 Coming up, a proton launch and failure. Space X gets certified. And Brightman steps down. And then I'll have an interview with Chris and Jesse of the Space Up Foundation talking about their upcoming Kickstarter campaign as well as how you can create a Kickstarter campaign for something spacey awesome. Stay tuned! Tomorrow begins right now! Welcome to tomorrow, episode 8.16 for Saturday, May 16th, 2015. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham. I'll be your host for this episode. Now before we get started, I did want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who've helped to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are the people who have contributed at least $10 to this episode. We are a crowdfunded show. Every single dollar helps. And if you want to help out the show, you can find out more information on our crowdfunding campaign over at patreon.com. Alright, speaking of crowdfunding, Kickstarter is a great way to get your program off the ground. And we are bringing back the CEO of the Space Up Foundation, Chris Radcliffe and the COO, Jesse Clark. Guys, welcome to tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you so much. So what are you guys working on on Kickstarter right now? Absolutely. So what we're working on right now is a way to kick off the very first Space Ups that are being backed by the Space Up Foundation. And we're going to do five in 2015, so I figured we'd make that the sci-fi project. So what is this going to do? So you're kick-starting some Space Ups, but we've already had Space Ups. For people interested in what Space Up is, we have a previous episode. We'll put that in the show notes. But what is this kick-starter actually going to accomplish for people? Good question. Yeah, so the two basic things that we need to provide to Space Ups from the Foundation are nonprofit support. So basically the foundation itself is a nonprofit organization. And so Space Ups that want to be at museums, libraries, other venues that really need to work with nonprofits, they can do that now because they can be projects of the foundation. In addition, there's a little bit of startup money. It's kind of the chicken and the egg problem where the venue needs a deposit before they'll give you the date. And until you have the date in the venue, you can't sell tickets and so you don't have any money. So it's just this little bit of startup money. And so for five Space Ups, what we're going to do is provide the startup money. It's in an account, the accounts associated with the nonprofit, and they're ready to go. Generally with a kick-starter campaign, there are rewards at certain levels. So I contribute $10.00. I get something back. What are some of those rewards? I'm helping create these Space Ups. They're getting some money to get their program off the ground. What do I get in return? It sounds so selfish when I say like, what do I get out of this? What's in it for me? Well, I mean a lot of people on Kickstarter, that's what they're going to look at that, right? They're going to be like, I'm not going to give you money. I want something in return. Right. And that's actually why we're doing it through kick-starter, not just taking donations. So actually in 2016, we're going to get donations in other ways. But the kick-starter really comes down to this is your Space Up. It's always going to be your Space Up. So all five of these, you're going to choose where they go. And so the very first reward that you get is a vote. And to decide where each of the five Space Ups are going to be. And you'll have a choice of Space Ups that all are ready to go in terms of the organizing teams. But then you choose. Do you want it to be Los Angeles or Anchorage? Do you want it to be Tuscaloosa or Buffalo? So that's the first big one. And of course, it's, you know, you're voting on the Space Up that you get. So it's directly connected. We'll talk about why that's important later. And then the other big thing that you get is our thanks. And a special kind of thanks. So again, sci-fi. And so I had this idea that we would actually thank you direct or we wouldn't. Yes, we would thank you. You don't thank us. I'm confused. I mean, you're getting money. So that's kind of a thank you, right? Exactly. But what we do is we're going to thank you directly. And so at, you know, at the smaller levels, you get a video that thanks everybody. But then if you put in $25 or more, I'm going to send you a video and I'm going to say, Hey, you know, person, thanks sci-fi. Exactly. Which, you know, it's a worth a little bit. And then at the higher levels, we actually have some famous people who are thanking you. People like Ben and Carrie Ann. You can get a thanks from them or from Leo Camacho or Dave Mastin. That kind of that kind of person. That would actually be very cool. I would like a sci-fi from Dave Mastin. Now there's sometimes when you do a Kickstarter, there's kind of that you'll get a T-shirt. And we didn't really want that to be the focus of this one. But quite honestly, if we raise enough money, each of the space ups are going to have stickers and patches and T-shirts as swag for the the participants. And which reminds me, I forgot about another one. So I'm going to kick them just going to jump right into that one. You get to go to the space up. I forgot the biggest, most important thing. If the space up happens, you get to go to it. $25 or more. So at $25 or more, you get a ticket. You go. And which is actually quite a bit less than they usually cost to walk in the door. And so that's the big thing. But then if we raise enough to actually make swag for all the people who go, including you, because you get that, then we're going to start making stuff for those space ups. I mean, we try to do that as often as possible. Do you have a T-shirt? Oh, you're wearing a T-shirt. Yeah, look at that. Space up. Paris. And so when we start making those things for the space ups themselves, we will send them out to the backers as well. And so we call those swag factors. Swag factor one, swag factor two, that kind of thing. Engage swag factor. That's kind of what that feels like. So you've got this campaign. I assume you'll be funded because you're only, it's sci-fi, right? So it was supposed to launch in 515-15, and you're raising $5,555. That's a recurring theme throughout the entire project. So I assume you'll be funded because it's a pretty low amount, and everyone in the space community is fairly tightly knit, and I have very little doubt you'll actually be funded and hit some of your swag factor goals. But then after that, what happens? So let's say we go six months from now. These space ups have already happened, but you still have the need for funding some of these space ups. Are you going to run more Kickstarter campaigns? Is there another project there? What's going to happen to actually continually flow money into space ups? Yeah, so actually I'll let Jesse handle that one because we're doing this to stay, and the foundation is being built up. This is kick-starting it, not kick-starting and ending it. So part of what I'll be doing after we get kick-started is to go out to the companies and ask them to make donations. It would then go towards a number of space ups, not just a single space up. So say X-Core, X could contribute to the next 10 space ups, or at least maybe the space ups in 2016. And that's actually where the foundation idea started, is the very first space up, one of our sponsors came up to me and said, well it was good, we could throw in this for each space up, but what we'd really like is to just write one check to a central organization and have them dole it out. So that's where that came from. So this is the beginning of the kind of the space up foundation funding process. And from here you should be able to continue and keep this going, hopefully for a future space up so you can have more and more around the world. And actually I say more and more around the world, Dada, there's a map. I'm going to segue into the map. What are we looking at here? Are these all the space ups that have occurred around the world? These are all the space ups that have occurred around the world. So it's 41 that have taken place in the world and you can see they've been pretty spread out between the US, Europe, India and Australia and New Zealand. And so we expect this to continue to grow with the help of the foundation. It's kind of the point is the foundation will enable additional space ups to actually get off the ground. Yeah, absolutely. And space ups are doing well around the world and they're going to continue to happen whether the foundation exists or not. One of the things that we've noticed though is that in Europe they're doing very well because there's both a nonprofit partner and an organization in the space of Europe that are pushing those forward. And in the US they've had some trouble in the past couple of years. And so there actually only been four space ups in the past couple of years in the US. And so that's actually where we're concentrating at least for the next couple of years is to bring the US back up to the rest of the world's speed. Maybe I should stop slacking and create a space up Orange County, make that actually happen. Although there is space up LA which is like half an hour, half an hour in one direction. So all right, we talked about what you guys are doing. When is it going to launch Chris? Because I mentioned 515-15 and that was yesterday. So what's the plan? That's so funny. Yeah. So we actually got all of the things together. So there's quite a lot that goes into kind of ramping up to a good solid Kickstarter. You want to have a really great story. So we've actually what we were just telling you about the rewards and where we're going to use it and where the money goes. We've been telling that story over and over again and we wrote it down and there's a video and that kind of thing. And all of that was basically driving toward the 15th in order to launch because it's got a five in it. And we got there and Jesse was actually sitting in the room with me and we went to hit the button. And it popped up with a little message that said, yes Kickstarter will start approving this project now. Start approving and we'll get back to you at some point in the next few days, maybe a week. So you're holding on Kickstarter at this point. Yeah, but actually the whole thing is actually ready to go and so the rewards are lined up and the video is done and the story is all together. So whenever they give us the approval, we're going to hit the button and start it. This is not your first Kickstarter campaign. So I'd like to transition this a little bit. So that's what you've got going on right now. Very soon I assume it will be approved within the next few days. Of course it's in Kickstarter's court so we don't really know but probably pretty soon. But you ran into a gotcha. So we're kind of big advocates of creating citizen space and kind of going out there and just doing stuff in space. And Kickstarter's a great way to help fund that stuff. And Chris, you wrote a great article called How to Ruin a Kickstarter talking about different things that Kickstarter campaigns do wrong. So what I'd like to do is talk about if someone in the community of tomorrow has an idea for a Kickstarter, what are some of the things they should consider to do right and what are some of the things they should avoid doing wrong? So either one of you can, I know Chris you wrote the article but you've both done these campaigns before and kind of know some of those gotchas. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll just, you know, I can briefly summarize the point in the article because it was actually something that I wrote after seeing a bunch of supporters and Indiegogo campaigns, similar sorts of campaigns for big space, you know, projects. And I say projects really loosely because what they were is we're going to send something to the moon. And, you know, we were raising $50,000 and you look at that and on the face of it just doesn't make any sense. And then, okay, well, what do I get back from this? Do I send something to moon? Do I get something back from the moon? And what you get is our thanks and a t-shirt. And it's like, well, it doesn't really match up. So the basic principles that you start with are first, start doing the thing. So, you know, for instance, we're doing this, you know, space up Kickstarter. We've both put on space ups before and we know exactly how that goes and we've actually been working for two years on this foundation. And so we've been doing the thing. So that's great. You can point to that. The second thing is make sure that the campaign itself is for a very narrow and well-defined piece of it. So the example I've given the article is if you've got an art car and you send it to Burning Man and you need some money for better seats so that people don't burn themselves, then you, the Kickstarter should be about the seats and it should be about people getting to use the seats or the car or whatever. So the rewards and what you're doing are very, you know, tightly, tightly matched. If you look at what the Arcade Space Telescope Kickstarter looked like for Planetary Resources, what you got out of that is your picture displayed on the telescope itself in space. That's awesome. That's awesome. And it's directly related to what they're doing, which is putting a telescope in space. It's not fund our company for the next 10 years. It's not we want to go mine asteroids, which is the long-term view. It's we're putting a single telescope in space. This is how much we need to do that. So make it very specific. So let's give some space geeks some ideas out there as to what work in space. You mentioned actually the example of, hey, we want to go to the moon for $50,000. So if you go to Kickstarter right now and search for space, you'll find the polar opposite of that. You will find a let's start a space program for $60 million and like no information about it whatsoever. Ready? And it's got like $200. So that obviously is also a mistake. So what are some of the things that the citizens of tomorrow could do for Kickstarter for space? Do we have any ideas we can give them? Like, hey, here's something that if you wanted to do, go run with it. Right. I was actually seeing a couple in the chat today that were very interesting. People talking about small scale launchers. There's actually a really good Kickstarter out there right now, which is for a 3D printed rocket engine. And it's not we want to someday make a 3D printed rocket engine. It's we've designed one and what we need are the costs to actually produce it and fly it, which is that's great that you can point to what's real and what you've done already. You can talk about how without these funds, you can't make that thing happen. And then you can absolutely see where that would go in the future. It's like three printed rocket engines are an amazing leap forward. So it could be, I think CubeSats are a really interesting thing to build right now because it's the sort of thing that's expensive for an individual. You're going to spend maybe $200,000, $300,000 to put a CubeSat together. But if you look at Kickstarter, that's actually very reasonable. And so if you have a group of people who can get together and build something interesting, I mean, there are whole companies now based around pretty much cell phone technology and little cameras in a CubeSat that then they're selling imagery and that kind of thing. Build out a proof of concept if that's something that's interesting to you. And then take that and say, oh, you know, if we only had a chunk of funds right now, we could then take this to the next level. So step one is to create something. The thing with Kickstarter is it doesn't have to be a physical thing either. It can be a show like this. It could be anything that you can dream of. But like you said, build a prototype or something of whatever that either physical or non-physical thing is. Then you're going to post it to Kickstarter. And this is where I'll tell you that we struggled because we use Patreon because we're a recurring thing. And, you know, we keep using Kickstarter as a term, but I would say there are two different crowdfunding sources out there that are really big and popular that you want to look at. If you've got a one-time thing, a CubeSat, you use Kickstarter. If you've got a recurring thing, a weekly internet show about the space and cosmos, for example, you'll use Patreon because you need recurring revenue over and over and over again for each one of those shows that gets produced. If you're producing a CubeSat every single week or every single month, maybe you want to look at Patreon. But where we got stuck on Patreon was the rewards. Those are actually extremely easy and difficult at the same time trying to figure out what you should do. What are some of the gotchas with those rewards? So, yeah, and we've had this conversation before. The thing about rewards is that the really effective rewards are access and intangibles. And so, let's say the show idea. The show is something that I would love to see a Kickstarter for. So, let's say you were going to do a space-themed game show, right? It's going to be on the Tomorrow Network. And so, we know that Ben and Carrie Ann can do and Dada and crew can do shows. We know that. There's an idea for this new show and maybe they've filmed something in one of the rooms as a test. But in order to do a pilot, you need, say, space to do the show or people to do the show or that kind of thing. So, there's some chunk of money. So, what would the rewards for that be? Both for that first pilot and then ongoing. Well, think about this show itself. Why do people actually want to be involved in the show? Is it because they want to watch the show? So, maybe it's that you have tickets to come see it live. Or the chance to watch it live as it's... Because there are things that you're giving away right now, like this live show that we're on right now. But let's say for the game show, you really wouldn't want to do that because of the way that's being filmed. But for a core group of backers, you might do that. So, access to the thing as it's being filmed. What was the other one? Oh, and then access to the people who are involved in the show. Let's say you're going to bring on a special guest every single show and that special guest can spend half an hour beforehand on a Google Hangout or can make a short video that says, hey, you know, backer, this is somebody you find awesome. You know, hello. Just something simple like that that's directly related to the show. You're going to be doing these things anyway. For something like a TV show or a scripted TV show or a movie, this script is actually a really great reward where every show that you produce, there's the shooting script. And the minute the show airs, you send all the backers the script. That would be amazing, technical drawings, the napkin drawings that you used when you were coming up with the concept. All of the stuff that tends to kind of pile up in a corner because it's part of how you make things, there are whole groups of people who would back you who find that stuff fascinating and amazing. So extending that to other items, because, you know, using movies and shows as an example, all of those things. But you can do the same thing for something like a CubeSat or a physical thing that you're building. Some of those napkin drawings you can actually, in the U.S. you need to be a little bit more careful if you're building something like a rocket engine, you've got ITAR, but, you know, some of those napkin drawings you can release, you can do the, like you said, kind of the intangible things. And I think one key takeaway, at least for us was something that doesn't cost a lot of money because that comes out of your revenue stream. In that revenue stream you need to put into the thing that you're building. So t-shirts are actually bad, or can be bad because they can get expensive, especially if you have low quantities. As can some of these other rewards, have you encountered that at all before or have you not ever run into those problems because you do some of more of the intangibles? Oh yeah, that's actually a big problem. So that's one of the reasons why we're not doing any physical items until we reach the stretch goals. Because, you know, let's say you've got something like a sticker, okay? Seems really simple. You design a sticker, you print a sticker, you can get them for 50 bucks off of something like sticker mule, and you get a bunch of stickers. That's great. But now you have, you know, let's say 500 backers who each one has their own address. They're all in various places around the world. And let's say about 10% of those addresses are going to have some kind of problem. So you have to stuff envelopes. You have to get those things to people. The actual, you know, cost of mailing something is considerable. So that's the thing. As soon as it becomes a physical item, you've got to shift it around in space. You mentioned t-shirts. T-shirts are at the very high end of the scale because in order to produce a bunch of t-shirts you need to know everybody's size of the t-shirt. You need to do a lot of specific things in terms of the design of the thing and printing it and that kind of thing. And then shipping a t-shirt. It's just big enough that it requires kind of a weird package, but small enough that it should be light. And so you end up spending, you know, $3, $4, $5 just to ship each one of these t-shirts. And if you're, you know, let's say giving somebody a t-shirt at the $10 level, that you've just eaten up everything that they gave you to send them this unrelated thing. Yeah, this is why I think rewards are important because people want them. They want that kind of access. But just be super careful that you don't absorb all your funds or screw up your campaign with the rewards. And if you go and you read some of the Kickstarter stories from people who have done these campaigns, even ones that have gotten millions of dollars, they talk about, yeah, we did not get as much as we thought we were going to get when it was all said and done. So, yeah, that's where rewards become scary and important. Are there any other gotchas or things people should know when creating their Kickstarter for their awesome new spacey thing that they want to do? Yeah, there are a couple of other things to keep in mind. One is time. It comes up as you're producing the project. So if you're not thinking about it beforehand, it can get in the way. There are the things that take longer than you think. So like getting approval, which I should have known because it happened to be the first time. But then after that, I had pre-approval on my other account. So getting approval for the project, putting together all the materials for the project, getting your video put together, yes. But then actually, there's this idea that it's like, okay, well, we'll run the project until we need the money and then when it funds, we'll get this big chunk of money. Well, you don't get the money right away. What you do is you get, hey, you've got money now and it's on its way and it could take a month to get there. So for instance, let's say you're putting on an event and you're going to run a Kickstarter to fund it and the Kickstarter ends, let's say, two, three weeks before your event, you might not get the money until your event's passed. So you need to keep track of the time that's involved. At the same time, it's also barreling along like a freight train. So the second Kickstarter that I did for a space-up, it was actually the second space-up in San Diego, I went ahead and I just started it and I started filling it out and I had given kind of an endpoint to it because of all those other timings that I was talking about. And the problem was that I wasn't telling anybody that it was out there. I wasn't spreading the word at all. And so of course it just sat there languishing with the few people who had heard about it for I think it was like a week and a half until I finally got to the point where I said, okay, I can get my head above water and wow, I should let people know. So leading up to the Kickstarter with a bunch of, hey, it's coming, as it's coming, can you please let people know and just kind of building a little bit of interest in it first can make a big difference once it actually starts. Yeah, this campaign, we did a pre-campaign. Yes. Social media campaign to get the word out. Did it work? The pre-campaign, I mean, it sounds like marketing these campaigns is a pretty big deal. Did the pre-media campaign work for you guys? Well, I mean, I guess you don't really know yet but have you gotten some of the interest you're expecting? Well, we got quite a bit of a response for it and then once the Kickstarter actually goes live then those people are going to help us become part of the people that spread the word for the main campaign itself. So in a sense, yes, it did generate some pre-interest and I think that it'll be a great addition to the audience. From the chat room of tomorrow, we have Spice Mike asks, does showmanship matter for the Kickstarter video? That is an excellent question and I have no idea being a rather kind of haphazard and terrible showman myself. But I've heard that showmanship doesn't really matter as long as you are honest about what you're doing and convey whatever passion it is that you have. And so if you're sitting there with the 3D printed rocket engine, I mean picture Dave Mastin sitting on the set of tomorrow showing off the Zeus model, showmanship doesn't enter into it. You can see in the just glee in his face that this is going to be an awesome thing and I would throw money at the screen to make Zeus happen after seeing that. So I think that's much more important than putting together a slick video or making sure that all the right words are coming out or that kind of thing. Then again, that's me because I wouldn't be able to do that anyway. It really comes down to the good story. I mean like being able to tell a good story that inspires everyone else to become part of it. So my two takeaways are be a good storyteller, no matter how you do it. Well I guess it's more than two takeaways. Carrie is laughing for saying it was two minutes more. Be a good storyteller. Be human I think is kind of what you're saying is be yourself. Don't try to be a salesman. Just be honest and truthful and human about it and show your passion for it. But then I think third, third takeaway from all of that is we want to give Dave Mastin money so that he can go to the moon. So if Dave is listening, start a Kickstarter campaign, we will give you money to go to the moon. We are excited about what you're doing. All right, a few more questions from the chat room. Many Elon asks, and this is kind of going back to the Spaceup Foundation and Spaceups in general, have you ever thought about making a Spaceup at a launch event? Yes, yes I have actually. That came up when I went to a launch at Mission I think it was. They were launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base, which isn't far from where I live. And all those people together and we were essentially a Spaceup anyway because whenever you get awesome Space people in the same place and they're in a circle and they're chatting about things, that's really what it is. But it would have been great to have a little bit of structure because we were standing around before the launch and after the launch. And I know that definitely for the shuttle launches people were there for days and there were things like the endless barbecues. So I think that there's certainly an opportunity there. It would be a really weird Spaceup because it's a Spaceup where you know where it's going to be but you're not really sure when it's going to be and it might shift by a week or a month or more. Or it might get interrupted. Right. And that's the other thing is that at some point during your Spaceup a rocket's going to go up and so maybe you know exactly to the second one that's going to happen but maybe at the same time it might be one of those where you're not really sure. So I think there's an opportunity there. I would love to go to one and see how it works. You could also end up having that Spaceup five times in a row while you're waiting for it to launch off the pad. It's not a bad thing. No, they are. That could be actually could be it's one pod but five different times as opposed to five different pods at the same time. Towicket asks, Spaceups are supposed to be recurring. Why not go with Patreon? Although are they supposed to be recurring? I guess I question that fundamental part of it but there's the question from Towicket. For any given Spaceup, Spaceup Los Angeles or San Diego for instance I go to one and then the first thing that I think of when it's done is when's the next one and it's usually about a year away. They're a year apart though for a given place and so that would be a rough one to do on Patreon because you'd have to sustain the effort. There's a version of that that I'd actually like to do with the foundation if we get a chance which is people who want to support the Spaceups wherever they are and are willing to give a little bit per Spaceup in each place. Again, the problem there is what's their reward for that? What are they getting? I get that just because I want to see Spaceups happen but is it that you get the group photo from that Spaceup? I'm not really sure where that comes in. All right. I think that wraps it up for some of the Spaceup and the Kickstarter stuff. For those who don't know, Chris is also one of the main guys who helps our Reddit channel. So what I think would be cool is Chris shouldn't have to run this but he'll be there because he knows our Reddit community quite well. As does Jesse, everyone does. If you guys in the community of tomorrow have ideas as to what you think a Space Kickstarter should be like you've got an interesting idea or you've got an unflushed out idea and you want to start trying to do some of this stuff we can use the Reddit, the subreddit of tomorrow to kind of help flush this stuff out before you start to try to make a Kickstarter campaign on your own and use the power of the community to actually come up with something that may be successful and do some more cool awesomeness in Space. It doesn't cost you anything other than a little bit of time. So if we want to use that subreddit it's kind of a repository of different ideas for Kickstarter campaigns. I know Chris will be there, I'm pretty sure Jesse will be there. I'll definitely be there. So I think that's an interesting place and idea to do some of these things because I'd love to see more stuff happening in Space. All right. I think that's about it for this particular interview. Thank you guys. It's been a great week. So thank you for taking time out of your weekend and Jesse it was good to see you again. Were you away for a while or am I just crazy? Yeah, I was gone to South America for a year. Oh, that's why. So welcome back, welcome back. And best of luck on the campaign. I know we'll be supporting it. Hopefully the rest of the citizens of tomorrow will be supporting it as well. And we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, Space News. And welcome back to tomorrow. I'm joined now by my beautiful, lovely, wonderful and talented wife, Carrie Ann Higginbotham. And now before we get into Space News I did want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow. See, I said I'd shout so I shouted. These are the people who've contributed at least $5 or more to this specific episode. If you'd like to help crowdfund this show, I don't know why. You can do that over at patreon.com. Now, we're going to be bringing Space Mike in for the news segment. And I bring that up because he is our ambassador of Space Pods. And if you enjoy those Space Pods, we've got Ariel doing some of the hacker space kind of stuff. She had a great post on the giggle factor of Uranus, which was hilarious and giggly. We've got Space Mike doing the news and the commentary and the events that are happening and some of the history of space flight. We've got Lisa, she's doing in her awesome accent. She's doing stuff like the science on the ISS. And then we've got Jared doing astronomy. So we have five Space Pods per week. And if you'd like to help crowdfund those, you can go to patreon.com. Everyone's going, get to the news. So let's go ahead and do that. First off, Proton. Yeah, so here's the launch footage. Now, one of two things. Either the microphone was about 10 miles away, because you will in fact hear those engines fire, or it was an IP-based microphone and it had some delay in the stream. I'm not sure which, but give it a moment. Give it a moment. Anytime now. Actually, I think it's when the graphic pops up. There we go. Now we should start to hear it. I'm sick of waiting. So that launched on May 16, 2015 at 547 Coordinated Universal Time. That was an internet... There it is. There it is. That's an international launch service. Right? I mean, those microphones were really far away. International launch service is Proton Rocket. It was carrying MEXAT-1, which is Mexico's 1.6 billion dollar space-based communication. Well, it's the whole network, but that was one of the satellites for that network. However, about eight minutes, or eight and a half minutes into launch, Roscosmo said there was an emergency situation, and that's pretty much all they said at that point. We did later learn that there was an issue with the third stage. This is going to be an interesting news segment. Third stage, and they did lose the payload. The rocket most likely fell back to Earth from an altitude of about 160 kilometers. Most of that should have burned back up in the atmosphere, but any larger debris that would have survived that would have fallen somewhere around, I believe that's pronounced cheetah, which is cheetah? It's a city in Siberia near Russia's southern border. Ironically, this crash happened exactly one year to the day from the last Proton launch issue that they had. Russia hasn't been having a super great time recently, so they've been having quite a few issues with their vehicles. Specifically in the last six years, they've had 13 complete failures resulting in the loss of all payloads. They've had three partial failures that left the spacecraft in the wrong or unrecoverable orbit, and they've had a complete loss of 20 spacecraft in six years. So hopefully they're able to figure out, I don't know if it's a QA issue, I don't know what the problem is, but hopefully they're able to figure out what's going on and fix that because this is impacting other things like ISS operations, which we'll talk about in just a minute. So that's the state of Roscosmos. Yeah, I mean, that's what's going on. That's what happened with the Proton launch. And on slightly better news, let's hand it on over to Space Mike to talk about some certification. Sounds boring, but it'll be cool, I promise. So SpaceX has just gotten certification to launch medium-risk satellites for now. Now, SpaceX are the low-risk satellites for NASA because you might think about it and it's like, wait a minute, hasn't SpaceX already launched at least one or two? One I can think of was back on the Falcon 1, although that was a failure. But anyway, the whole thing with this certification is that with this certification, SpaceX will be able to start launching missions that are kind of in the higher price range and a lot of stuff for Earth observation and satellites like that for NASA. Specifically, coming up, SpaceX is going to be launching the JSON-3 Oceanography Satellite for NASA. And that is also in partnership with the European Space Agency. And so that's going to be coming from Tails' Alenia Space, and that's going to be launching in July. Now, with that, they didn't have the certification until just this week to actually be able to launch that satellite. So with that, that's going to open up a whole bunch of possibilities for science missions that SpaceX will be able to launch for NASA. They're still in the process of certification for launching military satellites and classified payloads for the military, the United States military. And that's an ongoing thing. There's a whole dramatic story if you guys are interested in getting into that. But as far as this goes, this opens up a lot of possibilities for what not only SpaceX can do, but what NASA can do as well because the only other vehicles that were in this same classification were the Atlas V, the Delta II, Delta IV, and Orbital Sciences, now Orbital ATKs, Pegasus rockets. So that's going to open up a lot of different possibilities and it'll be interesting to see what other missions SpaceX is going to be launching other than JSON-3. The only one that I know about right now is they're going to be launching a telescope, a space telescope in 2017 and they're going to be looking for exoplanets around other stars and it's going to be using the transit method of discovery. So that's pretty cool, but there's probably going to be a lot more in the future. So anyway, I'm going to hand it back over to you guys because Carrie Ann has very interesting news about the space station flights. Before we do the space station flight sheet, you saw the quick little snippet of the SpaceX graphics. I did want to show those really quickly one more time. These are some awesome SpaceX graphics that they have released on their Flickr channel. Flickr feed, Flickr channel, Flickr page, Flickr thing. They're at scary high resolutions and I thought that they just looked absolutely gorgeous and you can download those for free and turn them into whatever you want. I just thought that they looked really cool and I thought you should share it. You mentioned something about these as well that they're all subtly branded. Oh yeah, there's some really super subtle branding. So if you don't like SpaceX, maybe you don't download them. But yeah, they're like a crazy scary resolution so you can do pretty much whatever you want with them. They're under Creative Commons on their Flickr feed, which is really kind of cool. But yeah, really, really, it's almost like a hidden Mickey. Hidden SpaceX. All right, moving right along. So Sarah Brightman, for those of you who don't know, is a singer. She's a soprano. She's done some sort of crossover stuff. They call it orchestral pop, that sort of thing. What does that mean? But she has intended, she's actually had a lifelong dream of going into space in the International Space Station, I guess not her entire life, but wanted to go into space and was intending to go to the International Space Station to be the first professional musician to perform in orbit because we've had other performances in orbit. And sadly she's had to put those plans on delay. Was she, was that who he sang? Chris Hadfield. Hadfield. Is she harping on Hadfield? No, she just gets paid to be a performer and he gets paid to be an astronaut. All right, anyhow, yeah. Okay, I mean, I think that's the definition of professional musician, is it not? I guess. Oh, okay, not to. Anyway, so she's had to put, sadly she's had to put her plans on delay. She was supposed to launch September 1st of this year. This has nothing to do with the proton failure or progress issues or anything along those lines. This is actually for personal family reasons, which is a little bit unfortunate. She has trained, she's had some NASA training. She was training at the Yurga-Gurain Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. She's done the outdoor survival training and what have you. So she really was all set to go and it's kind of unfortunate that she's had to put her plans on delay. So it's sad, but it's kind of neat that it's, she's very open about it and everything that's going on. And that's very cool. Now, as you mentioned, the reason that she didn't do that was because of the progress failure. And I get all the depressing Russian news today, apparently. So there's that progress supply ship that spun out of control on April 28th. That happened most likely because of the upper state, there was likely an upper stage issue and they were unable to recover the progress, so they lost over a ton of supplies to the International Space Station. Because of that, Russia is delaying the return of three International Space Station crew astronauts back down to Earth. They're doing that by about a month or so so that they have time to kind of analyze what was going on before they then spin up a new progress vehicle. Now, they're kind of playing musical chairs with all of the different vehicles at this point. They're going to accelerate the processation of another progress ship, moving the launch of M28M or 60P from August 6th to early July. Then they're going to take the landing and they're going to delay that and then there's a launch of three new astronauts. They're going to push that back as well so that that will happen after the progress vehicle. So we're kind of moving the progress supply craft in front of the crew stuff and then moving the crew stuff behind that so that they can try to figure all of that out. Yeah, like I said, it's just going to give them time to investigate a little bit more, figure out what's going on with the vehicle and yeah, they just didn't really what it comes down to is they didn't want to leave the station with just three crew, kind of an interesting time we live in. I remember not that long ago. So you're looking at footage actually from a Soyuz craft of the International Space Station with Shuttle attached. Back when Shuttle and Soyuz were helping to build the station we really never had more than, for the most part we generally didn't have more than three people on board permanently unless you had a visiting craft like Shuttle and now we're at a point where we don't want less than six because we have so many experiments going on that they don't want to under staff the space station. That's kind of a cool problem to have. It sucks that we have the issue that we don't have another vehicle capable of sending humans up there today but maybe we'll have that in the not too distant future. So there you go. Hopefully that'll be fixed out soon. Only a month long delay hopefully but we're looking at about a month and then we'll have full operations back to station for human space flight at least ready to go. And for getting additional vehicles to the International Space Station we look to commercial crew and I'll hand that over to Mike to talk about how that's looking. Mike? Well the budget request for NASA's budget next year first of all has been submitted already by the president's office and it has been being deliberated in congress as we speak and the subcommittee for science has released a budget that is the same amount as what the president has requested but in different percentages for different programs. Originally for commercial crew the president had asked for roughly $1.2 billion for the commercial crew program and this subcommittee for and this is in congress keep in mind that they're wanting to only give $1 billion to the commercial crew program which is about 20% less than what the president has asked for and even though it is a cut this is not as much of a cut as they have done in years past some of that money is going instead towards the SL Space Launch System program and they're moving things around in the science program they haven't specified what in this budget request they haven't specified whether there's going to be more money towards the James Webb telescope or if the earth sciences are going to be slashed to move things around so it's not exactly clear on what their plans are for that but at least for commercial crew if this gets passed and it hasn't been passed yet it still has to go on to the full science committee and congress has to approve this and finish voting on it they haven't finished voting on it yet and then it needs to pass over to the senate they have to prove it and back and forth between these three branches of government before this budget for next year is finalized and so this is subject to change but if this happens it will slow down the progress on the commercial crew program and the United States government is just going to have to give more money to the Russians with all of the problems that they're having to launch our astronauts on the Soyuz capsules and it's been really reliable but its rockets haven't been lately so very scary situation and hopefully congress will be able to get their act together and if you guys are so inclined and please contact my local representatives frequently to tell them what I think they should be doing it doesn't amount for too much but if enough people get involved with that we can't actually make a difference if they know what their constituents actually want so please get involved with that please anyway that's all I'm going to say on the subject for now alright awesome thanks space man now before we go to break Mike do you have rough ideas to what space pods we can expect next week? for next week I'm possibly going to be doing another space plane 3 pod depending on what the news comes and goes I'm always kind of in kind of standby mode until the last minute to see if there's something in the news that I want to talk about that's something to wish you something else that I want to get around to is all the different small business innovation research grants that NASA has dueled out there are a lot of really cool concepts and cool ideas that are building on progress of a lot of these small businesses that they've already been doing so a lot of these ideas and hardware are actually feasible and being built right now so there's a lot of really cool stuff but there are over 350 proposals right now I have about 20 of them that I really want to talk about so that's kind of a big thing to talk about for space pods but Jared Head is going to be continuing his four part series on the differences between different telescopes and what you should be looking for for that Zinovsky's space pod I'm not exactly sure what it's going to be but I can say for sure that it's going to be about some sort of experiment on the International Space Station and that's all that I know for now so that's what we can look forward to for next week awesome thank you so much we're going to take a quick break and when we come back comments from last week's show stay tuned we'll be right back let's look to the stars they guide us give us comfort help us find our way we see ourselves out there when we look up it inspires us 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 and dedicate and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard because that goes to serve to organize a mission of its kind the exploration of space will go ahead whether we join in it or not many think we stopped exploring but we know our journey didn't end we've only just begun Ryan is functioning perfectly at this point come with us and explore tomorrow and welcome back to tomorrow now before we get started with comments from last week's show let's give a huge shout out to all the patrons of tomorrow who have come to make this specific segment of this episode happen we've released $2.50 or more to the specific episode these are patreon plus subscribers and they are going to also get a copy of after dark as soon as it is available on demand it's usually around the same time as the show goes live maybe a day or two later if you'd like to get after dark otherwise it takes about four weeks for it to actually make it out there oh but there is more we also have our patron subscribers these are people who have contributed one penny to this specific episode one penny or more for that amount you get your name in the show and a couple other really cool perks so even a penny helps to crowd fund this show for more information you can head over to patreon.com slash t-m-r-o alright let's go ahead and get started with some comments from last week's show first up yo I'm taking all of it first up comes from Hywel Davis or Hywel 95 on twitter says it's crazy how far t-m-r-o has gone I've followed them is it two-thirds years or two out of three years I think it's two to three years in two-thirds of a year we've done nothing so I have to believe it's two to three years that's pretty sure feeling great supporting a great show and space pods our admiral of space pods has been doing a fantastic job of actually curating those and making those happen and making sure that they're posted on a timely matter because I'll travel around the country I don't know they just happen they just magically happen and that's because of Space Mike so let's be clear on that so that's great and he's been a fantastic help for that and so a huge thank you to Space Mike if you want to see an even bigger transition go back to season one that's fun oh go back to season one episode one I shouldn't even bring that up go back to season one episode two when she was like you're terrible by yourself let me help you you can see us transition and improve over the years except for this show except for this show even ironically his mic is breaking up what he's trying to talk about this is moving on from U5KO NASA's doing a mission to Europe Europa ESA's doing a mission to apparently NASA's doing a mission to Europe and then Europe's doing a mission let's try that again NASA's doing a mission to Europa which one people like more alright so leave your comments I have my own opinion but I'll tell you on the next show that we do which may or may not be next week I'm not sure yet so I'll tell you my opinion on that particular matter and yeah so I'll tell you that I think NASA should do a mission to Europe we haven't been there a long time sorry into Europa so leave your comments on Reddit, on YouTube, wherever you want and we'll kind of sum them up we can have a tally at tomorrow hashtag Europa oh that's a great idea so do a little twitter vote right so do a little twitter vote yeah at tomorrow hashtag or just hashtag tomorrow hashtag Europa hashtag tomorrow hashtag hashtag you gotta do it Jimmy Fallon way yeah I know hashtag Ganymede and there you go next up next one comes from YouTube this is Nico's mind I love it when daddy and other daddy fight the mini debate was fun and yes let's have it or throw in the odd debate episode once a month or something yeah so that was between space mic and myself where space mic was wrong and I was right and brilliantly his microphone is muted right now so he can do whatever he wants and we can't hear him most things a lot of this right now yeah but no that was in relation to boosting the international space station just inclination and its orbit and a bunch of other things using a fantastic amount of fuel while technically possible highly highly unlikely due to the amount of resources it would take to actually make that happen assuming it could even survive such a lift I mean you're moving it so much it's basically it's basically like launching it from scratch again not quite but pretty close so the difference is you're not launching it as one component you're launching it as the whole thing because it's still in earth gravity so you have to push it out of its current inclination and push it over to L1 and that's just not a realistic thing so there you go and I'm giving no one the ability to counter to debate that to debate that I actually did legitimately bring it back to some rocket scientists and like yeah no so alright finally this one also comes from YouTube this is from Alex Kandor I think that Ben is right about testing near white that's our show for this week wow however he missed one additional benefit if something were to go wrong you don't have to explain anything because it probably happens to the people out there all the time unlike having to explain why things are exploding in your backyard when your next door neighbor comes up to your door alright Alex here's the thing though Mojave as we like to call it is in the middle of nowhere it is in the middle of the desert the difference is there's a road that goes there's like a highway like a highway that goes through there and due to some other road closures there actually was a good amount of traffic trucking traffic that was on that highway when the Spaceship 2 problem happened and so there was some stuff nearby that was going on but otherwise yeah it is kind of in the middle of nowhere the advantage of Spaceport America is really that airspace you've got it's basically Air Force airspace I can quote the PR piece that came out from Spaceport America if you like please the advantages include an FAA licensed launch site with access to 6,000 square miles of restricted airspace through a collaboration with the US Army White Sands Missile Range a very low population density 340 plus days of annual sunshine low humidity and the nearly mile high elevation and low altitude of its location the value proposition is complete when combined with Spaceport America flexible fly lease build offering which enables commercial space companies to literally design their own spaceport supported by 24-7 security EMT and fire protection that's a lot of moxie right there so White Sands does or Spaceport America does have a lot of advantages when put in that particular context for suborbital spaceflight right it breaks down a little bit more when you want to do orbital and you have to pass over land in order to do stuff so anyhow that's the thought process there so I'm not sure that it's still of nowhere and it is kind of a testing ground for this stuff when you talk about low population density Mojave wins and if you don't believe us go to Mojave yeah I'll just leave it at that alright that's our show for this week thanks so much for watching there may or may not be a show next week check our YouTube channel for all of that that will kind of dictate what's actually happening with that one we have a potential scheduling conflict that may actually release itself we don't actually know yet however for certain the week after that there will be no show that that one so we may not be on the air for two weeks in a row or we may have a just watch our Twitter channel or our live stream if you subscribe to our live stream channel it'll alert you when we go live and stuff like that and I'll let you know when we're actually broadcasting I'd like to thank everyone so much for watching taking time out of your Saturday to make this happen if you're watching on demand taking time out of your whatever day you're watching and we'll see you in a bit