
Well, you're just throwing those figures around today like no one's business. I know, I know We've written stories about how much it's worth.

0:08:41 - Tariq Malik
But this latest means that they've been able to swap from that what they think might have been a leaky thruster line, to a backup line that now should recover what they were hoping to, that pressure in order to keep up the sustained thrust, in order to get there on time. So you know, huzzah for the engineers. I think it shows you that the folks behind these missions are very resourceful and able to figure these things out. But it was a little bit of an. I mean, psyche is not that old and it's a little early for a glitch like this. So hopefully it's not a problem that's going to come back later on to bite them too, you know, like at rendezvous et cetera.

0:09:18 - Mike Wall
Yeah, and this is a really crazy object that they're trying to see, you know, I mean it is a metallic asteroid that we haven't explored anything like it up close. And and I mean part of the reason why we're going to see it, why why NASA just they've dedicated this entire mission just to this one object is because it's possible. This is like the stripped away core of like an ancient proto-planet, so it, it like could allow scientists like a way to kind of look inside planets like this is like the building blocker. This is what the inside of of a young planet might actually look like. You know, it's like it's just like a chance to see like the core of a planet in kind of broken down form. So it's just pretty interesting. And so, yeah, let's keep our fingers crossed. That psyche makes it, cause we've never seen an object like this up close.

0:10:00 - Tariq Malik
Stripped away core of an infant planet is my new band name.

0:10:04 - Rod Pyle
For those of you out in radio land you got to listen to Mike because he has a pH period D in this kind of stuff. Kind of this kind of stuff, Tariq has a minor in astronomy and his bachelor's degree, and Rod ended up drifting out of astronomy at UCLA after three quarters because Maybe if we find the lizard people Because it was too hard. Okay, let's go to a quick break. We'll be right back.

Hold your thrusters, all right, let's talk Chinese rockets, because when, I see Chinese rockets, I have to double check and make sure I'm not looking at SpaceX rockets. Why, well, Chinese rocket maker Sepoch which is, I think, space Epic, space Epoch, space Epoch, oh, Sepoch. Okay, well, that's even worse Claims to have performed a successful ascent and descent controlled vertical descent of a booster stage by golly. That looks a whole lot like a smaller starship first stage. Yeah, so this comes after a string of similar attempts by various Chinese private companies quote unquote, because most you know the way things work over there. They have hooks into the military, usually to do something similar to what SpaceX is trying to do with Starship, which is what we're going to be talking about later. And, as we've seen with Starship, it looks like it's pretty hard. So it was interesting to see these guys apparently succeed with their test.

0:11:37 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, this is really good. Actually, john, if you scroll down, you'll find there's like a little embedded Twitter video in there for folks that are watching the stream to see, and this is oh, that's loud With sound. Yeah, but this is a company that is trying to do what we've seen SpaceX do pretty routinely right, they've got a vertical launch and a vertical landing. This is a stainless steel rocket, which is what sets it apart from maybe some of the past vertical launch, vertical landing attempts and trials that some of these companies have done. And what we're seeing is this huge stainless steel rocket kind of touched down soft land in the, I think, the waters off of Hainan Island, and then it sinks, you know, to oblivion. It looks a lot like the Terminator giving a thumbs up at the end of T2 to me, because you've got like the fire and everything. I like it. I think it's great.

But it is a fairly advanced milestone for this company, space Sepoch, as they plan to pursue reusable rockets. Now, when you see there's some new photos of it online in the ocean, like in the water, and it looks like it's pretty rough. The fins look like they're really, really rudimentary and whatnot, but I think what they've been able to prove is that they've got the gimballing right, because this was a launch from the ground. They shut the engines off, they relit the engines, they gimballed them around to get a stable landing and a splashdown. So that's a big milestone in and of itself, and it'll be very interesting to see where Space Sepoch goes to next, if they're going to go for full reusability or just partial reusability, like what SpaceX does with Falcon 9s, and then what that means for either commercial launches in china or government launches in china too mike, what do you think?

0:13:22 - Mike Wall
yeah, no, I, I think it is and I mean it is pretty remarkable that there there are like a number of of these Chinese companies that that are doing these sorts of things. You know, I mean trying to do reusability, which which we've seen spacex kind of master and and, and you are right to say you know they're like trying to do reusability, which, which we've seen SpaceX kind of master and and, and you are right to say you know they're like what a like Chinese private company is is quite a bit different than what an American private company is. In this context, because a lot of the these like Chinese public companies are these, they, yeah, they are kind of public companies because they are, they're, they're kind of sponsored by yeah, yeah, by the government, government and getting funding from the government. But still, all that being said, and the fact that they do tend to look to SpaceX for inspiration this is not the first time we've seen a very SpaceX-like rocket launch or be designed by a Chinese private company, I mean, and what like what we just saw is impressive, but they keep in mind it's still a big leap to go from doing a test like this that that goes maybe a few miles up to actually going to space and coming back down again and keeping the whole thing together.

And I can also like having the system be mature enough to actually deploy a satellite or do something else. You know, like there there's still a ways away from that. I mean, you think back to to what SpaceX has done with Starship. You know like they're still a ways away from that. I mean, you think back to to what spacex they has done with starship. You know, this is kind of reminiscent of like that, what what they did in the very early days with what's called star hopper. Um, that the very first little thing that looked like a flying kind of like a silo, basically like a little mini silo.

0:14:51 - Tariq Malik
So water tank which they turn into a water tank.

0:14:53 - Mike Wall
they turn into a water tank, so that that was like what? Like five years ago, something like that. I'm off the check, but so that's roughly the stage that these guys appear to be at. But of course they can use what SpaceX has done to get a leg up and to probably move faster, based on what they've seen SpaceX do.

0:15:11 - Tariq Malik
And, to be clear, this is a prototype of what they want to build, called it's a rocket, called hiker, one which will be a reusable rocket that can carry 10 000 uh kilograms uh to low earth orbit. It's interesting that they're like one of like five or six different Chinese companies that are developing uh reusable rockets. So, as opposed to like what we've got spacex, maybe some engines and new and blue origin right now, right in the yes yeah and and yeah I.

0:15:35 - Mike Wall
It does just kind of shine a light on what China is doing. China has become extremely, very ambitious and pretty aggressive. I mean, if you talk to folks in the US space sector and with the military space folks especially, they like talk about this all the time. China is very overtly challenging American dominance in space and it's the whole ecosystem. It not just military launches, but it's it's these private companies too that are sort of tied in with the military, albeit like one kind of step removed.

But but china is making big advancements. You know it's, it's it's they. They like just launched their, their kind of second ever interplanetary mission, you know, tianwen 2, which is going to go to to, to go sample an asteroid and then move on to a comet. They're actually looking to launch a Mars sample return mission in 2028. And they may actually get Mars samples back to Earth before we do, even though we've been planning that for a while and we already have Perseverance that has collected these samples, but we're currently arguing over whether or not we have the money to bring them back. So it's all of these theories, you know I mean military space and exploration. I mean military space and exploration. I mean, china is very, very ambitious and is doing a lot of stuff. So yeah, it's something people talk about.

0:16:46 - Rod Pyle
I'm glad Mike mentioned Tianwen too, because I forgot to put that on the list of big names for this week. I'm so impressed, mike, that you used the soft button, called Inspired by SpaceX, as opposed to ripping off.

0:16:58 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, that's another company. There's another company, iSpace, the Chinese company iSpace, not to be confused with Japan's iSpace, and they're building Hyperbola 9, which looks very much like Starship.

0:17:12 - Mike Wall
Yeah, it's like a full size version right or close to it. Yeah, Is that our?

0:17:16 - Rod Pyle
next story or is that something different? No, no, that's like a full-size version right or close to it. Is that our next story or is that something different? No, no, that's a different thing. That's another iSpace.

0:17:20 - Tariq Malik
So no, the next story is the actual iSpace of Japan, and this is just a fun one for folks who are watching or, if you want to chase it up later, if you're listening, because they have their newest photos of the moon from their Resilience lander. And as we meet in our next episode, dear listener, they will either have succeeded, dear listeners, singular.

We only have one now Listeners, listeners everyone, the legion of this week in spacers that are out there. As of our next episode, they will either have landed successfully on the moon or not. We're going to have that with you, but here is an image of the Earth, the full Earth, rising behind the moon, as seen by the Resilience Lander. We are less than one week from their landing. On June 5th Eastern Time, it'll be June 6th in Japan, this is their second time trying to land on the moon, uh, and and that's why they've named it resilience, because the company says that they are resilient and failure will not stop them. So you know, best of luck to japan, uh, in this next, uh, private moon landing attempt, and we'll see how that goes next week, next episode and finally, we have perhaps more awawas coming.

Awawas. Yeah, this is an alert to everyone, alert. If you look up this weekend in a really dark, dark part of the sky, you might see some awesome auroras. There's a corona hole that has been sparking, letting a lot of radiation and plasma out from the sun, and it's all buffeting us this weekend. In fact, there was a G3 geomagnetic storm earlier this week, which really rose levels. Now, we didn't really see a lot come out of it, but they're saying that there could be a lot more over the weekend. They actually put a there's like a KP index that the space weather department prediction group puts out, and they said that we're at like KP6 right now for the weekend. That's pretty high. Kp7 is like amazing conditions, so just be on the lookout. You could be seeing auroras all the way down to like the northern states, maybe like the mid-latitude ones, but we'll have to wait and see if that does in fact happen. If you want to maximize your chances, though, you've got to get really far away from city lights.

0:19:40 - Rod Pyle
You want dark skies and, of course, clear weather, so hopefully no rain, because that will ruin everything and that will probably put myself and Mike out of the running, because we both live in metropolitan areas that by the time you escape the light from them, you're driving into the light of the next one, and so, yes, a great week for solar flatulence. Um, so let's, let's go to, let's knock out this next break, and then we'll be back to talk about nothing but starship, starship standby Starships are meant to fly.

0:20:17 - Rod Pyle / Mike Wall
Stand up and touch the sky. So we had.

0:20:21 - Rod Pyle
Whenever you're done. We had our test. That's Nicki Minaj man. Come on, what's a Nicki Minaj?

0:20:28 - Tariq Malik
Well, the singer of Starships. Let's continue.

0:20:32 - Rod Pyle
So we had Test Flight 9, the highly anticipated Test Flight 9, which was Not a failure, but not a success either. It had successful elements. They reused the Super Heavy Booster with all but four of its engines out for their second flight, which is pretty impressive. I'm just going to digest here. Went up, had a successful hot staging, which has been a bugaboo a couple of times, upper stage reached the desired suborbital trajectory and then it all started to come apart, as the audio and the video is about to relay to you. So this is good, but it's not what they're hoping for, right?

0:21:19 - Tariq Malik
Should you only start with me, or should we go straight to Mike?

0:21:22 - Rod Pyle
Mike is the one that wrote the story, mike's the smart one in the room, so why don't we just let him tee off?

0:21:27 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, mike, mike, why don't you recount where Flight 9 rates in the, I guess, the retinue of Starship Flight so far? Yeah, what happened? What happened, what happened.

0:21:35 - Mike Wall
It's. I mean I would say they, they would probably say partial success, kind of like Rod said, you know, and they're always quick to say I mean all, I mean these are test flights. You know, starship is a very ambitious project and we're still in the development. That it's it's. It's still under development, so they don't expect perfect success and all this. And so there, there definitely were some things to point to as very positive signs.

I mean, one of them is that they did refly Super Heavy, the giant first stage booster, for the first time, and that's a big milestone because the entire point of this vehicle is to be fully reusable and rapidly reusable. So this one flew this past January on Flight 7. And it came back to the launch pad on that flight and was caught by the chopstick arms of the launch tower and they refurbished it, took four engines off, put new ones on, but, yeah, 29 of the 33 raptor engines were the same as the first as flight seven and it, it, it did quite well. You know, they also did some experiments with this booster on this flight, so they didn't try another chopsticks catch. So they they kind of diverted it out for what was supposed to be like a hard ocean splashdown in the gulf of mexico, or are we supposed to call it what?

0:22:40 - Tariq Malik
what gulf of america I'm, I'm they go for mexico, the gulf which I thought very politically adroit. We'll say that.

0:22:47 - Mike Wall
We'll say that but so they were doing experiments with it too.

You know, they brought it in at like a different angle of attack so that there would be more drag on it, to test out a new kind of landing strategy where they could use less fuel for the landing burn and stuff like that.

And that seemed to work and it it like almost kind of reached the like desired end goal, which was the hard splash down. But it kind of blew up during during the landing burn, about six minutes into flight. So that's probably mostly good for them, I think they would say, and ship the, the, the giant upper stage it was supposed to to, to stay together for about 65 minutes and come down for a soft splash down in the indian ocean, off the coast of western australia. And it like reached space, like you guys were saying. And it it was on the desired trajectory, which was an improvement over the previous two starship flights where ship I I would say it was disappointing how ship, how ship performed on those two flights. It didn't hold together for it it blew up about 10 minutes into flight or a little less than that on both of those flights yeah, very shortly after separation I yeah, yeah it did.

It didn't survive very long after separation and it like rained debris down on the turks and caicos and on the bahamas. You know people probably saw all those videos coming in from people in those areas were just like this huge artificial meteor shower streaking across the sky. So that didn't happen on this flight. It it's. It made it to space, but it didn't didn't make it all the way to the end. You know they're they're trying to do experiments on this one too.

They, they, they had these dummy starlink satellites on board eight of them, I think that they wanted to deploy as like a first as as a key test to see that the upper stage can actually deploy satellites. That didn't work. They couldn't fully open the kind of PEZ dispenser payload bay door, so they abandoned that try. They were also going to do an in-space relight of one of the Raptor engines on the upper stage, which has six of them. They couldn't get that to work either because they had an anomaly around this time where they kind of lost attitude control with ship and so they said a fuel leak they think, right, that's that, that, yeah, that's that's what they said during the the.

You know, like the launch webcasts. And then when you, when you read the kind of flight recap that they published after the fact, it doesn't really give a main cause, it just kind of, says they, they had an attitude.

Control error, I believe, is the terminology they use. So I guess it's kind of tbd, what. What caused it? But it seemed like, yeah, yeah, leak was the kind of go-to explanation, like at the time, but we'll have to see. And so they were not able to control it for for landing, for splashdown, and it just kind of came back uncontrolled. And I mean, if you can't control how it's re-entering this atmosphere, that's not great. It's going to break apart. You know, earth's atmosphere is going to tear it up. It's going so fast. So that's presumably what ended up happening.

They lost contact with it 46 minutes into flight and presumably pieces of it are now at the bottom of the indian ocean. But, um, so yeah, I mean it's a mixed bag like the like the previous two flights have been on, both flight seven and flight eight, there were huge successes with super heavy, both they did chopstick catches on both of those. So they've made big strides with the first stage, I think, ship, though still quite a bit of work to be done, I think. And it's just it's. It's just interesting, you know. I mean there, there, you know, there was a big but the kind of star base. Talk from youbase. Talk from Elon yesterday, where he gave one of his semi-regular here's our Mars plans and here's how Starship fits into them. He gave one of those talks yesterday. It's very ambitious. We can talk about that some if you guys want to.

0:26:12 - Tariq Malik
Let's point out, in the past, every year he's given these talks and they've been live right with reporters there. This was not a live talk. It seems like it was recorded.

0:26:23 - Rod Pyle
I think he wanted to make sure that they were able to do what they always do when you visit Hawthorne, which is they put the press in a little tiny box up in a riser and then shove 80 SpaceX employees in front of you. That go yay, yay. But yeah, that talk was a little reminiscent of 2016, I thought.

0:26:41 - Mike Wall
Yeah, and it was interesting because we were told there was going to be the update prior to the Flight 9 launch and then there was just no update, like after launch. We didn't really hear much about the talk. It just didn't happen. And then Elon said on X that they were going to air it shortly and then, yeah, they ended up posting up. It's like a 42-minute video. They ended up posting it on X yesterday, so I'm not sure what went into the decision of how to kind of broadcast it out, but it did seem recorded and it was a presentation to SpaceX employees at Starbase. I don't, there are probably a few select reporters who were invited to see it, but it wasn't like a general call to the press or anything like that but not Tariq malik Tariq did not get it.

I didn't get an invite.

0:27:27 - Tariq Malik
Tarik didn't get an invite yeah, I know I'm sure it was lost in the mail. I'm sure I'll find it. Yeah, a little bit right, well, thanks mike that about.

0:27:35 - Rod Pyle
Does it for this episode? No sure. I have to say I was watching on a couple of my favorite space groups on Facebook and elsewhere. You know I'm old so I still use Facebook, waiting for somebody to say it, and they said it about a half an hour after the broadcast terminated, which was it only took the Saturn V two flights and then it carried people, which is a valid point. But you're talking about a massive, massive budget and a whole lot more people working on it and the traditional cost plus budgeting for that, so obviously a very different creature. But one does begin to wonder how many more it'll take to get this right Now. Do you know when they're gonna uh, fly just raptor threes? Do they have a date for that?

0:28:22 - Mike Wall
I think, like by the end of the year, that during the presentation, elon said that they're they're also working on on sort of version three of starship. What, what, what launched on tuesday? Uh, was it was version two, like I believe. And I mean version three is like the mature, is the first fully mature version that he thinks can go to Mars, will be capable of fast reuse and be reliable and be able to be refueled in Earth orbit, which is a huge part of this whole project.

You launch these ship upper stages to Earth orbit, they do a rendezvous with like a tanker which will just, you know, just be like a modified starship upper stage filled with fuel and, um, then they'll, they'll fuel up and then they'll kind of jet off to mars, hopefully in giant fleets of that.

You know, there'll be like hundreds of these things at once.

You said thousands, but yeah, yeah, I mean we like we can talk about the ambition that that is always kind of inherent to these talks, but yeah, so and it's, it's, it's an entirely different vision, it's entirely different expectation of what Starship will do compared to the Saturn five, right, I mean, when it, when it launched people, it was launching three people.

What, what, like Elon wants to do is launch hundreds of people. He like wants to turn the starship upper stage into a craft that can hold maybe a hundred people that seems ambitious, but dozens at the very least and so there's got to be a whole like different type of life support. It's got to keep these people alive for months on the way to mars. It's just another order of magnitude of complexity and like difficulty that's involved, and that's one of the things that you need to talk about when you talk about Mars plans. I mean, you can't wave away what's going to be needed on this upper stage to be reliable enough to carry people. What's currently launching doesn't have any life support in it at all. It's just like a shell of a spacecraft and it's a big spacecraft.

0:30:15 - Tariq Malik
Elon Musk told me in 2019, when I asked that question, that that was going to a spacecraft, and that's it's a big spacecraft. Elon Musk told me in 2019, when I asked that question, that that was going to be simple and they didn't have to deal with it because they've already done it on Dragon.

0:30:24 - Rod Pyle
Just like dozens of tons of radiation shielding they need. Let me break in here for a second. We're going to run to another spot and we'll be right back.

0:30:39 - Tariq Malik
I want to ask about the pacing, because it's currently it is May 2025, as we're recording this episode, and this was the third test launch that had some failures in it. The first two obviously failed in January and March of this year, of this year, and Elon said shortly after the Flight 9 launch that the next one that they could start launching in three to four weeks, which feels very soon, given that, as of today, just before we started recording this episode, the FAA announced that they have to do another mishap investigation and we're on a timeline where you know again, it's may 2025 NASA wants to have people walking on the moon by the end of 2027 and they still haven't done a lot of with with the starship, lunar lander and 20 refuelings, yeah and and, and we still haven't seen anything about like refueling or or uh or or life support, support or any of that.

The Starship still hasn't gone around orbit. So I'm just curious how you see the rest of this year rolling out if they're going to try to do a launch every month or so, which would in four weeks. That's what we'd be looking at.

0:31:54 - Mike Wall
Yeah, I mean, I think that's what they want to do, that's the spacex way, right, and that's why they're kind of unbowed by by these difficulties that have cropped up on the past, on the past few starship flights. No, it is a it's, it's a development. They, their, their whole model is fly it. If something goes wrong then you fix it. That's that's how you learn is by flying and seeing mistakes in flight with these, with these vehicles, and they're they're churning out lots and lots of them. So I like, I don't doubt that they could hit the like every three to four weeks milestone with the launches. But you know, they do still have to to abide by by the rules and the regulations and they do have to do the fa investigations and they like do have to get launch licenses and like launch license modifications. So this, this ambitious timeline is not entirely up to them, right? Yeah, um, so I I don't know how often they'll be able to fly, but I think they they've demonstrated that they can build these things fast enough and test them fast enough that they probably can launch one every three to four weeks if, if, like, the regulations allow. Um, but yeah, you know, I mean, we shall see. It's really hard to predict. They they have and they they're incredibly talented.

Obviously, spacex has done amazing things the falcon 9 and the falcon heavy so you shouldn't doubt their ability to get stuff done with starship. It's just, what will the timeline be, you know, and that's, that's, that's, that's obviously what NASA I'm sure NASA is very worried about the artemis 3 timeline 2027. They're they're probably worried about whether, like, the Artemis program is going to be allowed at all or going to be funded at all. Based on what we saw in the budget, like a couple weeks ago, from the Trump administration, they've probably got a lot of anxiety on a lot of different fronts about, like kind of how they're going to explore the moon and beat China back to the moon, which they've been called upon to do by lots of different people. So yeah, it is an open question and we'll just see. I mean, I wouldn't bet against SpaceX based on what they've been able to do in the past, but the timeline thing is very difficult.

0:33:50 - Tariq Malik
Yeah.

0:33:51 - Rod Pyle
So I have an overarching question here. So we're talking. I don't think we yet have a number of tanker flights required for a lunar mission, right? It's still hovering between 16 and 24, something last I saw, it's pretty.

0:34:06 - Mike Wall
It's, yeah, it's pretty contest. You know elon musk would would dispute that, although he says eight? Right, I think so, but but. But NASA people have come out and said 12 to 16, if I recall correctly.

0:34:17 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, I think at least 16. So given that a two-part question, one you know this thing's filled with cryogenics, so it's loitering up there in orbit waiting for tankers how quickly does that series of tanker flights have to occur? And the second half of that question is do you see, from what you guys have seen of Starbase, the newest city in Texas, how far are we from having the logistics to do that kind of cadence? Because this kind of harkens back to Werner Von Braun's ideas about a space ferry where they're going to fly it out of the Central Pacific off of a crummy little atoll out there and we'd fly them eight times a day and blah, blah, blah, and it doesn't feel like it's that much closer than it was then, although you know his cadence is pretty impressive. But we're talking about having to launch multiple times in a week, right, because of the boil off.

0:35:10 - Mike Wall
That's probably true. But yeah, and so they're, they're thinking about that already, you know. I mean there's, yeah, there's a, there's the, there's already starbase. But they're also kind of outfitting their florida site for starship too, so and that will theoretically be up and running within like a year or so to host starship launches from the space coast. So they'll they'll have starbase and they'll have they'll have florida as well to launch starships from in the relatively near future.

So I'm sure that'll, yeah, that'll help a lot, and they're going to be building vehicles both in Texas and in Florida too, so that should help quite a bit. I mean, they are going to need a lot of launches, but that's built into the whole system. I mean, if you listen to the presentation yesterday Elon talking about sending several thousand ships to Mars and back to Earth again every 26 months when the two planets align you know that's built into the system. You can question how realistic it is or what the timeline is going to be, but that sort of crazy cadence and huge numbers, that's built into the system. It's like built into their Mars settlement plan.

0:36:18 - Rod Pyle
Okay. So I realized that that none of us on the call right now are aerospace engineers, but one begins to wonder can this really become the one one size fits all space system, or is he going to have to come around to saying, okay, there are things that's better at and things it's not so great at, and one of those maybe is you know these requirements for multiple refuelings before certain uses, and I haven't heard how many tanker flights are required for a Mars flight, although I read somewhere it's actually less.

0:36:53 - Mike Wall
Yeah, I mean like you can go ahead and talk. I've been talking a lot.

0:36:58 - Tariq Malik
No, I was going to say that actually came up in the presentation Rod that Elon gave yesterday. He did say that a Mars flight would be you would need less refueling for that. But we heard that when friend of the show and president of the Mars Society, robert Zubrin, was on back in March. He said that maybe they need a smaller version of Starship that he likes to call Starboat. I was at the Humans to the Moon and Mars conference this week and he gave the same kind of presentation where he envisions a smaller Starship, one-fifth the size, to be the lander craft for Mars or for the moon and therefore you'd have a scale and use the Starship as the actual in-space depot that would fuel up the lander over and over again to be able to reuse it. But to your point about logistics and infrastructure and I think Mike kind of touched on this there's like two things that SpaceX says that they're doing to meet that. Number one is that they're building Raptor 3 engines like there's no tomorrow.

They're already on like 30 or 40.

0:38:06 - Rod Pyle
And aren't they down to like one per day or something? It was one per week and then I saw somewhere in a respectable outlet one per day and I thought, is that possible?

0:38:12 - Tariq Malik
I mean, they've got a system in place for all of that and this is apparently their sleekest engine yet and they're building what they call these gigabays, these ginormous kind of vehicle assembly buildings to be like an assembly line for the ships.

And so that's one way to combat just the need for ships is that they've got these giant production lines, both in Florida that they're building and the one that they have that should be coming online in Starbase.

And then they've got two launch pads now, because they're almost complete with the second Megazilla in Starbase and they're building one of those in Florida. And the concept that Elon said and correct me, Mike, if I'm wrong is that they would launch a mission into orbit and then the booster comes back, they catch it on the Mechazilla and set it down, and then they launch the next one to go up and refuel that one, and then that comes back and then that booster gets caught and then they move that to the side and then the ship that did the refueling comes back. They catch that at one of those pads, tank, tank it up, put it on the first one again, launch that up and that's that's their whole big cycle is just to keep doing that over and, over and over again. Elon says they, he wants them to be able to do it in an hour. That seems crazy.

Uh, so it takes longer than that to turn around a jet I know right, uh, so, uh, but but still they, they have a concept of it and you know, like mike says, if I had heard it years ago it'd be like that's crazy, but we saw them catch the rocket, so we've seen them refly that rocket, so we'll have to see how it turns out.

0:39:48 - Mike Wall
Yeah, and it's just kind of interesting too, Tariq talking about. Well, there are some people who are advocating for a smaller Starship. It would be more efficient, be easier. That's not the way that they're looking. I mean, elon talks about getting starship bigger and bigger and he in the talk he teased that that the future version might be 467 feet tall. They, they like, want to make it bigger because he's so fixated on like we're going to need a million tons of mass to mars to set up a self-sustaining city, so we need the biggest, most powerful ship we get. So that's what they're working toward, not like trying to find more efficiencies.

Yeah, it's gigantic, so it'd be even more powerful than the one that we've got now, which is already the most powerful thing that's ever flown. So they aren't looking to scale down and make it more efficient, they're looking the other direction.

0:40:39 - Rod Pyle
So, after Elon's venture into American politics, am I the only person here that thinks he probably wouldn't want to live in a city that was Elon town? I don't know, I'd be a little worried about that, but we could talk about that after the next break, because we're due for a break. So stand by. Just an aside. Uh and I've said this a number of times on this show, but I don't think I have what you were on, mike uh, did we ever talk about the werner von braun worst science fiction novel in history?

I don't think so so he in the late 40s, while he was cooling his jets in white sands, designing icbm nose cones, he wrote a, a science fiction novel called mars. A technical tale, and boy, that title just fills you with to read, doesn't it?

and it was so bad it wasn't published till 2006 and I bought it immediately and started reading it, and indeed it was wretched. But the appendix for that, which he spent a lot of time on, became the mars project book, which was quite well regarded. It was really the first technical workup, given what they knew then of how you might do all this. But the best part of the novel, the most outstanding part, is when he's talking about the ruler of mars who was called 1948, the elon. Yeah, which is just crazy. You, you know it's just creepy. So I imagined this big dome city and he did. Once again, he's another guy talking about, yeah, we're going to have these big domes on Mars. And it's like, yeah, cause it's good to have a magnifying glass to focus all the radiation on you so you can be toasted in three days. Um, I assume it's more complex than that.

But what interested me in this talk? I mean, normally I'll see a headline about Elon and it's, you know, kind of tearing him up a little bit. And what's he saying? What's all this? Usually, when I listen to the whole thing, it makes more sense and he comes across as being more thoughtful and more with it than he would in some of his tweets and so forth. This one, this talk yesterday a little less so, I guess, but just because so much of it felt like a repeat of the starry-eyed yeah, we'll have it done in six months, no problem, and I want it to be true. I'm not fond of his politics, but I want it to be true because I want him to succeed, because other than Bezos, in his very much slower-paced way, nobody else has ever tried to do this. And it's a remarkable thing that one guy said I'm going to build this rocket that is going to outfly and outlift and outperform the Saturn five over and over and over again, and I'm single-handedly got to build a city on Mars.

0:43:13 - Mike Wall
Well, and it's. It's not just one guy, it's also like the richest person who has ever, basically, so he has the resources to do it. That does make a difference. And to say it's just Elon too we should give more credit to the SpaceX engineers. They have so many talented people there who are making this happen. All of the craftsmen and all the folks down in Starbase who are welding these things. They're doing yeoman's work.

And Gwynne Shotwell, for god, yeah, yeah, so she's holding that thing together they, they have so many talented people you know and like it's, plus some people from NASA as well, you know, kathy kerners, uh, uh, and gerstmeyer gerstmeyer, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and so it's. I mean, part of it is there's. There's a tendency, just for elon to Elon to be conflated with SpaceX. And he tends to do that.

He tends to do that himself, like he's the lead rocket engineer. I think he has said that multiple times. But yeah, we should give credit to all the SpaceX people because they're very talented. But yeah, I mean, I also want Starship to succeed. I also want Starship to succeed. I also want a very, a very bright future in space where we can have this amazing rocket that can send people to Mars and to Enceladus and to Europa and all this stuff, like we all want that sci-fi dream to come true, I think. For for the technical people or the the like folks who are a little bit more skeptical it it, it can be frustrating to to kind of listen to these presentations and just say it just seems kind of blithely Like, yeah, like you were saying, Tariq, you know, oh, we don't have to worry about the life support, because we figured that out with Dragon. It's like Dragon is a great vehicle but it's very different from Starship.

0:44:48 - Tariq Malik
It's a golf cart, by the way, as we were recording. This is weird. Today is the five-year anniversary of the first commercial crew of Demo-2, the first time SpaceX ever launched astronauts into space. That was five years ago today. We were in the middle of a pandemic.

0:45:07 - Mike Wall
Yeah, no, it seems like just yesterday and also like 100 years ago in certain ways. It's just crazy that it's been five years. Can I point out something, though, about the talk? Sure, Because you know.

0:45:15 - Tariq Malik
Rod, you Can I point out something, though, about the talk? Sure, because you know, rod, you kind of touched on something that this talk sounded like it was a lot more review than anything new, and there was some meat there, there was some timeline stuff, there was some discussion about the new version of Starship, but I was just struck right now when we were talking about this, about the fact that it is more review now with this talk than new means that they've got a lot actually happening. There was a point in the talk where Elon is talking about how well we needed to shift to the hot stage, and then he just points right next to him which is the new hot stage design, which is points right next to him, which is the, the new, the new hot stage design for the, for the.

0:45:59 - Rod Pyle
You know so they're very soviet looking by the way.

0:46:02 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, they they, they, and I think that is a key difference that just struck me now in hindsight, is that compared to again, like to that six years ago, when I was there in 2019 and saw starship one, uh, just standing up there, which sadly is?

0:46:16 - Rod pPyle
not more. Stop name dropping.

0:46:18 - Tariq Malik
I know, right, I was there, oh yeah, yeah, you know. So between then and now they have gotten a lot more under their belt and so the shape of what it is, people know what that's like. They've seen it launched now nine times and so they're familiar with that. And so now it's like just talking about iterating that and making it, you know, x inches longer, making it whatever. You know the, the, the thrust, you know engines, this, that and the other. Rolling out the v3 will be very interesting with the new um, the new raptor engines but let's, let's say version three, because v3 sounds dangerously yeah, version three version three sorry, world war iiously.

Yeah, version three, version three Dangerously.

0:46:58 - Rod Pyle
World War II. Okay, I have two points I want to make. First one is I've decided, after listening to Mike for this better part of an hour, that we need to nominate him for a Space Pioneer Award, because if they'll give you one, I know right, or me, for God's sakes.

0:47:14 - Tariq Malik
I don't know if he wants to be part of a club that'll have us as a member, it's.

0:47:18 - Rod Pyle
National Space Society's next to highest honor. So above that is the Wernher von Braun Award, which is sitting in the lobby of SpaceX under Lucite. But, mike, I think we should get you one of these little metal globes. My last question is, mike, where is your confidence at this point about Lunar Starship actually being the lander of choice for Artemis III or IV, with Blue Origin hot on their heels?

0:47:46 - Mike Wall
Yeah, well, I mean, I've definitely got confidence in what we've seen from Blue Origin so far. You know they've already launched New G, new gland and they're very capable people. But you know, with I, I would still bet on starship, just because it's already flown, it's got nine test flights and just just the amount of resources and the pace they work at. I'm I'm not saying anything will be ready necessarily for artemis 3 in 2027. I'm not saying that I'm, I'm just like blithely confident in like hitting that target date. But if I had to choose, I would probably, I would probably still go with starship, just because of the resources that spacex is able to deploy and the kind of monomaniacal focus that that elon has on this vehicle and the ability and his, his, he's. He's shown already that he's just he's willing to put so much into this and I think that's going to be the same going forward.

0:48:45 - Tariq Malik
They're going to do it one way or another, regardless of. I think that that's the lesson to learn there. I or I don't know 50 more test flights before they put people on it, but they will launch them.

0:49:03 - Mike Wall
Yeah, maybe it'll be three years, but they will do all they can to get it done Well and I do have to say I have.

0:49:10 - Rod Pyle
Sorry, Tariq, but I have a little more confidence in the lunar lander. I mean, I'm not fond again, non-engineer.

0:49:20 - Tariq Malik
I'm not fond.

0:49:20 - Rod Pyle
Again, non-engineer, I'm not fond of this tall, skinny design with what we've seen so far in the station, with landing legs in terms of landing, with stability, on a very rugged surface. But you know, the nice thing is you're still, at least in the last plan I saw, you're still launching the astronauts in Orion and they're meeting up with a lunar starship either an earth orbit or lunar orbit writing it down, writing it back, and they don't have to reenter in it. Which is one of the scariest things about starship is you know when they're going to get reentry settled. So at least from that standpoint it gives me a little more confidence. But, man, you know, two years is not very long.

0:49:56 - Mike Wall
It's, it's, but man, two years is not very long, it's not, and they've got a lot to do in those two years and it'll probably. Yeah, how far they're able to advance will be dictated by how often they're able to launch test flights, because that's how they learn.

0:50:09 - Tariq Malik
Rod, you're the expert. How long was it between Gemini and Apollo? We know eight years from the start, last Gemini flight was 66, and the first Apollo flight was 67.

0:50:22 - Rod Pyle
That was orbital Apollo seven 68. So that was fast, yeah, but you know, we were also willing to take a lot more chances then. It wasn't that they weren't concerned about the astronauts alive, but this was basically a wartime footing. Yeah, and apollo 8 you know, by all rights in today's world, apollo 8 flew probably two years sooner than it should have because it had one engine, the service propulsion system on the back of that capsule to get them into and out of a lunar orbit and if any of a dozen things went wrong, it was a simple engine and it did have a backup igniter, I think, but uh, had anything gone wrong or it didn't need an igniter, but anyway, had anything gone wrong with that, they'd still be there and that would be very sad.

So that those guys you know, when you talk to I was interviewing, uh, former flight director jerry griffin about this about six months ago, you know, and even he said we, we were just kind of going at warp nine and nothing was going to get in our way and, like I said, it wasn't that they were concerned about safety, but they're willing to take much bigger risks. You know. That's part of the conversation too was what is your risk tolerance? What's NASA's risk tolerance versus SpaceX's risk tolerance versus the Artemis astronauts risk tolerances? And usually, at least in discussions I've had, the astronauts are the ones that are willing to say just let us here, send me a waiver, I'll sign whatever you got. Let's get this thing going, let us do our job. Yeah, yeah.

0:51:48 - Tariq Malik
I don't think that you can count out Blue Origin just yet. By the end of this year, if everything lines up, blue Origin will have landed their Mark. I uncrewed lander on the surface of the moon, yeah Right. And SpaceX still has to do that with a starship, right? And if that goes well, you know they're in the landing. What is it? Program or whatever it is? To be another lander along with SpaceX and and there was one other company, right?

0:52:20 - Rod Pyle
I think Northrop Grumman was designing one. They were in and out of partnership.

0:52:26 - Tariq Malik
Just keep an eye on that, because a decision point can come to say hey, I know we said we would do X, but here is one that's already done it and they've got their other rocket that will get there. It's a lot easier and simpler of a mission. Let's do that because it's there and it's ready. That is a race that we have to see if SpaceX is able to catch up on that, because it's a much simpler system. They're not trying to do all the free reusable stuff. We'll have to see how that goes.

0:53:00 - Mike Wall
It's just worth highlighting I think that's really exciting that we have two of these private crew moon landers that are in development right now and are planning to actually fly to the moon in the next few years. That's something to actually celebrate.

0:53:11 - Tariq Malik
Plus China, Plus China Rod. We've got to get there before China.

0:53:16 - Rod Pyle
Okay, so this is another question for Mike. This is my last question for you, mike. My contention is that China will take any risk and I used to say short of loss of the crew, but I was corrected by one of the large minds in commercial spaceflight who said any risk. Leave out the concerns about crew to get taikonauts on the moon by 2029, because that's the 80th anniversary of the people's republic. What do you think?

0:53:46 - Mike Wall
I think they're definitely willing to take more risks than we would. I also think you have to think about how embarrassing it would be if they lost a crew on a moon mission, though. So like I don't think any risk, because if they, if they race to beat us and in so doing lose, lose three people, that would just be a huge black eye, and and I mean that, that I'm I'm not sure that, that that the Chinese communist party leadership would want to endure that, that that that would be really bad for them to lose face on the on an international scale like that.

So, I would agree because they are riding high right now.

0:54:23 - Tariq Malik
They have landed the first missions on the far side of the moon. They have returned samples from the Southern pole of the moon. They have done all these new things, success after success after success, and to kind of risk that momentum. You know, yeah, while they're kind of watching us struggle, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

0:54:44 - Mike Wall
And they're very capable and I think they're only getting more and more capable. I mean, they've just built their own space station in the last few years and everything works pretty well as far as we can tell. So they've got a really good human spaceflight program that they've built just recently. So I don't doubt that they can do it. But I also think that they're not going to rush it because failure would be a really, really big, black eye.

0:55:06 - Rod Pyle
Well, it's a lot harder to cover up now than it was in the Soviet days, when they'd announced the success after it was successful.

0:55:11 - Mike Wall
Yeah, you got all these amateur trackers watching every spacecraft and seeing what's happening everywhere.

0:55:17 - Rod Pyle
So, yeah, really, really hard, actually hide like a big failure, like that well, I want to thank everybody, and especially you, mike, for joining us today for episode 163 that we call the trials of starship. Mike, remind us where you can get your book, because we didn't talk about it out there uh, I don't know.

0:55:35 - Mike Wall
I'm sure it's still in.

0:55:36 - Rod Pyle
I don't know you follow your publications the way I follow mine.

0:55:44 - Mike Wall
It's like six years old at this point, so it's probably still around somewhere.

0:55:49 - Rod Pyle
Are you close to retiring on your royalties yet?

0:55:53 - Mike Wall
No, and then what? Just be a full-time podcaster?

0:55:56 - Rod Pyle
No, Be a full-time book writer. I did that for a few years. It was horrible. Who was the publisher?

0:56:04 - Mike Wall
It's actually Hachette.

0:56:07 - Rod Pyle
At least you went with a major publisher. It wasn't like it was Bill Finkelheimer's publications, or something.

0:56:13 - Mike Wall
No, it was like a real book deal. It wasn't self-published or anything. But I would just miss Tariq too much if I retired and just sat in a cave pounding away at a keyboard.

0:56:24 - Tariq Malik
anyway, that's great. I miss me too.

0:56:26 - Rod Pyle
Why are you just? Saying that Because he's on what no comment Okay. Tariq where can we find you flying?

0:56:34 - Tariq Malik
suborbital. These days, some people know which side the toes is buttered, is all I'm saying. No, no, no, no. You can find me at the Twitter, at Space.

0:56:44 - Rod Pyle
SpaceTronPlays.

0:56:45 - Tariq Malik
At space.com, as always, onx and BlueSky at Tariq J Malik. If you like, video games at SpaceTronPlays. Although I'm going to be away for a few days because I'm going camping this weekend, you will find me in the mountains trying to catalog, you know, I don't know bugs or whatever, and hopefully, seeing the northern lights, we'll see. We'll see Fingers crossed.

0:57:05 - Rod Pyle
I have a hard time picturing you camping. You're so adverse to discomfort.

0:57:09 - Tariq Malik
But have a good time. I'm an Eagle Scout, my friend. I grew up camping. Ah, ah, okay.

0:57:14 - Rod Pyle
And don't forget, you can join Tariq and me and I wish Mike Wall would join us at the International Space Development Conference in June, where we plan to record a live episode of this fine show for your heckling delight. It's in Orlando from June 19th to the 22nd. I'm sure, mike, that Tariq would be happy to pay your way to attend. Get more information at isdcnss.org and, of course, you can always find me if you should be so misguided to try at pylebooks.com, my increasingly aging website, or at adastramagazine.com. And remember you can always drop us a line at twistwit.tv. That's twis@twit.tv.

We love getting your comments and suggestions and we answer each and every email. New episodes this podcast publish every Friday on your favorite Podcatcher. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends and give us reviews. We'll take five of whatever their denominations are. And don't forget, we're counting on you to join club twit in 2025. As I say every week, besides supporting twit, you'll help keep us on the air with our great guests and my horrid jokes. It's very important. You can once again buy annual subscriptions. So I say, go there, click the button, provide them with whatever information they need.

0:58:28 - Mike Wall
John looks like he's queuing up to tell us exactly what's needed there but also in the club officially tomorrow price increase goes up for the club last chance, char Charlie's.

0:58:39 - Rod Pyle
Wow, they're only going to have a few hours.

0:58:41 - Tariq Malik
That's not tomorrow, that's Sunday.

0:58:44 - Mike Wall
That's two days from now.

0:58:46 - Rod Pyle
You get the idea anyways, no PhDs besides Mike's on this show. And don't forget, you can follow the TwitTech Podcast Network at Twit, on Twitter, on Facebook, at twit.tv on Instagram. I stepped in that one. Thanks everybody, it's been a pleasure and we will see you, as always, next week. Ta-ta!

0:59:07 - Leo Laporte
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