 And welcome back to tomorrow. Now, before we get started with our interview with Dave Masse, and I wanted to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who've done to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are people who've contributed $10 or more to get access to absolutely everything. We've also got our tomorrow producers. These are people who've contributed $5 or more. They're going to get access to After Dark and a bunch of other really great rewards to find out those reward levels and how you can help crowd fund the shows of tomorrow. Head on over to patreon.com slash tmro. Long time guest of the show, Dave Masse. And you're back on Welcome. Thank you for driving down from the mythical lines of Mojave. So unusual, pleasant weather and everything. It is weird. It is weird. So for those who don't know, who is Masse and Space Systems? So Masse and Space Systems is a small company up in Mojave. We've been, like to say, we're the hipster rocket company. We've been doing reusable since before it was cool. You have. You did, like, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Land. What are we calling it now? It's the Northrop Grumman Lunar Land or XPRIZE. They change it every year. It's the Lunar Land of Challenge, as far as I'm concerned. And it was a wonderful thing back in 2009. We demonstrated a small rocket-powered vehicle, essentially doing what it would be doing on the moon with a landing and then take off and land again. And the big things were it was be able to do two of them within a very short period of time. I think it was 45 minutes. As far as I know, no one's really done that yet, right? So you were landing five years before any of the other big players were doing that. Yes. But you were also then reusing it within, like, an hour. With it, yeah, a very short period of time. Turn around and launch again. We've done a number of times where we've done multiple flights in a single day. I think our record for a flight period is, like, 12 flights in less than a week. That's a pretty good number, yeah. That's a pretty good number. So hipster company. So anyway, since we've been doing reusable for so long, we've now been working on launch vehicles with DARPA and doing the XS-1 program. And the XS-1 program is DARPA wants to do not just a reusable launch vehicle, but a launch vehicle that is truly airplane-like in operations. And one of the requirements is to do 10 flights in 10 days. We've already done that. Of course, they want a much larger vehicle than we've done before, a little higher performance. So for our competitors, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, their challenge is to actually get a reusable vehicle. And doing 10 flights in 10 days, they've already done the same size or bigger. Whereas for us, well, we've already done the 10 flights in 10 days. We just have to do a larger, more higher performance vehicle. But in that XS-1, you're going to a higher altitude. You see more performance. That's what you mean. Not just higher altitude, but a higher velocity as well. XS-1 is a full go take a satellite to orbit type launch vehicle, where we have not done that. Pretty much suborbital vehicles, very low performance type of vehicles up until now and now. We're working on this, actually, a launch vehicle. It's a small to medium-sized launch vehicle. And NeuroPilot in the chatroom says, are you still working on winged reentry vehicles? That's what this XS-1. So XS-1, our initial concept drawing that we gave out to the press and DARPA sent out to the press actually had wings on it. We have a difference configuration. I prefer to think of them as fins. But they're kind of large, even for fins. But we do need some amount of aerodynamic surfaces for what we're trying to do with it, in terms of basically doing the reusability and still maintain some performance levels. So have you changed the orientation of launch or landing then? We still do vertical takeoff, vertical landing. That is, Mastin will not do anything, but you can't land horizontally or take off horizontally from the surface of the moon. So why do I want to do that anywhere else? NeuroPilot also asks, is Lynx still a partner, or is that all dead in the water? So XCOR was a partner for the XS-1 in the early parts of phase one. But what they were doing was they were literally just a, how to say, they were the what to do in case some of our technology development didn't go as well as we expected. So there was sort of a redundancy level to it. And we got to a point in phase one where DARPA agreed with us that we actually had bought down enough of the risk that we didn't need to carry another performer along with us to mitigate that risk. So basically they did what they needed to do, which was come in and do some of the work and make sure that we didn't have some technology risks. And we got to a point where we didn't have those technology risks. And so they said, oh, hey, you did a great job. Thank you for helping us out and have a nice day. Well, they kind of have met, they're not totally gone XCOR, but they kind of met the same fate that a lot of new space companies meet, which is a lack of funding. And it seems like they've kind of really shut down their links program, which was their reusable space plane. So they're kind of moving on, but you seem to be doing all right. We're doing okay so far. We're holding on. And it's basically, I think we found, we found a little niche that gives us enough money to keep going. And we actually have customers which helps and are actually able to fly those missions. In fact, one of those missions, actually a series of missions that we flew for JPL has resulted in the technology that we were helping JPL test get selected for Mars 2020. Which is the, basically curiosity reborn. Yeah, the next curiosity mission essentially, which we'll be launching in 2020, that's Mars 2020. And yeah, so that, I have a little piece of technology going to Mars, woo-hoo. Well, not just going to Mars, landing on Mars. So landing on Mars, yes. Or creating an impact crater, but we've already proven out the sky crane model, so we're pretty sure. Well, it's some knock on wood here because what we did was actually help them test out some of the technology, train relative navigation and hazard avoidance technologies that some of that is going to be used for the new mission. So hopefully it does enable a nice soft landing and doesn't mess up in bad conditions. Why is that important? Why is train navigation important for this one? So train relative navigation and hazard avoidance technologies are really important because we need to go someplace a little less boring on Mars. Because we're choosing flat areas that we can easily land on. Huge flat areas that you can easily land on just are not, apparently they're not scientifically exciting. The exciting stuff is where you have, you know, maybe, you know, deep canyons where water may have once gone. That's a little more interesting, you know, apparently geologists think that mountains and canyons and ravines are interesting. So we need to see that type of geology and that geography. So we need to be able to land in a much tighter band, you know, that landing ellipse needs to be brought down in size and once you have a smaller landing ellipse, then we can do a lot more science with that. And that's, train relative navigation hazard avoidance should enable that. So there was a tweet when we announced that you were coming on the show, it was like, oh, I hope they don't talk about hiking because you and your wife loved to hike and go, so let's talk about hiking. So exploration. Exploration is how I like to call it. That's what it is though, right? I mean, you're talking about hazard avoidance, but you're gonna need this on the vehicles that are landing on Mars, because, you know, for a long time we're not gonna have humans on board, but even when we do have humans on board, autonomous landing is a good idea. And then you have intention of going to Mars yourself. I would love to go to Mars. I'd love to, so I consider myself an explorer. I'm not the pioneer. I'm not the guy who's gonna go there and stay. I do have no intention of staying on Mars when I get there. I want to come home. So I'm gonna go there. I'm gonna survey. I would love to survey Elon's retirement home. And when I get done with the survey, you know, maybe hike around, maybe explore some mountains, you know, that hiking and mountaineering stuff that I do is, you know, there's the largest mountain in the solar system, so let's go hike to the top of it. You mentioned something before the show that I didn't know. The top of Olympus Mons, which is the mountain on Mars. On Mars. Is in space. It actually extends above the, quote unquote, sensible atmosphere. So you actually have more of the, so, you know, despite the hard vacuum of space, there is actually an atmosphere everywhere. It is, the solar wind is what you're going to, quote unquote, feel, is what you have there. If you have the instrumentation to detect it, it's more of the solar wind than it is the Martian atmosphere at the top of Olympus Mons. So you're basically out in space on top of Olympus Mons. The other dirty little secret is climbing Olympus Mons once you're at the edge of it, apparently, at the base of it. Yeah. Is like just a very long and- There's a long, gradual, easy-to-walk-up slope. It's not mountaineering at all. And then when you're at the top, you can feel that solar breeze rushing against your helmet, I guess, at that point. Right, right. So you're going to go there and you're going to come back. Are you going to go there and come back on a Mastin vehicle? I would hope so. So, you know, that's what we're working towards. So to that end, Jack asks, what is the ultimate goal of Mastin space systems? So the ultimate goal of Mastin space systems is we're a space transportation company. It is our intention to have, provide the transportation services anywhere in the solar system. If you're going to a solid body or maybe even a liquid surface, we'll take you there. And it doesn't matter where in the solar system. Maybe even outside of the solar system, too. Interesting. I feel like I should poke at that a little bit. Well, I mean, you know, hopefully someday we'll figure out how to go, you know, get to the higher performance rocket engines and, you know, maybe figure out fusion or fission or something and get some higher performance. And, you know, there is an effort of, I can't remember his name now, Russian billionaire who wants to send little tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. Love to help him with that. So that leads into another question from user little blind crippled girl who asks, what is your dream rocket? Can it do like three flights a day? Is it, what kind of load can it do with the low earth orbit on a daily basis? What's like the day Dave Mastin budget is no constraint. Time is no constraint. You can build it. What's your dream rocket? I know the two things that are always the huge constraints that keep everything down. But let's eliminate it for a moment. So I don't know that I have a single dream rocket. There's, it's sort of like, what's your dream car? Well, I'm in the transportation industry. Do it, you know, for certain routes, you know, think United Airlines. For certain routes, use Canada's, Canada Air regional jets. For other routes, you're using 747s. And, you know, there are routes with everything in between. We see the same thing. There are certain places where, you know, a small sat launch vehicle is the perfect thing to do and make sense. And so that's what we'll do. In other places, you know, we need something where, you know, even Elon's not thinking big enough. But that's, you know, that's somewhere way down the line. That's a pretty big rocket. That's a, that's a large statement. So, you know, that's, but, you know, who knows where, where that will end up being. You know, do we need, do we need, you know, think about it. There's a little tiny tank trucks that, you know, go from gas station from, you know, refueling facilities, tank facilities out to gas stations. Those are 5,000 gallon. You also have super tankers that are hundreds of thousands of millions of gallons of petroleum at a time. You need the whole range of things. So, you know, I think we're gonna need to do the whole range of things. You mentioned a super tanker. So I have to mention the tweet that you sent out, which was you were out looking at a, what was it, an Atlas or Delta launch? It was a launch of sorts with your team. And mentioned, you may have figured out how to turn a super tanker into a rocket. It was, it was, you know, it's a Friday afternoon, bunch of guys around the water cooler talking and recent, that might have been an Atlas 5, I think, launch, I don't recall. But yeah, and I just was like, what is the propellant mass fraction of a super tanker? At which point somebody else jumped on Google and started looking and was like, about 80%. 80%. Well, that's pretty close to, you know, reasonable rocket range. You know, normally it's 90%. Well, that does include the diesel engines. So we take out the diesel engines and we put rocket engines in instead and rocket engines have this thrust weight ratio and you'll need about this amount of thrust. And the next thing you know, we've got a concept designed for a rocket based on a super tanker. Now, that's very similar to something that we've brought up in the show before, which is C-Dragon. Would there, is it, just you guys just talking like, hey, wouldn't this be neat? Or do you think there's actually something there? So I'm not sure that there's a number of questions that still need to be answered. There's maybe there's something there, maybe something that big really does need to occur. And so yeah, I mean, we basically just, you know, sort of an afternoon, a group of guys thinking about what does, what does a concept design like that look like? And there's still some questions, but maybe maybe it's not too unreasonable. Would you, so if you were thinking about you floated out to sea and then like tip it down like you would sea launch, would you? Oh, that was one of our guys was like, yeah, you know, we could use our Zeus technology that, you know, where we land a centaur on its side. And so you have your side thrusters, plus you have your main engines. So maybe you take it out to sea and when you get out to where you know you've got your trajectory doesn't crossover land. You need, and you're pointing at the right inclination. You need maybe you're down at the equator. You can, you can light the engines up in the front. You can basically pop a wheelie, light your main engines and get going. I wanna see that. That would be amazing. Oh, that would be amazing. Just being a little much smaller vessel out at sea, like, oh, that's a very large, are they firing rocket engines? Yeah, there's some serious questions about that. But you know, it was a controls guy. So the controls guy thinks it can be done. It might actually not be. Oh my God. I would love to see you working out out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, just this giant super tanker with like the mast and logo and a pirate flag on top or something like that. The pirate flag comes after we raise up the battleship Yamato and make, turn that into a spaceship. All right. For those who grew up in the 70s. All right, so going backwards in time a little bit, just structure 1701 says in the chat room there are a lot of questions about MXP 351. This is the first I've heard of it, please describe it. Okay, so I'm not gonna give you as much description as you want. It's a hypergolic propellant combination. It is green for whatever definition of green we want. It's basically, it's really about, we, you don't need the full scape suit when you're handling propellants like you do with the traditional hypergols. You can, you still need some protective equipment. So for those who don't know, hypergolic fuels will basically react with anything like water. So hypergolic means that you have the oxidizer component, the fuel component and when they touch, they ignite. You don't need an igniter. You don't need an igniter. It's they will ignite, they will, and what the satellite industry loves about that is that they touch, they will ignite, you will, your engine is going. They love that you don't need an igniter. You don't have a point of failure out in space. You don't have a point of failure when you're out in space, they're extremely reliable. So we've come up with a combination. We've been working, this is a lot of the work has been done in conjunction with NASA on the catalyst program. And we've basically worked out a way of getting these two particular chemicals. They come together, they ignite, they're actually very easy to handle. Instead of a full scape suit, all you need to do is basically wear eye protection and gloves. We do one of the, an MSDS for one of the things said, maybe you might want to wear a respirator. So we said, okay, we'll wear a respirator. Not a big deal. So, but generally it's, the stuff is non-toxic. You can handle it. If you were to inhale it, you're not going to die in the next couple of seconds. You don't have to go to the hospital. If you- Well, wait, if you inhale a hypergall, like today, there is not going to a hospital, right? I mean, you're- It depends on which of those two you inhale. All right. One of them, you're pretty much dead. You're gone. The other one, you may have to go to the hospital. I guess that's the one I'm used to work or considering with aerospace, right? It basically will react with anything. Yeah, yeah. It will react with anything and bring the tissues in your lungs. Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. It's not a fun thing. Yeah, the hydrazine is not necessarily a terrible thing. I've understand that some people have accidentally breathe hydrazine and are talking about it. On the other hand, the red fuming nitric acid is a little bit worse. So yeah, the manner is a lot of details because we don't actually use hydrazine. It's more like aerosine, which is some weird combination of hydrazine and other things that makes it worse. It's much greener, so better for the environment because traditionally, hypergalls are not super awesome. Actually, you see like space disasters and they tell you don't go anywhere near their vehicle. It's very toxic. That's generally the hypergolic fuels. So it's green, but what about, it's easier to work with, so it's safer. But are there any words on like prices, is it less expensive, is it more expensive, or is that it well? Well, just because it's easier to work with makes it less expensive. Okay. The actual cost of buying the chemical is in the noise compared to the cost of actually loading it onto a satellite and actually working with it. So yeah, it's because it's easier to work with, it makes it a lot cheaper. All right, let's move even further backwards. Beginning of the interview because we're jumping all around with the chat room. Okay. A Vax headroom is, what is the maximum altitude you've achieved with your vehicles and how long can you provide flight in micro, kind of flight provide microgravity? So how long can you stay in? So we haven't actually gotten to microgravity levels yet. Our highest flight, shoot. We just had this discussion in an email conversation. We were like trying to figure out what our highest altitude was because we think we came very close to it this past week. I want to say it's around successful flight. It was around 500 meters. But it's not, you know, we hear Elon and SpaceX talk about this a lot. It's not the altitude, it's the velocity that is the hard part, right? Because you're talking about doing low Earth orbit, low Earth orbit missions with like XS1, that's not height, that speed. Yeah, it's all about the velocity at that point. And to a certain extent, up to a point, say 100 kilometers or so, or orbital velocities, up to about getting to the edge of space, it's speed and height are one and the same. Once you're starting to go to orbit, then it's all about the velocity after that. An altitude has little to do with it. But that impacts your recoverability as well, right? I mean, that's what makes reusability. I mean, you're known for reusability, but this is a nut that you haven't cracked yet, is it enough? So it is something that we haven't, yeah, we haven't gone really fast yet. We haven't done the really fast. But I mean, there's a lot of different things you have to deal with for reusability. One of the things is, can you even get a rocket engine to light, shut down, light again repeatedly? And then how often can you repeat that before you have to take it apart and do maintenance? You know, between shuttle flights, that was one of the things. Now, early in the shuttle program, they absolutely positively had to take the shuttle engines apart and rebuild them every single time. Now, my understanding is by the end of the program, by the time they retired shuttle, they did, but they really didn't have to take the engines off. Like they took them apart, they checked it out, rebuilt it, but they really didn't have the wear and tear. So like maybe they were thinking, hey, you know, maybe we are getting to a level of reusability that might be more like an airplane where you don't tear apart an airplane engine every time you land. Right. And so that's an interesting question. And now I don't know, SpaceX and Blue Origin, how much time do they spend on engine rework after they land? Are they just inspecting or do they have to clean the heck out of them, or even tear them apart and rebuild them? How about you? Obviously you're being able to fly within 45 minutes, so I have to assume the answer is like zero. We figured it out to where you don't have to take apart an engine, you don't have to, you just sort of look at it and say, yeah, that still looks like an engine. So what is, this is from Tarantula, what is the biggest challenge for quick turnaround of your reusable vehicles? So I think the biggest challenges are in the propulsion system. And then once you start doing things like going to space and doing much higher velocities, thermal protection systems. Making sure that you don't burn up. Don't burn up on reentry, yeah. And that's sort of the hard part, that's sort of the part that we need a lot more work on quite frankly. Why is it hard? It feels like there are a billion different thermal protection systems. You got the tiles from the shuttle, you got blankets, you've got Pica from NASA. I mean, what? So you have things like Pica from NASA which aren't so reusable. It's ablative. Sure. And so by definition, you're burning up a portion of it as you come in. Maybe you can reuse it a second or third time if the reentry wasn't as bad as you expected. But you really need something where you're not gonna replace it after every flight or every two flights or every, you don't wanna replace it until after you've done a few hundred flights. And that becomes difficult. Now on the shuttle, the shuttle used a lot of what RCC, let's say a carbon-carbon composite. And it had the problem of if you, the reentry part might go just perfectly fine. It lost a lot of tiles. They had constant problems with losing tiles. So that's a bit of an issue. So you had that replacement work. But also you couldn't land in the rain because just a raindrop hitting it, it was going fast enough. And the carbon composite, the carbon-carbon is so brittle that a raindrop hitting it will crack it. Oh my gosh, I had no idea. I did not know they could not land in the rain. So yeah, they couldn't land in the rain. That's why they oftentimes had to land at Edwards. It's because, oh, it looks like it's gonna rain and it's going to keep raining through our entry window. So let's shift to Edwards so that we can land this mission. That one time at White Sands. They landed there once and they said, we're never doing that again. So yeah, and so there's a lot of materials issues with thermal protection systems for doing a re-entry. And I think we actually have some answers for that. I'm excited to see that in the future when that, do you have any, are you allowed, are you able to give out any timelines? Because I know that XS1, they kind of did their, it's done in phases and the first phase is basically done and we're kind of waiting on phase two. Right, right. Are you gonna move, like do you need them to do phase two or can you just continue moving forward without that? Well, whatever their ultimate decisions are, we're gonna keep moving. We may change direction a little bit, like we might change the size of the vehicle. Not sure that, I mean DARPA's XS1 vehicle may be a little larger than what we really, really, really wanna do. Okay, so what do you really, really wanna do then? So right now I really, really wanna concentrate on small set launch. I think there's a really nice opening there and that's, yeah. How large is a small set? What do you define as a small set? Well, traditionally small set is anything that's 100 kilograms or less. All right. For a satellite size. I'm stretching that a little bit. I think maybe 250 kilos, 300 kilos is probably a sweeter spot for launch capability. All right. But generally, looking at most of the market is less than 100 kilos is enough of the, between 100 and 300 that we think that makes a more sensible size. What are you working on with XS1? So XS1 was 3,000 to 5,000 pounds to orbit, so about 1,400 or so kilos. So quite a bit more. So quite a bit more. But that's all, XS1 is single stage to orbit. Well, it doesn't have to be, no, no. But it's definitely reusable. It is definitely reusable. Do, if you did multi-stage to orbit, do all stages need to be reusable? No, no, it's just a booster stage for XS1. Interesting, interesting. I didn't realize that. And that was sort of another thing that, sort of another change there is like, want to make that upper stage reusable. And so there's a little bit of a, Well, because in your initial drawings, it looked like you were single stage to orbit, like with the wing diversion, right? The giant airplane- So we had a wing, but it was a booster. So there was, when XS1 program started, there were two missions for it. There was the go to orbit, and it was also a do a mock 10, scramjet kind of a vehicle that could carry a scramjet experiment. Okay. So basically hypersonic experiments for the Air Force. The Air Force is really interested in doing a lot more testing in hypersonic environments. And they thought that, you know, if you could go to orbit, then well, obviously you can do a mock 10 hypersonic experiment. As we got through the program, well, no, that's not really true. You really want to dedicate a vehicle for hypersonics. And it's either for launch or it's for hypersonics. You're really not going to do the same vehicle for both. So they sort of dropped the hypersonic requirement towards the end. And then you would actually take it, if phase two doesn't happen, or if you're not selected, you would take it and scale it down even more. We're just going to scale it down and do our own. Because you want to be fully reusable. That's what massive space is. Yes, exactly. So an interesting comment from Lars von Braun maybe you can speak to you. He says, I really want to like mass in space systems, but I feel like they're not very far along. Feels like they're more dreamers than anything else at this time. Are you just talking about this stuff? Are you building this stuff? Where are you? Because we don't hear a lot about you, right? We're building stuff. We're launching stuff. You know, we're not billionaires. We're not backed by a billionaire. So it's just taking a little bit more time for us to do stuff. And unfortunately, because the government has been helping us with, you know, contracts or our launch vehicle. We're getting a lot of assistance from DARPO through the XS1 program to do a launch vehicle. Then yeah, guess what? We can't tweet about it. Well, we can, but in order to tweet about something exciting that we did for XS1. For example, we recently did some engine testing for XS1. In order to tweet about it, I have to put in a request for media release to the bureaucracy. Feels like it feels like it's hilarious that you have 140 characters. You have to have this request. Yes. And two weeks later, I get a question about it. You know, social media nowadays is you have a four hour relevancy window. Sure. You know, if you're not talking, if you don't tweet it out in four hours, you're not relevant. So if I got away two weeks, forget it. So our social media is just, you know, taking a dive, basically, think we pretty much tweet about being on tomorrow and we tweet about job openings. So you're kind of, for lack of a better term, in blue origin mode right now where you're doing a lot of stuff, but no one can see what you're doing. Exactly. And some day, once you're able to do it, these floodgates will open and be like, oh, actually we have all of these vehicles. Because you have engines, you are flying things, you're making stuff, you're bending hardware, you're not just talking about it. You actually have a whole campus now up in. Yeah, we have a whole campus. We have five buildings now. You know, our staff has grown considerably. We're about three or four times what we were a couple of years ago. And we're doing a lot of cool stuff, but because we're working a lot more with the government, we're actually getting government contracts to support a lot of our development activities. We have to go through this whole long spiel for getting stuff, to tweet about stuff. And so it doesn't get us talked about as much. And just sort of, well, let's keep working. We can do that. They don't stop us from doing that. All right, a couple of last questions. We're gonna bounce around a little bit again. One more is that you really got the chat room all around over MXP 351. So if you can't, yeah, I know. You're like, oh, come on, join us this question. Don't answer it if you can't, but determined it's cheaper, safer, but can you produce it off of earth? So let's say you go to Mars and you wanna build a vehicle and refuel it on Mars. Could you go to Mars and create it there from only elements found on Mars? Well, I mean, technically it is elements that are found just about everywhere in the universe. So yes, we could. How much effort would it take? I don't know, I don't know. I mean, it's probably not as easy as just cracking water to get hydrogen and oxygen, although one of the components, pretty much if you have water, we can make one of the components, so. But yeah, no, you could. That's a solid maybe. All the elements are there. But it is, yeah, I mean, a question. I mean, we don't have any technology to make propellants off earth right now anyway, so. That's fair. No, you can't. And I don't care if you sleep or not, but theoretically you could. But no, I don't think anybody actually has that technology right now. All right, this is a great question to take us into break. So this will be the last question for you. This one's easy, I promise. And that is from Starter1701. Do you have any job openings right now? I don't think we're hiring right at the moment. But if you do in the future, where should people go for that information? In the future, Mastin.arrow, A-E-R-O. Did you know that there's a dot space top level domain now? You can actually own Mastin.space. I'll make sure to let our people know. We found that out the other day. So yeah, there is a whole new slew of things. So I think that'd be pretty cool. All right, Dave, it is always fun having you on the show. Thank you so much. Hopefully that was not too painful. Not at all, thank you.