 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 1800 hours, coordinated universal time, that's six 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 1800 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 helped 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 the 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. Head on over 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, 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 into 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 going to 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. 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? And the reusability or rapid low cost production? Also it's interesting, both SpaceX and Rocket Labs personally had things to do with. That was one of 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 geo-stationary market. And when one of the other vector founders, John Garvey and I, we're 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 at 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 geo-stationary 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, 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 in the beginning. And so what we're doing is building a vehicle that can be mass produced truly on 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 one, 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 100 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 sets and pico sets. So you actually have a launcher where I can, if I have a nano set 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? Yeah, that's getting down into the technical ways, 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 is 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 a 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. And so we've demonstrated the vehicle itself as 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 chat room asks, the 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 and put them back on the launch pad. We do have some service items on the engines themselves that are a little different than SpaceX would 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 NanoSats? 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 made 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, we'll start launching in 2018. And we have people who were so enthusiastic about getting into space who've 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 Tel, 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 in 2018 and 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 Spaceport Alaska is, 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 agency 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 overflight concerns. The whole safety regulations with respect to the FAA are easier 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 spaceport 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 a hundred 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 a hundred 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 they're in 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 24-7. 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 gonna 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 gonna orbit the earth that's gonna go beyond earth and 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 Nim which is will there be live launch coverage of these? Yeah, so what we wanna do is to have as much public engagement in what we're doing as possible and when we say we wanna 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 wanna 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 them your 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 leave 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 Friedman and Bruce Murray they were all frustrated with the lack of progress that NASA was making this was post-fiking and 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 what was really one of the first people that did it was people who 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 and 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 and 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 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 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 on our satellites and to develop that capability that operates on the satellite so by the time we get there now 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 old's my youngest and they can make computers turn on their head and what we wanna do ultimately and our success will 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 wanna know more about me personally JimTacanFell.com and you'll read a lot about racing there.