 Hello everybody, my name's Space Mike and I wanted to talk about a really interesting project that's coming out of Europe that is dubbed Callisto that would use different European abilities to launch, recover and refly a rocket from the Guiana Space Center in South America. This is your space pod for Tuesday, January 16th, 2018. The French and German space agencies, CNES and DLR respectively, have for the past two years collaborating on a scaled-down rocket that would allow Europe to practice different aspects of recovery and reuse. Callisto's first flight is planned for 2020. Now, Callisto officials have said that the goal of the program is not to create a new vehicle in 2020. The Ariane 6 is scheduled to debut that same year, but rather the goal of the program is to establish a base of knowledge for future launch vehicles that could maybe be reusable. Now, this program is almost working in parallel with the Prometheus project, an idea to have reusable engines, but not an entirely reusable rocket. And these reusable engines would have deployable wings, propellers and landing gear to land at a runway like a normal airplane. Now, the Prometheus project started off as a CNES idea, but late last year it became an ESA project with significantly more funding to seriously consider reusability for Ariane space in development with the Ariane 6. Now, both programs, both the Prometheus and this Callisto program would study what options Ariane space would have to follow to make Ariane 6 a reusable vehicle. And not even Ariane 6, but there's actually a new project called Ariane Next that would either be partially or fully recoverable and reusable. The main difference between the Callisto project and SpaceX's reusable falcons is the size. Callisto would be even smaller than Falcon 1 and also the fuel choice. Falcon 9s use liquid oxygen and kerosene, whereas Callisto would use liquid oxygen and either liquid hydrogen or methane. So I think that this is a really interesting idea and the different concepts that they have had to have reusability for their different rockets, I think is a really cool sign. And it's a little bit of the SpaceX effect seeing them be able to land their rockets now 21 times and be able to have flown five customers on previously flown rockets. This is definitely changing the space industry and I really like to see ESA taking notice of this. But in any case, I really hope that you get a chance to check out our last episode this past week, orbit11.02 if you haven't seen that already. And we have our live shows every Saturday at 1800 Coordinated Universal Time. Be sure to like and subscribe and hit the notifications so that you can be notified whenever we do have a new video and especially whenever we go live. But thank you very much for joining me. My name is Space Mike. Don't forget to like and subscribe and keep moving onwards and upwards everybody. And don't forget, add Astra to the stars.