 Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to tomorrow. This week for your space pod, I wanted to talk about how the European Space Agency and Airbus have signed a commercial partnership agreement to launch and fly the commercial Bartolomio module to the International Space Station. This is your space pod for Tuesday, February 13th. So this is Airbus's new external payload hosting facility, which will be attached to the European Columbus module of the International Space Station around mid-2019. This project actually started several years ago and has been marketed by Airbus commercially since at least last year, where they've even signed up a few customers for its use. But this new partnership makes it official. The agreement defines the roles and responsibilities of the two partners, with Airbus investing around 40 million euros into the development, construction and launch of this platform, and the European Space Agency is providing Bartolomio's installation to the International Space Station. Bartolomio will be launched in the unpressurized compartment of an ISS supply vehicle, most likely the Dragon, and will be installed using the ISS robotic system and an extravehicular activity or a spacewalk. And Airbus is then responsible at that time for all the different operations and payload integration. Now these new commercially available opportunities are open to users worldwide and are coming in from areas that are looking at doing earth observations, technology demonstrations, astro and heliophysics, material science, and all sorts of new different spaceflight applications and commercial missions, which is creating a cost and time efficient way for having institutional and private organizations bring their experiments into space as external payloads. Now Airbus claims they can get payloads launched just 18 months after signing a contract and then will manage most of the details from launch and installation to in space operations, communications links, and even all the way to returning the experiment to earth if that's required. Now interestingly it's actually named after the younger brother of Christopher Columbus, Bartolomio, and it's going to hover 12 payload slots to the outside of the Columbus module and all the different growing number of commercial space users that are looking at payloads in the 100 kilogram class is what's driving the demand for this. And the payloads don't require any hands-on maintenance by astronauts and they can be operated outside the ISS. Now the platform development has recently passed the preliminary design review and is on track for launch in May of 2019. The first payloads are then expected to be installed in the second half of 2019 and the key to offering a service like this for smaller payloads is a new attachment that they're developing called the General Purpose Oceaneering Latching Device or Gold and it's a new attachment mechanism for payloads of up to 125 kilograms and about 0.5 meters cubed and it's developed by Airbus's partner Oceaneering Space Systems in Houston, Texas. The two companies are also working on the system to be able to have a way to attach the different payload platforms to the Columbus module using the International Space Station robotic arms so that they don't have to have any sort of EVAs or spacewalk to attach payloads onto the Bartolomio platform. So I think that this is a really interesting idea and I'm very happy that this proposal is now official and is going to be installed under the International Space Station so I'm really excited for that. But in case you missed it, be sure to check out our last live show, Orbit11.06, where we had a roundtable discussion talking about the successful Falcon Heavy flight and its future moving forward. So be sure to check that out if you haven't already and be sure to tune in every Saturday where we live at 1800 coordinated universal time. Be sure to like this video, subscribe, and if you want to support us you can check us out on patreon.com as well as makersupport.com slash tmro. Thank you very much for everyone's support and until the next time keep moving onward and upwards everybody and don't forget, add Astra to the stars.