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Chapter 15: Outro and Thank You

Uh holy crap. Thank you so much to NASA and to Jared Isaacman, the administrator for making all of this happen. Uh it’s been a dream of mine since I first started coming out here over 10 years ago to go inside that building, see a rocket stacked, and talk all the details. I mean, what an actual dream come true. So, thank you so much to making that happen. And I also owe a huge thank you to all my supporters. So, those of you on Patreon at patreon.com/ everyydayastronaut as well as exsubscribers and YouTube members. You guys all make this stuff happen. So, thank you so much for your ongoing support. And you may have noticed I’m actually wearing the right attire for this interview today. I’m wearing our slow roll towing t-shirt uh that has the crawler that takes SLS out to the launchpad and back. It’s the iconic thing that took the Saturn 5 and the shuttles out there. You got to love it. I’m also wearing our brand new Artemis hat. and check out our other stuff. We’ve got shirts and hats and rocket models and mugs and lots of other cool stuff over at everydayastronaut.com/hop. Thanks everybody. That’s going to do it for me. I’m Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to Earth for everyday people.

Chapter 14: Lessons From Apollo Veterans

Because I feel like it’s this is obviously paying tribute to the work done by the Apollo program but when you talk to people that were involved uh you know Jean Cray you mentioned you you had a conversation with and I you’ve talked, you’ve spoken with Charlie Duke and a handful of other astronauts. What do they want to see out of this or what what do you think you’re taking from them and what do you think they’re proud to see uh leading up to now in in the Artemis program? Well, I’ll tell you, we um learned a lot from them. Uh you know, when I was, you know, the the whole like Athena plan coming out there, there was nothing in there about big workforce insourcing or whatnot because quite honestly, I didn’t know the extent of the problem. I didn’t know we outsourced, you know, 75 80% of our workforce, which creates a nightmare of contractual issues between partners. I mean, even going into Artemis 2 of one contractor not sharing uh, you know, vehicle schematics with the other. We had to set up a virtual machine. Just craziness uh on on on some of this. Like, I didn’t realize that until I started visioning centers. I spoke to Jerry Griffin about it. I asked him, I was like, you know, only one person in mission control is a civil servant. And he’s like, I’ve been talking about this for 20 years. It was not like that during Apollo, right? I mean, and I was like, “All right, this like this is enough. Like, we’re going to we’re going to fix this.” And then I was with Jean CR twice this past weekend, and he’s like, “I am just so happy that you brought mission control back to life again.” You know, uh they they they I mean, I’ve given them all they all have my cell phone. I’m like, “If we’re screwing anything up, you know, don’t hesitate to reach out.” uh Jean Cranston, he’s like, “You know, when you got confirmed this job, I wrote a letter uh and I didn’t send it to you yet, but I but 90% of what was in it, you’ve already started implementing.” Wow. And it means it it means a it means a lot. But that’s not a that’s not a me thing, right? That’s that’s what everybody here knows is the right thing to do, and they just now have the freedom to be NASA again. I don’t think we can end on a better note than that. So, thank you so much for your time and oh man, I just can’t wait to see this actual rocket fly and to see more of these. Uh, I mean, Artemis 3 is going to be incredible. Probably one of the most ambitious uh missions we’ve seen in a while getting three massive rockets together and and then Artemis 4 is just around the corner after that. Yeah. Can you imagine some of those rendevous footage? It’s going to be so cool. Everyone’s going to may not be going to the moon, but people are going to tune in to see that mission. It’s so true. Well, thank you so much and keep thanks for all you do. Thanks for getting everybody educated and inspired and energized about what we’re doing at NASA and across industry. It’s just very grateful for it. You brought you brought a lot more fans into the community. Well, thank you. Sweet. Go Artemis.

Chapter 13: In-House Manufacturing and Suppliers

Like what I’m trying to figure out the mechanism because I feel like it feels like you’re helping to uh you know get NASA back to its roots like what is the actual mechanism and almost the legality of of NASA saying hey we’re actually we’re just going to manufacture this because we can in house like that relationship with the contractors what’s that like actually looking like to make that happen? There is there are no rubs, right? Like um just to be clear on this, it’s a whole thing too when people get like really passionate about something like EOS or ML2 or anything like that of like where’s the walkouts, you know, where’s the picketing, you know, where where where’s the the the the great, you know, like Boeing lobby, you know, trying to trying to shut this uh shut this uh down. Like they’ve got pressure to ramp up uh you know, F-15 EX, F-47. They just got the contract for the Navy. like they’re not, you know, building one core stage a year versus making the next, you know, sixth gen fighters for 40 years. There’s priority difference. They, you know, they got the contract for the replacement of the T38s. They got to build hundreds of those. Lockheed’s got to build Patriots and and fads on this. Like, they don’t want all these other things going that they’re that are high priorities um you know, to come at the expense of returning American astronauts to the moon before China. They know the consequence on this. So, they want to help. There was no one on Boeing who’s like, “No, no, no, we got to keep you in the US.” So like we got to give you as many core stages as we can. We get it. Let’s do that. Let’s do that together. Right. And then it’s we need more people here. They are frustrated too with uh suppliers on uh you know subcontractors on this. This guy’s not giving me my valves again. TBC actuators. We go out in the field. I go out in the field. Amit goes out in the field. Where are the TVC actuators? Give them to us now. We’re going to start building them ourselves. Or you might see a truth social post wondering why you’re holding up America’s return to the moon. Right? This is what you want your NASA to be doing right now. Now I’ll tell you empowering people to just start doing things making hardware and whatnot you know it took a little bit to say you are allowed to do this these contractors work for us not the other way around and then like now now there’s no restraining the effort like people are thrilled to just be doing stuff so um yeah these are making decisions and empowering the people that know what needs to be done and your contractors they’re on board right they want this to happen so I I actually heard a story uh for Artemis 2 that you know with the the hydrogen seal valves uh an extra set was basically in California and the supplier said something along the lines of, “Yeah, we can get it out to you. It’ll be 3 days or something.” And I heard that someone’s like, “No, you’re going to give that to someone and they’re getting on a flight in 2 hours.” And that happened and someone took a redeye to help the the the schedule a spare seal to be able to go from, you know, a 3-day scrub to a 24-hour scrub or something along those lines. Is is there some truth to that or is that just a Now now that you cl Yes, that is true. uh for the existing uh QD, not the not the replacement, but I will tell you the replacement one, they were the workshops were going in parallel to build the better QD and seals alongside it. But yes, uh we’ve got people now that are just showing up in the lobbies of some of our suppliers saying, “I’m not leaving until you give me what I need.” Uh and it is working. And uh look honestly none of this is enough because this is all like I said when we first started talking like aspiring to to reach you know the ceiling that Apollo set for us instead of meeting it and exceeding it right so there’s still a long way to go but yeah that muscle memory is starting to come back like NASA’s in charge when exact so when you talk we’ll kind of end wrap up on on Apollo.

Chapter 12: Dropping the Exploration Upper Stage

Um, so if you don’t mind me asking, oh, we actually have some some motion going on. That’s awesome. Uh so if you don’t mind me asking what was the status like when you came in of uh of the exploration upper stage? You know it sounds like it was you know the OIG is saying it was pretty far uh over budget and pretty far behind schedule like was it what was the status of it and what was that decision-making process to say hey we this isn’t going to work on our timeline. Yeah I I mean that was very easy. Uh there was a lot of frustration inside uh NASA ready on on this one. There was I mean, you know, you had everything that touched that upper stage was a problem. I mean, stage adapter was like way behind schedule, way over budget. I know I stage. [laughter] Yeah, the uh universal stage adapter on that one. Like what is going on here? Uh in this one, obviously ML2, you know, NASA can be a very good partner at time and advanced payments to help partners. I think that is not limited to Artemis. you you see that in some of our uh you know crude space uh programs as well. And the problem then is they spend the money and you don’t necessarily have what you thought you’d have. ML2 that’s been looked at so many times of is that in any way an option to help us right now. It’s not. There is no plumbing in I’d love to let you crawl around that and take a look. There’s no plumbing everywhere. There’s no elevator in that has done nothing for pad integration work at all. That doesn’t meet any timeline even into 2029 at all. So it’s like you continue down the EOS path and what’s your biggest issue out of it? You can’t ramp core stage production. You can’t look core stage 5 is broken uh to schedule right now. We had to do so much to pull core stage 4 into this. You know Orion we when I said before like everybody needs NASA’s help. Everybody needed NASA’s help. Orion like we’ve come in and helped them think through problems uh you know uh with suppliers. We we we’ve attached TPS experts to this just to try and pull in to meet our Artemis 3 timeline. And they knew back in February uh of this year that we were going for for Artemis 3 in summer. Everybody needed help. There was no way you were going to get the production at a core stage. You would be if you love SLS, you would be sacrificing this program to try and keep that going in parallel for a stage nobody wants for a mission that doesn’t exist with co-manifesting that did not put Orion into lunar orbit. Yeah. Uh, so like that doesn’t make sense. Let’s get ULA ramped up on that. We’ll attach personnel. We’ll get it where we need to go. We’re going to dial in ML1. There is still a lot of room for us to get um to optimize and get efficiencies out of schedule out of this to be able to turn it really fast. I’ve heard like, you know, 8 months for sure we could get to on that possibility to get to squeeze two two potentially two more months out of that. You can get to anywhere in that six to eightmonth cadence at ML1, you’re in a great spot for this rocket. Budgets aren’t getting that good. um get ULA focused on delivering a stretch centaur. Boeing’s got to crank out core stages right now to give us potentially two opportunities uh in 28 certainly need it in 29 uh if you need it in Artemis 5 then and Orion there’s a lot of work to do there. So that was making that was that comes back to again the point of good resource allocation decisions. Um and uh yeah there’s other than a few people that have an affinity for it there’s no one here at NASA that thinks that was the wrong move. So, so what like what has actually changed?

Chapter 11: Stretch Centaur, ML1, and Lander Paths

So, uh I guess that kind of brings up the the cadence and stuff kind of brings up the there’s an interesting conundrum here coming up with uh Artemis 3 will will maintain like the ML1’s launch tower and existing umbilicals. But with Artemis 4, at some point there’s a an actual decision has to be made between whether you’re outfitting for like a stretch centaur to build a rendevous and and work with Blue Origins lander or you might fly something like this or with an ICPS or something again with the same M1 for uh to launch with Starship and rendevous with Starship. So, what’s that decision-m process look like? And those modifications would probably be like a one-way one-time thing, right? Well, but but but you also only have one ICPS yet. So, like the whole like, oh, once the modifications are done, ICPS is finished. One, there’s one left. All right. So, we still have, if you love, you know, the big orange rocket, which a lot of people uh do, then you want us to get to Stretch Centaur because that means lots more launches. So, like I I’m like totally scratching my head on like they may never use the ICPS. There’s one left. So, so what we’re doing is just preserving the option uh for as long as we possibly can based on lander because yes, you don’t want to commit to a a major structural modification of ML1 if you’re going to need that that ICPS, but we have time to do that. So, what have we already done? We already have the designs. We’ve already put in the uh the orders for the hardware. We will build the hardware immediately for the Centaur modification for ML1 on the sidelines. And then we will start installing it right up to the point of where it actually has an impact to to Artemis 3 or completely removes the the ICPS, right? And as soon as the the more comfort that we gain and we are working very hard to drive outcomes here, I that that is like kind of a new concept I feel like for for a lot of people following NASA space of late. But we are embedding hundreds of people across the supply chain to drive outcomes. We are not waiting for ULA to deliver us this and say we accept it right now. We’re not doing that with Blue. We’re not doing with any of our vendors right now on that. So, we have great insight daily as to the progress of that program. And once we’re sure like Centaur is going to make it, we would do that even like for sure by the end of 28. We would do that regardless of the lander because you you still have the optionality at that point. So, uh we will do everything in parallel, build up the hardware alongside it. when the time comes, we’ll start modifying right up to again it has any impact on Artemis 3 and as soon as it clears the pad if you’re confident it’s available, you’ll you’ll start making the rest of the modifications. So, right now the kind of the plan going forward is we’re pushing towards potentially being able to uh get Orion all the way into low lunar orbit and potentially rendevous there specifically with Blue Origins lander. So, the talk right now is that Centaur, a stretch Centaur would be able to give it the oomph at least to get on a TLI. Yeah. Uh now, correct me if I’m wrong. By my estimations, it looks like there’d actually be plenty of prop left over if it doesn’t boil off to be able to do the insertion burn. And I know that for a little while, uh ULA has had their mission extension package or their uh ACES. Yeah, the concept of it. Could that be an option to put it into low lunar orbit or are you specifically looking into a separate like kickstage? So that um you know just to give you a little bit more of the story here and again because uh I don’t want people to think these are all decisions at my whim here. NASA was studying alternative upper stages long before I ever got there from the New Glenn upper stage to basic centaur to stretch centaur. Again just didn’t have didn’t have the uh you know kind of the political air cover to do what was what needed to be done. Also the resources I mean bear in mind you know everybody budget cuts no NASA’s budget never got cut period. We did get 10 billion more from working family tax cut act. That is a fact. Without that 10 billion, this rocket isn’t here right now. You did not have the money for an extra mission. You did not have the money for all the other things we are doing to increase our chance of success. So, you needed that 10 billion. You needed the political air air cover to do it. There was a development along the way. Initially, it was, okay, we’ve got our two landers. Uh, we’ll do everything we can to help drive the outcomes. our our safest, most affordable bet, when I say safest, it’s from a schedule perspective, not a like a a crew safety one, is to substitute in kind of your standard Centaur and uh yeah, I was going to say Yep. 5. Yeah. Uh where we convened a conclave, there’s no politicals here on this. NASA leadership uh was after the Blue Origin anomaly and said, “Look, uh we’ll do everything we can to help them recover.” And they are they’re setting records out there. I hope you get if you get an opportunity to go out there, you should you should see uh how much progress they’ ve made. They are they are working with a flyer no one’s ever seen before. Say no matter what they’re probably a year I mean maybe maybe they’ll pull in a little bit before that of not flying and that’s not going to work. That’s why we came out publicly and said you’re going to separate launchpads and rocket from lander. That lander needs to progress right and then we asked ourselves what more can we do? Yeah. And the answer of what more we can do is get Orion to low lunar orbit. And that’s when we went back and said, we got to we got to revisit our our second best option here, which was uh which was the stretch centaur. Okay. Uh which again, whether in a world where you’ve got Blue Origin and SpaceX taking us to the moon, you you’re still going to use the stretch centaur, right? But uh but the but the advantage now is other people will buy it and that will drive down costs. It has a lot of DOW applications. uh when you know the chairman of the joint chief seg all came out and said we are fighting from the from the or or war fighting domains are from the seabed to cis lunar space you’re going to want to stretch centaur uh in that context and you’re going to want it for moonbased buildout and you’re certainly going to want it for for this now uh the extended mission kit we we traded that against uh a kickstage and I think we’re we’re going to land uh we’re landing at a kickstage there there’s going to be we’ll give you some more details on that soon um but we’re going to use the kickstage for lunar orbit insertion. Okay. And like a stretched European service module to to have just more delta V isn’t really an option either because they’re probably the fixed tankage and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I can’t really give you uh specifics on that. I think longterm for the Orion program and Orion will clearly live on beyond SLS. Clearly uh it’s going to have its place for crew deep space missions. You you should be constantly looking for ways to increase performance from from ESM. Yeah. Um but that uh when I when I’m talking about lunar orbit insertion, I I would not look to initial missions to um to an enhanced DSM within the time frames available. Okay, that totally makes sense. So even with like a stretched centaur, uh would that be used then for even if a Starship rendevous because they’re talking about doing that potentially in a pretty elliptical orbit. Let you know let let Orion get his a good amount of the work done and then have Starship kind of do the final little TLI. Is that kind of the Yeah, I I mean right now the two conops we revealed were um uh you know a a lunar orbit and a uh and a high earth orbit uh you know rendevous um you know earth orbit rendevous for for Starship. Every one of our partners in this would would probably welcome the news that would you like to meet Orion in low lunar orbit. Right. So again, uh, we’re making avail, you know, you you’re you’re you’re trying to get to the it’s a lot of like government services. Again, you’re you you can’t really just change out ingredients easily. You just try and reformulate them to make a better tasty meal. That’s what we’re doing a lot of with the ingredients that are available to us today. But the changes if you can get into low lunar or low lunar orbit for both our partners. Yeah. Yeah.

Chapter 10: X-70

So, let’s talk about the XPlane for a second. X70. Yes. You announced last night. Uh pretty pretty brief for now. Yeah. And I I have to say I don’t get it. So like what you can like swap the wings out and stuff like what’s the what’s the innovation? What’s the thing that NASA is going to be doing with X70 that industry hasn’t and and isn’t doing right now? We’re we’re going for very uh advanced flight controls um that haven’t been certainly have never been demonstrated on a crude spacecraft before. Uh and uh and there’s a lot of reasons why you would want to do that. Uh and uh that’s why you’d want interchangeable wings and tail planes uh that are that are on it. And you can get a sense from just looking at the lines like it is already a has low observable characteristics on it. Um and that’s important, right? We we the the uh NASA has always had contributed to civil, commercial, and national security applications since the get-go. I mean, we flew our first astronauts on missiles and ICBMs, right? Uh we had classified shuttle missions. you that we our purpose is always peaceful, but you want to attract the best engineers, you know, the the best technicians and operators and there’s not always something going on, especially in a world where you had one Xplane going right now to keep them busy and what happens their skills atrophy or they go somewhere else, right? So, you do things where 60% of my time is advancing things that are going to make commercial airlines safer, GA airplanes safer, right? But also has maybe some carryover national security it supplements or it’s helpful for our budget. Those are all things we used to do for a very long time and clearly with X70 you can see some indications uh that that is coming back but that should not be a surprise to an organization that flies F-15s, F-18s that pioneered things like thrust vectoring uh controls which have yet to make their way into you know GA which would be very cool. [laughter] Um but obviously you see it on display with the F22 right. So uh it’s it’s a it’s a subsonic plane though isn’t it? So, so you’re working on specifically like aerodynamic control services in a subsonic regime. Uh are there any like it stays subsonic? It never will go supersonic and work on not this design will be well I mean look you can change you can change the wings out so it’s this will be more of a power plant issue I think for uh you know um you know transonic and supersonic flight. Um but yes, it is an area of research that is extremely worthwhile and like a lot of things too, you’re rebuilding muscle memory, right? You know, and uh we we lost a lot of our flight test capabilities at NASA. We have um you know, we certainly have retained at least our our test pilots, but a lot of Armstrong’s technicians, operators, the ground teams, all outsourced over the years. It’s not going to work that way. That’s when you get really slow outcomes. So, you know, again, you put some wins on the board, you rebuild muscle memory. It’s the same thing with Artemis 3. It’s like, well, why don’t you just wait longer until you can do a a uh a full up uh Apollo 9 mission and do a grand, you know, do a full separation of the lander and whatnot because we need to fly every year. Yeah. Yeah. You have to do that or else we’re going to lose technicians and then we’re going to have to bring back new people and train them again and we’re going to lose time and we’re going to make mistakes again. You have to have some mu memory in what you’re doing and and you’re not going to be at the the most optimal desired state day one. my most optimal desired state in in aeronautics is I got a crude hypersonic plane, you know, going Mach 6 across the country. I got to build up to that and uh just like we’re building up to landing on the moon.

Chapter 9: Resource Allocation and the Mars

Race This is honestly all of this comes back to resource allocation, right? Um nuclear for as long back as I’ve looked now it’s a hundred million a year and inside a 205 billion budget that gets divided between two maybe three centers at a time. at best you’re keeping the lights on and as a result you wind up having this huge debate between NTP and NEP and the result is it goes nowhere. We have not put a reactor in space since 1965. That’s a problem. The other problem by the way is we’re in the midst of a space race code on the moon and I absolutely guarantee you that you know China is thinking about their Neil Armstrong moment on Mars not the moon. They win either way on the moon by the way. like whether they get there before us or after, it’s still an extraordinary accomplishment. The real prize is going to be is going to be Mars and they know they’re going to have to leverage NEP as part of that as part of that equation. Now, we can come in here in 2 or 3 years and make some changes and increase our probability of success to get to the moon. You cannot have a Mars program come together in two and three years and hope for success. It ain’t going to happen. So, we got to par you got to make your investments accordingly. You got to start with where do we waste money every year. It’s like every canceled program, it’s like shrink in a retailer. Like we got to drive this as close to zero. So like let’s stop having programs that get canceled where we where we waste money. Let’s concentrate our resour needlem get to the moon parallel bigger and progressively bigger investments in nuclear so you can get to to Mars and back. And if you do that properly and you resource it right then you have less time spent debating whether it should be an NTP or NP thing and you start building hardware and fly it. So, so it’s not like if you magically doubled NASA’s entire budget, is there if you did double NASA’s budget, is there like enough overhead that like doubling the budget would give you five times the output? Or is it not even like a it’s not necessarily like a a budget constraint thing? Well, I I think even within our current budget, you know, you could double triple the output if you if you resource accordingly, right? Uh you focus on the needle movers. Again, we we the the taxpayers lost $2 billion on Mars sample return. There’s nothing net left on that. There’s programs like uh OAM one like a billion dollars approximately. Don’t cite exactly, but believe me, I’m not off by like big big magnitudes here. You don’t get that back. Right. Right. Um that happens like all the time. So you can just like responsibly managing your 25 billion. Believe me, you can get more output. If you doubled to 50, would you get uh a lot more out of it? Yes. But what I but but you can’t do that if you don’t fix the resource allocation problem. If it just turns into make everybody happy across the spectrum, right, you’re you’re you’re going to have horrible outcomes. Uh and you’re just going to waste a lot more money. I mean, we’re down to one XPlane right now. Now we have two with with X70, but we were down to one. We were and I I I put my slides out deliberately on some of these points of like I was very annoyed when I got in the job and X59 flew for the second time and we put out a press release, right? And that’s why I showed some of the past Xplanes last night. I was like flew 499 times, guys. Okay? like that should just be normal, right? So, you take that environment and you just double the budget. Is a lot going to change? Uh, probably not. You have to fix what’s broken. And that was kind of my whole point is like you start by showing you can do more with less or in our case, we never got less. We did more with a uh with the same amount under RCR and you earn the right to do more with more. Yeah. And uh and we’re we’re doing we’re doing a lot of that right now.

Chapter 8: Mars Transfer Vehicles and NEP

I love that. So, give me a little rundown though on when you’re talking about eventually uh you know using nuclear electric propulsion for things like you know Mars transfer vehicle. Do we have what’s like the logistics of that with human space flight like being that close to your reactor? Are there some pretty big challenges about radiation shielding and things like that being 10 m away from a fision reactor? These are all these are all uh very solvable problems. Uh we keep a small city going on an aircraft carrier right now. I get it that the you know there there’s a little bit of a different um mass budget between between the two on this, but these are solvable. That’s why we’re there will be a boom on SR1. It will not be a boom to keep humans uh safely uh on but it’ll be a boom to keep the avionics for skyfall and and PPE safe. Uh right and we will learn from that. We will get good data. We will get really good data on autonomous reactor operations which right now is not permissible in the United States. you have to colllocate uh reactor control rooms with the reactor which is actually a real problem for the uh small module reactor industry which is why again I love us doing the hard things that make life better here on earth because we are not going to strap a human to SR1 you know controlling yeah dialing that thing in yeah so so uh so we will we will uh solve a lot of those problems but the idea is do an SR2 SR3 SR4 get your boom dialed in even more uh get to higher temperature materials there’s a lot of uh a lot components that have to come together on this. We want to run the reactor really hot. We want the radiators to be really hot, but not too hot because we want good power conversion from um the closed braen cycle power conversion unit. Get that dialed in and then what you’d probably have is an on-orbit assembly of this Mars transfer vehicle. It will almost certainly be chem augmented too for just kind of um aboard capabilities and such. And you will uh you’ll probably send an ascent and descent stage out to wait for it in Mars. Y you’ll launch on a conventional crude vehicle, maybe Orion, who knows? You’ll transfer over to your your your chem augmented NEP vehicle. It’ll make its way to Mars. Transfer over to the ascent descent vehicle. Come back. This can be done. Yeah. Yeah. Um and along the way, we get to send cool missions to Enceladus, Europa, and who who knows elsewhere. We might have unbelievable breakthroughs in our own solar system. And this is it’s the thing of like, you know, there’s always that like, well, why don’t you just and Buzz Aldrin himself had the Aluldren Cycler idea of basically doing this with Moon and Mars and developed a way to be able to have a trans a high efficient transfer vehicle. This has been talked about for 50 years now. You know, it’s like when when you just break it down to, well, why aren’t we doing it that way? And it sounds like you’re like kind of going back to that basic question of like this is actually what makes the most sense long term and you’re aiming for that by starting by starting with those small wins.

Chapter 7: SR1

Well let’s talk a little bit about SR1 then because SR1 one uh for those that don’t know is uh basically you’re taking like you said pieces of the gateway module uh or the gateway station and you’re turning it into kind of a dare I say hodge podge uh minimum viable product to be able to send three uh helicopters again uh to Mars on like you’re trying to do this in a pace that I don’t think I’ve ever seen. So just give me like the full rundown on on the power propulsion element which is uh which is xenon hall thrusters right and then you said the the fision reactor that’s never flown before right so like how do we who’s who’s doing all the building of this thing tell just I so let me um again in terms of we’re everything we’re trying to do is draw on uh you know the brilliance of this space agency during the 1960s a lot of littles iterative approach to build up to really hard things. We see this on full display at at companies like SpaceX and others in commercial industry and it’s like that SpaceX way. They drew a lot of that influence from what these heroes did long ago. We need to go back into that direction. lot of littles the the path we’ve seen over the last few decades of again and I don’t know if it was in a playbook at some point then of like we must design these programs that are so ginormous that people will be unable to kill them off uh as administrations change over and as a result things show up really late cost more than we want lots gets canled which is the worst thing for taxpayers like nobody really talks about that of all the programs where billions of dollars have just vanished and you have nothing nothing to show for it right so You need to you need to do a lot of littles and my opinion is you have to put wins on the board as imperfect as they are. Give me proof points that you can do things responsibly so I trust you to do the crazy things. Right? So the last time we had any real serious nuclear effort like a fision powered spacecraft was Prometheus and that started kind of small grew huge. They brought naval reactors office in it to design the reactors when they’re trying to build submarines and everything. And what started small became like this$2 billion dollar program that got cancelled. And they wound up writing a book about one of its missions, Europa Clipper, like 15 years before the mission ever even flew, right? And you’re like, this is not how we should do these things, but it’s the right direction to go in. So, put the win on the board with SR1 just like Nautilus and show that it works and make the case of why I can do a two, a three, and a four and gradually build up to maybe the transfer vehicle that takes astronauts to Mars someday and brings them back without having to do surface uh propellant manufacturing, right? Uh so that’s what we’re trying to do everywhere and um promise is another example of it uh which we’re going to talk about uh this weekend again where you certainly have enough components like from the engineering development unit from perseverance and curiosity to build a jeepsiz rover that’s not doing anything right now for the Mars rovers right we have plutonium PU238 it’s 20 years old right so it’s only got so much life left so you would never use it for an outer solar system decal priority uh you know like like Uranus or or Enceladus. Um so what are you going to do with it? Uh put them together and send it to the moon. If you liked Viper, you cannot like Viper and hate promise and send it into the PSRs really low cost. And then what does that enable me to do? I I can go to OM. I can go to Congress and say, “Look, for a lot of money that was already invested by the taxpayers, we put a win up and it’s great for science. Now trust us to do the next great thing.” We’re doing that with Xplanes. we’re doing with science missions, we’re going to do it for uh for human space flight and moon base. And you and NASA should keep doing that. Keep balancing the quick wins with the long-term plan that you build up to doing the hard things.

Chapter 6: Nuclear Focus and SR Missions

Yeah. So that’s our our nuclear focus that is so important. It is extremely dangerous for the health of NASA to do what industry is doing, right? I we can’t offer them the stock options of a Blue Origin or SpaceX or a Rocket Lab or or Stoke, right? Uh again, we got to have the honest conversations of how we wound up here. Um which is great and we will make the most use of the hardware that is available to us today. But NASA is at our best doing the things that don’t have an obvious business case to it. Low TRL, maturing it to high TRL, change the world in air and space, big breakthroughs, and then do the next thing, right? Yeah. Uh and that means we got to get on to nuclear. So uh SR1, very imperfect. Talk about it all the time like Nautilus was a conventional design. They put a nuclear reactor in. SR1 is the PPE element from uh from the gateway, right? Uh we’re taking a reactor design that like three different government agencies have been funding over decades called Valkyrie. We’re going to put it together. It will not even be close to optimized on anything uh mass power conversion, but we’re going to send it and we’re going to get underway in nuclear power, but we got to have more to follow. And I’ve told this uh during my visits to to to Mishude, to Marshall, uh you know, to to Glenn, all of the centers that have some nuclear component, like you’ve all been fighting over a hundred million a year on a 25 billion budget forever. like it is time for a lot of the money that goes into things like this to go into vision powered spacecraft and really explore the outer solar system and mature the technology to do the Mars mission without a lot of the the miracles that we know will be dialed in at some point making prop on Mars great um but like we don’t we don’t necessarily need to jump to that on the first crude mission vision powered spacecraft chemugmented is the is the right approach I think for NASA to be able to really do the outer solar system missions.

Chapter 5: Ten-Year Vision for NASA

Right. Right. And so on that note, like in if you if you were in charge for the next 10 years, where would you hope NASA is in 10 years? What do you hope NASA’s doing in 10 years specifically like with the moon? Where do you see if you project that far forward towards the end, you know, mid end of the 2030s? what what are you trying to set up now that you hope is is in place then? Yeah, I I mean there there’s a lot there to that because we are we are charged with doing an awful lot uh here at NASA. So what I would say for sure the moon base in 10 years from now looks very similar in terms of crude operations the international space station uh it should be that kind of routine where at least every 6 months we are sending a new crew uh to u to moon base that is our safe haven. We can’t wait to get out of the spacecraft that took us there to get on our moon base, right? Uh in the same way that you look at like let’s see how quickly we can dial in a a Soyuse or a Dragon Rende Buddha station because none of the action happens until we get there. Like all of this action is to get there right now. Like we need to make the transportation there routine where it’s like, “Oh, something is wrong. Time to abort to the moon base, our safe haven.” Right. Right. This becomes like the boring like this launch and all that stuff. is like I can’t wait to use this to be able to get to the moon base. So I I am hoping certainly within 10 years like we are feeling really good about the whole logistics supply chain over that 3-day voyage. Uh that we’ve got a lot of good institute resource manufacturing uh underway. We feel great about our suits uh about our habitability. Robotics has to advance. Um we talk about that a lot but like doing the EVA should always be the last resort. They’re they are unbelievable for the pictures. It is essential to have the human component to this. Like people don’t would not have paid attention to Artemis 2 the way they did if there weren’t astronauts on board. But like if we’re really going to conduct serious operations off-world for long periods of time, robotics got to be off the charts, right? And now it’s like we got to send our guys outside because plan A, B, and C failed and now we got to go fix something, which is fine. So that should all be going on in the moon base. Meanwhile, we should be on to at least like SR4 by then. Uh so the the Do you want to spell that out there?

Chapter 4: Artemis III

Artemis 3 is another example of you guys made a pretty big change that hey, we’re not we don’t even need an upper stage to be able to do uh there’s more boosters right there. [laughter] Like that is that’s crazy. That’s cool to see. Yeah, it is it is awesome to be here. Um yeah, so with with Artemis 3, I think that’s another thing is putting some some goals out there, right? You’re trying to get back into a habit of achieving the hard things on on reasonable reasonable timelines. Hey, good morning. set a set an achievable goal. We we want to we want to roll out before the end of the year. Uh and we want to do a tanking test and uh and gain confidence and send a message to all the other suppliers along the way of where’s our hardware. Yeah. NASA’s ready. Yeah. Um and even the change in the actual architecture, you know, there’s no longer an upper stage. And that’s a big NASA undertaking to be able to say, “Hey, actually, we’re going to change this rocket to match this mission profile.” Like, what did that actually look like as far as dealing with contractors and dealing with everyone from top to bottom? Like, how does that work? Yeah, it it was it was simply giving the uh the NASA leadership and workforce the air cover to do what they knew was right. Uh and we said that at the Artemis update. Like there’s a lot of people and just you know think because we’re in these politically charged time that every decision made at the agency is somehow you know politically motivated instead of what is the right thing to do for America’s space program. You you you think NASA didn’t study an Earth orbit rendevous mission uh before landing on the moon. Of course they did. They knew they could build the spacer themselves. they just needed the permission to do it, the cover to say this is the right thing because yes, for a very long time, and I know I’ve been pounding the table on this point, uh NASA has been like micromanaged by everyone other than NASA itself. I mean, you pick it from Congress to committee staff to to industry and lobbyists, everybody imposing their will on the agency other than the leadership that should be empowered to do the really hard thing. So, of course, they did studies on that. They did upper stage studies for a very long time. They knew they could build the spacer themselves if they were allowed to do it. They knew they could build the QD themselves if they were allowed to do it. And now we are returning that um that uh NASA back into the driver’s seat in its rightful place. And you’re just seeing it play out across Artemis 3 and hopefully you will with Artemis 4. How the suit changes we’re making, everything is starting to be what is in the best interest of America’s space program. [laughter] That is and we’re standing here right in front of the rocket that is in question here. I mean that is incredible to see. Uh isn’t it? Oh like and to see it right now with the boosters and the you know there’s not even going to be an upper stage will be the adapter and then Orion on top of that. It’s it’s pretty amazing. Pretty great backdrop. And I and I don’t want anyone to to uh to think this is this is somehow by accident either that you know this uh like NASA had to do hard things to make this come together in the time frame that it did. It had to rethink its approach every step along the way. Where can we optimize further? Not cutting corners, not taking any needless safety risk, but just if we did it this way on one, we did it this way on two. what have we learned that allow us to go faster to get to a proper cadence for this uh for this rocket? And that’s what shows up right now. But like this is we do the same timelines as we did with with Artemis 2, you wouldn’t see anything like this right now. Uh like we’d be we’d be pushing deep into months after Artemis 2. Yeah. I mean, everybody had to be willing to to kind of challenge the approach a little bit and do things different. Again, not it’s not RA, you know, this is not not radical thinking from commercial industry or like I said, tech industry pixie dust. It was really just dusting off the playbooks of how we did things then and bringing it to now. Yeah. And this is cool. [laughter] I know. like when you actually when you do take a moment and actually look at you see the the little tiny people up against those giant solid rocket boosters, it does just give you an appreciation for the the scale of what uh what you guys are working on here and a and an appreciation for the pioneers from a half century or more ago have kind of laid the foundation for all of this, right? 100%. I mean, yeah, that to know like in the 60s they were building this building to be able to launch, you know, humans to the moon on the Saturn 5 and then to come back today and we’re still doing it like it’s just uh and doing it hopefully even more magnificent and giving it uh our own flavor I feel like is uh pretty darn exciting. Yeah. We got to work towards that, right? I mean, that’s why I try and constantly invoke Apollo, why it was a big part of my my speech at the Artemis update, why I’ve talked a lot about it last night, you know, kind of rewound the clock even further. looked at a 2-year horizon from Apollo 4 to to Apollo 11 because, you know, everything that we try and do to move in that direction seems so out of reach of folks, right? Like going even to a one-year or an eight-month cadence uh for SLS and and it’s like what look at what they did during that time period that should not be the ceiling that we are grasping for, right? It should be the standard that we are capable of improving upon, right? Um but it means confronting all the all the all the shortcomings, all the tough tough truths, right? Um you know what’s great about this and what what is you know suboptimal about it. Is this a is this a more efficient rocket than Saturn 5? No, it is not. Right? Like that’s we made certain decisions a quarter a century ago that put us on this path and let’s do the absolute best we can with it. But acknowledge where we got things wrong and take it to the better direction or else you will never get to the point where you can exceed what those heroes did during Apollo. You will always be grasping to come close.

Chapter 1: Welcome to Kennedy Space Center

Hi, it’s me, Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut. Welcome to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Uh, this place is busy because uh, the Artemis program is ramping up. We’re adding new missions to the Artemis program. We’re seeing launch providers ramp things up like crazy. We’re seeing orange rockets get stacked. We’re seeing Xplanes come out. We’re seeing a ton of stuff happen. So, I’m about to go inside one of the most iconic buildings in the entire world, NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building. And I’m going to speak with the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman. Let’s go. Jared, good to see you, man. I’m fantastic. You mind uh if I mic you up here?

Chapter 2: Meeting Jared Isaacman in the VAB

Yeah, no problem. Let’s have you stick that on your to the VAB. Thank you. You know, I got to say it’s been a hot minute since I’ve been in this thing and there’s been a lot of action in here since [laughter] I’ve been in here. So, well, give me the hint. How many times you come to the VAB? I don’t know, three or four times, you know, something like that. So, I mean, I I I obviously I launched from space here twice, and I didn’t actually see the inside of the VAB until I was an asset administrator, and I I was I was blown away. Right. Oh, there’s so much history right here and the scale is just so hard to, you know, get on camera. So much history. And then obviously you look at it from the exterior and you’re like, well, that’s gorgeous. It’s a very big building. But until you walk inside it, you see the volume in here and you’re like, there were a lot of Saturn 5 in here. There were a lot of shuttles in here and you can see it. You rockets get lost in here. Yeah, they [laughter] really Yeah, you can’t even tell. Right now, we have a no an SLS rocket tucked back in here. Even when uh we brought uh obviously with leading up to Artemis 2, I was in here quite a bit and then when it came back in, you like you’d get lost if you were trying to find a fully assembled SLS in here. It’s uh it’s incredible. That really is absolutely insane. Sometimes when you just stop and and look at it takes the parallax to see like, oh, that is like beyond my brain’s comprehension of how big this building actually is. There nothing does it justice really until you’re standing here.

Chapter 3: Re-Empowering NASA

Oh, it’s crazy. So, you’ve been extremely busy. I mean, are you you’re not even a year quite in the job yet, are you? No. Uh, no. It’s December before we had a year, but um uh you’ve had it’s been Yeah, we’ve been staying pretty active right now. I mean, there’s just not a lot of time to get as much as we want to get done. So, yeah. Well, I mean, some of the morning some of the you know, the biggest changes that I’ve seen is just it feels like there’s just a lot of energy that you’ve brought. Uh I you know you’re constantly talking about like re-empowering NASA to do what you did during the Apollo program and and how do you restart that machine? How do you kickstart that machine to fire back up and you’re seeing the evidence of that? What’s that like? What is in your mind? How are you what are you physically doing to empower that in the employees and and and empower that throughout NASA? Yeah. Well, I want to start by saying it’s not as it’s not as hard as you as you might imagine because everybody comes here because they want to do this kind of thing, right? Like that’s a that’s a thing. Uh there there isn’t anyone at uh NASA that wanted uh you know three and a half years between Artemis one and and Artemis 2. So you’re just you’re unleashing the the potential of the workforce their desire to do things right. I mean you know take uh you know take the QD and the the hydrogen seal issue on that. So that was known it was known for a long time. Uh, and then, you know, you heard Jeremy talk about it and Ahmed talk about it during the the Artemis update and saying like, look, yeah, we we knew it was a bad design. Uh, but you know, one of our vendors wanted to charge like tens of millions of dollars of which there’s really no excuse for that either because our that is almost budget dust uh inside NASA. Um, and it was like, but we can do it. Yeah. And we put together a team on a 90-day sprint. And we said, turn on the the workshop machines again. We have the ability to do tests here, then we can do uh further testing out at Stenis and go prove it and get comfortable. So much so that you’d be you’d be you’d feel good qualifying this to uh to install for for Artemis 3. And they did. And they did it in record time. And then you tell everybody about it. You tell 55,000 people at NASA that we just did something not for $50 million, but NASA hands built something again that will be part of the next mission. Now do it everywhere. [laughter] Like literally, it better be off the shelf in a catalog like high rate production that buying off the shelf is just the right thing to do. Otherwise, default to building hardware again ourselves. Yeah. And if we have vendors that are out there, and we do, and I talked about this in the Artemis update as well, where it’s this huge whatever $50 billion public company, and they’ve got all the demand from the Department of War, and they got to make lots of missiles and everything else, but we need, you know, four valves. We need some TBC actuators or something. And they’re like, “We’ll get to it.” you get to it. If it’s been a cost plus contract for decades, it’s our IP. Build it ourselves. Do it. And they and everybody loves that. They love being empowered like that. You know, we we don’t work for the contractors, they work for us. And if they’re failing to deliver, take control of our destiny. Uh and that and then again, it just that’s what that’s how you build this momentum, this culture around very akin to Apollo. Again, it’s that is and we need to talk more about that, but for a quick second, I need to point out that from here, you can’t even actually see the rocket at It’s on the mobile launch platform and it’s all above basically what we see as a a wall and like it’s so crazy. Oh yeah. I mean that’s that’s kind of the that’s that is the craziness is you could actually have multiple rockets in here and I hope we’re building to that day again and you’d get lost trying to find them. Yeah. You don’t even see it. So let’s go. I think we can go up the elevator and uh we can actually get a a shot to be able to see SLS the for Artemis 3 coming up. And there’s been so kind of back to that that culture shift though.

The YouTube transcript was processed with my fine country craftsmanship, and *may* follow. LOTS of run-on sentences from Jared. On the page it looks like a Charles Crumb comic panel. 🚀🛰️

00:00 Welcome to Kennedy Space Center
00:27 Meeting Jared Isaacman in the VAB
01:47 Re-Empowering NASA
05:25 Artemis III
11:09 Ten-Year Vision for NASA
13:22 Nuclear Focus and SR Missions
15:06 SR1
18:51 Mars Transfer Vehicles and NEP
21:36 Resource Allocation and the Mars Race
24:58 X-70
28:21 Stretch Centaur, ML1, and Lander Paths
35:38 Dropping the Exploration Upper Stage
38:54 In-House Manufacturing and Suppliers
42:20 Lessons From Apollo Veterans
44:48 Outro and Thank You

The rest of the Green Sahara keyword, sorted:

Dunno. Mostly it pertains to the banning of capital punishment in much of Europe.

Transcript

European Lineages in Africa

And there’s another paternal lineage that might preserve evidence of movements between Neolithic Europe and Africa. That lineage is R1B V88. Today R1B V88 reaches its highest European Lineages in Africa frequencies in the central Sahel, particularly in northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad and Niger. In some sample populations of northern Cameroon, it’s carried by more than 3/4 of the men. It also survives at much lower frequencies in parts of North Africa like Egypt and in Sardinia.

The oldest known carriers of R1B V88 were messylithic hunter gatherers in the Balkans. These include two individuals from the Iron Gates region of Serbia dating to around 9,000 BC. Watch my video on Leensky Ve to find out more about these people.

During the Neolithic, the lineage is seen in European farming populations. A man buried at a cave site in the Pyrenees in around 5100 BC carried R1B V88. Interestingly, this was a massacre site of early farmers, perhaps by local hunter gatherers or by another farming group. V88 was also common among ancient Sardinians. This distribution suggests that a paternal lineage originally carried by European hunter gatherers was incorporated into expanding Neolithic farming populations and carried westwards through Mediterranean Europe.

After that, however, there is a gap in the direct evidence. As of now, there’s only two Yapper group samples from the Moroccan colony site and they’re both G2A. If we could get more samples from the region, perhaps we would find V88 among them. The African part of the story has instead been reconstructed mainly from the family tree of modern Y chromosomes.

One study estimated that V88 originated in Europe approximately 12,000 years ago and that the ancestors of its African branches entered the Sahara between about 6,700 to 5,900 BC. But these are statistical estimates of when different branches shared common ancestors, not direct dates for a migration. And they don’t tell us where the Mediterranean was crossed, but the estimated date range is within the African humid period when lakes, rivers, and extensive grasslands occupied regions that are now desert. These conditions would have made movement across the green Sahara far easier than it is today.

The same genetic study identified a later expansion of V88 around the Lake Chad basin between about 3800 and 3,300 BC. This expansion likely accounts for much of the lineage’s present concentration in the central Sel. Who carried this lineage towards Lake Chad is unknown. We have to look at the archaeological evidence for possible cultures in these regions at this time and see if any of them might fit with these kinds of movements. One plausible candidate is the pastural populations archaeologists associate with the Tenarian tradition. They occupied the central Sahara during the same broad period in which V88 underwent its rapid expansion.

Some Tenarian communities practiced cattle husbandry, constructed megalithic monuments, and carried out ritual cattle sacrifice. The people buried at the site of Goro were also physically distinct from the population that had occupied the region before them. being shorter and more slender and with a cranial morphology described as Mediterranean. It’s thought the megalithic and cattle sacrifice traditions of the Tenarians were a response to the aridification that ultimately drove them out of the Sahara and into the Sahel by about 2200 BC. And as the broad waters of Lake Meachad receded, fertile lands were exposed and settled by agriculturalists.

A mobile patrinearally organized pastoral society would provide a plausible mechanism for the expansion of a single paternal lineage. The Y chromosomes could be spread through founder effects, clan expansions and unequal reproductive success. The same kind of processes seen in later Indo-Uropean societies in fact. But this is just a hypothesis. We don’t yet have any Tenarian DNA. The V88 lineage might have been carried by Tenarian pastoralists or by another unsampled Saharan population.

And the concentration of V88 among a number of Chadicsp speakaking peoples led researchers to propose that its expansion was connected with the spread of the Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic languages. The association isn’t exact though. V88 is also found among people speaking Nylo Saharan, Niger Congo and unclassified languages. Anyway, the V88 lineage seems to be linked with the expansions of Chadic speaking populations across the region.

By the late Neolithic, North African groups were a mixture of people and cultures from the Mediterranean, the Levant, and the Sahara. And we have evidence suggesting a remarkable journey of a lineage over thousands of years from the Mesolithic hunter gatherers of the Balkans to Neolithic Iberia into the green Sahara, the drying Lake Chad, and into tropical West Africa. And we now know that around 5,500 BC, pioneering Neolithic farmers, men and women, crossed from Iberia, established communities, and mixed with local Mcgrebi people. The crops, livestock, and technologies they introduced were then adopted and transformed by local communities spreading the Neolithic way of life through North Africa.

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