 Coming up, Boeing's plan to go to Mars. Our universe has more galaxies than we expected. And we have an interview with Declan Murphy of Flight Club I.O. Stay tuned, tomorrow begins right now. And welcome to tomorrow episode 9.33 for October 15th, 2016. Now before we get started with the show, we first want to thank all of our tomorrow premier patrons. These folks are giving us $10 or more per episode on Patreon. They get access to everything, including our Slack channel. So big shout out to these people. We love them. If you would like to help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, consider heading on over to patreon.com. And of course, I am joined by our two wonderful correspondents with us here today. I myself, I'm Jared Head. I'm going to be hosting the news for you today. Next to me is Space Mike, who comes to us live from the mythical lands of Arizona. And even further to my left here, we've got Carrie Ann Higginbotham. Welcome, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. So we are going to go ahead and get started with you, Space Mike, because we've got some bad news. Well, it's not some bad news, but some rather unpleasant news in the space world. Yeah, so the whole thing is that Boeing has delayed their CST 100 Starliner flights again for the second time this year by six months. And for those of us that remember, they had a $4.2 billion contract, which was quite a bit more than what SpaceX received for the current round of the commercial crew program, the CCT cap, commercial crew transportation capability contract. And the reason they got so much more money was to avoid delays like this. But here we are. So what's going on is that they've had lots of different technical issues and even some hardware has been damaged. And they need more time to figure out a lot of the different problems that are happening with their vehicle. And one of the big problems or one of the cause for the delay earlier this year when they pushed back their schedule was that the aerodynamics of the CST 100 capsule that's being launched on the Atlas V vehicle was going to be a problem. There was going to be a lot of extra stress on the Centaur upper stage. And so what they've done to kind of remedy this situation is just an aerodynamic skirt that goes down below the service module and that is enough to reduce the stress loads on the Centaur upper stage. And even this skirt here would even be jettisoned during the flight. So they wouldn't carry it the entire way up until the CST 100 Starliner is separated from the Centaur upper stage. So that seems like a pretty good ingenious test for that. And they've even been doing some wind tunnel testing for this to validate that this skirt will work. And under the new schedule, the pad abort test that they were going to do which hasn't been completed yet, has been shifted from October of 2017 to January of 2018. The first uncrewed flight called the orbital flight test has shifted from December 2017 to June of 2018. And then the first crewed test flight which would have one NASA astronaut and one Boeing employee has shifted from January of 2018 to August of 2018. Now with these delays, there are a lot of concerns that NASA needs to purchase more Soyuz flights. And unfortunately, it might be too late to purchase any more Soyuz flights. The reason for that is because it's a two-year process to order, manufacture and prepare the Soyuz capsules for any launches. And as of right now with the seats that we've purchased the last Soyuz flights that we've purchased are going to be launching in 2018 and then landing in 2019. They spend about six months at the space station before coming back home again. Now, even though it might be too late to order any more Soyuz capsules from the Russians, NASA isn't necessarily worried about it because they do have an in-kind deal with the Russians, with Roscosmos, in order to trade seats on the Soyuz capsule and presumably their new Federation capsule once that enters service and to give the Russians a free seat on these commercial crew vehicles once they start flying. And if the schedule holds, if SpaceX and Boeing's current schedule holds then they still will be able to hopefully begin those flights in time for that. So the way things are, even though it's getting delayed a little bit more things hopefully should work out without having to purchase any more additional flights. And then from there it would just be our barter system of having the astronauts fly on the Soyuz and later Federation and cosmonauts flying on the Starliner and the Dragon Crew vehicle. So we don't necessarily have to worry about not being able to purchase any more Soyuz flights but it definitely is frustrating that there are more delays like this especially since they received so much extra money to prevent delays like this. But it is what it is. Yeah, it is what it is and welcome to the business of space flight. If you're not comfortable with delays then you probably shouldn't really be involved in it unfortunately. So moving on a little bit because I want to talk about the universe a little bit and not just our part of the universe. Surprise, surprise. I want to talk about the whole universe all at once. Because, yes, we do have enough time to talk about the whole universe all at once because astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to actually take one of the most accurate censuses or censuses of the total number of galaxies in our universe. And using both Hubble and some of the most powerful ground-based telescopes here on Earth they have discovered that 90% of galaxies in our universe are actually either too faint to be seen by current instruments or they're so far away from us that their light hasn't reached us yet. So these missing galaxies, they're all from the early days of the universe when the galaxies are small and forming. Now using Hubble's sequence of deep-field images and those other deep-fields taken by telescopes here on the ground we have realized that actually the total number of galaxies that are contained in the universe is 10 to 20 times what we were expecting. So in other words, that means the lower limit of galaxies in the universe is now set at 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. Now this is obviously quite a surprise when you end up finding something literally an order of magnitude above what you were expecting in total number. And what this means is that galactic evolution, which is the evolution of galaxies from how they used to be to how they are now must have included tremendously more amounts of mergers. So if we've got a lot of galaxies, we look around that our current local neighborhood of galaxies. That means a lot of these small galaxies had to come together in order to make the galaxies at least the total number that we see in our local universe currently. So a big surprise that we were not expecting. There's a lot more stuff, or maybe not so much more stuff. I don't want this to sound better, but I feel like every time there is this discovery we're like, hey guys, did you know there's way more stuff than we thought? No way! Did you know that there's even more stuff than we thought? Wait, really? Now this does not affect dark matter overall. The total amount of dark matter and dark energy, that still stays the same. I mean for now. It's just that the overall number of galaxies is a lot more than we were initially expecting. So when the universe first formed back in the day, if you will, there was just a lot more than we have right now. So it's not necessarily an assessment of the overall total number currently. It just means that we had a lot more to start with than we expected. So overall, a pretty cool result that we were able to get. Mike, you should talk about something really cool too that just kind of popped up out of nowhere like this study did. Tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, this is kind of strange because this has to do with President Obama. In the last hundred days of his term here, he has written an opinion article for CNN reinforcing his support to send humans to Mars in the 2030s and to move on with the rest of the program that he set forth back in 2010. And furthering more commercial crew partnerships and stuff like that. And the very next day, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden also put out a blog post, not on CNN though, kind of reaffirming what the president was saying and also clarifying a little bit on one particular thing that the president said in his article. And that was having commercial opportunities at the space station. And there was already a program going on at looking at this, but now there is even more incentives for new commercial opportunities at the space station. As you can see right now, this is a Bigelow Aerospace's plan to send what they call X-Space to the International Space Station. And there are other companies who are already involved with NASA's Next Step program, which is to build deep space habitats for the journey to Mars. And with this, there's also another company called Axiom Space, which is started by Mike Sufordini, who has a really cool plan to have a pretty large module with its own propulsion system and two extra docking ports so that whatever port it takes up, there would be two free ports instead of having one less port for docking vehicles and such. And the thing is though, both with Bigelow Aerospace and Axiom Space's plans, they both want to dock to the forward port of Node 2, Harmony. While the whole request for information is to actually put the use on the aft port of Node 3, which you can see kind of highlighted there. And the thing is, that's where the beam module currently is, and there's not a whole lot of space there. You can see at the bottom of the picture where the folded up solar panels from the Zaria module just doesn't allow a whole lot of clearance for there. So neither Bigelow's B-330 or Axiom Space's large modules would be able to fit there. And that's what this current request for information is, is to put a commercial module in that particular spot. Now in the future, I'm sure that they would look at more opportunities with the more different ideas and plans that companies are coming out with. I really like Axiom, the idea of turning the Centaur upper stages into a dry workshop essentially. And with this, the whole plan is to have commercial modules dock to the space station and then later be undocked from the station to form a commercial space station. This is Axiom's graphic for a commercial space station that they could build once the international space station has retired. So this is really cool, and I like how even though Obama was kind of trying to champion more the plan of going to Mars in the 2030s, it's kind of brought about these extra incentives. And I think that probably the biggest legacy, in my opinion, but the legacy of Obama's administration as far as NASA's concerned is having these really strong partnerships between commercial or public and private and doing all of the different commercial programs that we've been doing. And I really hope that whoever becomes president next will be able to continue that sort of philosophy of cooperating on a public private level. Excuse me. Yeah, I even heard that the astronauts were requesting additional pieces on to the international space station. So like I know one of the requests was they want an extra cupola up there because right now the current cupola aims what's called, if I remember correctly, nadir, which is basically straight down at the Earth. The astronauts actually want one to point zenith, which would be away from the Earth. So I suppose when they go into the night side of the Earth they would look out of that one and really enjoy what would be just an incredible view with that there. So really cool stuff. I love this public-private partnership stuff. Everybody wins when you do that. It's just fantastic overall. Okay. Are you guys ready to go back to the beginning of the universe again? I mean, I guess. Yeah, if we want to talk about it. So there's this really cool thing that happened in the early universe called the epic of re-ionization. That sounds like some woo-woo crap. It does sound like some woo-woo, but it's not woo-woo because it's good, solid science. All right. I'm trusting you. Basically, the best way to describe it is that this is when the first stars in the universe formed. And this is a very long time ago, okay? So initially we had neutral atoms of hydrogen start to form about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. And neutral hydrogen atoms were the dominant element until the epic of re-ionization. So what is this? Well, basically these clouds of neutral hydrogen atoms eventually collapsed under gravity and they ignited in nuclear fusion, and this is when we formed the first stars, which stars are what formed and generated those heavier elements that we now have in our universe today. So scientists have just recently ran a shakedown of a system called the Merchison Wide Field Array. Now this is going to... This is a really neat array of radio telescopes that use 128 groupings of 16 antennae arranged in 4x4 squares that are going to study light at the meter wavelength, so definitely within radio. And this is actually going to allow for the epic of re-ionization to hopefully be studied in detail for the first time. So they are looking at some of the longest wavelengths of light so that they can see as far back as possible as you can in radio, and they just did a shakedown of the Merchison Wide Field Array in order to figure out all of the radio sources that they're going to have to look through. So because they have to look through galaxies, they have to look through parts of our own Milky Way in order to look this far back. So overall, basically they've got this array of radio telescopes ready to go and they are now going to start observing, hopefully potentially, some of the light from the first stars in our own universe. So very exciting stuff. By the way, first stars in our universe are about 400 million years after the Big Bang. So some pretty cool stuff. All right, now speaking of timelines that we have here, Space Mike, there is an interesting timeline that's being put forth by that company that we talked about first today, Boeing. So Space Mike, tell us a little bit about this surprise and sort of interesting thing that Boeing has said that they are going to try to do. Some representatives of Boeing, including their CEO, have said that they can beat SpaceX to Mars. But the important thing to understand about their plan, yeah, they say that they can beat SpaceX to Mars. But here's the thing to understand is that their plan is in tandem with NASA's and I'm almost hard pressed to say that it's the same plan as NASA's to get to Mars in the 2030s. But before they go to Mars, before they send humans to Mars, what they want to do is build what's called an exploration gateway. And what this is is several modules that they would send up via the space launch system and assemble the space station around either low Earth orbit, lunar orbit, or one of the Earth's moon, the Grange points. Now with this, they could, with this station, they could be able to help with international and commercial missions around the moon, contribute toward United Launch Alliance's CIS Lunar 1000 plan, and test their lander on the moon first. May I have an image of that lander right here? This is the Mars configuration. The service module for it for the lunar configuration would be much smaller. It's tiny. Yeah, it is pretty interesting. It almost seems to me that the service module is kind of the same, or at least looks similar to the same hardware as the Altair lander, whereas the pressurized section where the astronauts would fit in looks like a new design. And we actually have a video that I've put together of their different plan here. Once the station and the hardware elements that they have are complete, they'll start sending pieces needed for a Mars transportation system into low Earth orbit to be constructed. And meanwhile, they will start sending uncrewed precursor missions to Mars with a solar electric propulsion. And that's going to be their main method of transporting to Mars. And once they have the Mars transportation system complete, what you're seeing on screen right now is the assembly of the exploration gateway. But once the Mars transportation system is complete, the exploration gateway take on a really large habitat which looks similar to a Bigelow habitat. That is the Mars transportation system right there. This is them docking with the exploration gateway and you'll see in just a moment where they take on the larger habitat there. And then they would take on the crew that is needed for this journey and they would depart from whether it's from low Earth orbit or the range point, wherever it is that the station would be that they would first head to. And it would be a six months journey to Mars with a much bigger version on the crew instead of the uncrewed versions. And once there at Mars, the Mars transportation system would undock leaving the habitat and the solar electric propulsion in Mars orbit. And then they would unfurl their inflatable aerobrake slash heat shield which would be able to slow them down to the speed that they need so that they can get the rest of the way to the surface of Mars via rocket power. And their hope is to land as close as they possibly can to the other precursor missions where they have supplies and hardware to start studying up power and have everything they need in order to stay there for about two years. Once they're finished with their mission, they would of course go back into orbit, redock with the Mars transportation system and head on home. And what they would hope to do is leave the large space tug of the solar electric propulsion in space and just have that be going back and forth between Earth and Moon. And their hope, they feel very confident that they can start a base have a foothold and eventually have it evolve into a colony. Now, here's the thing about this is that if they proceed with this plan and keep in note that Boeing is, as far as I know, the only company who's been coming up with potential payloads for the space launch system other than exploration mission 1 and exploration mission 2. And this is part of their plan of payloads that they could be launching on the space launch system. This is all dependent on whether or not NASA and other international partners fund their idea and fund their program. In my personal opinion I feel that if they didn't get that sort of funding that they wouldn't necessarily proceed with this plan and if they did proceed with this plan it would be scaled back and that would take much longer. They probably wouldn't get there in the 2030s. That being said I also feel in my opinion that their plan is a little bit more realistic in terms of scale and funding versus SpaceX's plan. I definitely like SpaceX's plan for their interplanetary transport system better because it's much cooler much bigger much more futuristic but this is something that we could do today and part of the hardware for this is being built and Boeing has a ton of experience building habitats building the habitats for the US segment of the International Space Station so this is a very feasible plan but again like I said if they don't get the funding that they need to proceed with this plan I worry that it might not ever happen but nonetheless it is very cool and for no other reason I like seeing animations like this to dream even more of what our future might be like. In the end it's ultimately show me the money which is what ends up making SpaceX's problem right now too they need the money they want to get their Mars transportation system Everybody's in the same boat when it comes to the no-buck Rogers kind of attitude towards things with that there but still interesting plan and I like having more than one plan it's really cool to see SpaceX has a plan Lockheed Martin is sort of developing a plan it's like finally all these plans are starting to come together and who knows NASA may actually end up picking and choosing from all three of the plans in order to put some sort of weird Franken sort of Franken rocket design I guess is the best way to call it that and we'll see what ends up happening so this is a very fun very exciting time if you're a big fan of going to Mars so very very cool now I want to talk a little bit about the most mysterious star in the Milky Way galaxy which is known by the formal designation KIC 8462852 or you can informally call it Tabby Star named after the woman who discovered it in Kepler data now it was originally discovered in that Kepler space telescope data because the brightness of the star was fluctuating wildly over an extended period leading to absurd speculation that it was an alien megastructure not in orbit around it and then oh it's actually a big thing of comets being destroyed and ripped apart around the star and a whole bunch of just interesting ideas because we literally cannot think of an idea to explain it I mean even as you could tell I'm having a hard time trying to explain this as it will well they've looked at more data now from the Kepler space telescope and they've shown that not only is its brightness rapidly going all over the place but long term it's actually dimming at an incredible rate that we've never seen before on this kind of a time scale so over the first 3 years of monitoring by the Kepler mission Tabby Star lost 1% of its brightness as we could see in this light curve here and then all of the sudden in the next 6 months of observation it lost 2% of its brightness before it just suddenly stabilized so we looked at 500 similar stars within Kepler's data guess what they showed a loss of brightness but not to the severity that Tabby Star is doing it so what is Tabby Star doing? I don't know everybody in science is kind of throwing they're literally doing this right now they're like I don't know what's going on with this thing they're taking their data and doing a table flip with it because nobody understands what is up it's just absurd with it so I can't explain it I don't know what it is so somebody else a lot smarter than me can figure out what it is so I don't know what it is but I love great great questions that the universe likes to throw at us like this so space Mike we've got some honorable mentions let's go through them real quick yeah a lot of really cool things have been happening and you know we didn't want to take up too much time in the news segment so one thing that I didn't want to mention is that Strato launch of Vulcan Aerospace has put out this new image where they would be launching 3 Pegasus rockets that are made by Orbital ATK instead of doing like a Pegasus type version of their Antares rockets so that's pretty interesting and I'm curious to see how things unfold in the future with that and also if they'll be able to get the price down and have more demand for those rockets that's pretty cool also another thing that I wanted to mention real quick that has just made me laugh really cool is that the White House has their frontiers conference that they do and they put out this image of President Obama successfully docking to the international space station with their simulator so I mean if Obama can do it anyone can right yeah I mean it should be pretty easy so not all that difficult alright so we're going to go ahead and take a quick break and when we come back from the break we've got Declan Murphy from Flight Club here and Ben will be doing that interview so stay tuned and we'll catch you right after this break and welcome back to tomorrow before we get into our interview I did want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who have topped to make this specific segment of this episode happen these are tomorrow premier members they get absolutely everything that we have to offer from the reward level we also have our tomorrow producers these are people who contributed five dollars or more to this specific episode to find out how you can help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow head on over to patreon.com slash T M R O alright we are joined by Declan Murphy who is the creator of flightclub.io which is actually one of those things that I found on our website and it is as our tag says data is beautiful so Declan first off thank you for joining us on tomorrow and taking time out of your Saturday yeah thanks for having me this is awesome so tell me what is, for those who don't know what is flightclub.io Flightclub.io is a rocket launch and landing trajectory visualizer it's also a simulator so anybody can go on this website and have your own custom profile and simulate it and then visualize the trajectory afterwards and where do you get this data from? I make it up all of the all of the launch vehicles and launch sites and all of the physics like the gravitational constants and all that kind of stuff is real stuff that I can get online quite easily but then for the actual flight profiles I have to I have to create my own flight profile that ends up matching real life constraints such as target orbits and payload masses and hazard areas for debris from launches that kind of stuff but it turns out there's really only a very small number of trajectories that fit all of those things together so it's quite easy to get to it the easiest way to describe what you're doing is actually just to show it. Dada we have a video if you wouldn't mind let's mute the audio from the video Declan would you mind walking us through what we're looking at especially for I mean the space geeks are going to get it right away but for the non space geeks help them understand what it is that they're looking at here sure so oh wait Dada is saying he has no video so you at least have some images right alright so we'll pop some images up and you can kind of describe what you see there okay so the image you see there I think is choosing the launch site yeah so there's a bunch of launch sites you can choose they're all based on actual launch sites that exist today there's a bunch there you can see Kennedy Space Center 39A is highlighted but there's some in Kazakhstan French Guyana for the Ariane launches Mahia Peninsula for rocket labs which hasn't been used yet I suppose you can flick through this is the stock profile that I've built for SpaceX's interplanetary transport system obviously it hasn't launched yet this is just my best guess as to what it looked like but what I did was I took a Falcon 9 launch from before and I just scaled it up so it's actually remarkably similar to a Falcon 9 launch and this is what you get when you run the simulation so you get a bunch of readouts on altitude versus time, flight profiles propellant mass over time, velocity versus time phase, space, diagrams that entire page is just graphs and graphs and graphs so it's not particularly interesting unless you're super keen on looking at graphs but this is the 3D earth view of the launch so what you can see there is to the first stage launch up to about 100 kilometers altitude and then it separates and does a boost back to the launch site and lands while the second stage continues on to orbit and you can watch this live in real time so when a launch is happening this will be playing in real time so while on your computer monitor you might just see some engines firing and you know where things actually are this shows you where things are and it shows you what things you're doing so you can see like there's a red line for when engines are burning and a yellow line for a coast phase and it's quite clear there that the landing site is not the same place and yeah I think that's actually CRS-9 space exhibition from a couple months ago three or four months ago maybe their last or two years launch and so that's a good overview of what you can do on Flickr one of the things you kind of glossed over I think is especially for the rocket nerds out there we like to watch launches live as they're happening, kind of cheer on the rocket and your data is driven live so you know as the webcast is going you can actually kind of follow along and actually watch the rocket launch and in the case of SpaceX when the rocket splits into two and stage one comes back to earth and stage two continues on you can actually watch both of them kind of go to their two different places and it's really it adds a lot to the webcast I think to be able to follow along and actually see what's happening with these vehicles my laptop is nowhere near powerful enough to be able to run that and YouTube at the same time crap so I've never actually watched it live I always go back afterwards and I really play the launch on YouTube and I watch my real-time simulation with the audio from YouTube playing over to see how close I got so I've never actually watched it live but it gets pretty close actually that brings up two questions in the chat room so as you know Wan asks how close was your output to historical missions have you had to tweak anything to increase realism or any surprising issues yes the thing I tweaked the most would be the atmospheric model I started off with just some simple data that I got from some naso website for air identity and air temperature against altitude but over time I've been tweaking that constantly I keep tweaking drag coefficients for different vehicles different configurations like for example for the Falcon 9 when the grid fins and landing legs pop out that changes things when fairings come off that changes things and the one thing that I haven't done yet that is on my list is incorporating aerodynamic lift which I need to do because for some of the down range landings that they do there is a non-zero angle of attack I think when the booster is coasting between the entry and landing brands and the boost back in entry brands which gives it a bit more a bit more range which I couldn't model without adding a bit of extra lift into it so that was one of the approximations that I made at the very start was I evaluated drag but not lift and now that's one of the failings I guess or one of the things I need to tweak to get slightly more accurate so yeah there is a big long list of things I need to keep doing to get more accurate I need too many trillions of galaxies apparently according to the directions to get gravity perfect Missy Hawk does bring up we talked about this kind of earlier which is where is the data coming from and you say well I make it up but you can only make up so much about it I mean you need to have a baseline of the vehicle itself do you get any of that or do you kind of have to piece that together from different places how did you get that baseline well for some vehicles it's super easy well not easy but there's some good sources online so for space exes vehicles they're quite public with their figures I think it's space flight 101 has a really good article which goes through all of the stages and all of the trimasses, propellant masses the engine, ISPs and thrusts for sea level and vacuum and so on and so forth for different vehicles it's a bit harder like for New Shepherd I tried simulating their New Shepherd launches sorry for Blue Origin their New Shepherd launches and I found that really difficult because I have no idea what the trimasses and propellant masses are at those stages so that was a complete guess I couldn't get it to match what you see in the webcast so yeah for some vehicles it's quite simple for some vehicles it's quite hard Lish asks what unexpected thing has been the most frustrating to work around that would definitely be really fast boost back after the CRS9 stage separation sorry if you can hear a phone in the background sorry so after the CRS9 stage separation the first stage did a seriously fast flip and then boost back started almost immediately and I couldn't make my data match real life unless I said that the boost back began was still happening so it didn't flip the whole way around to 180 and then burn it started burning while the flip was still happening but then I still couldn't get it to match and I had to have the flip end slightly below 180 it was really kind of hand wavy yeah that was really frustrating and really annoying I'm pretty sure that's how boost back is going to happen in the future so that's really really annoying so yeah if Chip Harris could mail me with what actually happened that would be fantastic but one thing for everyone to realize as well is that there isn't just this one thing that you get for rockets when Falcon 9 launches it's not the same every single time and even with the projected trajectories the vehicles be it Falcon, Delta, Atlas, Arian whatever it is they're all making real time decisions as they're ascending and changing their own flight profile and because you don't have a direct downlink of their data you have to make those guesses and kind of tweak it after the fact and do it without direct data from the vehicle so going back and tweaking is kind of required absolutely yeah it's impossible to know for sure exactly what it'll be so yeah after each launch I go back and tweak it and make it match the webcast or whatever data I have as close as I can and then I'll record the webcast and make a YouTube video and upload it and post that but yeah so when you watch it live it's always kind of within about 5 seconds for certain events but it's never perfect because there's things that you just don't know like you don't know how windy it'll be in Florida if I'm sitting at home in Dublin, Ireland like this or in this case in Mexico yeah so yeah there's a lot of guesswork that goes into beforehand but I mean like there are tons of useful pieces of information like space access press kits beforehand give loads of times for burns and separations and cut-offs and hazard debris areas which I mentioned earlier give a really good like when you use those debris areas it's really easy to model the first stage flight profile because it has to be going a certain velocity to land in that big red area so that's really helpful as well so yeah there are certain things that make it get really close you never get perfect have you reached out to any of the launch services providers and said hey look I'm doing this really cool thing would you mind giving me some real-time telemetry even if it's like only once every second or once every 10 seconds just give me something I can basis off of I haven't I've reached out and asked for jobs but I haven't gotten any of them but no I've never actually I've never even thought of that I never thought that would be an option because I guess that's all kind of ITAR restricted I don't know I'm not an ITAR it might be I don't know I'm not an ITAR lawyer but certainly Arian space doesn't have that issue right jack said doesn't have that issue the US providers that because they said you know launch lines they may not be able to but yeah yeah that would be a really good idea yeah definitely do that stop guy asks what's been the most interesting thing you found out about spacex interplanetary transport system it's which is an unfortunate acronym from playing around with the simulations one really interesting thing I noted was so I tried to use information from the video they made of the launch and return to launch of the launch sorry of the launch and return to landing site of the it's and during the boost back burn there were 714-21 engines firing and it was also said that there would be 7% of propellant left over but if you do the maths on that 21 engines firing a full throttle with just the dry mass of the first stage and 7% of fuel gives this huge acceleration which I think was like 8 or 9 Gs and I had to immediately throttle to like 60% or 50% to keep it at like 60's or lower so yeah either they'll be like trotting down loads for that or they'll be using a lot less engines than they showed in the visualization but apart from that it was it was remarkably similar to a Falcon 9 in the sense and descent so it actually wasn't that it wasn't it was nothing too surprising so then we also have Rockamveld I think is how you pronounce that asking can you use Flight Club for Mars launches not yet but that is in the works at the moment it's just based on Earth and there's no like it doesn't even go as far as the moon with but yeah I'm going to add in some like transform stuff yeah I'm not entirely sure how I'll do that like I don't know if that would be completely user generated or the website would give you hints saying you should burn now to get there in time and you should stop now like you know with Kerbal Space Program when you're doing your burns it gives you your ellipse and you can see it growing and growing up when your ellipse hits the orbit of whatever planet you want to get to and Flight Club doesn't do that it's you hit submit it does it all forward in the background and then it gives you the results so yeah I had to think about how I would do that it wouldn't fit into its current UI I'd have to make a different kind of UI for that but you know that definitely isn't the works because that's super interesting which brings up the next really kind of logical question which is what are your future thoughts I mean it kind of and correct me if I'm wrong it kind of felt like it started off as a slash r slash space x kind of like hey wouldn't this be cool for some additional visualization as to what's going on and then there were some obvious like okay now let's add other rockets and maybe that's incorrect but that's kind of how it felt so where do you go from here now that you've got all those data in there and no that's actually that's perfect I mean it started off as just I want to see what it looks like and I posted it to the SpaceX subreddit and everyone said oh that's pretty cool you should make it 3D and make the Earth Spin and do this and do that and I kept adding what they'd say at their request and the next big thing oh yeah and there was a period of time where I was trying to make it look like the 3D visualization on the SpaceX webcast there was about two months there where I was trying to match that perfectly so I need to make 3D models of the rockets and display them in the live launches rather than just have a little a little one marker and a little two marker I think that would be really cool and you can see its orientation and then you can see when it's firing and when it's not firing and I could have animations like legs deploying and stuff I think that would be really cool but I need to learn how to use blender or something else for that I have no 3D animation experience whatsoever but I guess I could say that about something else in flight flip everything about it I had to learn to make it work in flight flip so I guess learning blender would just be something else out at the end of the list so the user trebles is actually out on the website right now and noticing that actually it is fairly hard to use it's not for the faint of heart are there any plans to kind of make that less rocket scientist and more mere mortal so that you can do this just like to play and see interesting data can kind of really easily massage that data yeah definitely isn't super worth a beginner I don't think I did have a plan to make a youtube video of a walkthrough and say this is how you use it if you want to do this then do X Y and Z if you want to do this do 1, 2, 3 but I never got a range of that I do still plan to do that I've been traveling at the moment I was at IAC 2 or 3 weeks ago so it's difficult to do that right now but yeah that is in the works I could also maybe when you visit the page pop ups appear and say hey look this is where you put the payload mass in or something like that but yeah it's definitely not as beginner friendly as something like Kerbal Space Program where you go on and get tutorials and walkthroughs and it tells you what everything a better rocket does and teaches you organ mechanics it's definitely something you have to understand a bit about it before you go on you know if you have a two stage rocket you have to know in the middle somewhere there has to be a first stage cutoff, stage separation second stage ignition you wouldn't know that unless you watch some rocket launches right so yeah it's not as beginner friendly as I would like it to be I guess yeah walkthrough videos probably the best option for that so you were at IAC because IAC is over now which is where SpaceX announced their Mars plans actually a bunch of announcements at IAC this year which means that you're obviously a hardcore space geek and Doomkitten is wanting to know have you ever actually had an opportunity to see a launch live I saw my first ever launch about three weeks ago actually I saw at launch of Osiris Rex I had been in Miami the week before and I was going to go up to watch Amos 6 with you know tier so a few days later Osiris Rex launched and I got to go up and watch that myself and my friend were driving up actually but my friend was driving we rented a Mustang and we were driving up through Patrick Air Force Base we had about two minutes to launch just trying to drive as fast as we could to get as close as we could and then I think it launched at like three minutes past five and a woman is past five so I was like okay pull in let's run over to the beach and watch and we got there with about 30 seconds to spare it it was everything I hoped it would be even though we were still so far away but I think I might be in California around December, January which I know is when SpaceX plans to return to flight and they won't have a Vandenberg launch which I guess is already in the next so that'd be cool to go to Vandenberg and watch that but no yeah so far I've only seen the one just the Atlas 5 two more quick questions one from Spaceman Stiff which is Spaceman Spiff is there or will there be a membership for you for the site? I haven't thought about it I guess yeah I could offer some features to members that other users don't get like you can simulate more orbits I guess if I incorporated Mars flights into it then I could only offer that to members because that would require more computational power yeah that's a good idea the community is like no give it to us for free throwing out other ideas Patreon completely and totally changed the show so if there's the membership idea and then there's also the I personally would back you as a patron on Patreon because I think what you're doing is awesome and I have to believe that there are other Redditors on Slash R Slash to do the same thing and the advantage of something like that is then people who can't afford to help and get the membership they still get all the data and they can maybe get excited about space but the people who can't afford to do it they're helping back you in your program and your projects that you can actually afford to continue to do what you're doing just another weird random thought that's a good idea at the moment there's a donate page on there but that's all in the way of there's no kind of membership but yeah I don't even think about what kind of features I could give paying members but if I did do that everything that's there now would say a free option because that's like the basic package right? Alright and final question for the show which is a constant debate like I said you were at IAC so you heard a lot about the moon so the question is from Missy Hawk moon first or Mars first? I am absolutely no authority to discuss that like flight tickets is just a bunch of physics I mean personally I think moon first would be like more gratifying in the short term because it's like two days away instead of six months away but then Mars is just so awesome and people on Mars would be like the most mind-blowing ever so I guess it depends in the context of the moon with the plan of then going to Mars I'd say okay then go to the moon but if it's either or I'd probably go for the long haul and say I'll go for Mars and I'll get my satisfaction in ten years time but I'm not a rocket scientist as much as I'm trying to be and where could people find more information on a flight club and yourself? So I have a Twitter handle which is decmurphy underscore d-e-c-m-u-r-p-h-y underscore and I generally post like if I do updates on the flight club it puts up there after every SpaceX launch at least I always post the video to slash or slash SpaceX which is an awesome resource and they are absolutely the reason why the flight club is what it is now like they've been but the people on there have been pushing me constantly saying do this, do this, this is awesome this is great, do more so yeah, huge thanks to everyone they actually made a bunch of them at IAC and they're all super nice where else obviously flightclub.io is probably the best place to find flight club information there's no Facebook page or anything yeah, yeah, Twitter or SpaceX and the website itself will be the best places to go awesome, thank you so much for your time I definitely follow along and use it for rocket launches I think it's a really great resource it's a lot of fun to watch live when the rocket is taking off assuming you have enough power watch them side by side it's really, really quite awesome alright, 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 when we look up it inspires us on for something we don't yet know we yearn to go there so we venture forth join in it or not many think we stopped exploring but we know our journey didn't end we've only just begun come with us and explore tomorrow and welcome back to tomorrow before we get started with comments from last week's show I did want to give a shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who helped to make this specific segment of this episode happen these are the people who have contributed ten dollars or more they get access to absolutely everything producers, they've contributed five dollars or more and they get access to After Dark and a bunch of other really awesome features we've also got a Patreon plus subscribers also get access to After Dark as soon as it's made available on demand as well as some hangouts and other really cool things and we've got our patrons these are people who have contributed one dollar up to one dollar, I'm sorry two dollars and fifty cents and just a little bit of time and effort to really grow this show it's more than just money it's anything that you can help contribute head on over to patreon.com for information on how you can help crowdfund the shows tomorrow the different reward levels that we have all that fun jazz and like we were talking earlier we do our best to make it so that you don't have to give money especially if you're a starving student we've been there, we know what that's like so we don't make it so that you never get access to the data we just simply delay it a little bit and just contribute it to the show get access a little bit earlier and then maybe you've got some other talent maybe you're really good at social media maybe you're good at whatever it might be yeah hit me up benjamin at tmro.tv we'd love to have your help whatever you want to do always love to have it let's go ahead and get started comments from last week's show I believe that was hashtag every day astronaut he was putting the A and steam the art in stem I don't know how to do that capcom take it away first comment comes one more time first comment comes off of youtube this one is too big for you says I like the new co-host he's cool so there's that I'm not sure if I was being called a dude or if Tim was being okay anyway good times next comment comes off this one comes from citizen big number who is also currently in our chat room so if you have a comment directly related to this particular comment you can go ahead and feel free to tell them all about it if you will anyway it says why is it nasa spacex or somebody in the industry hoisting Tim Dodd on their shoulders celebrating his work these photos can capture the imagination of more kids than 100 wonky public outreach activities ever will Tim Dodd if you're reading this make your children's book post-haste post-haste hurry up hurry up get it done there is he has an image of him with like shooting off fireworks yeah and I know I think it's of the salt flats if I remember correctly I don't remember I will say just from a visualization standpoint one of my favorite pieces not just of his just one of my favorite general pieces I think it's just absolutely beautiful yeah absolutely gorgeous alright so oh my gosh yeah this is a wall of text this is a wall of text are there two screens that go to this I assume so there are three three screens that go to this wall of text I'll do it again I'll see how quickly we can get through this maybe I'll just change my tempo this will be a 40 minute segment this comment comes off of youtube from a user called nightlightabcd so begin the text when there's a discussion of living on the moon or Mars almost never is the problem of reality of reduced gravity ever brought up to Mars next to zero gravity and Mars has about half the gravity of Earth after just a year or so once the legs will be shriveled up and your body is adapted to the reduced gravity so no one that's working on Mars for several years will be able to return to Earth gravity seems to be the only hurdle that NASA does not seem to want to address if the human species is to truly be a spacefaring civilization it must have spaceships and space stations must have gravity and von Braun's wheel concept is the only way to deal with this we are not going to be traveling faster than light we are not going to be having gravity plates so when we're talking of space travel we should be addressing reality instead of fanciful sci-fi to induce preconceptions excuse me also space travel costs money and through private enterprises in the picture many of them are reliant on government so government revenue reductions does not help having anti-science people on congressional science committees also does not help so many things I was with you about halfway through and then I was not alright so let's start off with yes reduced gravity the human body is designed for 1G it's designed for life on Earth when we go into microgravity or reduced gravity of say moon or Mars it will have impacts on the human body but it's not like we don't know how to get around this we have the International Space Station they are in microgravity and really what it comes down to my understanding and I'm not an expert but as I understand it, lots of exercise you have to exercise a lot but if you do exercise a lot and you eat the appropriate foods and there's a certain regime you can keep your bone mass up and you can keep your muscle structure up and you'll be just fine and if you can do that in microgravity on the International Space Station which is much less gravity than on Mars you should be able to do that on Mars as well anyone here know how many hours they work out every day on this day? two and a half hours to work out every day twice a day or two and a half hours each day so five hours every day okay that's a lot that's a lot but the point is the idea that you have to have 1G isn't necessarily fully accurate so maybe there are other things and other interesting ideas we haven't thought of yet to help keep that look I'm going to go out and just say this even here which is that even exercising as much as they do in the zero G microgravity environment on the International Space Station Mikhail Kornenko after his one year in space was still able to come home and literally do a kilometer of swimming the next day and he said he felt and he came home on a Soyuz and he said that he felt even better swimming that kilometer than he had at any time during the time that he swam in his life so maybe we're pushing maybe the five hours isn't necessarily required and you can reduce that again because you do have some gravity on Mars it's what it's one percent of the atmosphere is one third gravity of Earth so it's not like the microgravity where microgravity is even worse so actually the International Space Station is a terrible place to put a human body it's actually it's like the worst possible conditions right on the moon and on Mars it only gets better from what we're testing right now and even in our horrible conditions we haven't figured out and also a wheel isn't the only way to do it either as well you know you can actually use you can actually get like a tether and attach it to your upper stage of the rocket that you've launched with it and still use that as a mass and kind of using this in typical force as you're going around and around spinning you need spinning doesn't have to be a wheel but you need spin also I've heard concepts that you have a centrifuge module when they sleep they're in 1G or they can be at like 1.2 or 1.3G a little bit more than Earth and that way they can do it that way I like that idea go ahead Mike you were trying to say something oh there actually was a plan to build a centrifuge module for the International Space Station it was mostly built and it's just sitting outside in Japan right now and because it's got cancer it's never going to be sent up but I mean I do I don't agree that NASA is not addressing the problem they are very much concerned with the problem and the medication that they've developed for their astronauts to take to help not lose as much bone mass is being sold here on mass for osteoporosis patients so I mean that's just another benefit that this whole thing brought for life here on Earth but the whole thing is with our circadian rhythms and I mean once we do get to this kind of way way future out there where we actually have people who are born on Mars their circadian rhythms are going to adjust and they're going to be different and they're not going to have as many adverse health effects as someone who was born and matured on Earth and then spends time on Mars and this whole thing with the year in space that Mikhail Kornenko and Scott Kelly did showed that after a certain point the damage stopped being as much and maybe we just need longer adjustment periods the human body is very very adaptable and with this long duration spaceflight that we recently accomplished we've discovered that we might need a little bit more adjustment and of course there still needs to be a lot of data needs to be gone over to verify this and see what the actual changes are happening within their bodies but I mean it might not necessarily be so bad now someone who goes to Mars to stay there after a certain amount of time of course they're going to start having a lot of different problems but someone who goes for a four to six year trip might not necessarily have as many problems as we think so we just have to do more experiments and get more data Dutta did a real time fact check for us it's actually two hours every day of workout on the International Space Station two hours total much more reasonable number than five and again that's in a worst case scenario right so it gets better on moon or Mars I think they do one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening that's a reasonable number even on Mars two hours of workout to ensure bone density and muscle mass and it's like one hour of cardio and one hour of resistance training so which is like that's like pretty good and also working out is good for you psychologically as well it helps between that you're on earth anyway yeah yeah I'll get right on that yeah that's called our drive time to work from work that's that's our exercise time yeah you should get many weights in there and you know I have like one big beefy arm I'll trogg door style alright let's just move on listen there was so much more to that comment we should have cut that thing down into like a reasonable shock yeah I blame all of you for that yeah dada he's blaming dada over there yeah we'll just point that next up capcom I just read him next one comes off of twitter comes from actually comes from next week's guest on the show so we do all about it yeah yeah actually I'm gonna yeah I know you're gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna man crush like this for a minute hey Dave in case you guys haven't figured this one out hi Dave oh man hi I like your rockets hi Dave it's not after dark yet start asking the questions oh boy like I said it comes off of twitter from one at dmastin man I think my team figured out how to turn the super tanker ship into a huge spaceship those billionaires have nothing on us hashtag biggest rocket we should bring vax in on that one it's called freaking C C dragon I almost said C launch called C dragon same thing it's a thing it's been there since like what the 60s so yeah yeah the real thing actually it's actually I don't think it's a bad idea I've always thought it was actually really interesting idea it's super simple C dragon itself is pressure fed but you know whatever I think you should do it Dave ready to go waiting for it he doesn't know how he's data says he doesn't know how he's going to get a big giant ship into or no that's the whole and he does that's what next week is for we'll ask him on next week's show they did it during the avengers movie so they can so you know it's possible great fans next up capcom next one comes off of patreon it's from a Brendan Caulfield says there were some awesome discussion and of in-person launch viewing experience this week love all the details about the effects of the sound wastes and stuff very evocative that was specifically in after dark so for those who don't for those who aren't patrons if you consider becoming the patreon plus or above you'll get after dark automatically through patreon you get a little email every time it comes out we usually try to post it right after the show as best we can sometimes it's delayed 24 hours and then a few weeks later it's generally a month later everyone else will get access to it now it doesn't get posted to our main YouTube channel because that would just clutter the whole channel so if you just search YouTube for TMRO after dark you'll find the after dark channel it's the easiest way to find it and then go from there and so yeah if you want to see any of our after dark episodes they're all on YouTube otherwise like I said patreon it helps support the show helps us do cool new things I'm actually looking at this new set in the other direction in pieces on the floor yep so it's not a paper set there's hardware there is hardware it's not put together but it's there's some hardware it's coming it's starting to come together oh yeah you can't you guys can't see it but right off camera we've got like huge saws oh that's with a vacuum one so huge saw is that ours or is that his it's theirs it's there oh why they have the same vacuum as we do yeah so giant saws huge pieces of wood over there got cut up wood over here like it's it's like if I just move the camera just a little bit the illusion is ruined it's fantastic so that's all for orbit 10 coming up so the next year is going to be orbit 10 that's all coming up there it's going to be awesome I'm super super excited to yeah so actually and was that the that was the last comment right yeah so just closing out the show talking about that a little bit we actually are you'll notice us playing with the format ever so slightly and how we're doing news how we're doing interviews how we're doing different segments that's all in anticipation of orbit 10 now part of this is just to see how it works on like how the chemistry works in certain areas but I think it will all make a lot more sense once we have kind of the whole cohesive vision come together for next season it's going to be pretty awesome we're really going to use the studio space quite well I think we're going to use every square inch of it to produce the show and I think you guys are really going to like it so bear with us in toying and messing with things for the rest of this year but it seems to be working fairly well and I think we'll kind of continue forward I for again talking I'm sorry to bring a patreon again for our patreon premiere members who get access to the slack channel they actually at that level because it's let's be frank it's an absurd amount of money and thank you guys very much for your money show at that level we do give you you get behind the scenes like they've seen pictures of all of this they've seen what's coming up like all of that fun when we were constructing me and Dud over here Thursday night actually cutting the hardware and doing the wood and everything I was uploading images to it in real time so they were actually seeing us as we were progressing on our slack channel for our tomorrow premiere members yep it's pretty cool anyhow thank you so much everyone for joining us after dark is up next and next week as we mentioned Dave he's going to be a master of master space systems it's going to either be awesome or he's going to come here and be like yeah I can't tell you anything that we're working on not sure which so stay tuned after dark is up next we'll see you next week