I’m Anthony Colangelo.

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.”

HTV-7 arrived this morning, carrying with it a hugely-under-appreciated piece of hardware.

Northrop Grumman and Boeing both have previously denied that they were submitting a bid for GPS IIIF, leaving Lockheed Martin as the only known bidder. But apparently, there was another response.

Typically, we see ULA chosen because the customer needs to know they can hit a specific timeline. In this case, SpaceX was chosen because ispace is confident SpaceX will be flying near where they need to go, sometime around when they need to go.

There’s some weird, gross politicking happening over in Israel around IAI lately.

Titan is, by far, the second coolest planetary body in the solar system and I can’t wait to see Dragonfly explore it in all its glory. It better get picked!

We haven’t heard from this little explorer yet, but it’s sitting pretty on its way into Perseverance Valley. Check out this beautiful shot of Opportunity from the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and then some landscape perspective from the incredible Seán Doran.

Still has the vibe of a solution in search of a problem, but I continually like the theory that Stratolaunch is the Glomar Explorer of aerospace.