 Hey, what's up everybody? This week I wanted to talk about some really interesting news regarding Bigelow Aerospace and the creation of a new sister company called Bigelow Space Operations, which is going to handle all of the sales, operations, and customer service regarding all of the management of the inflatable space stations that Bigelow Aerospace is building. So this week I wanted to talk about what all of this means and some of the exciting partnerships that have come up from it. This is your space pod for Tuesday, February 27th, 2018. The first task or goal of this new company is basically to quantify in detail the global, national, and corporate commercial space interest for these orbiting space stations. The subject has kind of had a lot of ambiguity for many years, and Bigelow Space Operations is going to be spending several millions of dollars this year to establish concrete answers and find out exactly who the interested customers are. This concerns me slightly, but let's move on to what exactly this company is going to be doing. Bigelow plans to launch one of two of the B-330 space stations by the year 2021, the first of which will hopefully launch under the X-space proposal to be attached first to the International Space Station. The module would stay at the International Space Station for hopefully many years and serve as a type of transition for all the different science and experiments done at the station after the ISS operations end whenever that might be. But whenever the time would come, the B-330 module would separate from the International Space Station and await the next B-330 module to form the first commercial complex where microgravity research could still be conducted. Now to help facilitate this goal, Bigelow Space Operations recently announced a partnership with the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, or CASIS, which is the manager of the International Space Station, at least the U.S. National Laboratory side of it. So, Bigelow Space Operations is now officially a user of the ISS National Lab, and it will be facilitating the different integration of payloads for commercial, academic, and government customers. So, in this capacity, Bigelow Space Operations intends to contract with other payload-integrating companies and to promote the services of the ISS National Lab, promote other payload-facilitating companies, and develop new relationships for the ISS and Bigelow Aerospace Stations. And with a lot larger commercial platforms on the horizon, BSO recognizes that this is a really important step that they need to take of gaining experience at the ISS so they can move on to a lot more of their bigger ambitions, especially considering the partnerships that they have with United Launch Alliance and Boeing and all of the different goals that they want to have of creating a very vibrant space economy, not just for science but for tourism and mining and just developing a big space economy, all of these goals are moving forward in this really cool direction, and I'm really excited for this. And even just this partnership with CASIS is something that's really exciting and will probably yield a lot of really cool science in the future. So, we're going to have to wait and see how things happen, but I'm excited that things are finally ramping up and getting serious for Bigelow Aerospace and what this could mean for the future. So, hopefully, this will bring space more accessible to everybody. In the meantime, though, be sure to check out our last week's show, Orbit 11.08, where we had a fantastic interview with Dr. Alan Stern. And be sure to check out our live show every Saturday at 1,800 Coordinated Universal Time. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and if you can support us on Patreon or make your support. And until the next time I see you, don't forget, add Astra to the stars.