I’m Anthony Colangelo.

A holiday special! Enjoy this week’s episode of Headlines free. It’s an absolute monster episode—way longer than usual Headlines episodes, I promise—but it’s a great example of what you get when you support the show over at mainenginecutoff.com/support.

Jake and Anthony are joined by Brendan Byrne, News Director at Central Florida Public Media and host of Are We There Yet?, to present the 2025 Off-Nominees: the most bizarre space news stories of the year.

Yesterday, I had the chance to visit the Pentagon and sit down with General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations—the head of the United States Space Force. We talk about the service 6 years into its existence, the state of aquisitions, the threats and space environment today, and what the future may hold for the Space Force when it comes to human spaceflight.

Jake and Anthony are joined by Jeffrey Kluger to talk about his new book, Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.

Stephen Clark of Ars Technica joins me to talk about a ton of stories in the news—Jared Isaacman was back in front of Congress, a few Starliner flights have been cut from the ISS manifest, Starship received environmental approval to proceed at SLC-37, Zhuque-3 almost stuck its first landing attempt, the Soyuz launch pad fell apart at Baikonur, and the Space Force has a new mission naming scheme.

Jake and Anthony are joined by Loren Grush of Bloomberg to talk about Jared Isaacman’s second nomination hearing and everything else going on around the industry, like maybe Sam Altman’s foray into rockets. Also, a little side quest into AI.

Blue Origin is fresh off an incredible few weeks—a successful second launch and first landing of New Glenn, followed by an exciting unveil of upgrades to the vehicle, including an enormous new version, New Glenn 9x4.

Jake and Anthony are joined by Ed Ge, CEO and co-founder of Aethero, a space computing startup focused on building the best integrated hardware and software in space. Also we randomly go eBay shopping for old Russian space hardware.

Jake and Anthony watch the ESCAPADE launch on New Glenn, and catch up on some other news.

Simone D’Amico of Stanford and EraDrive, DJ Bush of NVIDIA, and Al Tadros of Redwire join me to talk about autonomy in space, to get into the specific details of what they’re working on and how it comes together, and what it may do for the industry in the next few years.