 Coming up, China launches Long March 5. Sickness rides an Atlas. I interview Jim Cantrell, the CEO of Vector Space Systems. All that and more coming up on this week's episode of Tomorrow. Welcome to Tomorrow 9.36. It's hard to believe we've gotten that many shows this season so far. It's really amazing. And at first, I want to give a shout out to all of our Patreon Premier members. These are the people who are giving us $10 or more per episode, which is really fantastic. Thank you so much for all of your support. It's been a really great ride so far. So, to get us started, first of all, I am Carrie Anne Hengenbotham. And with me as always is Jared Head. And we also have, I only call him Space Mike. I really said call Jared by his first and last name. And Space Mike, you know what? He's just going to say Space Mike for now. That's just the way it's going to be. Forever. That's okay with me. Oh, goodness. So, we are trying things a little bit differently. And if you've been watching us for a while, you may have noticed I typically don't host. Ben will be with us a little bit later on. He'll be on camera. Awesome. Perfect. Ben will be with us a little bit while later. He'll be giving our, or taking our interview a little bit later on with Vector Space. But first, we want to get into a couple of Space News items. And of course, as we always like to start off with a couple of launches. The first one coming up is an H2A launch. It's at Himawari. How do you pronounce that? Does anybody know? Yeah, Himawari 9 is the satellite. It's a weather data satellite. Perfect. So, let's get into a little bit of launching. So, this was the Japanese H2A, which launched on Wednesday, November 2nd, at 620 Coordinated Universal Time from the Tanagashima Space Center in southern Japan. And like I said, that was the Himawari 9 satellite, which is a weather data satellite for the Japan Meteorological Agency. And this was actually a commercial launch that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries does for that. So, I'm very happy for that. And this was just the second launch that Japan has able to successfully do this year. And there's another one planned with the H2 for their HTV cargo vessel later on this year. But very happy for that launch. It's really great that Japan is having these launches. It's really exciting to see more people launching, I feel like, just in general. Sort of, I was gonna say, regardless of what they're launching. I worry a little bit if they're launching something sketchy, but this sort of thing is really exciting. Also really exciting is there's a Long March 5 launch from China. We've got a little bit of footage of that. Almost look like people in the background there for a second. This bird, so it was really cool though. So, this was a launch on November 3rd at 1243 Coordinated Universal Time from the Wenchang Space Center in Hainan Island, which is just 13 degrees north of the equator. And this is a brand new rocket. It's a two-stage rocket with four liquid strap-on boosters that you just saw, be jettisoned there. And the thing that's new about this is that it's using liquid oxygen and kerosene as well as liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen instead of the toxic fuels that they've been using, like tetroxide and hydrazine in the Long March is two, three, and four. And with this, it's now gonna be in the same class as the Delta IV rocket with a 25 ton payload to a low Earth orbit and a 14 ton payload to a geosynchronous orbit. That's a big rocket. What's this? Yeah, and probably the coolest thing what you're seeing on screen right there is their new upper stage, which they're calling YZ2 which has a multiple reignition capability and is equipped with precision control systems so that it can be a space tug to get payloads to the desired orbit similar to the Centaur upper stage. Oh, I love that they're plotting. That's so awesome. So yeah, I'm very happy for China that they were able to successfully do this mission and with this rocket, they're gonna start being able to launch the larger modules that they have planned for their mere class space station. That's really, really cool. So in this particular class of rocket, how many people have this kind of capability? You mentioned the Delta IV Heavy. So it's China, the Delta IV Heavy with the Long March V Delta IV Heavy. Who else has a rocket this big? I suppose that Europe comes close with the Ariane V rocket. Yeah. And then from there, India has their GSLV Mark III rocket but it's not fully operational yet because they've only done a mission with just the first stage and the boosters of it. They haven't had a full mission with the upper stages of it. But once they have a fully operational mission of the GSLV Mark III, then that should be within the same class as well. And then of course, Russia has the proton rocket that is in the same class as well. Gotcha. Yeah, Space Vogel in the chat room is talking about the rocket cams. The cameras on the rocket themselves which are always very cool to see. Those shots are amazing. And then Citizen Big Numbers says the contrast and countdown to the Ariane. Yeah, I love that everybody has their own sort of look and feel about all of their launch stuff, like all of the coverage and the cameras on the rocket. It's all you need. Yeah, yeah. That's what makes it amazing. It's really, really fun. So anyway, so we've got a little bit of space news going on, of course, besides just launches because we do that. So Jared, you've got an Atlas V called on once again to deliver international space station cargo. Yes. So exciting. Once again, Orbital ATK is going to be partnering up with United Launch Alliance to launch Cygnus OA-7 on a flight to the International Space Station. That's awesome. It was just recently announced. And in fact, this is taking advantage of something called the Rapid Launch Program, which United Launch Alliance has just developed. You basically sign a contract and then you get to launch within four months. So that's a very fast timeline for it there. Now, they are doing this because NASA has sort of requested this to happen because SpaceX's Dragon Capsule to deliver cargo to the International Space Station is currently grounded. The next HTV cargo vehicle from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has been delayed as well. And a neat fact about the Atlas V that I didn't realize is that it allows the Cygnus to actually carry an extra ton of cargo to the International Space Station. So it should be able to allow some extra cargo to sort of relieve the supply chain that's been very strained over the past couple years for the International Space Station. OK, and really quickly though, for those of us who don't know, because we just had the talk about the Long March 5. Yes. So but an Atlas V is still smaller than that? Yes. Is that correct? Yes, it would be. OK, just want to make sure. In the configuration that they're going to fly the Atlas V in for the Cygnus, which has no boosters, it cannot lift as much as a Long March 5. OK, but it's still lifting more than it had before? Well, it's lifting more than the current launcher for the Cygnus, which is called Antares. OK, perfect. I think I got it now. There you go. So with Antares, you can launch a Cygnus, but you can't carry. You can only carry about 2,500 kilograms with it. OK, this is. And with an Atlas V, you can do about 3,500 kilograms. That's a much bigger number. Got it. Much bigger number, much more supplies, which is better overall. Nice. Very cool. Awesome. So speaking of the International Space Station, Mike, you have a story coming up about a battery swap. That's right. So kind of as a side note to this, NASA has discovered the possible causes for some of the leaky suits that they've been having, where the water has been leaking up into the suits. And they were able to find out that it was actually because of cross-contamination with cleaning supplies, where they store both the cleaning supplies and the space suits in the Leonardo module. So different processes should be able to avoid similar water leaks in the future, which has cleared future spacewalks to proceed. And the next major spacewalks that are going to be happening, and could be anywhere from two to six spacewalks, is to replace the aging battery packs on the solar panels of the International Space Station and replace them with lithium-ion batteries. They're going to do six lithium-ion batteries to replace the nickel-hydrogen power packs that they're not sure when or rather how long those old power packs could last for, but better to replace them with new technology. And with this, those batteries are going to be sent up on the next cargo mission that Japan is going to be sending, the HTV-6. And that is scheduled for launch on December 9. From what we've been hearing, that everything's already been loaded, and they're just working on some issues with the software propulsion on the service module before integrating the full stack and hopefully having another successful launch. Really nice. Matt Clark in the UK, or Matt Clark UK, sorry. I just assumed that you were in the UK. So how would a cross-contamination cause a leak? Is anybody? So with certain cleaning supplies, I guess what's happening is that the different aerosols were getting inside of the tubes that normally would suck water and have it be filtered through their whole kind of undergarments that they wear. The whole problem is that there's these certain valves that if they're not having the water move around, then they'll just kind of pool up in one spot until it comes back out where it would normally be sucked through. So that's why there was a problem, I believe this was in 2014, where there was a massive amount of water. And it was actually kind of life-threatening to the Italian astronaut who that happened to. But it happened again earlier this year, back in January, when Tim Copra and Tim Peake were on a spacewalk. And it wasn't as much water, but there was enough to be worried about it. And they sent that space back on a CRS 8 or 9, I believe. I forget which one it was. But they sent that back on a dragon capsule so they could inspect it fully. And they discovered the reason that it was pooling up and clogging, essentially, was because of these aerosols from cleaning supplies. So they were just like, oh, well, as long as we just avoid that contamination, this shouldn't happen again. Interesting. All right. Very cool. In the meantime, we have some really crazy, this is why we have you, Jared, because I don't understand any of this stuff, man. The title of this one is Galactic Merger Exposes, Supermassive Black Hole, which is also Supermassive Black Hole is a really great song by Muse. Go on. All right, well, the National Science Foundation actually has a program where they're using a group of radio telescopes that combine together, and they're called the Very Long Baseline Array. And what they're doing is they're looking at merging galaxies to see if they can actually see the supermassive black holes which sit at the center of very big galaxies to see if they can either see them orbiting each other or actually merging together. And you get to do that in the radio frequencies. Is this the, like, we don't know what they do situation? Like, I don't know. Sometimes they merge, and sometimes they whatever. So one of the fun things that we do, especially in astrophysics, is that we do computer modeling of things. So that means that we run it on supercomputers and we see what happens. And then we look out at nature and we compare what's happening with nature on our computers. And we see if it matches up how it's supposed to. So they're doing the survey, and they were looking at two galaxies that are merging together, about 2 billion light years away from our Earth. And they found that a trail of material was seen leading to a very intense area of activity. And in this image that you see right here, that plus symbol is over the center of the galaxy. So that's the bigger galaxy of the two that merged. And then that circle there is circling the area where there's intense activity. So they realized that what's happening here is that there's an indication that the supermassive black hole's galaxy was actually stripped away from it in the galactic collision. So now this naked black hole is actually leaving its old galaxy behind at 3,200 kilometers per second. Is it looking for a new home? Really, really fast. It could be looking for a new home for a while. But what's interesting about this is that scientists thought that when this kind of a process happens, that the two supermassive black holes will go into orbit around each other. They'll become a binary system, and then they'll fall in and eventually form an even bigger black hole when they merge. A super supermassive massive black hole? A super supermassive massive black black hole. We don't have a name for that yet. So I guess we don't. A black hole sun, oh my gosh, thank you. Yep, I appreciate that. Going down the song route here. So we're old, go on. This was just unexpected, because they expected the two black holes to go into orbit around each other. But they didn't. One stayed where it was at, and the other was like, well, I'm out of here. So it kind of didn't match up with the models. So now they've got to go back and kind of maybe rethink the physics of what happens to supermassive black holes when galaxies combine with each other. Interesting. Jim Green, Jim, I can read really, in the chatroom is saying, is it headed this way? No, it's not. OK, that's good. And we don't know if any black hole that's headed our way. That is insanity. All right, so one, oh gosh, we have so many. We've talked so much. We'll do one more, because I do find this one really interesting as well. Mike, you've got to talk about a proton medium. I can't even talk. You've got a thing. Let's just go with you. International Launch Services, the commercial arm in Russia that markets the proton rockets, a couple months ago back in September announced two new variants of the proton rocket, proton medium and proton light. And essentially, to create that, they would have an extended first stage, and then they would remove the second stage and use the third stage as the new second stage. And with this, they would be able to have a more to medium to heavy class capability instead of just the heavy market. And with this, they've already, just one month after they announced these variants, they also got their first customers. The first payloads that will be on the first launch of this in 2018 is going to be U-TelSat-5 West B, the communication satellite, and then Orbital ATKs MEV-1, or Mission Extension Vehicle. And this is something that I'm really excited about, because the Mission Extension Vehicle is a robotic spacecraft that would be able to rendezvous with other spacecraft. And they've already announced that they're going to rendezvous with an Intel satellite, although they haven't announced which one yet. And with that, they're going to not necessarily refuel the satellite. They're just going to be able to dock onto an existing piece of hardware that they can grapple onto and take over the propulsion duties for that satellite to be able to extend its life another, they're shooting at anywhere from five to 15 years. And it would do all the different station keeping for those satellites. And even for satellites that might not necessarily be in a good orbit or have used up their life and need to go to a graveyard orbit but don't have the fuel to do so, a satellite like this could move dead satellites into graveyard orbits so that a geostationary orbit can still be useful for many, many years in the future. So I'm really excited about this, not just the new rocket but also progress on this Mission Extension Vehicle. So I'm really looking forward to that in 2018. Yeah, so much stuff I look forward to. And just as an honorable mention really quickly, Curiosity found some meteorite on Mars that we heard a little unsure of. So that's really exciting. And the Soyuz crew returned home from Earth. They returned home to Earth. So that's a really good thing. So it's awesome to have some of our people back and we are always learning more and more. So we're going to take a little bit of a break. And when we come back, Ben Higginbotham is going to be joining us. And he's going to be interviewing Jim Cantrell from Vector Space Systems. So stay with us. We'll be right back. And welcome back to tomorrow. Now, before we get started with the show, I did want to give a quick notice, actually, to everyone. Tomorrow is a worldwide show. And as such, we have chosen a worldwide time standard, which is Coordinated Universal Time. This show is always at 1,800 hours Coordinated Universal Time at 6 o'clock PM UTC. And UTC does not honor daylight saving in neither do we, which means if you are in the A European time zone, you've probably already set your clock back, which means this show is at a different time. For those of you in the United States, tomorrow you're going to be setting your clock back, which means if you change your clock, this show's time changes with it. So it will be one hour earlier for those people who change their clock, nifty little factoid. Not everyone changes their clock. So if you're in an area that does not change your clock, the show time for the show does not change for you. So again, always 1,800 Coordinated Universal Time for a good chunk of the United States that will actually be adjusting for you unless you're in what, Arizona, areas on the east coast. So, all right, I did want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who have talked to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are people who've contributed $10 or more to the show. We've also got our Patreon producers. These are people who've contributed $5 or more. They get free worldwide swag store shipping. And of course, premium members get the access to the Slack channel to find out more information on how you can help crowdfund the shows of the tomorrow. Or to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. All right, we are joined by the CEO of Vector Space Systems, Jim Cantrell. Jim, thank you so much for taking time out of your Saturday to join us. Yeah, you're welcome. So, we're space nerds. We've heard a lot of space companies, but Vector, that's not one that we talk about too much. You guys are fairly new on the scene. Tell us a little bit about who Vector is. Well, so Vector is the company that's putting together a set of technologies that are really designed to, as we like to say, democratize space by lowering the barriers to getting there. And I'll get into a little bit of what those are, but basically the problem with space exploration over the past 50 years has been, it's been very expensive and very time consuming to get there. You mentioned earlier that ULA was offering this rapid launch capability. That's a really big part of the problem. That's where we're starting is this whole business of actually getting assets to orbit. And so with that, we're building a launch vehicle system, which we call the Vector R and the Vector H, two different vehicles, basically the same family, to focus on the microsat community. And then the second part of our business plan is to place our own constellation of satellites in orbit that allow people to essentially escape this whole business of building the satellites and launching them and be able to directly access them and put their own apps directly on our satellites, much like you do on cell phones. So that's the innovation model that we think is gonna play into the next century where people are not having to put out $100 million and wait four years to get their ideas in space. So let's talk about the launch vehicle. Let's talk about the launcher. You've got SpaceX, focusing on reusability. We've got Electron Rocket, who's focusing on just rapid production of the rocket. What kind of camp are you guys in in the reusability or rapid low cost production? So it's interesting, both SpaceX and Rocket Labs personally had things to do with. That was one of the on the founding team of SpaceX. And their model is interesting in the sense that what Elon's doing and they're doing as a whole company is paying for their capability to get to Mars on the geostationary market. And when one of the other vector founders, John Garvey and I were working with Elon in the early days, we urged him to start with a small vehicle because it's easier to build. It's less costly. And the point that that was in 2002, the market wasn't really there for the microsats. But what SpaceX has decided as a business decision is to chase the geostationary market to go after those mature revenues and at the same time developing a capability that allows them to exploit that technology to go to Mars. It was clear from the beginning that that was what Elon wanted to do. And we're starting to see that for 10 years. People thought I was crazy when I told them that the goal of SpaceX was to go to Mars. But now we're starting to see that I wasn't so crazy. Rocket Lab is more in our camp. They started with the idea of mass production of the rockets. When they started, it was several years earlier than us and what they ended up doing was sizing their vehicle. So it's a little bit bigger. They're about three times five, no, sorry, four times the size of our vector R and about twice as big as our vector H. And so that was because that's where the market was really active at that point. What we're seeing is the market for the satellites is getting smaller and smaller over time. And there's more and more of the smaller ones there. And nobody's really serving that market. And so that's what we set out to do as a start is to build that original, we joke it's the Falcon Zero, that small vehicle that we tried to talk you on into building the beginning. And so what we're doing is building a vehicle that can be mass produced truly on the 100, 200 a year and hopefully launched at 100 to 200 a year so that we can get the service to the Microsoft community, something that's specialized. We're finding our customers like owning the entire shroud of the launch vehicle, whether that's a big vehicle or small. And that's a very key factor in their choosing of launch vehicles. So what we're finding so far when we signed up about five customers, totally about a hundred launches is the thing that's really brought them to us is their ability to own the shroud environment, which you really can't do with the rocket labs because you end up putting more vehicles, more satellites on a single launch and then that's a risk profile issue. So pound per pound to orbit, we're about the same cost as rocket labs. We're quite a bit more than SpaceX because as the vehicles get larger, the cost to go to orbit goes down. But it's like everything else in life. Very few economic decisions are made on the cost per pound of the things you buy in the store or homes, the cost per square foot. What we really find is the price point is driving the customers to look at buying something that meets their needs and they can own the shroud. So the big differentiator for you is that actually you're quite a bit smaller. So that allows you as a customer because we're seeing the satellite market as we were talking about in the last few weeks, the satellites are getting smaller and smaller and smaller and now we're at small sets, nano-sats and Pico-sats. So you actually have a launcher where I can, if I have a nano-sat and I don't wanna have to wait to be a secondary payload on something else, I can just buy your rocket. And because the rocket is smaller, it costs less. There's not as much stuff that has to go into it. It's a lot easier from a ground system standpoint. That's the main differentiator here? That's getting down into the technical weeds, but that's really what makes us technically different. We're very small. It's about a 45 foot tall rocket for the Vector R. It weighs about 5,000 kilograms wet and it's launched literally off the back of a trailer. So we have a mobile launch system where it launches off of a concrete pad and it's very simple, the fueling's all liquid. So you can launch it pretty much from anywhere. The explosive siding requirements are fairly minimal. You can see here where it's going through Tucson. This is exactly, illustrates our point. Not everybody can drag a rocket behind their one ton Dodge truck. And you can see how literally small the vehicle is. The blue strong back there is what lifts the vehicle up. You can see part of the launch pad structure on the back of the rocket there. And we don't have to have the huge $100 million infrastructure to launch from. And if we have a bad day like SpaceX had, it's a matter of getting the bulldozer out and clearing it off and starting all over with a new pad. So everything's built to be mass produced. Everything's built to be launched easily. We're thinking the whole problem through really from the manufacturing and operations point of view. One of the things that allowed us to do that and be going so quickly is we acquired Garvey Spacecraft Corporation when we began Vector and they've been in business for 15 years. So we have an unfair advantage in that we have a head start. They developed all the propulsion, the proprietary fuels and so forth that has really got us very rapidly at this point. Our first launch of the Vector R is gonna be the end of next year, about 12 months from today. And what about reusability? Is that something that you're gonna try to reuse the rockets? Are they just small enough where it doesn't make sense? You just take it and throw it away? No, we'll reuse the vehicles. To date, Garvey has flown 30 of these flights. We've flown one and they've all been reused. And it's sort of an ironic circumstance. Everybody makes a big deal out of reusability. We did it out of economics just because we didn't see a reason to replace the engines. So we've demonstrated the vehicle itself is reusable even with the composite tanks. They're pretty durable on a parachute landing scenario. Our intent is to have an aerial recovery rather than a flyback of this booster so that the first stage comes back and we can recover at the very least the engines and the composite tanks which are a good portion of the cost of each vehicle. So to wicked in the chatroom asks, their website doesn't really clarify. Are the vehicles reusable launch land launch or are they refurbishable launch land fix launch? Yeah, the reason we're hedging our bets on that is because we don't know for certain whether they'll be just plainly reusable like SpaceX is looking like they're gonna say we think they will be. But until we get a little more experience with it, we really don't know. Ideally, we could take them, clean them out, put them back on the launch pad. We do have some service items on the engines themselves that are a little different than SpaceX will probably swap out an engine pack and send the engine pack back to the factory to be rebuilt. The nozzles themselves are ablatively cooled. So once we get a little more experience in the flight and know how the ablatively cooled nozzles disfigure with time, we'll know whether or not we need to service that. We know the injectors, for example, are all fine. We know all the valving and all that works fine. So it's really gonna be a question of how we see how this operates. And that's a down the road capability that we haven't factored into our pricing. But down the road, once we can demonstrate this capability and get comfortable with it, it can help our pricing quite a bit. Which brings up the next question. You say down the road, how long out until you think you'll start launching some of these nano sets? So our first launch with a paying customer is scheduled for early 2018. We have what we call our block zero vehicles gonna launch in the end of 2017. And that's what we're currently working on is to get that going. It's very close to what you saw there in the videos you were showing. Except that's an engineering model being out of aluminum. This block zero will be an all composite vehicle. And we'll launch it out of Kodiak, Alaska. And it'll be proving all the major orbital systems. We probably won't have a satellite on that one. The block ones will start launching in 2018. And we have people who are so enthusiastic about getting to space who bought our first three test vehicles from the block one series. So we've given them some advantage pricing for that. But we'll be flying either our satellites or customer satellites on the first three. We like to say we'll be in a full operational situation by the end of 2018. And like I said earlier, we sold almost a hundred of these launches. So the vector H, which is a bit heavier than this, it's about 50 feet foot tall. We'll launch on the same basic platform. The mobile tell has five first stage engines instead of three like the R does. And slightly longer tanks and it's got a full diameter second stage. Same second stage engine, same avionics. It's basically the same vehicle with bigger tanks and more first stage engines. That one, we're looking at the block zero launch being in 2019, early 2019, and being in service probably mid 2019. Many storage has an interesting question, which is why fly from Alaska? Well, so one of the high demand orbits is polar. Sunsacran is sort of just plain polar or high inclinations. You can do that out of Cape Canaveral because you'd be flying over land and that's more of a policy issue than anything else. I think the highest you can get out of Cape Canaveral is about 57 degrees, something on that order. So Alaska has a commercial launch range, the Pacific Space Port, Alaska. I think the official name of it, we always call it Kodiak. And they have launched into orbit out of there a number of times. They've been doing a lot of suborbital launches for missile defense agents and so on. They're good folks to work with and it's a little logistically difficult to get there, but we don't have overfly concerns. The whole safety regulations with respect to the FAA are easy to deal with. And so what we're planning on doing is both cutting our teeth there plus servicing our high inclination orbital customers there. And being that it's not a majorly busy space port right now, the idea of being able to launch 50 to 100 a year works very well out of a place like that. So you mentioned you had five customers covering over 100 launches. Are you allowed to say, Phelps is asking who are some of those customers? Sure. I think all but one of them I can mention, well actually two by name, I can give you some generalities just because we haven't agreed on the press releases yet. So our first customer was ISI and they're a Finnish radar satellite company and they're building microsats to use SAR radar imaging to look at all of the various shipping activity all over the world, ice flows, environmental kinds of imaging. So if you are familiar with that particular world, SAR imaging is a very popular data and it's very expensive. And so these guys are building a constellation of about 100 SAR satellites over time. We've got a contract with them for 21 of those satellite launches. Their first one is going to launch at the end of next year on a Falcon 9, but they're caught up in this Falcon 9 failure investigation. The chances are that we may actually beat those guys to orbit depending on how things fall out for them. But the rest of them they've contracted with us. The second one that's out there is York Space Systems and York is an interesting company that builds microsatellites, primarily as a sort of a turnkey solution for payloads. And they've purchased a combination of the vector Rs and the vector H is based on some of the customers they're working with. And I don't actually know who their customers are at this point, but I know they've got a couple of them sold early on. So that's more of a bulk buy with some options on it. The third one is Planet IQ who's looking at weather satellites for the global coverage of the Earth. And so what Planet IQ uses is the GPS signals and as the signal passes between the GPS satellite and the Planet IQ satellite, it goes down through the Earth's atmosphere. And so it provides a sounding of the atmosphere all over the Earth, 24 seven. So essentially, if you want to think of the Earth as a grid of knowns and unknown atmospheric temperatures and profiles, what they'll do is densify that grid of known profiles. And so they're going to build upwards of 100 satellite and fly them. And we'll fly them three at a time on our vector Rs. And they've got into the second generation satellite, they're looking at our vector H. And so we have two more constellations, one's an imaging constellation that's looking at this. And then another one, which is not going to orbit the Earth, it's going to go beyond Earth. So I can't mention their name yet, but we just signed the contract last week and that'll be one of our very early launches. So standby watch for the press release on that. That'll be very interesting. That actually sounds really cool, which brings up an interesting question from Anno Nym, which is, will there be live launch coverage of these? Yeah, so what we want to do is to have as much public engagement in what we're doing as possible. And when we say we want to democratize space, we really mean it because this is where the innovation is. It's not at the government agencies, it's not in the big companies at the individual level. So part of our mission is to broaden the DNA pool, if you will, of people who are really, truly doing stuff in space. And most of us who got interested in space got there because we had some experience where we saw some activity, we had almost a religious experience watching a rocket or something of that nature. I myself never intended to get into the space business, but I got involved back in the 1980s when I was in college because I saw a sign in the hallway for a design course taught by NASA to design a Mars rover. And so I ended up actually working for the French Space Agency on a joint French-Soviet Mars program because I followed my nose on that and I was gonna go in the automotive industry, I would have never done it. So the long way to answer the question, yes, we want to get as much public engagement of what we're doing as possible. It's gonna take us a little while to get the infrastructure together, but in Alaska it's gonna be a little tougher. We have a deal signed for Launch Complex 46 out in Cape Canaveral for operations out of there through Space Florida. And we're working with the Kennedy Space Center, visitor center to work with them to engage the public on tours and so forth of our operations. So we're still working all those details out. I probably shouldn't go into too much detail, but we definitely see the public interest in this stuff as a very important part of what we're doing. So you mentioned you were kind of doing some space stuff in the 80s, which means you had an opportunity to see, we'll call it New Space 1.0 kind of come and go and a lot of people forgot about that era of like Beale Aerospace and things like that. Does that scare you that there was this kind of bubble of new space? We had people trying to buy the mere space station and build their own vehicles and they all disappeared. We were left with the general like Boeing and Lockheeds and now we've got New Space 2.0 coming along. Do you think there's gonna be a repeat of that or is it a totally different market now? Yeah, it's completely different. Let me sort of suggest to you also, maybe I'll call it New Space 0.0, but there was a whole bunch of activity that I was personally involved with that happened a long time before New Space. I mean, obviously commercial space has been around for a long time with the commercial commsats. What really sort of started the modern space era in New Space is everybody calls. I've got on records here, I don't like that term, but okay, fine, we'll live with it. What term would you use? Is there a better term? I would say it's entrepreneurial space. So it's non-government space. You can call it commercial space. I mean, really what we're seeing now today is investor funded where it's done by more entrepreneurs than big companies. So looking at things that are possible with smaller dollars and that's what I find interesting. So, let me just go back as far as history if you've got a moment. When we first did this mission to Mars, I actually did it through the Planetary Society and that was citizen funded space. Now, if you look at the Planetary Society, which was founded by Carl Sagan and Lou Freeman and Bruce Murray, they were all frustrated with the lack of progress that NASA was making. This was post-fiking and where NASA seemed to be shutting down and so on. They formed the Planetary Society to advocate citizen space. And what that ended up being, and I was really one of the first people that did it, was people that were Planetary Society members believed so much in making things happen, even if it wasn't our own government, that we gathered up citizen funds and I went to France on that money. And so my involvement in this Mars mission was funded by individual donations. And it was something that our government would never do because it involved the Soviet Union. That's back when the Soviet Union still existed with France. And so we made a real honest contribution to that with citizen funding. And then what's came after that though is the Beals and all these other things that happened about 2000, about the time SpaceX started by the way. And that happened, that all fell apart in my opinion because the capital expenditures were too high. There was a few companies that survived that. Iridium's one of them, but they barely survived it. They went bankrupt and they almost took Motorola with them. And then when somebody finally bought them for $50 million and recapitalized, it's a very profitable business. I think our modern era is much better off because what we see is a lowering of the cost of capital to get there. And that's the whole point of vector is we wanna see that continue. And our idea is taking what today is arguably a $20, $30 million expenditure to get your constellation or your business in space in four years, we wanna transform that to single digit million dollars in weeks or months so that literally the people in the basement with their computer can come up with the idea, write this off or for it and then demonstrate on our cloud that it will work and then go find the money for it, whether it's VCs, investors or family and friends that invest in it and they can upload this to our constellation and it works. That's where the real innovation will come. And if we can get the capital and the time down to that level, we can ensure that this will not only become a trillion dollar industry, but it will draw the best minds to this business. And that's really why I'm doing this. The rocket part is easy. The hard part is making this thing sustain itself. And we really wanna change the space industry the way that Apple changed the computer industry. It went from an industry where it was specialists who could use it, you had to go to college to use a computer and all that sort of thing where my 80 year old mother was using her Mac up until the day she died. And that's a fundamental change. That's a fundamental change in taking the power of this technology and putting it into the hands of the people. And it does enormous good for the world too. It's not just something that's for the technical. It's something that allows the world to advance. You think about how differently things happen geopolitically today with things like Facebook and Twitter and this instant news everywhere. And here we are doing a television broadcast on the internet and I'm in my office in the backyard of my home. And it's a major revolution and how things are done. And we wanna continue that. We wanna make that whole model transform into space. And we think that we don't even know as we sit here today as Vector, we don't know what people are gonna do with it. But we know if we give them the tools to do it that that innovation will follow. So you talk about an entire space economy. It seems like hearing you talk, you've kinda got the launchers this phase one, lowering the cost of getting things to space. Then phase two kind of low cost constellations in space. Is there a phase three? What's beyond that? Well, phase three is really just putting together the virtual machine technology that enables these people to put their software onto our satellites and to develop that, that capability that operates on the satellite. So by the time we get there, no, there's no phase four after that. But this turning the whole space problem into one of software that I'm too old to be doing a startup, I guess I'm in my fifties. But I started programming on card readers and my kids today, I've got a 15 year olds, my youngest and they can make computers turn on their head. And what we wanna do, ultimately and are successful be had when even kids can put together space apps and put them up there and run them on our constellations, that we will consider our job done. That sounds pretty awesome. I'm very excited for that. All right, I did wanna end on a couple of interesting questions that we're trying to start to ask all of our guests. And these can be really quick, short one answer type of things or as long as you want them to be. So the first one is moon or Mars first? Mars, of course. Liquid or solids? Liquid's always. Always, liquid's interesting. All right, what should the name of the first vehicle sending humans to Mars be? Apollo. Apollo, when do you think humans will set foot on the moon again? I don't think that'll be until 2030. 2030 for the moon and when will they set foot on Mars? I will go on the limb and predict that Elon will be there by 2025. Oh, so we'll go to Mars before we go to the moon. Of course you were Mars first, so yep. And why space? Space is a unique perspective that gives humanity the ability to see the world as a whole, that there's no other way to do it. You could think of it as a cell phone tower in the sky that doesn't need permitting, but it's really about more than that. It gives us a view of ourselves. This is our fragile little blue planet, and that's why we go there. There's something that draws us there. All right, thank you so much for your time. Where can people go for more information on yourself or vector space systems? Yeah, vectorspacesystems.com, and if you want to know more about me personally, jimtcantrell.com, and you'll read a lot about racing there. Awesome, Jim, thank you so much for taking time out of your Saturday. We're going to take a quick break. 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 decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize a mission of this. Can body base here? The eagle has landed. It's one small step for man. Start. 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 and one more reminder because everyone gets screwed up this time of year. We are changing time zones worldwide. So for those of you in Europe who've already changed your clocks back, the show is already a different time. It's an hour earlier for you. For those of you in the United States who'll be changing your time soon, if you are changing your clock, the time of the live show will be changing for you also. It'll be an hour earlier. If you do not change your clock, the time of the show does not change. The show is always 1800 coordinated universal time. All right, I want to give a huge shout out to all the patrons of tomorrow who've come up to make this specific segment. Easy for me to say. If this episode happened, la, la, la, let's get all the words out. These are the people who contributed $10 or more. They are our premier members who are going to get access to our Slack channel. We've also got our producers. These are people who have contributed $5 or more. They get free worldwide shipping on our swag store and a bunch of other things. We also have our Patreon plus subscribers. They're going to get access to After Dark early. They're $2.50 or more. They get a bunch of other rewards as well, such as Hangouts when we have those approximately quarterly or so. And we've also got our patrons. These are between $1 and $2.49. They're going to get your name in the show and of course, those Google Hangouts as well. Thank you to all of the patrons for helping make all of this happen. We actually have some behind the scenes shots. So your patronage goes to making this show better and this is some of what it does. We've actually got a shot. This is us getting new wood for, this was this last, yep, yep, that's Jared working hard. Jared and Dada working hard. That actually gets heavy after a while. It is. Yeah, and we also have many sheets of MDF. What's interesting is we chose MDF because it is one of Dada's favorite substances to work with. I did not know that. No. So he's actually requested that a good chunk of additional items be made out of MDF. No, thank you. We call this. He's laughing wildly. You guys can't hear him, but Dada is close to cursing Ben out right now. What you're seeing is the soda, like the dust from like one or two cuts of MDF. We're calling it our Martian Regolith. It is, let me tell you, all over the studio, it is coating everything, absolutely everything. We painted one of these walls black. It is now basically that brown color again. And then we also, I wanted to show you something that we haven't purchased yet. This is kind of cool. We've been going back and forth and back and forth. For those of you in the Slack channel, you've already seen this, but these are the new interview chairs that we'll be getting. These are kind of neat. They're way more expensive than they should be, but I think they look kind of cool. We don't really like the base, the pedestal, like the feet that we're not huge fans of. So we may custom build something there, but. Let's make it out of MDF. We are definitely making it out. You know what? I don't think we need to buy that chair. We'll just build a chair out of MDF. It had to be so fake. Because you'll sit in it and it will just crumble into dust and it'll be nice and soft. It'll be great. Or we could just bag the regalus into bags and that can be the cushion. It's so messy, guys. It is so messy. It is the worst thing to work with ever. So for those of you who are Premier members, if you haven't accepted that Slack invite, go check your email again. Go accept that Slack invite. Because you get like a good chunk of these pictures. Dutta cursing at me when I'm talking about MDF, which is hilarious. And then you also have other, a lot more behind the scenes photos of us actually building this thing. Actually in there you have the full CAD drawings of what all of it's going to look like. That is only available to our Premier members. Now our other patrons have had little glimpses inside. They've actually had access to some other pictures in a really cool time lapse video that's only available to our patrons. Actually I believe all patron levels got access to that time lapse. It kind of trickles down, right? So you get it sooner with your different reward levels. Sonya, I again thank you to all of our patrons who are enabling us to do these really cool things. So yeah, this is our temporary set. It's kind of, it is what it is right now, but I'll tell you by orbit 10 next year, this is all going to be fantastic. And we keep playing with the show format a little bit. You'll notice us doing that week after week to try to really get it honed in for orbit 10. All right, let's go ahead and get started for our comments from our last week's show, which was a small sats with Vax. I like that title, that was a fun one. It's like a children's show. Well then, I was definitely one who came up with that title. Yep. All right, Capcom, take us away. This first comment comes from side right, Zaquidex says, admit it. You're just glad you don't have to pronounce Schiaparelli anymore. Schiaparelli. Schiaparelli. Schiaparelli. Schiaparelli. Schiaparelli. Schiaparelli. I think we've pronounced it every single way in this show, probably in the same show. Yeah, or parallel-y. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. We do trip over some of these a lot. And then every... Train. And then, yeah, I thought it was an earthquake for a second. You probably can't hear it because we have high pass filters on everything that allows the high frequencies through and it cuts out the low frequencies. But there is a train track, like 100 feet away from this building. And that train was large enough that the whole table shook. It was all sorts of awesome. All right, anyhow, moving on. Everyone's like, why are you talking about things we can't perceive on camera? Just ignore it. Moving on. I did. So next comes off of YouTube. Kind of comes from Ryan Duncan. Says, I think Cube sat with a descent camera and CPU system with an electromagnet power by either radioactive degradation or even solar could work, couldn't it? I envisioned the CPU would set her position in a spot where the field cancels itself out. So what's this in reference to? I have no idea, but it was put in there and so I read it. You've got all this room, but only Vax was here to answer this question. Oh, this is, Vax says, rad hardening equipment to make small sats last longer. Vax didn't say that, Dada said it, but keep going. Someone said that and I heard it in my ear, but you guys weren't there. I heard voices in my head that you didn't hear. With a decent camera. Yeah, I mean, and actually, if you have a decent enough EM shield around it, that's what our magnetosphere is essentially. We have a giant electromagnetic magnetic shield around the earth. You can build a big enough one around your small set. That would do it too. Although I'm not sure we have to rad harden it that much. I mean, a little bit, but just let the radiation rip through it and just have enough where you can deal with it. Yeah, although CMOS sensors don't, CCD sensors really hate radiation. You can actually watch the radiation just rip through and destroy the pixels. CMOS is a little better with that, but yeah, interesting. Yeah, you could probably pull that off. Cool. Okay, next up. All right. Next one comes up also off of YouTube. It comes from Gonzo God 75. I can say things. We all need easily interested people like Vax Headroom. Yes. Just because I might know what's happening with cute sets doesn't mean that Joe and Jane Citizen do. So thanks, Emery. I agree. All right. I think that's why we have everyone kind of here, right? You're able to make nerdy, constellation-y stuff easy to understand. Yeah. And you're able to make nerdy, rocketry stuff easy to understand. Nerd. All right. So, I mean, there's everyone. Nerd. Well, yeah. What I wanted to know was what the difference was between the different rockets because I'm just calling something of five doesn't inherently mean anything to me. I'm sorry. It could actually be smaller. The five could be smaller than the four. Yeah. And I can't call it a Delta V because that's a totally different thing. It's super annoying. Yeah, it's not a Delta V. I know. It's a Delta V. I get it. It's super annoying though. It's a Delta V. Just saying. Yes, wheels five. We like Vaxiloc. Not only is he great with like the Northrop Grumman stuff and doing all of that, his Sea Dragon interview was all sorts of epic. And if you guys haven't seen the Sea Dragon interview, definitely go back. That is one of my favorite episodes because it is, it's a little nerdy. It's a little nerdy, but the Sea Dragon project was so beautiful in its simplicity. No turbo pumps. No big huge. It's not about being making the most efficient engine. In fact, it's pretty much what's the opposite of the most efficient engine. I guess we call that Sea Dragon. It's just... Inefficient. It's super inefficient, but it's so large. It's so massive, it doesn't matter. So, Dada's saying in my head that there were several comments asking for a redo between Sea Dragon and the car. I mean, I don't have to do the last comment. Does everyone else want to take my words away from me? You guys suck a whole lot right now. Yeah? Yeah. Dada. Yeah, is that what's going on? Yeah, Dada. All right, so last comment comes off of YouTube from one Jval90. Thank you, J for this comment. Hey, Kari. Because apparently everybody else agrees with you. Hey, Kari. What's Jval90 say? I want to see an episode about the Sea Dragon versus SpaceX BFR. Include the point that rockets seem to scale less on literally once than they get above a certain size. Well done. Thanks. Well done. Because that's... In any case, I did meet a Delta IV, not a Delta V. Sorry. That was my IV joke that didn't go over well. No, I got it. I understand what you were saying. I know most people don't understand, but some people don't understand and I felt like I needed to explain. Yeah, you were saying... Yeah. It made sense. If you didn't get it, go back. She was joking. It's fine. It doesn't matter. So everyone wants a Sea Dragon and SpaceX BFR episode. Awesome. Want to know why? Because Vax was awesome. You know what you should do? We have Vax here in orbit 10 and put him on studio like in set. I think that would be a really great... Can we just put him in the corner though? Just in the corner? I don't know, like Skype him from the next room? That would be a little hilarious. Like fly him all the way out here and then have him Skype like from here. Skype him from our house. No, no, from like 10 feet away. Have him behind the set. Yeah, but I can't say that reference. No one knows what it looks like. Yeah, all right. From behind the set. Don't have made it funny, but you have no point of contact. So there you go. Itar redacted. Itar redacted. All right. That's our show this week. Thank you all so much. Curious to what you guys thought of the news segment. How did that flow for you? Did you like it better than what we've been doing the last two weeks? We're kind of trying an on-off thing to try to get the news better. I think, you know what? I'll talk about it after dark and my thought process on that. So all right. Thanks so much and we'll see you next week.