I’m Anthony Colangelo.

This was my prediction back in July, and everything I said then still holds true, so if you want my thoughts on their choice, go have a listen.

For all my skepticism of Stratolaunch, it’s a major bummer that Allen never got to see the giant plane fly.

It’s kind of amazing that this is the first we’re hearing of this. Is this a new issue, or related to whatever caused Dragon 2 to end up with four parachutes?

Speaking of Russia, this is a story I’ve been following closely, from Tyler Rogoway and Ivan Voukadinov at The Drive.

I mentioned this on the last episode of Off-Nominal, but it’s worth saying here, too: I’m totally fine with Russia sitting out for the Gateway. Considering the state of the Russian space industry, and specifically how Roscosmos has been handling the ISS drill hole situation, I would very much prefer them to not be involved in building any hardware that will be flying to the Moon.

Very special thanks to the 222 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon for the month of August. Your support keeps this blog and podcast going, and most importantly, it keeps it independent.

Looks like all the rumblings about Moon Express folding entirely weren’t the whole story. But I do want to point out that they haven’t even started building the first flight vehicle.

I don’t really understand the decision to establish in Luxembourg. It makes sense for organizations focused on space resources, since Luxembourg has taken such a strong stance for private space property rights. But I can’t quite make sense of it for CubeRover.

It’s encouraging that they chose to develop a hydrolox engine for their architecture, and 200,000 pounds-force puts it right about what a Merlin 1D is pushing these days.

ULA says its on track for a mid-2020 flight of the BE-4-powered Vulcan. I was expecting to hear a bit of a delay with this announcement, because past statements sounded a lot like, “This is what we said previously so we’re going to say the same thing again until we update the schedule when we make the selection.”