 And welcome back to tomorrow. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham. Before we get into our interview, I did want to give a shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who have up to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are people who have contributed $10 or more. They get access to our Slack channel. We've also got tomorrow producers. These are people who have contributed $5 or more, and they're going to get access to international free shipping on our swag store to find out how you can help crowdfund the show as a tomorrow and get all those different levels of rewards. Head on over to patreon.com. All right, now we are joined once again by John Powell of JP Aerospace. Thank you very much, John, for taking time out of your Saturday to join us. I know it's been a bit of a long day. Oh, no problem. So let's start off with who is JP Aerospace? What are you guys doing? Well, we're a small aerospace company. We consider ourselves a private space program. We just had our 38th anniversary this year as an organization, since we incorporated it in California. And we just got back last weekend from our 186th flight where we flew a bunch of student payloads. We had 180 PongSat student experiments and six of the MiniCube student experiments. And we did that run up to 95,000 feet on a high altitude balloon and it had a nice flight. And then two weeks before that, we just flew our new airship, the Ascender 36. And so we've been doing a lot of flying and a lot of building and a lot of work in the shop. On our, we have a hypersonic wind tunnel and we've been trying to get it to Mach 4 for a year and a half now or Mach 3.8. You can't quite break that. But there's a lot going on. So one of the things that you're doing a little bit differently, and actually we brought this up on a few shows a while ago is you're actually, you're doing balloons for the most part. So you're not doing giant vertical, vertical landing rockets or anything else like that. Your first stage is a balloon. Oh yeah, our first, our second, our third stage is a balloon. We are the completely crazy airship to orbit guys. And we've been working on this project for literally decades now. We're the slowest space program in history. Working out each technical problem, each technical problem as we go to see if we can pull this off. And what is airship to space? How does this, what is the plan? Well, the simple idea or the simple way to put it is we take a lighter than air vehicle to 160,000 feet, like balloons are flying to right now. And then we slowly start to accelerate it. So we take the good at 60,000 feet and then with a plasma propulsion system slowly start to accelerate. And instead of over six minutes accelerating to orbit, we take up to 10 days to accelerate to orbit. But we start our acceleration and our orbital insertion at 400,000 feet way above the atmosphere. Essentially we wanna change the whole nature of space travel by taking the rocket completely out of it. But as was brought up in the chat room, I believe this is brought by Vogan. You can't fly a balloon to space. You know, those gases are going to expand. So how do you deal with it? There's a certain threshold that you just can't go over. How do you deal with that? Well, actually it's dynamic climb to orbit. Think of it as a flying giant flying wing. We actually are getting no buoyancy or it's diminished buoyancy and we're neutral at around 230,000 feet. And then that's when we actually begin to accelerate the vehicle slowly climb. We don't even break Mach 1 to over 300,000 feet. Where they were taking balloons in the 60s, the project shop put balloons, they were flying them at Mach 10 at three to 400,000 feet. It's kind of our first goal is to replicate that old 60s technology and get our balloons going at Mach 10 or not quite, but almost halfway orbital velocity at three to 400,000 feet. So the question becomes, well, they could do that in the early 60s. Can we push it a little faster today? If with 40, 50 years more advanced technology, can we go to Mach 14 instead of Mach 10? Can we go to Mach 15? How far can you take that technology? And that's the question that we're trying to ask at JP Aerospace. I can't tell you if we can actually go Mach 22. But I can tell you it's important enough question that somebody needs to find out. And that's what we're doing. How fast have you gotten the system to go? With the smaller vehicles, we've been up to Mach 3.5, but that's nothing as part of our bigger system at all. And that's not been driven with our primary engines. That's been driven with solids. Right now, our biggest airship we built was a little bigger than a 747. And we actually, that was a custom build we did for the Air Force about 12 years ago when we built a whole series of these big B-shaped airships for them. Our latest series, we built a 26-foot airship that we flew last year a couple of times. And then we're building a 36, we finished the 36-foot, the Ascender 36. And we flew that about two months ago now. And that one looks like this. Got props? You have to have props. And that was the, those were the blue balloons that we showed earlier, right? The giant blue, I think Dada's got him coming up here. Here's one on the ground, right? You flew, I saw pictures of this flying. This is what you flew just a, you said a couple of weeks ago? Yeah, well, that one's about a couple of months ago. We just flew literally last weekend, but one of our conventional balloons that we fly our payloads on. And this one, even though it's smaller than the ones we built in the past, it's with all the new technology in it. The internal structure, the internal balloon lifting cells, the command and control system is completely different on these new smaller vehicles. And it's cheaper to test these on small vehicles than the really big vehicle. So one of the questions from the chat room or more of a comment says, this is from Space Cookie 84. Says, that's cool. So basically you're waiting until most of the atmosphere is below you before you're putting the pedal to the metal. And you're not really putting the pedal to the metal. You're more kind of just very slowly continuing. You're just never letting go, right? You've got a very slow moving vehicle, but you never let off the accelerator. Exactly. So based on that, the 50s, assuming the late 50s, early 60s were just mylar balls. And they got these very thin mylar balls to go to Mach 10. And they didn't quite get all the way around the earth. They didn't orbit, because they're only 400,000 feet away in Mach 10, but they were getting literally circling the earth and not just ballistically. So again, ours are a little sturdier and have their own propulsion rather than just be pushed by solids. So one of the things Space Kyle mentions, Mach speed is relative to atmospheric pressure, more specifically, it's the speed of sound which changes through atmospheric pressure and density. So you're saying like Mach 10, is that Mach 10 at sea level or at that altitude? At sea level, Mach 10. Okay. As just a number to explain. Sure. As the Mach number changes up there. So using just kind of an absolute, will you be able to hit, are you targeting like the 17,500 mile per hour range? That's kind of generally considered orbital velocity. That's the number you're trying to reach. But the question at this point is, can you reach that number with balloons? You know you can push them forward. It's just, can you make 17,500 miles an hour? Yes, that's the question. And one of the big parts of it that we're doing in the lab is we're doing active drag reduction. Again, this is a lot of stuff that was in the lab in the 60s and 70s. And you can search and there's literally hundreds of IAAA papers on it on electrically reducing drag by emitting plasma in front of the field, breaking up the shockwave at hypersonic speeds. And right now, we really need to be getting to Mach four for that testing to really be valid. And we're doing a lot of our wind tunnel testing in the shop here. And then we just got our wind tunnel, say we're at Mach 3.8, starting to do that kind of research. Because even at 300,000 feet and 400,000 feet, you know, you get up close to where Alan Shepard went, there's still a lot of drag up there. And so we need to reduce the drag by about 40% to kind of close the loop to make that work. And the 60s, they were getting 80 and 90% drag reductions on those systems. But those were in the lab. And we want to take those lab experiments and put it in the real world. And that's a whole different can of worms. So what does it take to take those lab experiments and move them into the real world? Is it a funding issue, a time issue, a building issue? What do you need to get from A to B? Well, next fall is mission. We fly about five missions every year. And we're all independently funded. We're crowdfunded. We do small contracts. We do a lot of TV commercials. We did Margarita in space for National Margarita Day for Jose Cuevo. We did the chair in space. Oh, I remember that. The chair in space, absolutely. Yeah. And that's actually a full-sized chair. That's really cool. Above the chair is the big balloon platform, these carbon booms coming down with IMAX cameras all around, you know, filming all that. And even though we're just, Nicollin Dymd is barely making it, we've never missed a mission or build a vehicle, never had a problem due to lack of funding. So you mentioned crowdfunding is one of the things. Is that an active campaign like on Kickstarter, Patreon, something like that? Or is it just kind of- Oh, we have something going on now. We've done two successful kick starters and we're ramping up for our third. We'll probably be starting that in about four months because it takes a lot to put one of those together. And that's mainly to fund these, our Ponsats. And we're actually the largest student payload program in the world. We've flown more student payloads by an order of magnitude than all the rest of the world's space programs combined. We've now flown with this last mission last weekend, just over 18,000 student experiments. Oh, wow. It's about 75,000 to 80,000 students have participated. And on this last vehicle, there's like the one in the picture there. There was about 480 student experiments. And some are real simple. You're like little marshmallows that puff up in vacuum or plant seeds. And some of them had GPS's and cameras. We had one that had a GPS, a camera, and he was taking pictures every 10 seconds and then altitude stamping each of the pictures as he went. And then it also had cubes. You know, like CubeSats? We have a smaller version called the MiniCube. And this is one from Eastern Florida State University. And it flew on the last mission. This is a double stat cube, because there's a cube here and a cube there. And he's got a whole range of sensors in doing their experiments. And we fly a lot of these. The Ponsats were always free. In fact, most of the money doesn't go into the Airship Door Program. Most of the money from the TV commercial pay for flying ping pong balls. But the universities pay for flying the cubes. And that also helps pay for the CubeSats. And then on each of these missions, even though they have all these education payloads on, there's five or six Airship Orbit experiments. So anything that goes on an airship before it flies on the airship will have flown to the edge of space a dozen times on one of the balloon vehicles, just testing it and doing shake down. So this is a big giant crazy program with these big giant crazy ideas. But literally every couple of months, we're doing the flights, flying the missions, crossing one more impossible thing off the list. So it sounds like you're using the balloon missions and the Ponsats and the very small CubeSat missions as a way to test out the technology for your airship to orbit stuff. Then once you get airship to orbit kind of working and moving faster and actually making it into orbital speeds, what's kind of the game plan there? Is that a, is something that helps reduce the cost of objects to orbit? I mean, what does the advantage of airship to orbit get me? Oh, we wanna change the whole nature of space travel. Right now, it's like to use the shuttle as an example. Except for right near the end, if you have an engine out, it's called, they call it LOC or loss of crew event. There are so many things that are loss of crew event. With the airship to orbit, say you're right in the middle of the final orbital insertion burn and your engine conks out or anywhere on there. Well, you go have a meeting about it. It's not like you have to make everything right and save the crew in the next four seconds for everybody's dead. You have a meeting about it, you talk to the people on the ground, you have a big conference call. We had a couple hours, you go work in the back, tear down the engine, see if you can fix it. And if you can't fix it, you float back down. And the idea is that what if you took off in your 747 and everyone in the control tower, every time it tooks off, everyone jumped up and cheered, oh, thank God, everybody made it. You wouldn't wanna fly on 747s. But that's what happens every time we fly astronauts to space. The moment the rocket shuts down, everybody jumps up and cheers and cries because they didn't kill everybody. We wanna change that. And also, it's a completely reusable system. Right now, a transatlantic travel is five cents per ton mile by container ships and a modern container ship is an amazingly sophisticated vehicle. Not quite as sophisticated as a space shuttle but pretty complex in its own right. We wanna bring not the thousand dollar a pound, the mythical thousand dollar a pound from the 10,000 dollar a pound. We wanna bring it down to dollars per ton mile just like cargo is. How large do you need to make the airship to make that vision a reality? Oh, these are huge vehicles. You remember, they're also inflatable vehicles. So size, you know, it's like we built one vehicle that was a little bigger than a 747 but only weighed 630 pounds and that's the total vehicle I'm gonna enjoy. We're talking about a vehicle, our primary test vehicle that we're eventually gonna build is 6,000 feet long. It's literally over a mile long airship. So it's a giant airship. You can put humans on it, you can put cargo on it. Once you figure out the velocity part of it, right? So you're still testing, you're not quite there yet but working towards it. You mentioned one of the factors is safety and certainly chemical engines are, and even solids are scary, right? I mean, it's a controlled explosion which you don't really have but you are on a giant balloon and that balloon can, and this is a bit of a harsh term but it could pop. I mean, you could lose the structure of the balloon, could you not? Would that not be an immediate catastrophic? No, it's like our current airships. It looks like it's one big vehicle. If you did a cutaway, it's actually a series of smaller balloons all up and down those arms. And we can lose up to three balloons in flight and not even abort the mission. We lose the fourth balloon in flight and then we do have to not catastrophically fall but abort the mission and fall and fly down and land. So you have a point where even if you start losing structure, you can go, okay, well, we've lost too much structure. We abort at this point and you just, you come back and that's that. Assuming you don't continue to lose structure on your way back down. Oh yeah, well, if the whole thing breaks up but it falls apart and explodes, then everybody gets out. But so many things would have to happen for that. Like on the big one that we built for the Air Force, the 175 foot. On the top was six 14 inch diameter vents preventing helium. At 100,000 feet, those vents have to be open for about 45 minutes, all six of them before you can detect descent. Oh wow. So say you had a meteor hit you and left a big hole. Well, the real trick isn't that you're calling falling to your doom. The real trick is detecting that that event has happened because the pressures are near vacuum. The flow rate across there is so low. If you have the meteor storm, you have six of them. Well, you know, in 45 minutes you're gonna be starting down. And what you do at the time you detect that you pump the remaining helium from those cells into the adjacent cells and you definitely abort the mission if you have a whole bunch of holes from meteors and mutants. It's an interesting concept, right? Because you don't have the chemical engine reaction so you're not worried about that. It sounds like you have some redundancy in structure. I mean, nothing's foolproof but you've got a good chunk of redundancy in structure. So then it's just a matter of, and how are you re-entering, right? Because one of the problems is you're going 17,500 miles an hour. You're gonna slam into atmosphere and you're gonna want to burn up. Do you just... We do our deceleration up high instead of down low. Re-entry temperature is really based on wing loading or surface area to mass. Surface area to mass determines, you know, your temperature load and your heat load. The 6,000 foot vehicle, the max re-entry temperature is right around 71 degrees. So, in fact, the drag, even on orbit, the drag is so high you have to keep the engines on. You're truly not in a free orbit. You literally, you're flying up there, you get to orbit, you have to release your payload or deploy the payload and then re-entry, you're not doing your re-entry burn, you're literally throttling down and the drag pulls you back down. So let's go back to some questions from the chat room. One of them comes from St. Alex which asks about those engines, are they going to be solar powered plasma or basically what's your fuel for that? They're actually hybrid engines. They're not in the, well, only partially in the sense of the chemical engine, liquid oxygen and a solid fuel. They're hybrid in the sense of half plasma engine, half chemical engine. In a sense you have, in a chemical engine, the combustion chamber is where the fire is, where the plasma is. We're actually using that plasma from a chemical reaction to accelerate and then accelerating that magnetically like a traditional plasma engine. So it's half chemical engine, half plasma engine. People haven't looked at this kind of engine before because you could think of it as the world's worst ion engine, you know, traditional ion engine, they have a thing called ISP which is kind of a function of performance. You know, they're getting 60,000, 70,000 ISP, just amazing on these quad stage ion engines but they can barely lift a piece of paper up off the ground. So they're basically for orbital things. And then you have your chemical engines that have ISPs in the 350 range or the shuttle, which was the best ever in the 400 range. But they burn all their fuel in moments and you can't really throttle them down. Well, you can, but you throttle them down and your ISP tanks. You can't really run a shuttle engine you just barely on slow. So what this engine is, it's a small chemical engine. And then the chemical engine creates the ions or the plasma. And an ion engine, that's actually quite a bit of the power, electrical power requirement is in that creation of the ions. We actually do away with that power requirement by using the chemical engine to do that. And then on the backside, it's what's referred to as either a mixed ion gas or non-mixed equilibrium ion gas or dirty ion engine, then as a plasma engine to accelerate that plasma. The reason it's a terrible engine, it's either the world's worst chemical engine cause it can't even lift itself off the ground. Or it's the world's worst ion engine because instead of 60,000 ISP, it only has 1,000 ISP. You'd only need this if say you had a steam ship going across the Atlantic Indian engine that would chuck along for nine days and give you the reasonable amount of thrust. Well, that's what we have. We have the airship lifting that until we get really high and start dynamically climbing. So it's an engine that has no use on the planet except for our purposes. And we actually have a pretty vigorous engine program. And we've done about 119 firing so far, just all very small scale. And we've done four flights. We're actually, our test stand for our engines are at 100,000 feet cause we do fire them off at on platforms from our high racks. We have Ponsets below, rocket engines firing off the top. And that's actually coming along really well and we're starting to scale up our engines and we've now cannot fire the engines in our parking lot anymore cause the last one set off some car alarms a few blocks away, made lots of noise. We just recently now have our own facility up in Northern Nevada. The last couple of launches we did was from called the Area 42. So this 42 acres or the JPR Space Advanced Research Facility which is the fancy way of saying big plot of land with a cargo container on it. And that's where the next round probably in January of the engine firing test will be taking place. So dumb question on your chemical rockets. You know, what one of the disadvantages of a traditional rocket is it's the chemical reaction is a controlled explosion. It's a very large, very powerful controlled explosion. And if you lose even a little bit of that control it's a very bad day. But if you're using chemical rockets on your vehicle how is that any different? Oh one thing, it's a lot smaller and we're burning at a much lower rate than you would. It's more akin to a jet engine firing than it is to a rocket engine firing. But that risk is there, it doesn't completely vanish. And then, so you're using these engines the other disadvantage of a chemical engine is you're going to expend your fuel at some point. You're 10 days to orbit. So are you bringing like huge vats of fuel or do you only need a little bit? Like how does your fuel work for a 10 plus day? The fuel, actually the chemical part of the engine is also a hybrid where the fuel is a solid and the oxidizers are liquid. So it's really cartridge based. And these engines are long. The engine is about 300 feet long. It's more akin to a linear accelerator that you keep a flame going inside than a rocket engine. And then it's also cartridge based. And so right now you have to literally open up the engine and replace all the cartridges between flights. You mentioned your oxidizer. What are you using for your oxidizer? Is it liquid oxygen, something else? Well for what we're doing right now we're doing nitrous and acrylic and we're moving to nitrous in the spring and a paraffin, you know enhanced paraffin, you know paraffin with magnesium particles in it. We don't see that being combination as being the final one. There's a lot of candidates for it. But let's say we're still, you know, right hip deep in the development process. I'm thinking it's probably going to be a LOX paraffin and magnesium combination. But that's, we won't really know for a couple more years. This question comes from Green Jim 2, which is, you know, we talked about this 10 days to orbit. Traditional rockets have launch windows measured in seconds or minutes because they're trying to, you know, make this particular orbit and you have to pass by it at a certain time. What does a 10 day orbit launch have as a launch window? Is it the same kind of you need to get moving? Huge adjustable launch window because you can accelerate, decelerate. We want to be in kind of the middle window. So if we need to drop down to 12 day insertion, we can make that change in flight or accelerate up to an eight day exertion, excuse me, insertion, if we need to. So we don't have those real tight narrow windows like a traditional rocket would. And how far does this scale? We're about to see the goes our launch in, you know, an hour from now or so. Would you be able to take that satellite eventually up to its intended orbit? There's the eventual vehicle. Our eventual dream vehicle is the 6,000 foot vehicle. Now our initial vehicle demonstrator for actually reaching orbit is only 1,800 feet, you know, baby 1,800 foot long vehicle. And that would only carry a couple hundred pounds to orbit. Our eventual goal is the 6,000 foot vehicle that will kind of scaling everything around is 60,000 pounds to orbit to Leo. Destructure 1701, space station's intact to orbit. Destructure 1701 asks, at the end of the day for your 6,000 foot vehicle fully laden, how long would it take to get, for example, to the international space station type orbit? Because assuming you could go theoretically, assuming you don't have power, you could go anywhere you want. Well, ideally, this vehicle will just take payload to Leo, to minimum Leo orbits. And OTV, you know, orbital transfer vehicle is really the ideal vehicle for taking it up to the station. You wouldn't want to drag this big airship and all that infrastructure up from Leo to a station altitude. So we're not really shooting for that, we're just kind of giant bulk cargo to Leo. But you could take bulk cargo that then from Leo launches itself up to the international space station. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. So would someone else develop those vehicles? You're basically saying, hey, look, we've got this big, huge thing, and then you go to, say, Sierra Nevada, for example, and say, hey, we'll get you really high up and going at really good velocity if you can make it the rest of the way there. Oh, exactly. We'd love to develop that top half vehicle, but doing that on top of doing all of this, I think it'd be a bit too much. It's almost like, what if we don't pull this off? Worst, say we only get back to what they did in 1962 and we got to Mach 10 at 400,000 feet. That makes an awesome air launch vehicle to fire a rocket on top of. What if we do a little better and we get to Mach 15 at 500,000 feet? Suddenly a Falcon 1 fired from there is like a Falcon Heavy. And that's if we don't make it, that's our... The other thing we can look at is once you're at those speeds and those payloads, you could use it simply as a refueling architecture for traditional rockets. So we want to go to Mars, for example. We need to bring fuel depots up to space. What is a cheap, easy way to just bring giant fuel tanks up there where we can refuel? This might be an interesting way to do that. It gets you a good chunk of the way there and then maybe a couple solids on the sides brings up the rest of the way to where it needs to be. Yeah, because air launch is getting more and more popular whereas kind of it comes and goes with Virgin Galactic and I don't know why I don't remember their name right now with the giant double 747. Straddle launch. Straddle launch, yes. And they're talking about flying from about Mach 0.8 from 50,000 feet for their air launch. They're great people, but that's wimpy air launch. Air launch should be 500,000 feet at Mach 17. That's air launch. Destructure 1701 also asks, what sort of materials challenges do the 1,806,000 square foot vehicles present in terms of stresses? The conventional stresses that you look in spacecraft design are well handled with those materials. There's actually some exotic stresses that are the real challenges. Because this is a flexible membrane surface, you get this phenomenon called hypersonic flutter. And usually in hyper like X-15 and hypersonic craft, you have flutter issues on the rudder and on the horizontal stabilizers. We actually have the problem of hypersonic flutter on the cross the surface of the vehicle. And that's one of the really extreme design challenges that we're trying to model in our hypersonic wind tunnel to start to get a handle on. Because if you don't have a handle on it, there's no known material. You can make it thing out of concrete in case in steel, in case in titanium. But if you have hypersonic flutter, it's not enough. So it's really, you can't handle it, you can't solve it through a materials solution. Unfortunately, you have to solve it through a management of the load issues. I mean, the solution has to lie there. All right, just a couple more questions. This one comes from Citizen 12708, which is why don't you put these firings on YouTube? The rocket engine firings I think he was referring to. I have about 20 of them up there. We do. They want more. They want more. They're all lying. Everyone wants everything. I'm still, I haven't got the videos from the last airship up there yet. I have to get these. When we ever we do the Ponsaps, all the kids get a documentary of their mission so they can see their ping pong balls. And so we're in deep, deep of making that. But I think I have like a dozen firings on YouTube. Again, these are all very small. They're not very big. These are little engines. And we've just scaled them up to be too scary to be standing next to when they fire, which is why we have to move out to the desert to do them. So those videos will be more fun because more fire, more flame. Hopefully controlled. Hopefully controlled. Hopefully controlled. Jimber asks, speaking of those launches, what's the cost per small sat launch? For what we're doing now? Let's say Citizen wants to bring up a Pong sat or yeah, well the small cube sats or something like that. Cube sats are completely free. We don't charge anything and we do thousands every year. These guys, this is our double cube. There is two, you can buy them in pairs and then when you buy them in pairs are a little cheaper but they're $340. And you get the cube and the flight for the $340. Now we also just, in fact, we announced it today. We've never had this before. Our new cube is called the Arduino cube. And it's elongated so you can put an Arduino board in there. And the Arduino boards or Arduino cubes are going to be $440. And that includes the cube and the flight of the cube. And we just flew our Arduino cube on this last mission. Last question before we go into the, we've got a little rapid fire thing we're going to do. And this comes from space and this is, during the last interview, which I think was about six years ago or so, you mentioned a high altitude propeller design. Are you still working with propellers at all? We did that. We pulled it off. We made the world's only tested high altitude propeller. Then afterwards the Helios people did that. Ours performs a little bit better but they spent over a billion on it and we spent about 6,000 on it. And that's part of what we did for the Air Force. And those drive all our, we've set the world altitude record for airships only two years ago. Oh, three or four years ago, time flies with our tandem airship. And those are six meter, excuse me, six foot blades. And we flew it to 95,000 feet, flew it around. And those propellers are, we're on that vehicle and they're on our airships that we're flying now. I'm just going to mirror something that Destructor 1701 said, which is, you're awesome. I love how far outside of the box you're thinking. And it's really cool to see new innovative ways. The fact that you're, I would say, normally we say bending metal, but you're not really bending metal. You're more like stitching balloots. I don't know what phrase to use there, but hate to think a lot of things together. There you go. You're making hardware. You're actually flying things. And you know, a lot of the traditional aerospace people might go, well, that's not space. Well, it's not space yet. Right? So once you get those velocities up, yeah. Yeah. The really thing is it used to be space when the X-15 program was going on is huge Titanic arguments that would get really heated between scientists where their space began at 70,000 feet or 100,000 feet. By the time the end of the X-15 program, the 100,000 foot guys won, absolutely. And they finally got support of the pilots when they started flying above them. But then it got declared when they got in that fight with NASA and the Air Force that it began at 50 miles. So the X-15 guys didn't count. That's more of a political thing than a science thing, but officially it's near space. It doesn't matter. You're working on stuff. You're working on stuff to go faster and faster and you continue to iterate on the design. And it's very cool. They're actually building things and making stuff happen. And I'm excited to see what comes of that. We were all excited with the balloon castles, I think is what it was referred to. And we thought it was just really cool. All right. These are a few questions that we ask all of our guests now and you can have really short answers. This is just, there are no right or wrong answers. All right. The first question is Moon or Mars first? Venus. Oh, good answer. Liquid or solid propellant? Hybrid chemical electric propellant. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. What should the name of the first vehicle go into Mars be? Anything but calling it Mars or one of the variations are like Aries or? Sure. Just something besides calling the Mars mission Mars. When do you think humans will first land on Mars? Oh, I wouldn't say we're a solid 20 out. 20 years. I think we're going back to the Moon first. Interesting. That would be my bet. If I had to put a dollar down, I would love it to happen sooner. But I think we're 20 years out. I think we're gonna get close and then we're gonna zoom over to the Moon. That ties to my next question quite well. When do you think humans will set foot on the Moon again? Oh, I said within 10 years. Interesting. Maybe within eight years. And why space? Because I want to go. All right, great answers. John, where can people find more information about you and JP Aerospace? If they want to keep up to date with you. I try to post pictures on our Facebook site every day. I get to our blog and you search for us JP Aerospace on Facebook. We also have a Twitter account that we post about every other day. The blog we post at JPerospace.com right across the top. Click on the blog. I get to that about once a week.