I’m Anthony Colangelo.

Phil Bracken, Vice President of Engineering at Spaceflight, joins me to talk about their past, current, and upcoming missions, the Sherpa program, and to dive into the technical details of it all.

This month, Anthony and Jake are taking it bit easier. It’s summer, everyone is excited about getting back in to the world again, and space news will be winding down a bit. It’s just the two of us, and we go through a potpourri of topics from random space stories that have caught our attention, some stray conspiracy theory talk, then talk shop about our plans for the show, our work, our lives, and more.

Brock Howe, the Program Manager for Nanoracks’ Bishop Airlock, joins me to talk about the final build out and launch of Bishop, its installation on ISS, some details of its operations, and its plans for the future on ISS and beyond.

Stephen Forbes, the Program Manager for DARPA’s Blackjack project, joins me to talk about DARPA and its interaction with the rest of the Department of Defense, how they appraoch space initiatives, where Blackjack came from, where it’s going, what they hope to accomplish with it, and how it fits into the near-future of the industry.

SpaceX successfully flew and landed Starship SN15 last week, amid protests of their NASA HLS award by Blue Origin and Dynetics.

Miriam Kramer joins Jake and Anthony to talk about space tourism. From Inspiration4, to Axiom-1, to suborbital flights, to some future adventures we’d like to go on. And some we wouldn’t.

Eric Berger of Ars Technica returns to the show to talk about NASA selecting SpaceX’s Starship for its Artemis landings, Bill Nelson’s nomination hearing, Amazon buying 9 Atlas V launches for Kuiper, and the state of Blue Origin.

NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship as its ride for crew to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program. As the Source Selection Statement outlines, Starship was selected as the sole winner because of the constrained lander budget. It’s an aggressive, interesting, and exciting move from NASA, so I have a lot of thoughts.

President Biden nominated Bill Nelson to be the new NASA Administrator, so I check in on some of my past thoughts on NASA Administrators and Jim Bridenstine, talk about Bill Nelson’s history in space policy, and what the future may hold under a Bill Nelson NASA.

Our good friend Jake Robins, host of WeMartians and my cohost on Off-Nominal, joins me to talk about the arrival and early operations of the 2021 Mars fleet—Hope, Tianwen-1, and Perseverance. Then we dig into what the future of Martian exploration looks like, including strategy, communications, sample return, and the upcoming decadal survey.