 All right, this is your Tuesday space pod space Mike. You've got United Launch Alliance and Bigelow Aerospace. What's going on over there? So Bigelow Aerospace and United Launch Alliance who have announced a partnership for a while What they want to do is launch a B330 expandable module on the Vulcan rocket And what they want to do with this is they want to outfit it first in low-earth orbit and then send it into low Lunar orbit by the end of 2022 to serve as a lunar depot So the B330 would launch into low-earth orbit on the Vulcan 5-6-2 Configuration and once in orbit, but a little aerospace would outfit the habitat and demonstrate that it's working properly That this would also be able to be a good opportunity to work with their other commercial partners like SpaceX and Boeing And I for one would love to see a crude checkout flight with maybe a paying tourist on board to help pay for the expense of this entire mission Now once the B330 is fully operational in low-earth orbit United Launch Alliance would have two more missions where they would launch Vulcan Aces upper stages each one would have about 35 tons of cryogenic propellant on board Now once these are in orbit they would rendezvous with each other and all of the cryogenic propellant would be transferred to one of the Aces upper stages or advanced cryogenic evolved stages and the full Aces upper stage would then rendezvous with a B330 module Perform multiple maneuvers once they were able to mate or rather dock with the B330 and transfer it into its final position in low lunar orbit And this could be a If done correctly, this could be a game changer this commercial lunar station could provide an anchorage for all sorts of different lunar business Develop that is in development right now in addition to having NASA and other Governments have a new location to conduct long term exploration and astronaut training pretty much This could be either taking part in or take the place of the deep space gateway concept either way This idea could really capitalize on the current lunar momentum going on right now Now, I really hope that Bigelow and United Launch Alliance with their own CIS lunar 1,000 ambitions will build all of the pieces of this and launch it without the need for NASA to pay for it along the Way like a fixed-price contract that that United Launch Alliance and Bigelow Aerospace will do it themselves and then later Have NASA as a customer once it exists now a single B330 module is comparable to about one-third the current pressurized volume inside volume of the International Space Station and Bigelow Aerospace is building two of these modules right now of these B330 modules And they've said that they could be ready for launch anytime after 2020 and even though that's still a little less than three years away It's still really exciting This is something that they have been working for for a lot for many years and having this partnership with United Launch Alliance could Change everything and I really hope that they are able to push forward this and that this becomes a real space station You seem pretty excited Mike All right, thank you. I just like these ideas. I want to go to all the places I want to go to Mars don't get me wrong, but I want to go to the moon first and stop off on those places Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially if it's one-third the you said one-third the volume one-third or one-quarter the volume of the space station Pretty much one-third the volume of the of the International Space Station is just one module Yeah, you just need a common docking collar kind of in the middle a common collar Then you drop three or four of them in a circle and you've got I guess more usable volume than your International Space Station you could do quite a few things and be really cool. Oh Yeah, and if this was part of the deep space gateway I mean there's already a node module that has four to six docking ports on it for you know Additional modules to be part of the deep space gateway, you know dock two of these B330 modules to the deep space gateway And boom, you know, we have something that's almost the same size as the International Space Station So at least on the inside for the astronauts. Awesome. Thank you so much, Mike. All right So for our last show us tomorrow orbit 10 dot 39 We had John Amobile on talking about how we can colonize our solar system in one lifetime Check that out. Otherwise, we've got live shows every Saturday at 1800 coordinated universal time