Roid Rage

Jack is joined by Eric Foster, Senior Mechanical Engineer at AstroForge, and Chris Hearn, Head of Avionics to discuss the design and function of DeepSpace-2's avionics boxes, what it's like working in legacy space vs "new space", and how they felt seeing hardware they worked on fly on Artemis II.

Jack, Matt, and Chap (Chief of Mining now-turned Chief Operations Officer) dig into the mining stock crash; why gold tanked when it should've surged, what tools producers actually have to survive price swings, and why none of them fix the real problem. Plus: Artemis proximity ops reactions, whether it's time to start robbing mines, and mailbag.

Sasha, AstroForge's Principal Mechanical Engineer, spent 29 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) working on some of the most ambitious missions ever built. He joins Jack and Matt to talk about why he left, what surprised him (and what didn't), and how you build spacecraft when the rulebook doesn't exist yet.

Jack and Robyn bring on Yuri, our xenon supplier, to talk about where spacecraft propellant actually comes from. Turns out xenon is a byproduct of steel production, there's no stock exchange for it, and when SpaceX tried to buy enough for Starlink they basically broke the market and had to switch to krypton. Also: Robyn brought a prop.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission went to asteroid Bennu expecting sandy soil and found a rock quarry instead. In this episode, AstroForge senior payload scientist and former Lead Scientist on OSIRIS-REx's sample physical and thermal analysis working group, Andy Ryan, joins Jack to discuss what the team actually found, why it was so radically different from what was expected, and what it might mean for mining a metallic asteroid. Plus; planetary defense, porosity, and lock-in thermography!