 Coming up, Blue Origin going to the moon. SpaceX is going beyond the moon. And I'm over the moon with Tori Bruno in today's interview. These moon jokes are so cheesy. All that and more coming up on this episode of Tomorrow. Good morning. How's everything up in the sky? Welcome to Orbit 10 Episode 9. I am Carrie Ann and of course with me is Benjamin and everyday astronaut Tim and another Tim Dada back there and all other sorts of fun, interesting things happening. In any case though, before we get started I do want to give a huge shout out to our escape velocity patrons. These are people who have donated 10 or given us $10 more for this particular segment in this particular episode. And if you would like to get your name in the show, always feel free to head over to patreon.com. I'm speaking very quickly because we have so many huge, huge amazing wonderful things to talk about. This was a great week for space nerds. This week was crazy. The cosmos was like, you care about the moon again. Right. Oh my goodness. Okay, but first of all we need to start off with launches. We have a couple of things. Rocket Roach, we said we would talk about it after dark if you missed that pre-show thing going on. But Ben, tell us a little bit about our Atlas launch. Well first off we have a N-R-O-L-79 launch at National Reconnaissance Office. This is on an Atlas V rocket, check it out. Three, two, we have a mission at the R-E-R-U main engine. One, lift off of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the N-R-O-L-79 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. That launch March 1st at 1749, coordinated universal time out of Vandenberg. That is in the 4-0-1 configuration, meaning 4-meter fairing, no solid strap to the side, and one upper stage engine. That was the 70th Atlas V launch, and it was carrying, as they mentioned, N-R-O-L-79, which is a Naval Ocean Surveillance System, or NOS. It's a spy satellite for the N-R-O, and that's about all the more information you're going to get on one of the U.S. spy satellites. Particularly for a Vandenberg launch, that is the clearest launch I've seen out of there. To be fair, Vandenberg launches are 50-50. They'll either be beautiful and clear, and you get the ocean in the background and those gorgeous mountains and hills, or covered in fog. You're never entirely sure which one you're going to get out of, Andy. But yeah, absolutely gorgeous launch. Next up, a surprise launch from China. This is the KT-2 launch. This happened March 2nd at 2353 as per usual. Not a lot of footage from China, but we'll give you what we got. There you go. This is a brand new rocket. It's a new solid rocket for China. As I mentioned, it's known as the KT-2. It's a small-sat launcher, adding to their, at this point, ginormous fleet of small-sat launchers. And of course the payload was a small-sat, known as TK-1. And it will be, quote, used for remote-sensing telecommunications and experiments in mini-satellite-based technologies. So there you go. Those were the two launches from this last week. That is so great. And I feel like they're just, instead of, you know, how a lot of organizations just build a rocket and then they, like, standardize on it, they build a bunch of them. I feel like China is just, like, building a new rocket for every launch. They're just like, oh, let's start over with some scratch, build a new rocket. They have so many different rockets at this point. You need to iterate. Like, you need to, right? I guess. You need to go, that wasn't quite right. I need to fix this. They're just throwing rockets at the wall and seeing what sticks. Like, that one was cool. Let's try this one, though. I have no qualms with that. As far as I'm concerned, if you can do it, do it. They're doing it. They're doing it. Full-blown Kerbal. Full-blown Kerbal. Yes, that's exactly it. That's full-blown Kerbal. That's what we need, yeah. That's totally what we need. Oh, my goodness. Okay, so Tim, start us off with some news that I don't think anybody was really expecting. No. So, okay, for those of you that don't know, on Sunday, Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, tweeted randomly, like, in the middle of the afternoon, something like announcement tomorrow at 1 p.m. And that's not something he typically does for SpaceX. And so everyone kind of was sitting there going, oh, you know, speculating what it will be, what it will be. A lot of people were thinking spacesuits or, you know, something about Mars or something. And out of the blue, he announces that they have two people who have paid a significant down payment to fly around the moon at the end of 2018. Absolutely mind-blowing. I don't think anyone saw this coming. So, what they ended up doing, so they'll be taking their crew dragon capsule, which should be testing this year. At the end of this year, it should be doing a crewless, just a demo mission. And then they will be putting it on top of their Falcon Heavy, which should be flying here, sometime hopefully this year. It needs to have a few flights on it, I think before we consider putting humans on board. And that Falcon Heavy will be able to push a crew dragon capsule out to a nice little free return trajectory around the moon and back. And it's going to be absolutely incredible. So, yeah, I mean, that's really about all the details we have at this point. But some of the fun things would be, if it does fly at the end of 2018, it could coincide with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8, which Apollo 8 was a CIS lunar flight around the moon. So, that'd be really cool. And worst goes the worst, if it goes until the next summer, it could coincide with the Apollo 1150th anniversary as well. So, hopefully, between those two, I'm really hoping that one of them ends up happening. I want so bad. That would be really cool. Also, just really quickly, for those of us who weren't alive at the time, note the significance of how closely Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 were. Well, it wasn't like they were back to back. No, but I mean, within six months, we did some really amazing, major, crazy pants things. Crazy pants. Seven months. Yeah, that's huge. Apollo 8, Apollo 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 11 within seven months. That's insane. Well, we did the entire lunar program in under a decade. No, I know, but I'm just saying. But hey, we barely got humans up. Hey, we threw them around the moon. Hey, we got them on the moon. We threw them around the moon. No, actually, one big difference is, remember, Apollo 8 did enter lunar orbit. Yeah. So it actually went into lunar orbit, and I don't believe Grey Dragon is doing that. I don't know if that's what we're calling it. Grey Dragon is doing a free return trajectory, which means it doesn't, well, it doesn't have enough delta V, most likely, to put itself into lunar orbit. And then, again, break lunar orbit in order to make it back to Earth. So it's just doing a clean little figure 8 pattern, which will still be really cool. Yeah. And rumor has it, this is the best way actually from Earth that people will have ever been. Wow. So they're going to probably break Apollo 13's record, which I think was, I don't quite remember, something like 240 or 50,000 miles, and it sounds like they're going to go way beyond that even, which will be really, really cool. Nice. Not that that wasn't a huge announcement, but the origin is also same. Jeff Bezos was like, yeah, cool, that's two. A lot of stuff. This isn't really... I love this picture of Jeff Bezos, too. Yes. It's all like, I actually kind of want that blue origin. I want the blue coat is what I want. They've been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and the President Trump transition team talking about developing a lunar spacecraft and lander. They are planning to a blue moon lunar lander at the Shackleton crater on the moon's south pole. That specific spot is important because there is water, ideally frozen because it's kind of like on the cusp of sunlight and not sunlight. Darkness? I was going to say moonlight, but that doesn't apply there. We'll just say moonlight. It sounds way better than rain. Sun and darkness. And so they'll have frozen water and, but they'll be close enough where they can use the solar power for the photovoltaics and sun and power generation. Love it. They're going to first off deliver gear for experiments, cargoes and HABS, hopefully by the mid-2020. Now, what I didn't get clarification on is, is that like June 2020, or do they mean 2025? I assume. Oh, like the mid-2020s? Uh-huh. It said mid-2020 or year. Exactly. So I'm going to go with mid-2020 because it's more ambitious and I want us to go there faster. It sounds way clearer. It sounds way clearer, but I have no idea. So one of the two, I mean still 2025 or 2020. That's still pretty close. Yeah. Here's the neat thing. They're developing the technology for these landers now. So they're saying the new shepherd vehicle that they've got could be used as the kind of the landing technology for landing on the moon. So they're kind of, all the stuff they're testing here on Earth, they can then reuse on the moon. Sure. And then Jeff Bezos did have a couple of quotes out of this. The first one being, a permanently inhabited lunar settlement is a difficult and worthy objective. I sense a lot of people are excited about this. He also said, Blue Moon is all about cost-effective delivery of mass to the surface of the moon. Any credible first lunar settlement will require that capability. And one could argue, as we've had Dave Massin on the show multiple times, saying moon first before Mars, you can use the moon as a launching post for Mars. So he could be setting up some pretty cool stuff for going to Mars in the future. Yeah. Yeah. Really cool. Very much so. Yeah, something not quite as cool as that. Don't want to talk about what I was going to talk about next. Yes, please. Please. Oh, after talking about two awesome moon missions, it's time to talk about safety. Yes. For everyone's... It is boring, but it's... Everyone's favorite topic. Like, nobody wants anybody to get hurt in all of these things. Like, we... That's true. All we want is to succeed. So safety's part of that. So part of the safety thing is, traditionally, there's literally been a guy kind of sitting there with his hand over a button. Hopefully, the button has like a cover on it or something, but he's sitting there waiting and watching the trajectory of each rocket launch and making sure that, it goes off course and looks like it's going to, you know, do anything that could remotely come into contact with property or humans. They go boom and it goes boomy, right? And that's a termination system, a flight termination system. Well, in the most... And recently, the Air Force has been giving out... They basically developed an autonomous flight safety system, or AFSS. And what this does is it's actually been flying on the backup system as a secondary system to a lot of rockets lately, but for the first time on SpaceX's CRS-10, it was the primary system. And what this is is a 100% automated version of that flight termination system. So if it has a lot of redundant parts inside it, different GPS trackers and inertial movement units are things that can sense which direction it's going. And if it senses that something's wrong and it's outside of its parameter, it will blow itself up. And that's actually a really good... I know that sounds... To me, that sounds like a thing that could fail really, but this is to prevent... It's basically an abundance of caution. And another thing you might say is, why are they worrying about this right now? Well, it's really hard to track as spacecraft get more and more advanced and as they get more and more complicated, such as the Falcon Heavy, it will have three cores flying and a second stage flying. And if you have to track all four of those moving parts through the sky, you better have some autonomous system that's paying attention, a lot closer attention than a human could, you know? At least it's faster. Make those calculations that much faster. So, yeah, adding to that, I actually know that as AFTS, so Thomas Flight Termination Systems. So I don't know if there are two different acronyms for the same thing because the traditional termination system is known as FTS, Flight Termination Systems. So I don't know if they just switch the acronym if they're both or what the deal is, but you may hear it referred to as AFTS as well. One other thing and one of the reasons this is important is particularly looking at the East Coast launch sites. We've got a lot of different people trying to launch out of there. We've got ULA with the Atlas Delta and Sun Falcon. We've got SpaceX with their Falcon rockets. Then we've got Blue Origin going to start launching out of there. I forgot which slick they have. Slick 30. Then we've got, I don't remember if I mentioned Space Launch System going to start launching out of there. And then there was another SmallSat launcher that just announced launching out of there. If the range needed to track and perform flight termination on every single one of those launchers, we would have contention in the turnaround time necessary to launch from Provider A to Provider B, Provider C. So moving to AFTS allows the range to actually support a greater number of launches, which would be very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. All right, Ben. A little more. There was some more news. More news. So we'll end with this one. Virgin Galactic is breaking up. It sounds bad. It does. It's actually not bad. It's actually pretty cool. No, it's a good thing. It's a good thing. They're splitting the company. Right now there's the Spaceship Company and Virgin Galactic. The Spaceship Company makes the Spaceships. Virgin Galactic will then fly and operate said Spaceships. Well, now there are going to be two different operating companies. One is Virgin Galactic. And the second is going to be Virgin Orbit. Virgin Orbit is basically taking their Launcher 1 program and moving it into its own company. So there you see, that's actually Cosmic Girl. That is a Boeing 747 that has been repainted. It's from Virgin Atlantic. They repainted it with the Virgin Galactic soon to be Virgin Orbit logo. And off of that is what they will drop Launcher 1 from. Now George Whitesides, who is currently the CEO of Virgin Galactic, will remain CEO of both companies. So he's CEO of Virgin Galactic and of Virgin Orbit. And then Dan Hart, who is a veteran Boeing executive, will become Virgin Orbit's president. And then you can see the 747 Cosmic Girl dropping Launcher 1. Awesome. And the second price of one of those launches, by the way, is below $10 million per flight. And it's going to be able to loft 200 kilograms, which is about 440 pounds to low Earth orbit. And they're hoping to debut fly this in the end of this year, 2017. So that'll be really cool. Set the timers to December 31st. Aw, that's just neat. Come on, that's how the space industry goes. The whole industry feels like sometimes for sure. Yeah, for sure. Oh my goodness. Okay. That was great, you guys. We had some really great news. Yeah. That was awesome. We covered some really big things, really exciting things. And yeah. So I feel good about this. You? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to go ahead and head into break. And when we come back, our very own Jared Head has a great interview coming up with the one and only Tori Bruno. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hello, folks. And welcome back to tomorrow. Now before we get started with our interview with Tori Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance, we first want to thank our patrons of tomorrow of the escape velocity variety. These folks are giving us $10 or more per episode. And in addition to that, we also want to thank our orbital variety folks. These folks are giving us $5 or more per episode. And if you would like to help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com. This is it, everybody. We've been waiting very long time to bring you on Mr. Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance. Just a little bit of background about yourself. You served as the vice president and general manager of the Lockheed Martin Strategic and Missile Defense Systems. You joined ULA on August 12th, 2014. And you've been there for just about three years. Well, you've been at Lockheed Martin for over 30 years since 1984. You have a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. And you've also written two books very interestingly about the Knights Templar as organization for management, which is pretty interesting. So, Tori, welcome to tomorrow and welcome to our observation deck. Well, thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. And I gotta say, I love that news report. I'm all jazzed and excited now. Yeah, it's always exciting when we've got so much to talk about. And that's been one of the great things over the past couple of years, is that it seems like every week we get more and more to talk about. So, speaking of talking about, let's talk a little bit about you to go ahead and get the interview started off. You're the CEO of United Launch Alliance, one of the biggest aerospace companies here in the United States and in the world. And what is your day-to-day like at United Launch Alliance? Oh, a typical day at ULA? Sure. I was gonna tell you that before I do that, I think we have to take a moment and acknowledge your hair. Oh, yes. That is awesome. Yes, it's pretty... Could I sport that? Would it work for me? I think you could. And one of the cool things is that you'll notice it's an aerodynamic feature. So, it ends up stabilizing you as you walk. Yeah, turbulence though. Yeah, very good. Well, yeah, so typical day for me at ULA. So, when I'm here, when I'm in Colorado where headquarters is, because I do travel a lot, it starts early. I'll wake up at anywhere between 3 and 4 a.m. the alarm clock never goes off because there's space happening and you just sort of wake up and you want to get going. Now, I'll come into the office. I usually get there before a lot of other folks and I'll catch up on some paperwork and stuff. But then we start the day with first looking at the manifest, what launches are coming up? What is the team working on? Do they have everything they need to be able to solve whatever problem might be on the pad or any issue that they're trying to work? And then we'll typically go off and we'll work on our strategy. We always have that north star in really in focus. Where are we trying to go to really change the future of space, transform our company, make things like our revolutionary ASIS upper stage happen? That gets talked about every single day. Then we'll work with our people. We'll have maybe a skip level meeting. I should probably explain what that is. Sure. So about once a week, certainly maybe two, three times a month at a minimum, I like to bring folks in to see me who don't work directly for me. And so it might be a group of new hires. It could be a group of frontline managers, people who are in an organization that would not normally see me or work directly for me. And we close before we get about a dozen of them. I sit back and I say, okay, it's a skip level meeting. You have to do all the work. You guys want to talk about. You can ask me anything. You can tell me anything you think I'm the CEO. And then they believe in conversation. Interesting. Yeah. Sounds like a pretty good organization that you've got going. So speaking of that, what's your philosophy in running an aerospace company? Because there's many different approaches that you can take. So what's your philosophy on it? Well, sure. Some people think that an aerospace company is all about technology. And there's certainly truth to that. The technological things that we do are so far above and beyond what any other industry requires. But the secret is it's not actually about the technology. It's about the people. A company like ours, any true aerospace company, the people are the most precious asset. It is all about the people. It's about their knowledge, their dedication, and their commitment to the mission. What do you feel is interesting about working with people in aerospace? What's the overarching theme that you see with people in aerospace? Well, there's all kinds of interesting things. I mean, first off, you get to work with some of the smartest people on the planet. And it's inspiring to be around them. Even your interns and your entry level people, they bring such an energy and commitment. Everybody cares about the mission really deeply. And then I'll just share that in our industry, there is probably a higher coefficient of eccentricity than maybe in other businesses. Yeah, just a little bit sometimes with that. I know I'm a recovery and aerospace engineer, so it's definitely one of those things I'm very well familiar with in that. So sort of changing gears a little bit to talk a little bit more about the technical aspects of things. What can you tell us about your upcoming Vulcan launch system? Vulcan's pretty exciting. So we're starting with the booster, which replaces the venerable RD-180, sort of Russian rocket engine with an American engine using the same very advanced thermodynamic cycle, but much more producible, much lower cost. And that rocket, that booster, which is more powerful than what we have on Atlas today, and more affordable, also supports the ASIS upper stage that will go on that rocket in the next step. So is Vulcan still in its design phase or is it moving towards production? So both. So when you go through the life cycle of designing a rocket, there's these big milestones, you'll be familiar with them as an aerospace engineer, but the first major one is called the preliminary design review. That happened a year ago. We're coming up on a critical design review this year, and at that point you've really nailed down your design and you're confident to release everything to manufacturing. However, some items take so long to build that they have been in development for a long time and they've already begun being produced. And a great example would be Blue Origin's BE4 rocket engine that will replace the RD-180. Now what makes Vulcan a superior choice to your current launch vehicles? Is it just the power and the lifting capacity or is there something else involved in it that makes it better than what you've currently got? Sure, it's a combination thing. So it is a more powerful rocket. It's a rocket that is easier to produce and costs less to manufacture. It is also quicker to assemble at the launch site, integrate with a spacecraft and put into space. As we've been designing it, we've brought through the latest techniques and philosophies around design, and we are using a process we call Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, and so we'll have our engineering teams after they've built the basic architect rocket, zero in and we call them sprints on a specific subsystem. They'll get it designed pretty well, they'll be happy with it, and they race down to the factory or to the launch site where we have models made either adequately manufactured or even just plywood. We'll get the techs, people who build and launch them, they'll work together. Sometimes they'll throw the whole design out and they'll come up with a new one that's very easy to put together and then they'll move on to the next system. And so it's a whole philosophy around having a rocket that is more flexible can launch very easily a very wide spectrum of spacecraft at a much lower cost and of course it's easier to put together, it's more reliable, you're less likely to make a mistake when you assemble it, it's just that whole universe. Now I know from working on my own projects that there's always challenges that come up and obstacles to overcome. So what are some of the challenges that you've had to come up with and face on your own while developing Vulcan? Well sure, we're going to have a pretty large content of additively manufactured hardware. So we have had to figure out which parts are appropriate for that. Everything on the rocket isn't actually a good candidate for additive manufacturing. So you have to pick the right ones. The next thing that's a challenge just about that one particular element is that additively manufactured parts are so new there are not big databases of material properties and strengths and erosion rates so you really have to develop that as you go. If you use a conventional material it's a completely different story. There's a handbook, you can pull it off the shelf, there's standards, you don't have that with AM. And then of course there's the engine itself. We're carrying these two engines along in parallel until we make our down selection. They use different propellants and that has a fundamental impact on the design of the booster itself. So we're having to bring both designs along. One is much farther along than the other but keeping the ability to switch back if we have to and then also maintaining all the hooks and connections to be able to put that asus upper stage on top of the booster. To talk a little bit about that reusability is kind of the big buzzword in spaceflight right now. If you want to get a lot of people talking about you you just say the word reusability and that's the key way to do it. So how's Vulkan going to be incorporating reusability? Yeah, so there's two things. There's a reusability element to the booster itself which is much along the same kind of lines is what other people are trying to accomplish in terms of economics. Can we make this simply less expensive to launch a rocket? And so we've taken a little bit different track than some of the other folks. We really kind of put those systems engineering lenses on and said okay you could fly back the whole booster. There's good reasons to do that and once you get the hang of it it's going to save you money. But let's take another broader look at it and when we did we said well it turns out that two-thirds of the price of that thing is literally one part. It's the rocket engine. And so our approach to reusability on the booster is to just capture the engine itself sever it from the booster let it re-enter behind an inflatable heat shield that we're developing together with NASA they're producing it for the next Mars mission some parachutes scoop it up with an aircraft and take it home just like the old corona space satellite and the advantages of that approach that we like are the fact that you don't have to save any propellant to fly home with. So you get to do it every single time. No spacecraft would be so heavy that you weren't able to reuse it. And then you don't have to capture the parts of the booster that are inexpensive and yet difficult to refurbishing and recover. But that's kind of mundane. I mean as cool as that is the part that's really exciting is the upper stage. That's a revolution. ASUS is going to change everything about how we go to space and what we're able to do there because it will be a fully reusable refuelable in-space stage that will become the pickup truck of space. We will stop de-orbiting our upper stage we'll leave it there every time we take a primary mission up gas it up and begin building a fleet a transportation system that will allow us to really develop salooner space. So ESL Burndi one of our chat room members has a really good question which is that Vulcan is going to be he asked that Vulcan is going to fly with a Centaur upper stage on the first flight so when can we expect ASUS to fly? So ASUS will fly about 2022-2023 could fly faster in fact if we did not need to replace the Russian route we'll probably be doing ASUS first but since most of the money is coming privately we're doing it kind of in series first the booster which will fly with Vulcan Centaur then we'll do ASUS we'll retire Centaur and Centaur will never fly again. So what are some of the difficulties that you're having to deal with with ASUS? Because this is something that nobody has truly nobody really has ever done before which is refueling in space so what are some of the things that you have to deal with in that? Sure, I'd put them in two buckets there's technology and then there's culture and acceptance because it's so radically different in terms of what can be done so let me start with the technology piece you know the fundamental idea behind ASUS that allows it to do what it's going to do which is to have a tremendously long lifespan in space is that we capture our propellants see our upper stage is a cryogenic upper stage unlike many others which means that the propellants are very very cold so cold that even in the freezing temperatures of space they're continually boiling off and that is what limits the life of the stage well on ASUS the idea is to capture those propellants don't waste them to space bring them back down put them inside a system that can use those propellants for power so today you know Centaurs a conventional stage there's a hydrazine system for attitude control there's a big helium farm with models that provide pressure inside the propellant tanks to push the propellants out through the engine and there's long duration batteries well if we can capture that boil off propellant and make use of its energy all that stuff goes away we actually are developing an internal combustion engine with Roush the race car company that will burn hydrogen and oxygen as propellants and run a piston engine and then that piston engine runs a heat exchanger compressor to push the propellants out through the engine so the helium goes away we're developing a hydrogen thruster that will replace the whole hydrazine propulsion system and then since it's an engine we'll just hook up an alternator for power and you don't have any batteries anymore any long duration batteries now to go back into our chat room Jason 519 has a question that I think will kind of lead into my questions about Cislunar 1000 which is that this question is these days we usually have six people in orbit continually what do you think that space-based workforce will be in ten years? it'll be several hundred so this is the really exciting thing, Jared to be alive right now when we are about to take our first bold steps for a permanent human presence beyond this planet the caller, the texture is exactly right it's just a handful of people they're astronauts, they're elite folks that have trained they're really tourists if you will they're not in the commercial sense but they're people that visit space and are going to come home when we are able to put this transportation system in space we're going to be able to do economic activities in space we're going to put businesses in space which means jobs so people will go to space because their job is in space and they'll live there they'll become their new home and all of that is going to happen so can you explain Cislunar 1000 because it sounds like from my reading of what Cislunar 1000 is that you guys are going to be helping really enable this so what is Cislunar 1000? Cislunar 1000 is our vision for the first thousand people that live and work in space and so it's a concept where there is a transportation system it's got nodes in it I'm going to go build the rail with the space and then we have lots of friends and partners and colleagues that are entrepreneurs for space businesses that are going to use that transportation system to go to space to generate wealth and jobs and really create that infrastructure that will become sort of the new frontier will people go there because they can have a better life there but why is this Cislunar 1000 space how is it economically important? Well it turns out that there are just tremendous resources in Cislunar space and all of the things that we think about here on earth that are rare and therefore valuable precious metals and rare materials and things like that they're really only rare here on earth because of their density all the millennia they have sunk to the sort of the inner part of our planet where they're very difficult to get at and therefore very expensive all of those materials reside in abundance on asteroids and on the moon and because of lesser intensity of the gravity they're basically just laying there it's like the California gold rush where gold was laying in streams waiting to be picked up it's like that there there's over 1500 near earth objects asteroids if you will between here and the moon that have such an abundance of wealth and materials it defies human imagination and it turns out that you know two thirds of the energy to get anywhere in the solar system is just climbing out of the earth well into Leo and once you're up there where Asis will be building up this fleet of space trucks it is much much more practical to then get around between earth and the moon and the near earth objects to take advantage of that tremendous you know body of natural resources so Explorer one of our chat room members has a question do you see us mining asteroids in 10 to 20 years so I would imagine CIS Lunar 1000 would definitely enable you to do that absolutely I see us prospecting the asteroids within the next 5 to 10 and mining them easily within the next 10 to 20 so another question from our chat room from Destructor 1701 is asking is CIS Lunar 1000 independent of government or does it require some government help for you to actually do this well government absolutely plays a role you know fundamentally it is a private commercial activity but government plays a key role in terms of helping to establish the environment that people will operate on the exploration that the government has already done that NASA has done it allows us the technologies in the understanding now commercially to go exploit this and then there is a whole regime of you know legal and property rights and regulation that will need to be in place if we are going to have a company you know gather investors and hire people and spend money to go out and prospect an asteroid and find just the right you know richest place to go mine it and bring it back and take it back to earth they need to be able to own that resource they need to be able to sell it and they need to be able to protect their mining claim you can't have somebody else just sit back and watch until they find the richest deposits and then zoom in and try and take them at the same time so government absolutely plays a role they will also be places where the government can be sort of a key anchor customer you know one of the activities that will happen very early will be commercial that's in near earth orbit doing research in gravity manufacturing and so there will be opportunities for our government here in the US but also other governments who would like to have the ability to expand their research footprint that's an opportunity that will help that business get going and then practice its commercial customers so I'm going to take a question from our chat room from Andrew Shier and kind of modify it a little bit about my if CIS Lunar 1000 is mining and transportation focus but I'm also going to add on about expanding humanities reach to the solar system do you see CIS Lunar 1000 as something to be local or do you see it as something to really expand out into the solar system with oh I think it's the launch pad that expands this out into the solar system remember what I said a few minutes ago it takes so much energy just to get off the surface of the earth if you're really going to run out to Mars and back and other places in the solar system you want to be doing a lot of that activity starting from node that is in CIS Lunar space and so we're looking to see materials that are gathered in CIS Lunar space and manufactured there to create the infrastructure that will create that port you know out to the rest of the out to the rest of the solar system I mean I sort of think of it this way if you live in the Alps but you want to have a shipping trade in the Mediterranean you might want to port down in Italy on the coast some place yeah good place to do it at so is CIS Lunar 1000 a paper plan to get a thousand humans living and working in space or is this an actual reality and if it is something that's being pursued how soon can we see something like CIS Lunar 1000 well I think it absolutely is a reality we're working on the technology so we'll enable it right now I talked about some of the key which is that fundamental enable or build in hardware we're demonstrating a fuel transfer part of that right now at the Marshall Space Flight Center with our partners at NASA all is happening but it's also starting to become a movement building a community of CIS Lunar entrepreneurs about a year or two ago and we just had a really exciting event at our headquarters in Denver about two weeks ago we called this the CIS Lunar Marketplace Workshop and we invited about 60 companies 60 of these space entrepreneurs people who want to manufacture in space, who want to mine space all these different activities we brought them together at our facility and we organized a workshop where they could sort of work on their business plans they could identify what types of services and supply chains they might need what type of infrastructure they might need and then through the day as they built that they interacted with each other so that people suddenly discovered well you know I need this type of support and somebody else would say well that's my business that's what I want to do in space so we need to get together and jointly build our business plan and we're going to continue that to broaden that community connect them to the investor sort of community and now we're even involved with the AIAA so the AIAA has jumped on this and said we want to sponsor panels and conferences to help develop the plans, the architectures the technologies and the standards that all of these businesses will need I kind of want to jump back to ASIS real quick because we do have a question about it from our chat room from Chris DM he's asking how additional fuel is going to be delivered to the ASIS stages sure so it's a journey, first we start by bringing fuel up from the surface of the earth so every rocket typically has some excess capacity once in a while you lift a satellite that is just so heavy you can't get one more kilogram on there but normally the rocket is the rocket and you have big satellites and you have ones and so we will take rockets that have a lot of excess capability and we'll bring extra fuel and then we'll use that fuel initially to refuel the ASIS stages that have gone up and stayed in space over time we will move to mining water from the moon and from the asteroids to produce rocket fuel see I think that is really a discovery of our time that has sort of gone largely unheralded that water is everywhere, it's everywhere we look at the opening of the show people were talking about Jeff's plan to go to the Shackleton Crater where there are perpetual shadows and therefore moon, lunar ice, frozen water there's that elsewhere on the moon, there's that on the asteroids there's water on Mars and of course the poles in Shackleton have over 20 billion metric tons of water and so that's where the propellant will come from over time we'll shift away from bringing it out of Earth's gravity well and start picking it up there where it's much much less expensive and we could actually economically afford to mine it manufacture it into propellant and then sell it, that'll be one of the first instances I think stations in space so from our chat room caster364 is actually asking a very interesting question which is can you see water as a currency sort of like in sci-fi's the expanse do you see it sort of acting as like a currency in space? well sort of I see it really as a fundamental resource that will underpin the cis-lunar economy if you think about Earth Earth is really foundational relative to fossil fuels underpin every economic activity we have on our planet here if you think about it there isn't anything that you've purchased that didn't involve gasoline or petroleum somewhere if you went to the store to pick it up you drove there in your car it got delivered on a truck it came from China on a ship I mean it's all really foundational to petroleum to energy whatever the source of energy is and on Earth today that happens to be petroleum in cis-lunar space that foundation will be water this will be a water-based economy and so ice cubes will not literally be money the economy itself will be residing on that found in water and to talk a little bit about cis-lunar space with one of our good friends of the show Mastin Space Systems can you tell us a little bit about this project that you guys are working on with them yeah Mastin's one of our very early cis-lunar marketplace partners and we have been working with them to help create a lunar lander that would be affordable to sort of move things back and forth because one of the transportation nodes in this future will be the Earth Moon Lagrange point one which is that location in space between Earth and the moon where the gravitational forces roughly balance it will be easy to hang out there that will be a depot that will be a train station in space and so you are going to need shuttles to go back and forth to do economic activities on the moon and then ferry materials and people back up to EML-1 to get on the freight train out to Mars or back to Earth collect up large quantities of manufactured goods to move to other places and so Mastin has been a partner we actually provided them a while back with a scrapped Centaur upper stage so that they could experiment with it and we are helping them develop that capability Zeus is our version of a lander that could be really sort of attached to an asus upper stage we might do that together with them or other people or even by herself but it would allow us to come down and land on the moon our concept is horizontally a lot of lunar landers want to land vertically which is fine but it makes the logistics of getting material and people in and out of the rocket a little bit more difficult than if it were closer to the surface what else should we look for in ULA's future because you are a very rapidly evolving company now what are some of the upcoming things that we should pay attention to sure well what's coming next of course will be transferring bulk into the marketplace so you know we we did a couple of I think exciting things last year that weren't really about technology they were more about how people will get their right to space so we released a program we called rapid launch today if you want to go to space I should say yesterday because we've changed it you buy that right to space three years in advance of going there it's been an order than two years because that's how long it takes to build a rocket and rockets are typically built made to order and there is always a certain amount of customization on the rocket for your individual spacecraft well we thought godly that makes it really hard on the people who want to go to space they're buying their right before their spacecraft is even done being built or designed in some cases they're tying up a lot of money up front to do that it's kind of got to be a way to make this easier so we figured out how to take all the customization work and move it all the way to the very end of the manufacturing process then we collapsed all the spans it now takes half as long to build a rocket at ULA as it did just a couple of years ago and it only takes about a third as much time once that rocket gets out to the pad to be assembled and then it's created to the spacecraft and literally go to space we have done that part in a short of 17 days and with the tempo we can maintain we can fly within a week we can launch two rockets within a week so we call that rapid launch and it means that you can buy your right to space as close to as three months from your launch date so that's been kind of a sort of an earthquake in the space to build a web-based tool it's complicated to figure out what rockets you want to fly on and how much it's going to cost and where the break points are in terms of how much mass you put on your spacecraft if you add one more kilogram oops now you have to add an SRB and there went a bunch of millions of dollars or if you added three more centimeters to the diameter of the stowed condition you had to hop into a more expensive payload ferry now people can figure all that out for themselves in real time in just a few minutes even before they call us to decide that they want to talk to us about our so we've done those two things we'll be Vulcan pretty soon Vulcan will be mature enough that we're going to offer it to the marketplace it will appear in Rocket Builder it will continue to support rapid launch you'll be able to buy that ride three months out obviously two years but as close as three months and I think that's going to be pretty exciting and I've got a couple of things that are going to be in Vulcan that we haven't talked about that are going to be pretty exciting but I'm not going to tell you yet just dangle the little carrot and then make sure not to get it so yeah we look forward to hearing about those in the future so just a few more questions before we get into our Ben's standard questions with that there is there any Kevin or Kay McCoy is asking that he's very interested to hear about how you use social media because you are very accessible on social media is there any memorable interactions or have you hired any aerospace engineers from that or what's it sort of like being very accessible on social media while still maintaining being a CEO at a major aerospace company well I'll say yes and yes we absolutely have hired people as a result of that folks have reached out to me and told me about their passion in space and I've encouraged them to apply or send a resume and turns out that's a great fit and there are people working at ULA today because of that interaction I have had some very interesting interactions on social media you know I'll start by saying it is actually me there's no one else doing it for me and there's nobody who sort of reviews and approves my tweets responses I understand that's actually pretty rare a lot of the senior industry executives that you might you know think you're hearing from or interacting with on social media you're really not exactly but when you get me it's all me it's real time you know I sort of have a professional mission as a CEO to make space more accessible but I also have a personal goal to make the industry that causes all that to happen and become possible to also be more accessible so that's also and largely why I do this and why I spend so much time on it you know I've had people who sort of start out with preconceived notions about our company and they might be a little bit hostile and I think that is the thing that frightens a lot of executives away from wanting to engage but as long as people are you know they're not swearing at me or you know crazy over the top I'll talk with anybody and more often than not you know as I answer their questions and you know they get some facts and their enthusiasm and their passion for space where it takes over and it ends up being a really positive interaction I've had a couple of folks who I would say like me just a little bit too much and so those were some interesting interactions but we won't say anything more about those I think also from our chat room Vogan wants to know how easy is it to dust your rocket collection that you've got behind you oh that takes a while you can see in the tip of the iceberg these are my favorite ULA rockets but over my career I've done over three dozen different rockets I've done hypersonic gliders I've done lasers I've done all kinds of things and so that is a small fraction of the memorabilia that is here in my home as well as in my office at work and also from our chat room Missy Hock wants to know do you play Kerbal Space Program? I love KSV yeah we always like it because it lets you do the things that you're sort of not allowed to do with rockets exactly you can do horrible things to rockets with that game and then in finality basically from our entire chat room with the dangling of the carrot with some surprises coming in from Vulcan can you give us any hints about that or do we just have to deal with not knowing for a little bit of time oh no more hints today alright Tori now we're going to go over just some standard questions that we have we asked these five questions to all of our guests no right or wrong answers just tell us exactly how you feel about it so the first question is Moon or Mars first Moon first alright would you go to space absolutely but don't tell Mrs. Bruno when do you think humans will first land on Mars oh in the next just in the next few years NASA has a real focus on Mars exploration and I see that being carried through when do you think humans will set foot on the moon again sooner than that and our final question and my favorite question out of all of these five is why space space well this planet that we live on is so precious and it is a finite resource right there just beyond just a few miles from where you and I are sitting right now is a whole universe of possibilities and space inspires us it will be our human destiny to go there and when we do everything here on earth so much better excellent well Tori I want to thank you so much for coming on the show today it's been fantastic and it's been a privilege to interview you here on tomorrow it's my pleasure alright and now what we're going to do we're going to go ahead and head to break and when we come back from break your comments from last week's show see you soon help us find our way we see ourselves out there when we look up it inspires us and 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 they are difficult they'll serve to organize a vision of this and Roddy Bay here the eagle has landed it's one small step for man one giant leap for man the exploration of space will go ahead whether we join in it or not many think we stopped exploring but we know we've only just begun Ryan is functioning perfectly at this point come with us and explore tomorrow and welcome back to tomorrow now before we get started with the comments section I did want to give a shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who have adopted to make this specific segment of this episode happen these are people who've contributed $10 or more to this specific episode we've also got our orbital subscribers there are people who've contributed $5 or more and our suborbital subscribers these are people who've contributed $2.50 or more and they're going to get access to After Dark and all the neat little goodies that come along with it and we've got our ground support crew these are people who've contributed $1 up to $2.49 to find out how you can help crowdfund the show is tomorrow head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O alright let's get started with comments from last week's show which was all about you no it wasn't it was a lot about you how's that let's never do that again alright Capcom okay so first comment thankfully not about me comes off of YouTube this one comes from Robert Beasley Bob which is such a great such a great name I'm not going to lie says I hate hearing that the RS-25s are going to be expendable damn shame yeah a little bit those engines were high performing hydrolox engines designed to be reused over and over and over again the shuttle didn't kind of like take them apart and then like rebuild them each time so reused more means refurbished I think go ahead I think it's important to make sure everyone knows the RS-25 is the space shuttle main engine it has traditionally been reused every space shuttle mission it would come back and there's three engines still attached refurbished I prefer the term refurbished over reused you reuse a jet engine over and over and over again you take it and go okay well it still spins looks good but it seems like the space shuttle main engines you know someone who worked on the space shuttle program can maybe help clarify this which is the shuttle would land and then what would they do to the space shuttle main engines is the answer they would generally let it go for maybe five or ten missions or would they pull it out inspect it do all the stuff and put it back together my understanding is they would pull it out and inspect it but if they didn't if they just kind of left it intact for five or ten missions between the tolerances of space stuff is just difficult they do inspect and pull out jet engines eventually too it's just that they do it over very long periods of time alright next up next one also comes off of youtube this I did not look at this particular name so this will be fun I get to pronounce this on air here we go first time go astridis laicus astridis astridis astridis yeah I should have practiced that one I'm so sorry somebody is definitely going to tell me how to say that yeah right I'm so sorry guys says though this is the part I can read bye bye dear SoyuzU hello 1.8 times more expensive SoyuzU well I mean yeah that's not fair you need to the more expensive isn't necessarily good but yeah I mean you do need to make progress forward and you know a lot of times the new thing is going to cost more until you can figure out how to bring this cost down so you know just because the more expensive now doesn't mean that it's going to be more expensive SoyuzU ran for 50 years 30 years well sometimes you have to make the initial investment in order to you know for it to last longer really long time yeah exactly one unit of a really long time it's kind of okay it's not exactly fair the new thing is probably going to be more expensive we can measure we'll start using SoyuzU as a measure of time yes that was three SoyuzUs three SoyuzUs three SoyuzU time units it's like saying four score and seven years ago right next up this one comes off of YouTube as well this one comes from Rocky Boulders omg ha that's something you would say yeah it is all the rockets of technology don't mean a thing if you don't nail down the quote unquote why Carrie Ann brought it straight to the human soul and knocked this interview out of the park this is what takes us to the stars yeah actually in pre-show I was talking to Tori and something along the same lines which is humans can't relate to rockets they're just too big they're too powerful there's nothing in our life that we deal with on a daily basis like a rocket for most people there might be a few I realize we have rocket scientists and launch artists launch artists in the room who do deal with rockets on a daily basis but you are the minority and most people just can't relate to it so we ask everyone to tell stories that are human relatable about other humans that connect humans to humans because I think that's those are the stories we really want to hear the challenges and some of those exciting things exactly and not to plug every day astronaut too much but that's kind of been my whole thing is adding that human element and especially with the sense of scale with this stuff you know when you see a human next to you know at the base of an atlas 5 or at the base of a rocket and you realize that they're just this little speck and there's this you aren't even seeing you're only seeing like 1% of the rocket you're like holy cow you're launching a 20 story building in this space and 22,000 kilometers an hour yeah it's just incredible it's hard to fathom and that's why those human elements help bring it into that I'll say I work in the industry and I have the opportunity to see a lot of these vehicles you know on their side and even when you see them in person in a horizontal configuration your brain still can't fathom how large they actually are it isn't until you're standing quite literally right next to it in its vertical orientation and you look up at it and you go oh this thing's huge when you get dizzy looking at the top of something like that wow it's really hard to relate it's just really hard to relate so yeah I think the human side is super duper important I really want to look down from the eye level with the rocket and look down and see people down at the bottom I feel like that would be one of those views I hope you're not afraid of heights I'm not I'm excited to do that someday I think that's going to be awesome yeah alright next one comes off of Facebook this is from Charlie Fox it says great and unexpected interview yeah I know right the unexpected part not necessarily the great anyway as a former minister I'd like to hear how you got into this and how much effort you put towards it so much more effort on Ben's part than mine really how do we get into it you know that's a whole story in and of itself I mean that's the whole I told that story we had another podcast you wanted to do this podcast I said no I told you you were stupid and then I said you need me there you go that's a short version episode one was terrible but yeah you were also trying something completely new and different yes it was it's not fair that had nothing to do with me watch it I think as anybody who reduces any sort of anything we all sort of feel that way about the first time of your first thing you're like yeah but that's you learn from that okay anyway last comment right last comment yes comes off of YouTube this one comes from Bobbert for him multi-commenter yeah Karian is the voice of reason amongst a band of space nerds a space nerd too to pack it in if things get boring helps us keep the show genuinely interesting thank you like Penny from Big Bang Theory Karian is the outside observer who translates the high science in engineering into terms the average observer can engage with thank you I wonder if the boys would have starved to death long ago without her yes I would have that is without doubt also hysterically we took one of those Myers-Briggs 16 personalities quizzes and it tells you like who you're like and in case you have trouble relating or you don't really understand the four letter acronym that they give you for the most part and one of those personalities is in fact Penny from Big Bang Theory so nailed it I kind of like it all right around that is our show this week next week we've got Anita Sengupta of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory specifically NASA's cold lab coming down that's going to be an interesting and awesome conversation so after dark is up next for those of you watching live just stay tuned it will be happening otherwise for those of you watching on demand that will be available to our patrons at the $2.50 or above level or everyone else in about four weeks thank you so much for watching hope you enjoyed it see you next week