I’m Anthony Colangelo.

Andrew Jones returns to the show for the third time to talk about China’s current missions and future plans, including Chang’e-5, Tianwen-1, the Chinese Space Station, and the international politics surrounding it. And then we dig into the Chinese commercial market a bit—launch companies and remote sensing companies are raising a ton of money, but it’s not yet clear what effect that will have on the global market.

Jake and Anthony are joined by Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, to talk about Starship SN8’s epic flight test, Tim’s trip to Boca Chica, and to unveil the 2020 Off-Nominees and crown the winner.

NASA awarded Venture Class Launch Services contracts to Astra, Firefly, and Relativity. Astra almost made orbit with its most recent test flight of Rocket 3.2. And something is up at Firefly, but I don’t know what yet.

Starship SN8 took flight last week on a mostly-successful mission to test its final descent phase. I share some thoughts on the test, the state of Starship development, and what that all means for the near future of Starship.

A new company plans to launch small satellites from the belly of a drone. It joins the growing number of small launch companies popping up to send tiny payloads into space. So what’s the market for these small satellites?

We’ll dive into this growing industry first with Jay Skylus — he’s the CEO and founder of Aevum. His company has plans to launch small payloads on a rocket launched from the belly of an unmanned aerial vehicle. What does he see heading to space on his vehicle? And what will it take to get the Ravn X UAV off the ground?

Then, Aevum joins the growing market of small launch providers. We’ll take a look at the state of the industry with Anthony Colangelo — he hosts the commercial space-focused podcast Main Engine Cut Off about this bustling market and the future of the small satellite industry.

A lot of big, long-running projects have faced delays recently, and it seems like as good a time as any to check in and share some related thoughts. I cover a lot in this one: the Orion PDU issue, Ariane 6, Japan’s H3, Dream Chaser, Vulcan, and New Glenn.

SpaceX Crew-1 successfully launched and docked last week, kicking off a new era of the ISS. It’s a good time to zoom out and look at the ISS program overall, and what it means for the future of space development.

Jake and Anthony are joined by Eric Berger of Ars Technica to talk about the space policy fallout of the 2020 US election, Eric’s upcoming book, and Jake’s bad decisions.

With a massive amount of news happening in the week following the election here in the US, it’s a good opportunity to give everyone a listen in on MECO Headlines. I run through all the stories of the week each and every weekend just like this for the supporters of MECO, so if you like what you hear, join the Headlines tier or higher!

Jake and Anthony are joined by Caleb Henry, formerly of SpaceNews and now of Quilty Analytics. We talk about SpaceX’s new satellite contract, OneWeb’s new lease on life, Caleb’s new gig at Quilty, and what it’s like transitioning away from capital-J journalism.