 Coming up, two crews launch into space. Juno has a hiccup. I have an interview with Dave Mastin in studio. And I crack up on air thanks to our live audience. All of that and more coming up on this week's episode of Tomorrow. And welcome to Tomorrow, episode 9.34 for October 22nd, 2016. Now before we get started with our episode, we want to thank all of our patrons on Patreon who give us $10 or more per episode. These folks are our tomorrow premiere patrons. They get access to everything in our Slack channel. So thank you to these patrons. And if you would like to help consider crowdfunding the shows of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash t-m-r-o. Now of course I am your host through the news, Jared Head. And next to me I've got Space Mike from the mythical lands of Arizona very far away from us here, of course, in the studio in Anaheim. Now we're going to get started with you, Mike, because we've got a nice array of exciting things to start off with. So go ahead, Mike. That's right. We try to start each show at the top of it with Space launches and we have quite a few of them. First up we have a Long March 2 F rocket which launched the Senzo 11's capsule into space. This launched on Sunday, October 16th at 2330, coordinated universal time. From the G-Quan Satellite Launch Center in China. This carried two Tyconauts on board bound for the Tiangon 2 space station, which we'll talk about a little bit later. They could have taken three crew members on board, but they wanted to take up more supplies instead, so they only had two crew members on this particular mission. And then next up we have a Cygnus, or rather an Antares launch, which launched the Cygnus cargo vehicle. This launched on Monday, October 17th at 2345, coordinated universal time. From the Mid-Atlantic Regional Space Port at Wallops Island, Virginia. I love the shaking on that first part. This was the first Antares launch since 2014. The first launch with the new Russian RD-181 engines. And it carried the sixth Cygnus cargo mission for the commercial resupply services program, but it was designated OA-5 and also called the SS Allen Point Dexter. So congratulations to Orbital ATK for that successful launch. But then next up we have a Soyuz launch, which launched on Wednesday, October 19th at 805 coordinated universal time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. And this was launching a Soyuz capsule, specifically the MSO-2 capsule, which carried with it cosmonaut Sergei Regikov, Andrei Borosenko, and also the astronaut Shane Kimbra, and this was going to be bound for the International Space Station, which we'll talk about in a few moments. So congratulations to Roscosmos and to NASA for this successful launch. Yes, a fantastic week of launches happening throughout the world. Although we do have a little bit of an issue with something that's occurring off of the world about a billion miles away from us with NASA's Juno probe. So engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here in the Los Angeles area are troubleshooting the issues. It's currently in orbit around Jupiter and in testing for preparation for an engine burn to place it into its 14-day science orbit, delivered data showed that two valves on board were operating significantly slower than needed. These valves control the helium pressurization system for the main engine, and they are designed to open a few seconds, but it took several minutes for the valves to open during the test. So mission managers opted to skip that burn and take an extra 53-day orbit before attempting another burn to put it in a 14-day orbit, but then during the close-pass to Jupiter, Juno went into safe mode, and all science from that orbit was lost. So Juno is perfectly fine, but unfortunately any science that was done on that orbit is gone. So, yeah, there goes the data. Now, Mike, we want to get back to talking about Shenzhou 11, so go ahead and take it away. Well, just two days after launch, they successfully rendezvoused with the Tian Gong-2 space station, and they were able to successfully dock with the space station on October 18th, which was Tuesday, at 1924, a coordinated universal time, and this docking happened automatically. On board, the two Taikunots were a veteran Jing Haipeng, who has previously been on Shenzhou 7 and the Shenzhou 9 spacecrafts, and also a first-time Taikunot, Chen Dong. They will spend 33 days in space total preparing the lab for experiments and a refuel operations test next year. Now, some experiments will be conducted during this visit, and they will do lots of public outreach and also guest reporting for the Chinese media. So that's going to be interesting, and so congratulations to the Chinese Space Agency for the successful mission so far. I hope the rest of it goes well. But over to the International Space Station, that Soyuz vehicle that launched also was able to successfully rendezvous with the space station two days later, instead of the new four-day rendezvous they've been doing. This took place, the docking took place at 9.52, coordinated universal time, and as I said before, the crew members on board, MS02, are Cosmonauts Andrei Borisenko and Sergei Rajikov, as well as the astronaut Shane Krimbra, and they will be joining the crew of Anatoly Ivanishin, Tokoya Onishi, and Kate Rubins, who will be departing the space station on October 29th. Now this new crew, during their stay, a Cygnus vehicle and a Japanese HTV cargo vehicle will be docking with the International Space Station, and I love that shot right there, so beautiful. And during the time, there's also going to be at least one spacewalk planned. And then the next three crew members, who will be replacing Ivanishin, Onishi, and Rubins, should arrive in mid-November before the Japanese HTV cargo vehicle arrives in December. So congratulations to NASA and Roscosmos, and everyone involved at the International Space Station for having these successful docking operations. Yes, now turning our way back out to the solar system, the European Space Agency probes Venus Express returned a lot of data, and scientists are still scouring that, and they found a very interesting result coming from that. Now there is a very large mountain on Venus called Inan Mons, and the use of an infrared mapping sensor has showed that what was originally thought to be a heat anomaly actually is layered on this topographical map, and it puts it squarely on top of Inan Mons. Now what that means is that scientists think that we're essentially looking at fresh lava flows on the surface of Venus coming out of this. Now this isn't direct evidence, if you will, of actual current lava flows on Venus, but scientists in Germany were actually able to extrapolate the data and determine where those lava flows would actually be at at different times, and this is a nice little image of that chart right there. So some very interesting scientific results that do need a little bit more scrutiny, but are sort of showing that maybe Venus really is sort of Earth's evil twin in that it does have volcanism potentially on the surface even today. Now we're going to go from Venus to Mars. Mike, tell us a little bit about something that happened at Mars this week. Yeah, and also speaking of the European Space Agency's Planetary Exploration Program, we're talking about the Trace Gas Orbiter, which successfully entered orbit around Mars on Wednesday. And it successfully entered, but what we're talking about today is the Schia Pirelli Lander, which this is an animation that you're seeing on screen of what should have happened during its re-entry or rather entry in landing operations. And this whole thing, they were partnering with Russia to have a future lander in rover. But with this, the data so far looks like that something went wrong and the Schia Pirelli Lander crash landed into Mars instead of making a safe landing. The European Space Agency doesn't yet know what happened, but the initial data looks like that the last signal was received 50 seconds before the expected landing time. And it also looks like the parachutes were released earlier than planned. Now some reports are even saying that the landing thrusters only fired for three seconds, but that hasn't been confirmed by the European Space Agency yet. But even so, this lander as a technology demonstrator and from an engineering standpoint, the European Space Agency will have a lot of useful data to pour over that the Schia Pirelli was able to broadcast before going silent. Now there was a couple of images that were actually taken by one of NASA's Mars orbiters that showed the predicted landing site, and there's kind of a before and after that shows where it possibly landed. And just based on the scale that they give us up at the top right-hand corner, it looks like it's kind of a large landing zone, even like a crater. That's just what it looks like to me, though. But it's really interesting they were able to capture this and even the opportunity rover was supposed to be able to take a couple pixels of the landing. It'll be interesting to see if they were able to capture that. Congratulations for getting the Trace Gas Orbiter into orbit, but unfortunately I feel really bad for the Schia Pirelli not being able to land successfully. Yeah, tough luck. Mars, very difficult place in order to land. Now talking about flying and landing, when we come back from the break, we're going to be having Dave Mastin from Mastin Space Systems here in the studio with Ben doing that interview. So stay tuned. We'll see you right after this break. Welcome back to tomorrow. Now before we get started with our interview with Dave Mastin, I wanted to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who've done to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are people who've contributed $10 or more to get access to absolutely everything. We've also got our tomorrow producers. These are people who've contributed $5 or more. They're going to get access to After Dark and a bunch of other really great rewards to find out those reward levels and how you can help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow. Head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. Long time guest to the show. Dave Mastin, you're back on. Welcome. Thank you for driving down from the mythical lines of Mojave. So unusual, pleasant weather and everything. It is weird. It is weird. So for those who don't know, who is Mastin Space Systems? So Mastin Space Systems is a small company up in Mojave. We've been, like to say, we're the hipster rocket company. We've been doing reusable since before it was cool. You have. You did like the Northrop Grumman Lunar Land... What are we calling it now? It's the Northrop Grumman Lunar Land or X-Prize. They change it every year. It's the Lunar Land of Challenge as far as I'm concerned. And it was a wonderful thing back in 2009. We demonstrated a small rocket-powered vehicle essentially doing what it would be doing on the moon with a landing and then take off and land again. And the big things were it was be able to do two of them within a very short period of time. I think it was 45 minutes to do two flights. As far as I know, no one's really done that yet, right? So you were landing five years before any of the other big players were doing that. Yes. But you were also then reusing it within, like, an hour. With it, yeah. A very short period of time. Turn around and launch again. We've done a number of times where we've done multiple flights in a single day. I think our record is, for a flight period, is like 12 flights in less than a week. That's a pretty good number, yeah. That's a pretty good number. So, hipster company. So, anyway, since we've been doing reusable for so long, we've now been working on launch vehicles with DARPA and doing the XS1 program. And the XS1 program, as DARPA wants to do, not just a reusable launch vehicle, but a launch vehicle is truly airplane-like in operations. And one of the requirements is to do 10 flights in 10 days. We've already done that. Of course, they want to launch a larger vehicle when we've done before a little higher performance. So, for our competitors, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, their challenge is to actually get a reusable vehicle and doing 10 flights in 10 days. They've already done the same size or bigger. Whereas for us, well, we've already done the 10 flights in 10 days. We just have to do a larger, more higher performance vehicle. But in that XS1, you're going to a higher altitude. You see more performance. That's what you mean. Not just higher altitude, but a higher velocity as well. So, yeah, XS1 is a full go-take-a-satellite-to-orbit type launch vehicle, where we have not done that. Pretty much suborbital vehicles, very low performance type of vehicles up until now and now. We're working on this, you know, actually a launch vehicle. It's a small to medium-size launch vehicle. And NeuroPilot in the chatroom says, are you still working on winged reentry vehicles? That's what this XS1. So, XS1, our initial concept drawing that we gave out to the press and DARPA sent out to the press actually had wings on it. We have a difference configuration. I prefer to think of them as fins, but they're kind of large even for fins. But, yeah, we do need some amount of aerodynamic surfaces for what we're trying to do with it, in terms of basically doing the reusability and still maintain some performance levels. So, have you changed the orientation of launch or landing then? We still do vertical takeoff, vertical landing. That is, Mastin will not do anything, but you just, you can't land horizontally or takeoff horizontally from the surface of the moon. So, why do I want to do that anywhere else? NeuroPilot also asks, is Lynx still a partner or is that all dead in the water? So, XCOR was a partner for the XS1 in the early parts of phase one, but what they were doing was they were literally just a, how to say, they were the what to do in case some of our technology development didn't go as well as we expected. So, there was sort of a redundancy level to it, and we got to a point in phase one where DARPA agreed with us that we actually had bought down enough of the risk that we didn't need to carry another performer along with us to mitigate that risk. So, basically they did what they needed to do, which was come in and do some of the work and make sure that we didn't have some technology risks, and we got to a point where we didn't have those technology risks, and so, they said, oh, hey, you did a great job. Thank you for helping us out, and have a nice day. Well, they kind of have met, they're not totally gone ex-core, but they kind of met the same fate that a lot of new space companies meet, which is a lack of funding, and it seems like they've kind of really shut down their links program, which was their reusable space plane. So, they're kind of moving on, but you seem to be doing all right. We're doing okay so far. We're holding on, and it's basically, I think we've found, we've found a little niche that gives us enough money to keep going, and we actually have customers, which helps and are actually able to fly those missions. In fact, one of those missions, actually a series of missions that we flew for JPL has resulted in the technology that we were helping JPL test get selected for Mars 2020. Which is basically the curiosity reborn. Yeah, the next curiosity mission, essentially, which we'll be launching in 2020, that's Mars 2020, and yeah, so that, I have a little piece of technology going to Mars. Well, not just going to Mars, landing on Mars. So, landing on Mars, yes. We've created an impact creator, but we've already proven out the sky crane model. Well, it's some knock on wood here, because what we did was actually help them test out some of the technology, train relative navigation, and hazard avoidance technologies that some of that is going to be used for the new mission. So, hopefully it does enable a nice soft landing and doesn't mess up in... Why is that important? Why is train navigation important? So, train relative navigation and hazard avoidance technologies are really important because we need to go someplace a little less boring on Mars. Because we're choosing flat areas that we can easily land in. Huge flat areas that you can easily land on just are not, apparently, they're not scientifically exciting. They may be deep canyons where water may have once gone. That's a little more interesting. Apparently, geologists think that mountains and canyons and ravines are interesting. So, we need to see that type of geology and that geography. So, we need to be able to land in a much tighter band that landing ellipse needs to be brought down in size. Once you have a smaller landing ellipse, you can do a lot more science with that. And that's train relative navigation and hazard avoidance should enable that. So, there was a tweet when we announced that you were coming on the show. I was like, oh, I hope they talk about hiking because you and your wife love to hiking. So, let's talk about hiking. Exploration! Exploration is how I like to call it. That's what it is though, right? You're talking about hazard avoidance but you're going to need this so for a long time we're not going to have humans on board but even when we do have humans on board autonomous landing is a good idea. And then you have intention of going to Mars yourself. I would love to go to Mars. So, I consider myself an explorer. I'm not the pioneer. I'm not the guy who's going to go there and stay. I do have no intention of staying on Mars when I get there. I want to come home. So, I'm going to go there. I'm going to survey. I would love to survey Elon's retirement home. And when I get done with the survey maybe hike around maybe explore some mountains. You know, that hiking and mountaineering stuff that I do is there's the largest mountain in the solar system. So, let's go hike to the top of it. You mentioned something before the show that I didn't know. The top of Olympus Mons which is the mountain on Mars is in space. It actually extends above the quote-unquote sensible atmosphere. So, you actually have more of the so, you know, despite the hard vacuum of space there is actually an atmosphere everywhere. It is the solar wind is what you're going to quote-unquote feel. It is what you have there. If you have the instrumentation to detect it it's more of the solar wind than it is the Martian atmosphere at the top of Olympus Mons. So, you're basically out in space on top of Olympus Mons. The little secret is climbing Olympus Mons once you're at the edge of it apparently at the base of it is like just a very long and it's a long, gradual, easy to walk up slope. It's not mountaineering at all. And then when you're at the top you can feel that solar breeze rushing against your helmet I guess at that point. So, you're going to go there and come back on a Mastin vehicle? I would hope so. That's what we're working towards. So, to that end, what Jack asks what is the ultimate goal of Mastin Space Systems? So, the ultimate goal of Mastin Space Systems is we're a space transportation company. It is our intention to have provide the transportation services anywhere in the solar system. If you're going to a solid body or maybe even a liquid surface we'll take you there. And it doesn't matter where in the solar system. Maybe even outside the solar system too. Interesting. I feel like I should poke at that a little bit. Well, I mean, you know, hopefully someday we'll figure out how to go, you know, get to the higher performance rocket engines and, you know, maybe figure out fusion or fission or something and get some higher performance and, you know, there is an effort of I don't know, I can't remember his name now, Russian billionaire and send a little tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. Love to help him with that. So, that leads into another question from user Little Blind Crippled Girl who asks, what is your dream rocket? Can it do, like, three flights a day? What kind of load can it do with a low-earth orbit on a daily basis? Like, Dave Mastin budget is no constraint. Time is no constraint. You can build it. What is your dream rocket? I know the two things that are always the huge constraints that keep everything down, but let's illuminate it for a moment. So, I don't know that I have a single dream rocket. There's, it's sort of like what's your dream car? Well, I'm in the transportation industry, you know, for certain routes, you know, think United Airlines. For certain routes, use Canada's, Canada Air regional jets. And, you know, there are routes with everything in between. We see the same thing. There are certain places where, you know, a small sat-launch vehicle is the perfect thing to do and makes sense, and so that's what we'll do. In other places, you know, we need something where, you know, even Elon's not thinking big enough. But that's, you know, that's somewhere way down the line. That's a pretty big rocket. That's a large statement. Who knows where that will end up being? You know, do we need, you know, think about it, there's little tiny tank trucks that, you know, go from gas station, from, you know, refueling facilities, tank facilities out to gas stations, those are 5,000 gallon. You also have super tankers that are hundreds of thousands of, millions of gallons of petroleum at a time. You need the whole range of things, so, you know, I think we're going to have to do the whole range of things. You mentioned a super tanker, so I have to mention the tweet that you sent out, which was, you were out looking at, what was it, an Atlas or Delta launch? It was a launch, of sorts, with your team, and mentioned, you may have figured out how to turn a super tanker into a rocket. It was, you know, it's a Friday, Friday afternoon, bunch of guys around the water, cooler talking, and recent, and Atlas 5, I think, launch, I don't recall, but, yeah, and I just was like, what is the propellant mass fraction of a super tanker? At which point somebody else jumped on Google and started looking and was like, about 80%. 80%, well, that's pretty close to, you know, reasonable rocket range, you know, normally it's 90%. Well, that does include the diesel engines, so we take out the diesel engines and we put rocket engines in instead and rocket engines have this thrust weight ratio and you'll need about this amount of thrust. And the next thing you know, we've got a concept design for a rocket based on a super tanker. Now, that's very similar to something that we've brought up on the show before, which is C-Dragon. Would there, is this you guys just talking like, hey, wouldn't this be neat, or do you think there's actually something there? So, I'm not sure that there's a number of questions that still need to be answered. There's maybe there's something there, maybe something that big really does need to occur. And so, yeah, I mean, we basically just you know, sort of an afternoon a group of guys thinking about what does what does a concept design like that look like? There's still some questions, but maybe maybe it's not too unreasonable. Would you, so if you were thinking about you floated out to sea and then like tip it down like you would sea launch, would you? Oh, that was one of our guys was like, yeah, you know, we could use our Zeus technology that you know, where we land a Centaur on its side and so you have your side thrusters, plus you have your main engines. So maybe you take it out to sea and when you get out to where you know you've got your trajectory doesn't crossover land, you need and you're pointing at the right inclination. Maybe you're down at the equator. You can you can light the engines up in the front. You can basically pop a wheelie, light your main engines and get going. I want to see that. That would be amazing. That would be amazing. Just being a little much smaller vessel out at sea, like, oh, that's a very large, are they firing rocket engines? Yeah, there's some serious questions about that, but you know it was a controls guy, so the controls guy thinks it can be done. It might actually not be. I would love to see you working out in the middle of the Mojave desert, just this giant super tanker with like the Mastin logo and a pirate flag on top or something like that. The pirate flag comes after we raise up the battleship Yamato and turn that into a spaceship. All right. For those who grew up in the 70s. All right, so going backwards in time a little bit, just structure 1701 says in the chat room there are a lot of questions about MXP 351. This is the first I've heard of it. Please describe it. Okay, so I'm not going to give you as much description as you want. It's a hypergolic, a propellant combination. It is green for whatever definition of green we want. Basically it's really about you don't need the full scape suit when you're handling propellants like you do with the traditional hypergols. You still need some protective equipment. So for those who don't know hypergolic fuels will basically react with anything like water. So hypergolic means that you have the oxidizer component and the fuel component and when they touch they ignite. You don't need an igniter. You don't need an igniter. It's they will ignite, they will and what the satellite industry loves about that is that they touch they will ignite, you will your engine is going. They love that you don't need an igniter. You don't have a point of failure out in space. You don't have a point of failure out in space. They're extremely reliable. So we've come up with a combination. We've been working. This is a lot of the work has been done in conjunction with NASA on the catalyst program and we've basically worked out a way of getting these two particular chemicals. They come together they ignite. They're actually very easy to handle instead of a full scape suit. All you need to do is basically wear eye protection and gloves. We do one of the an MSDS for one of the things said maybe you might want to wear a respirator. So we said, okay, we'll wear a respirator. Not a big deal. So but generally it's the stuff is non-toxic. You can handle it. If you were to inhale it you're not going to die in the next couple of seconds. You don't have to go to the hospital. If you Well, wait, if you inhale a hypergall like today, there is not going to a hospital right? I mean you're... It depends on which of those two you inhale. One of them you're pretty much dead. You're gone. The other one you may have to go to the hospital. I guess that's the one I'm used to work considering with aerospace. They basically react with anything. It will react with anything including the tissues in your lungs. Exactly, it's not a fun thing. The hydrazine is not necessarily a terrible thing. I've understand that some people have accidentally breathe hydrazine and are talking about it. On the other hand, the the red fuming nitric acid is a little bit worse. So, yeah, it's the... and there's a lot of details because we don't actually use hydrazine. It's more like aerosine which is some weird combination of hydrazine and other things that makes it worse. So, it's much greener, so better for the environment because traditionally hypergols are not super awesome. Actually, you see like space disasters and they tell you don't go anywhere near their vehicle. It's very toxic. That's generally the hypergolic fuels. So, it's green but what about... it's easier to work with so it's safer, but are there any words on like prices? Is it less expensive? Is it more expensive or is that it well? Well, just because it's easier to work with makes it less expensive. The actual cost of buying the chemical is in the noise compared to the cost of actually loading it onto a satellite and actually working with it. So, yeah, it's because it's easier to work with, it makes it a lot cheaper. Alright. Let's move even further backwards, kind of to the beginning of the interview because we're jumping all around with the chat rooms. Okay. What is the maximum altitude you've achieved with your vehicles and how long can you provide flight kind of flight-provided microgravity? So, how long can you stay in... So, we haven't actually gotten to microgravity levels yet. Our highest flight shoot we just had this discussion in an email conversation we were like trying to figure out what our highest altitude was because we think we came very close to it this past week. I want to say it's around successful flight it was around 500 meters. So 1600 foot. We hear Elon and SpaceX talk about this a lot it's not the altitude, it's the velocity that is the hard part, right? Because you're talking about doing low-earth orbit missions with like XS1, that's not height, that speed. Yeah, it's all about the velocity at that point and to a certain extent up to a point, say 100 kilometers or so or the velocities up to about, you know, getting to space, it's speed and height are one and the same. Once you're starting to go to orbit, then it's all about the velocity after that and altitude has little to do with it. But that impacts your recoverability as well, right? I mean, that's what makes reusability, I mean you're known for reusability but this is a nut that you haven't cracked yet is it not? So, it is something that we haven't gone really fast yet. We haven't done the really fast. But, I mean, there's a lot of different things you have to deal with for reusability. One of the things is can you even get a rocket engine to shut down and light again? Repeatedly. And then how often can you repeat that before you have to take it apart and do maintenance? You know, between shuttle flights, that was one of the things. Now, early in the shuttle program, they absolutely positively had to take the shuttle engines apart and rebuild them every single time. Now, my understanding is by the end of the program by the time they retired shuttle they did, but they really didn't have to take the engines off. Like, they took them apart, they checked it out, rebuilt it, but they really didn't have the wear and tear. So, like, maybe they're thinking, hey, you know, maybe we are getting to a level of reusability that might be, you know, more like an airplane where you land. You don't tear apart an airplane engine every time you land. Right. So, that's an interesting question. And I don't know SpaceX and Blue Origin, how much time do they spend on engine rework after they land? Are they just inspecting or do they have to clean the heck out of them? Or even tear them apart and rebuild them? How about you? How much time? I mean, obviously you're being able to fly within 45 minutes, so I have to assume the answer is like zero. We figured it out to where you don't have to take apart an engine. You don't have to, you know, you just sort of look at it and say, you know, that still looks like an engine. So, what is, this is from Tarantula. What is the biggest challenge for quick turnaround of your reusable vehicles? So, I think the biggest challenges are in the propulsion system. And then once you start doing things like going to space and doing much higher velocities thermal protection systems. Hmm. Is there a danger that you don't burn up? Don't burn up on reentry, yeah. And that's sort of the hard part. That's sort of the part that we need a lot more work on, quite frankly. Why is it hard? It feels like there are a billion different thermal protection systems. You got the tiles from the shuttle, you got blankets, you've got pica from NASA. So, you have things like pica from NASA which aren't so reusable. It's ablative. Sure. So, by definition, you're burning up a portion of it and you can reuse it a second or third time if the reentry wasn't as bad as you expected. But, you really need something where you're not going to replace it after every flight or every two flights. You know, you don't want to replace it until after you've done a few hundred flights. And that becomes difficult. Now, on the shuttle, the shuttle used a lot of what RCC, let's say, a carbon-carbon composite. It had the problem of if you the reentry part might go just perfectly fine, it lost a lot of tiles. They had constant problems with losing tiles, so that's a bit of an issue. So, you had that replacement work. But also, you couldn't land in the rain because just a raindrop hitting it was going fast enough and the carbon composite, the carbon-carbon is so brittle that a raindrop hitting it will crack it. Oh my gosh, I had no idea. I did not know you could not land in the rain. So, yeah, they couldn't land in the rain. That's why they oftentimes had to land at Edwards. Huh. It's because, oh, it looks like it's going to rain and it's going to keep raining through our entry window. So, let's shift to Edwards so that we can land this mission. That one time at White Sands. They landed there once and they said, we're never doing that again. So, yeah. There's a lot of materials issues about doing a reentry. And I think we actually have some answers for that. I'm excited to see that in the future. Do you have any, are you allowed, are you able to give out any timelines? Because I know that XS-1, it's done in phases and the first phase is basically done and we're kind of waiting on phase two. Are you going to move, do you need them to do phase two or can you just continue moving forward without that? What other ultimate decisions are we're going to keep moving? We may change direction a little bit like we might change the size of the vehicle. I'm not sure that, I mean DARPA's XS-1 vehicle may be a little larger than what we really, really, really want to do. Okay, so what do you really, really want to do then? So right now I really, really want to concentrate on small set launch. I think there's a really nice opening there and that's... How large is a small set? What do you define as a small set? Well, traditionally small set is anything that's 100 kilograms or less for a satellite size. I'm stretching that a little bit. I think maybe 250 kilos, 300 kilos is probably a sweeter spot for launch capability. But generally, looking at most of the market is less than 100 kilos, there's enough of the between 100 and 300 that we think that makes a more sensible size. XS-1? So XS-1 was 3,000 to 5,000 pounds to orbit, so about 1,400 or so kilos. So quite a bit more. So quite a bit more. But that's all... XS-1 is single stage to orbit. Well, it doesn't have to be. But it's definitely reusable. It is definitely reusable. If you did multi-stage to orbit, do all stages need to be reusable? No, it's just the booster stage for XS-1. There's sort of another change there is I want to make that upper stage reusable. And so there's a little bit... Well, because in your initial drawings it looked like you were single stage to orbit, like with the wing diversion, right? A giant airplane looking thing. So we had a wing, but it was a booster. So when the XS-1 program started there were two missions for it. There was the go-to orbit, and it was also a do-a-mock-10 kind of a vehicle that could carry a scramjet experiment. Okay. So basically hypersonic experiments for the Air Force. The Air Force is really interested in doing a lot more testing in hypersonic environments. And they thought that if you could go to orbit then well obviously you can do a mock-10 hypersonic experiment. As we got through the program well no that's not really true. You want to dedicate a vehicle for hypersonics. And it's either for launch or it's for hypersonics you're really not going to do the same vehicle for both. So they sort of dropped the hypersonic requirement towards the end. And then you would actually take it. If phase two doesn't happen or if you're not selected you would take it and scale it down even more. We're just going to scale it down and do our own... Because you want to be fully reusable. That's what massive space is. Yes, exactly. So an interesting comment from Lars von Braun maybe you can speak to. He says I really want to like mass and space systems but I feel like they're not very far along feels like they're more dreamers than anything else at this time. Are you just talking about this stuff? Are you building this stuff? Where are you? Because we don't hear a lot about you, right? We're building stuff we're launching stuff you know we're not we're not billionaires we're not backed by a billionaire so it's just taking a little bit more time and unfortunately because the government has been helping us with contracts so our launch vehicle we're getting a lot of assistance from DARPO through the XS1 program to do a launch vehicle then yeah guess what we can't tweet about it well we can but in order to tweet about something exciting that we did for XS1 for example we recently did some engine testing for for XS1 in order to tweet about it I have to put in a request for media release to the bureaucracy it feels like it's hilarious that you have 140 characters you have to have this request yes and two weeks later I get a question about it you know social media nowadays is you have a four hour relevancy window you know if you're not talking if you don't tweet it out in four hours you're not relevant so if I got way too weeks forget it so our social media is just you know taking a dive basically I think we pretty much tweet about being on tomorrow and we tweet about job openings so you're kind of for lack of a better term in blue origin mode right now where there's a lot of stuff but no one can see what you're doing exactly and then someday once you're able to do it these floodgates will open and be like oh actually we have all of these vehicles because you have engines you are flying things you're making stuff you're bending hardware you're not just talking about it you actually have a whole campus now up in yeah we have a whole campus we have five buildings now you know our staff is growing considerably we're about three or four times what we were a couple years ago because we're working a lot more with the government we're actually getting government contracts to support a lot of our development activities you know we have to go through this whole long spiel for getting stuff you know to tweet about stuff and so it doesn't get us talked about as much you know let's keep working we can do that they don't stop us from doing that alright a couple last questions we're going to bounce around a little bit again one more is that you really got the chat room all riled up over mxp 351 so if you can, yeah I know you're like oh come on join us this question don't answer it if you can but determined it's cheaper safer but can you produce it off of earth so let's say you go to mars and you want to build a vehicle and refuel it on mars could you go to mars and create it there from only elements found on mars well I mean technically it is you know elements that are found just about everywhere in the universe so yes we could how much effort would it take I don't know it's probably not as easy as just cracking water to get hydrogen and oxygen although one of the components pretty much if you have water we can make you one of the components but yeah no I you could all the elements are there but the question we don't have any technology to make propellants off earth right now anyway so no you can't and I don't care if you sleep but theoretically you could but no I don't think anybody actually has that technology right now alright this is a great question to take us into break so this will be the last question for you this one's easy I promise and that is from structure 1701 do you have any job openings right now I don't think we're hiring right at the moment but if you do in the future where should people go for that information in the future Mastin.arrow A-E-R-O did you know that there's a dot space top level domain now you can actually own Mastin.space I'll make sure to let our people know we found that out the other day so yeah there's a whole new slew of things so that'd be pretty cool Dave it is always fun having you on the show thank you so much hopefully that was not too painful alright we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back comments from last week's show stay tuned we'll be right back we've always looked to the stars they guide us give us comfort help us find our way we see ourselves out there when we look up it inspires us we long for something we don't yet know we yearn to go there so we venture forth we choose to go to the moon in this decay and do the other thing not because they are easy but because they are hard because that gold will serve to organize a vision of this the eagle has landed welcome back for man welcome back for this the exploration of space will go ahead whether we join in it or not many think we stopped exploring but we know our journey didn't end we've only just begun come with us and explore tomorrow welcome back to tomorrow now before we get started if you have any viewer comments from this last week's show I did want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who helped to make this specific segment to this episode happen these are people who have contributed $10 or more to this specific episode they're going to get absolutely everything we've also got our tomorrow producers they've contributed $5 or more to this specific episode and the people who are going to get access to after dark early that's going to be our tomorrow Patreon plus subscribers these are people who have contributed $2.50 but wait this little is $1 per episode and get your name in the show to find out more information all those different reward levels head on over to Patreon.com slash T-M-R-O alright and a huge thank you to all of our patrons for helping to make all of that happen let's get started with some comments from last week's show what was our topic last week it was data is beautiful we're talking about flight club IO and how you can do thanks it was and how you can do some beautiful graphing and like real-time charts of where the rockets are and whatnot so capcom take us away first one comes off of YouTube this one comes from Fabio Malone says we only know the human body behaves under two conditions one G and no G we need more samples before we can say or predict anything about how the body will react in other conditions the moon one 6 G the Mars the Mars the Mars is the Mars that's the one 5 so might as well be the Mars one third G may provide more entry points to this chart yes right Dave you'll you'll help us with that right yeah yeah Dave Dave gives us a thumbs up yeah and you know we did have experiments for space station that were like a centrifuge and other ways to do these you know tessie since we built them and they're sitting in Japan right now is that correct and they will never fly unfortunately or at least there are no plans to have them fly at this time so you're right we do need to do these tests and understand what's going on there and we have the experiments we're just for whatever reason choosing not to send them up which is I think somewhat sad alright next up capcom next one also comes off of YouTube this one comes from Stuart Young President Obama it's gratifying to see president taking some time to participate in some boyhood fantasy dreaming at this extremely difficult point in history it always shocks me how gray he's become that happens to all the presidents have you ever noticed yeah well eight years under super stressful situations you try to not turn gray but they do they age like 20 years and eight it doesn't matter anyway offhand I think it's I can't think of a president who's taken more of a consistent interest in space since Lyndon B. Johnson which was 1965 to 1969 for those of you who don't know well I mean I think it's great that he is showing this interest and has you know tried to be consistent and you know we say consistent but a lot of people complain when he changed the plan when his administration took office that it was somewhat vague but you know as we were talking about the new story that I was talking about this with I mean I feel that his legacy is helping to enable all of this public private partnerships and having the commercial crew program the commercial cargo program his legacy all these other things but didn't start out with his program but he was something who was able to further that and give support to that and urge Congress and the Senate to vote in favor of programs like that whereas before they didn't they didn't necessarily want to throw out as much money towards programs yeah I mean and to be clear the COTS program started under the brush administration to searcher 17 oh one says Abel Lincoln no interest in space exploration at all totally worthless sorry I just that's true George Washington didn't care about space at all but you know COTS in the commercial space stuff really started mostly under the bush administration specifically under Mike Griffin's NASA administration they're the ones who kind of help you know dream that up and then it was the Obama administration certainly did help but I think there was a really big push from deputy administrator NASA administrator Harvard who really championed this quite a bit and took it and ran with it and like made it kind of like their thing like we shouldn't be doing this and she really fought I mean she fought for it yeah she fought in my opinion she fought for it more than administrator Bolden did I mean she was the one who really made it happen and yeah yeah I mean President Obama certainly kind of had some space stuff but he helps sort of define the funding that is necessary I guess I just felt like his administration like his view of space was uninspired and just boring lackluster it was lackluster and I mean it's neat that he enjoys this stuff but I was constantly disappointed for better or worse go back to the moon oh I forgot to ask Dave we'll have to ask him in after dark we're trying to ask everyone moon or Mars first I'm the reason I forgot to ask David because I know the answer but yeah we so anyhow this is me Curian Crack I'm Dave you guys are all so he's in the studio what am I trying to say he's in the control room and he just like stands up and he's a formidable guy and he's wearing a shirt that says moon first and he's like eh alright so there you go I don't know and maybe I'm wrong maybe maybe the Obama administration did a lot more than I'm not giving them credit for if that's the case and you do know something there certainly post it in the comments and let me know why I'm wrong but otherwise I just I feel like really it was even you know the Bush administration did help start some of these cost programs what not but every every program has been underfunded so I mean yeah great you can have an idea and you can go hey let's do this but if you're gonna steal all the funding and drop it on a giant rocket that won't fly I don't it yeah it's very difficult to understand that alright next up next up oh my god you're kidding I didn't how many pages is this four pages hang on while we go to this I'm just gonna stare at Duda the entire time Duda the hair okay so this one comes off of reddit I'm gonna have a drink you probably should you could probably go to the bathroom actually during all this you're gonna have some time people this one's from Brandon Mark hmm oh oh oh another US president who has another Mars plan slated to happen and oh you guessed it about 20 years I wish I could attend a speech like this and throw a pie in the guy's face you know what bold into I feel like every single US president in my lifetime is a promise we go back to the moon and then Mars and every single time it's 15 to 20 years away Reagan Bush Clinton Bush Obama same story every single time why should anyone take these people seriously it's like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the stupid football I'm convinced politicians by and large really don't care about spaceflight they want DOD contractors to stay in the black while they want US missile engineers to stay in practice and as far as NASA and its dreams it's no it's good PR vehicle to convince millennials to pay their taxes also of note 20 years is convincing conveniently far enough in the future that nobody will remember or care where the president said in 2016 and Obama certainly won't have to shoulder the responsibility for the policy or the spending to make a Mars mission happen double convenient and my bitter hell yeah I was promised an awesome future time and time again I'm older but the awesome is still frustratingly quote-unquote only 20 years away I think I'd rather keep my tax money thank you very much and I'd rather pin my hopes on fickle politicians I'll just watch Elon Musk demonstrate how worthless these 20 year plans really are we accomplishes it in far less maybe it won't be 10 years maybe it'll be less than 15 I had enough time to go into the other room grab a soda and a mug that was a long comment Dutta although a fairly passionate plea and that's why and that's why Dutta yells fairly passionate plea and not necessarily wrong you know I'll argue that today's guest Dave Mastin may be able to do it in less time as well I don't know yeah I don't know that it's politicians that don't want to see success you know you just need to understand what their role here is and that's that they want to create jobs for their district and they don't want their constituents to be out of work because then they're not going to get reelected yeah and I mean in the space industry we hate that that sucks we don't want to see that but you can understand where they're coming from at least right so I would make the argument that what we need to do is change the idea and concept that instead of building big rockets to know where that will keep people employed if we instead create new industry you'll employ even more people in your district by letting the market mature into a way in which we're not just working here on earth but we're also working out in space and I think that will create all new jobs all new industry all new manufacturing at a scale of which we have not seen before and I think that scale is so large that they can't even fathom it and I think that's part of the problem but if we can do that then then and convince politicians of that and actually work towards that model then I do think government would play an incredible role in making that happen also you look at small space companies NASA new space companies NASA and even Dave good chunk of that funding is coming from government so they're not it's not that they're evil it's just that there are certain very small factions they're doing that have a lot of control over money they're doing things that we disagree with yes there you go I think that kind of goes back into the whole public private partnerships you know all these new space companies that could accomplish the goal of going to the moon and Mars in you know less than 20 years like you said are getting a lot of their funding right now from NASA and I think that that you know the past eight years have kind of helped to foster this kind of new contracting that they have instead of doing cost plus contracting you know it's fixed price contracting to do a certain goal and and I think that it's for the better for all the reasons that you that you just said and because this is the political system that we have we need to work within that system and I think that just the amount of successes that we've seen in the the recent past is starting to convince more and more politicians that maybe this is such a good idea and will create an industry that's just my opinion anyway and that gets me into my whole cost plus isn't necessarily a bad idea you just can't use it everywhere and it can't be abused there actually is a that's a different conversation for a different time though it's kind of like the solid the solid fuel versus liquid fuel argument yes there are places for each one of them each one of them has their pros and cons you just have to understand them and apply them appropriately and when you don't do that bad things happen yes so alright I don't know how I want oh hey I'm being told to do this there you go alright next up or is this the last one yeah alright last one capcom also comes off of youtube this was from josh willis says it's a little screwed up to be so flippant about the theories around tabby star we don't know what it is so at this point a Dyson swarm is still on the table though very very unlikely biases can influence the way data is perceived so it's very important to not let our own lack of knowledge color what the data may very well be saying Jared well I mean I'll throw this out here which is that Carl Sagan once said extraordinary extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence so in science we don't jump to the fantastical immediately when we're working on things we work but we want to do you want so fantastic so much better story it's like the best thing ever to just say aliens and then work with it but there's a problem with that which is that in science you have to first look at the obvious and that's really what you do you throw the obvious guess at it and you see if that sticks on the wall if it sticks on the wall there you go you found it unless somebody else comes in and looks at your obvious guess and says no that's wrong here's another one and then that sticks to the wall okay maybe it sticks a bit better than the other one did so you compromise with it so sorry you know I'm not here to sugarcoat or try to try to give you some kind of Star Wars answer with everything I'm just going to tell you what we know and the fact is with Tabby Star we don't know but the chances of it being a swarm of comets is probably a lot higher than it being aliens so just throwing that out there sorry it's I mean I would love for it to be nice and sphere and we find out that there's intelligent life out there but guess what it's probably not what it is and because that's not and because the chances of that are so much smaller than any other potential answer nobody's really going to pursue it because you're not going to be able to fund the study to even think about you know doing stuff like that you know it's going to be fun in early December Fraser Kane of Universe Today is going to be on and he and I have somewhat different views on the possibility of intelligent life out there and he actually basically says no it's not out there it's almost certainly just us and I am of the opinion that there's almost certainly intelligent life out there it's just never been here yes so that taking that conversation like I think that is going to be a fascinating fun show yes because he actually has very compelling arguments so hopefully my arguments are as compelling as his slash he's smarter than I am so he might just win that by debate December 3rd December 3rd is when that particular debate he was actually going to be on a couple weeks ago but our bandwidth issues unfortunately prevented him from coming on so I'm excited for that debate to actually occur yeah yeah absolutely alright next week show we're going to have a long time viewer and contributor to the show Emery Stagmer also known as Vax Headroom he's going to be on and we're going to be talking small sats so very apt to go from Dave Preston to Emery who also actually this is a really great transition because he also has been on talking about Sea Dragon before and you know some of the floaty super yeah exactly right so that's going to be that's going to be a lot of fun so everyone thank you so much for watching after dark is up next if you're a patreon plus subscriber you're going to get that as soon as it's posted on demand everyone else had to be available at about a month and we'll see you guys next week