I’m Anthony Colangelo.

Docking standards are convoluted.

This is the true coming-of-age moment for ULA. Fight for independence and a surely-more-exciting future, or take the “safe” government job like your parents think you should. Look, they already got you in the door because of their friends that work there. You’re practically a shoo-in.

Explorer is something that seems so simple and obvious in hindsight, but only became possible once a few things came together in the right way: the rise of small satellites, the increase of launch availability, and easy distribution on the web, to name a few.

Great rundown of Starliner progress, complete with some talk about RD-180 certification.

Going once for a wonderful set of lawsuit-laden intellectual property! Going twice!

Jake of the WeMartians podcast explores the three remaining candidate landing sites for the Mars 2020 rover. It’s really worth a listen, whether you know about the sites already or not.

NASA announced the selection of 133 proposals for Phase II of the SBIR program. One of the more exciting proposals selected is from Altius Space Machines, titled “Lightweight, High-Flow, Low Connection-Force, In-Space Cryogenic Propellant Coupling”.

It’s a shame that SpaceX is getting so distracted by all their other projects.

An engine on its way to the test stand, 2 customers signed on for 6 launches, a factory well underway in Florida—things are progressing well for New Glenn.

An absolute wealth of information about SpaceX’s 2017 from Chris Bergin of NASASpaceFlight.com.

Marcia Smith of SpacePolicyOnline.com with an extensive rundown of the upcoming busy week.

These numbers are getting more and more unbelievable by the day. The Intelsat-OneWeb merger is very interesting to follow, too. Hot on the heels of the big investment OneWeb received back in December, the merger gives them more resources, knowledge, experience, and a customer-base. That’s a pretty good mixture.

It’s somewhat of a lackluster response to all the excitement this past week to say “Oh yeah? Well we’re lobbying for the obvious next step of Commercial Cargo!” To me this reads a lot like Blue Origin isn’t quite ready to talk about any additional plans, but wanted to make their voice heard alongside SpaceX. As I said on this week’s podcast, none of the old insiders (Boeing, Lockheed, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Orbital ATK, …) are going to invite SpaceX and Blue Origin into their club. They have to insert themselves into these conversations, and will inevitably ruffle some feathers doing it.

Architectures like these could flourish with the budget levels that SLS and Orion receive. Things are coming to a head now with the NASA exploration program, and it’s hard to say where it will go. No matter what, the next few years are going to be thrilling.

Thanks to my patrons for the month of February. If you’re getting some value out of what I do here and want to send a little value back to help support Main Engine Cut Off, head over to Patreon and donate as little as $1 a month—every little bit helps.

Interestingly, he didn’t rule out a near-free return trajectory, which is seeming more likely for the currently-planned EM-2. As I said in the latest episode of the podcast, “Then what?” is the most important question this study has to answer. Putting crew on EM-1 and leaving the entire roadmap after that unchanged doesn’t accomplish anything more than a stunt.

I don’t envy the people making the call on which launch vehicle to go forward with, or making the call on when that decision is appropriate. From where I sit, it’s too early to narrow the options down to only SLS.