 Hello everyone and welcome to Tomorrow Space Orbit 12.27 and I'm going to be your host today Jared you probably know me from space every once in a while or new excuse me every once in a while I pop into space here and today I'm so excited because of our guests that we have a frequent guest that we have here on Tomorrow Space but always wonderful to have Will Pomerance the VP of special projects at Virgin Orbit so great to have you on today because there's been so much going on with Virgin Orbit and some other things that you do as well so why don't you tell us a little bit about what Virgin Orbit has done since the last time you're on so that was about a year ago it's about a year ago last time you're on and you guys have done quite a lot I don't have a lot then so first of all thanks for having me back I'm always always thrilled to be here yeah it's been a really busy time you know when I was last on a year ago and I think I was mainly here to talk about we're going fellowship so maybe we only talked a little we will talk about that that's totally fine with me but back then you know Virgin Orbit was a company that had developed a lot of our technology and we were just starting to really put it through its paces and now we've done basically all that that is possible to do on the ground so the major things that have happened since then have been happening in the factory at the test site and in the air and I'll talk about all those in the on the test site we went from many years worth of testing of engines and sort of separate testing of tanks and separate testing of avionics to bang let's put the whole package together and start testing integrated stages that have flight engines flight stages flight avionics flight software flight processes flight everything and so we went into a full integrated stage test campaign first for the upper stage late last year and then for the main the booster stage in the early part of this year up in Mojave those are a heck of a lot of fun the way I always like to think about them basically those are tests where if we didn't physically bolt the rocket to the ground it would go to space so that's a great way to prove that hey yep our math really does check out and and happen there yeah there's one of those tests happening right yeah so so so there are a lot of fun it's a nice a nice rumbling feeling fun to get to watch one of those whether it's on video or in person so in parallel to that we were also working on our flight test campaign we obviously have a relatively unusual rocket and that we don't launch it from a pad at Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg or anywhere else we start all of our missions with a rocket strapped under the wing of a Boeing 747 we've had the 747 for a couple years but had to go and test first of all that make sure that it flew just fine after all the modifications that we did with it then we had to build this thing called a pylon which you can think of basically as the big catcher's mitt that will grapple on to a 60 000 pound rocket and carry it under the wing of the of an airplane safely so we flew around with that and then finally we started flying on with an empty rocket and then with a full rocket running through full mission simulations and doing everything we might do on a good day and also everything we might ever had to do on a bad day and then finally the biggest one of those tests which we accomplished in around the middle of july was we did a drop test so it was the first time we took a complete launcher one rocket with its tanks full and we actually dropped it off the wing of the 747 to test and make sure all of the wind tunnel testing and super computer modeling and math that we'd done was right when we said hey we're pretty confident the rocket's not going to bump back into the airplane or bump into the engine or start to tumble in a weird way so I did that drop test which was a really big success in mid-july and then the third parallel string was getting our factory ready you know one thing that we've done at virgin orbit that's pretty unusual for our industry not just the small launch companies but the big ones as well is we really invested in operationalizing if that's a word our factory floor at the same time as we're developing our rocket I think typically in our industry people go and build one rocket and fly it and see what works and what breaks and then maybe they build their second rocket and then once they've got that up and going they really focus on how do they build their manufacturing facility which is very prudent in some ways but also slows things down so we said you know what let's do them all in parallel let's really start ramping up the factory getting to a high build rate and let's get not just our first orbital flight rocket ready but let's get our second one ready and our third one and our fourth one and our fifth one as well yeah because I mean virgin orbit is you know I don't want to necessarily say brand new on the scene but like you just spun out of virgin galactic I guess did you is it right to say that virgin orbit spun out of virgin galactic yeah yeah so and you just did that maybe like a handful of years ago yeah about two years ago yeah two you're getting close to two and a half so we're still a baby rocket company and even if you count the work that we did at when what's now virgin orbit at the time was part of virgin galactic even that were only sort of four four and a half years into this effort we've been thinking about small launch vehicles for a while before that but it was really a different vehicle at a different mass class different propulsion different carrier aircraft so we started this program a little before years ago so I think by industry standards we've been moving pretty quickly not as quickly as we would have liked certainly would have loved to go a little bit faster as is the age over frame of everyone in the aerospace industry but given that we weren't just developing a rocket we were developing a rocket and a launch site that flies and a factory it's been it's been really busy times which is really fun to work on yeah and developing that factory down in Long Beach which I've taken tours of it is so cool down there and I love the the collection of cereals that you have on the wall as well I always hit that up every time I go down there and and also you guys have Cosmic Girl well you had I don't know if Cosmic Girl is still at Long Beach Airport today she's in Mojave she moves around it's a nice thing about our launch site it's pretty easy to take her wherever she needs to go so today in in Mojave but often in Long Beach right down the street yeah and I do have to say you know if you fly into the Los Angeles area you can fly into the Long Beach Airport or fly out of Long Beach Airport and if you do and Cosmic Girl's there it's very obvious because there's only one seven forty seven at Long Beach yep and I've seen Cosmic Girl a couple times from some flights and stuff have given her away about the window I have so taken photos ever through the window of the plane and everything it's always so awesome just to see that sitting there but you know being based out of Long Beach and then also having a base in Mojave as they're sort of like an advantage in having two separate areas do you end up having like sort of two separate types of culture that are that are working in the company yeah well there's definitely advantages to have the two areas and we try to work really hard to make sure we don't have two different types of culture we want to make sure that we don't have a lot of communications challenges between that you know in a company that's doing something as complex as any launch company and that's trying to move as quickly as we and everyone else in the new space industry is trying to move you know if you have if you have two sites that aren't talking to each other very well that's fatal to any company very very quickly and if you start to have the oh you know those folks are there they don't really understand what it's like over here again that that gets fatal really really fast so we try as hard as we can to make sure that we're bridging between the two sites that all the fun perks like you know having the free cereal or whatever else that you know whatever we get in one place we're matching it with something it doesn't necessarily have to be the same thing but something like identical you know equally cool and and surprising and fun and whatever else in both sites to try and make sure that yeah we don't want any we don't want a sibling rivalry we don't want to disconnect we want everybody pulling in the same direction on on the same mission but obviously the two sites are just good for different things so you know I find a lot of people when they come to visit one of the things that they're surprised about about virgin orbit is that you know we don't have a hundred different buildings and you know a campus that's dedicated just to engines and another one just for avionics and another one just for structures most of it happens all in one building we really do as much as we possibly can under one roof that's fun that's convenient you're not you know humans aren't spending time getting on a shuttle and going from building to building because that loses time but also it's just neat for us whether you're on the management side or the engineering side or the business side it helps break down stove pipes between departments and it helps have those kind of like nice accidental collisions of ideas that lead to really productive things when you sit down at the lunch table and you've got a brand new electrical engineer who's sitting next to a veteran mechanical engineer who's sitting next to the you know the general counsel or something like that the sort of fruitful conversations that emerge there so we do as much as we can in that one facility but obviously we are in the middle of a major metropolitan area so there's certain times of testing that wouldn't be appropriate our neighbors wouldn't like us very much we were testing engines our neighbors like to come over and look at our engines we try to host our neighbors for tours but yeah I think they'd be upset if we if we started firing them off there so so yeah we have different areas of focus but try and keep them as blended as we can in terms of culture definitely um and we actually do have a really cool question that uh back's headroom did in our own chat room which is asking so why not use white knight two instead of a 747 because you know virgin galactic has white knight two to carry spaceship to up the altitude and then release and send it up is there sort of like weight considerations or like white knight two can't fly far enough to do that yeah great question as I would expect from from back so so actually if you look back at the early history of launcher one when we first started talking about it publicly that was the plan that we would use white knight two as the carrier aircraft um and uh and we and we now change it we now launch up this modified bowing 747 um as a carrier platform there was really two things that drew drove that uh one is for the moment there's only one white knight two and when we started out we had this really great idea about how the two programs could share because you know white knight two is an aircraft it can fly many times a day and has does relatively routinely um when its main job is carrying spaceship to spaceship to can fly extremely often for a spaceship but not every day and not twice a day certainly uh so often you have the aircraft sort of sitting there idle waiting for the spaceship so the thought was well hey we've got this awesome carrier aircraft yeah it was custom designed to carry heavy things really high up and drop them safely and it's sitting there unused you know at least a couple days a week generally speaking so maybe we can use that and what we found was that makes a lot of sense in one way and it really kind of makes a lot of sense once you're up and operational and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you're in development because when you're in development it's not like hey dad can I borrow the keys for a couple hours I want to go to the movies it's like hey we're testing out our program I need to borrow the airplane for six months uh and so we had the two programs sort of saying no I can give it to you for three days but like not for six months uh and you know and you want to because you want to get your pilots trained and proficient at your facilities with your launch pylon and yada yada yada so we knew we needed a second airplane um Virgin Galactic and TSC our other sister company the manufacturing wing had always had plans to build a second white knight two so as the thought was okay we could just accelerate the build of the second white knight two that's an option but was also happening in parallel was we were going out and looking at the small satellite launch market and and one interesting thing I happened to have been the one at Galactic who helped start up Virgin Orbit so I've been around from the start and one of the fun things about it was when we had this idea that hey wouldn't it be cool if we went out and built a very small very affordable launch vehicle um one of the challenges of that was that when you went out and you talked to the satellite building community and said I want to build a small affordable launch vehicle what does small mean to you and what does affordable mean to you we would get just this huge range of answers because you'd have CubeSat builders from universities to say well small to me is this is 10 centimeters on an edge of cube and someday I sometimes I do three of those stack together as a three you and yeah maybe eventually I'll do six years or 12 years so small is you know briefcase size or smaller and then you'd go and talk to the government and the big traditional satellite manufacturers they say well most of my satellites are school bus size so a minivan seems really small and like briefcase to minivan is a pretty big range a little bit similar than when you talk about price you know the universities are saying well I have a little bit of money left over on a grant I wrote so I can probably write you a check for $50,000 and the people who build traditional satellites saying well my last launch I purchased for 150 million so you know anything under 75 cents pretty affordable to me and again pretty big range and it's at the very very early phase that kind of big range didn't matter all that much because we didn't know how to build a rocket company so it didn't matter whether we were building this size rocket or that size rocket we needed to go just teach ourselves how to be a rocket company how to build rocket engines how to test rocket engines how to manufacture all these structures and at the very earliest stages that range it matters a little bit but is not critically important so we said you know what let's go do our homework let's educate ourselves let's go far down all the technology development trees and where we get to the point where the branches start to really diverge and it makes a very big difference whether we're building a 50 kilogram class launch vehicle or a 500 kilogram class launch vehicle or something in the middle let's go back to the market and say what does small mean to you now what does affordable mean to you now and when we got to that point which was when we had built some engines and we knew what we were doing we built some test stands we built some structures and we knew we were in the market for a new airplane we said this is the right time to go back and ask and what we found was still a dispersion but less of a dispersion and it seemed to us to be trending at slightly heavier slightly more massive satellites than what it had been a couple years ago and it got to the point where we said well I think there's a really interesting business you can make with a white knight to class launch vehicle but I think there's a better one that you can make with a bigger launch vehicle that's heavier than what white knight to can carry him so we went out and we did a really global search for every type of airplane ever basically we looked at military aircraft commercial aircraft cargo aircraft passenger carrying aircraft commercial widebodies single aisle jets you know we looked at bowings and airbuses and allusions and antonovs and everything you can think of and at the end of that study we settled in on a Boeing 747 and said actually we think that this is really the perfect launch vehicle for us there's a couple things we like about it first of all it's just like a badass awesome airplane it's I agree yeah it's the queen of the skies it's called the queen of the skies for a reason right it's maybe the most successful commercial aircraft of all time it's carried billions of people over a 50 year long flight history the first flight of 747 was a few months before the moon landing yeah so it's around the same age age as that program so you got five decades of an incredibly robust data set about how these things perform with a great safety record a great maintenance record they're just big honking airplanes right they're designed to carry about 450 people and all their passengers and duty-free shopping to the other side of the world and they do that all the time they have a global supply chain anywhere you are in the world there's someone who knows how to fly a 747 someone who has spare parts so we didn't necessarily want to get in the business of we own the entire fleet because we own a unique aircraft like a white knight two or an l 10 11 which means you have to own all the pilots and all the instructors and all the spare parts and all the manuals it's nice to have a 747 where if we have an encounter that we've never dealt with before there's probably a million people in the world who deal with that problem every day and we can call them up and rent you know buy them by the hour to come and come and come and and help us out with that so that was nice they're really cheap right now which doesn't hurt when you're trying to build an affordable launch service 747 still carry most of the world's air cargo and in fact are still being built for that yeah but they've all been retired from passenger travel so there's a lot of used 747s that are in great condition that are sitting in the used car dealer kind of lots where we could buy one for a song and that was pretty nice and then the last thing and this is the thing that came to the total surprise to me because I am not an aviation nerd I'm a space nerd obviously but not a big aviation nerd I did not know this but it turns out 747s were designed from scratch to carry an external payload under their left wing which was kind of cool because we were looking for an airplane that could carry an external payload under its wing and it was nice to know that this one not only theoretically could do it it actually had done it repeatedly all around the world lots of times not millions of times but you know dozens hundreds of times and that we could go and find out how that worked how your wing behaves in all kinds of weather conditions what kind of fortification you had to do with the wing to carry a big payload under that wing and also how the pilots just sort of operate with something big and heavy under this wing that isn't balanced out by something correspondingly big and heavy under this wing now what Boeing had designed it to do the reason they designed to do that was to ferry an extra jet engine yeah kind of the same way in a car you might have a spare tire in the back right yeah repairs and things you know they need one here in London so we've got a flight from New York London strap it on there exactly so yeah and so what we're carrying is bigger and heavier and has different aerodynamic structure than an extra engine so there was still work for us to do but it was just nice to know someone has already done a project similar to this they will share that data or at least some of that data with us and we know that they did it safely so that kind of gave us confidence to go and go and go and take on that project and Adam Synergy in our youtube chat room is asking how many people will be on board the 747 for a rocket launch is it just a flight crew it's a pretty small flight crew could I buy a ticket yeah yeah you know we get that question a lot we'll see let's get a few flights under our belt okay we'll see okay so right now it's just the flight crew which typically would be two pilots maybe a third in there on some flights and then what we've done so the Boeing 747 is a double-decker aircraft like I said built to carry about 450 people so we've taken that main deck of the aircraft and we have totally stripped it it's got nothing on it I mean not only does not have the seats or the overhead bins or the kitchens or the bathrooms it doesn't have walls it doesn't have ceiling panels that's like exposed structural beams and and wiring we then took the upper deck which is where most airlines would fly their first class cabin and we converted that into a flying mission control and so we have a couple work stations up there where we can have engineers who are either monitoring systems on the aircraft or the rocket or maybe someday in the future the satellite or satellites that were carrying on board the vehicle so on a typical flight we'll have something like five people it might be four it might be six or seven there should just aren't a whole lot of seats left on the aircraft we left a few on there for when we're just when we aren't carrying a rocket and we want to ferry people ferry our own crew from place to place but yeah not too many people yeah so one of the things that you guys have really done a very interesting thing with is your payload processing system yeah so Lisa in our youtube chat room is saying you guys have an awesome flexible payload processing system you know why did you guys choose to have a trailer based system what advantages does that give you so tell us you know tell us a little bit about that system and then why is that system so awesome yeah so let me zoom out a little bit and then get to that because because there's some of the underlying things that are affect the entire company that drove that decision and are really enabled by that decision so why do we launch from an airplane when hardly anyone else does yeah that's true it is unusual and you're certainly taking on some additional complexity right it's it's nice to have a ground-based launch pad because you can go and plug into electrical outlets yeah i think north of grumman is the only one with their pegasus rocket north of grumman with their pegasus is the only one currently operating at an orbital class you know you have cool companies like generation orbit which does some hypersonic platforms paul allen straddle launch was sort of working in that direction and and we'll see what comes of that and then obviously in the olden days you had x1 and x15 and lots of air airlocks of vehicles v52 yeah exactly so so we're not the first to do it nor the only do it but it's still relatively uncommon we like a couple things about air launch as relates to ground launch there is some performance advantage that comes with launching from the air rather than the ground at the most simplistic level even if you don't want to nerd out and do the math you can just think of two rockets racing to space and imagine one that's starting standing on its tail at cape canaveral and one that's starting under the wing of a 747 and you can realize well the one starting at cape canaveral which is a wonderful place but the downsides about it is that rockets at zero miles per hour and zero feet above sea level and ours isn't right we're moving a little bit under the speed of sound we're up at 35 000 feet 35 000 feet you're already above two thirds three quarters of the atmosphere by density right so you're out of the thickest part of the soup and that gives you a little bit of a boost on your on your way to space so that performance advantage helps a little not massively but it helps a little and every little bit counts what we really like though is the incredible flexibility that comes from having an entire launch site that can move anywhere and that can be reused incredibly quickly and both those things are really important to us in terms of being able to move you know just this past week all of us space fans space fans around the world watched with anxiety as a hurricane board down on cape canaveral right and that kind of thing happens relatively often or you have a wildfire here in california that's encroaching on vandenberg just a couple years ago that happened at vandenberg yeah and those i think tend to focus our minds on what happens when you have a critical an amazing critical facility that is stationary what happens when there's bad weather there you know most rockets don't fly on the rain and and i lived in florida for many years as i recall it rains every day between about 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. right that you sort of have have some of those issues to deal with threats whether those are coming from people or coming from mother nature you have to worry about those but then even more than that the thing you have to worry about is from every launch site you can only launch to certain orbits you can only really launch in certain directions for safety and regulatory reasons and also you have to consider the rotation of the earth in your position and in terms of your latitude is kind of dick going to dictate that for every launch site you're going to go to a relatively narrow kind of wedge of of potential orbits and as we look at the small satellite world we're saying hey the value of these small satellites the reason that makes them cool and interesting more so in some ways in the big satellites is their flexibility and the fact that they cost so little and can be developed so quickly on a relative basis that you kind of throw them at a bunch of problems not just the problems that we've all been thinking about for 50 years but brand new problems brand new opportunities and so if we want to really enable and super charge that cool facet of our customers we need to further enhance their flexibility rather than limit their flexibility so when we have a launch site that can get up and go we can have a customer call us today and say I know no one's ever asked you to go to this orbit before but it's absolutely where I want to go can you do it and we can generally say yes absolutely we can do it because our launch site can pick up and fly we also have this nice advantage as we start thinking about high flight rate as almost everyone is these days talking about launching really often you know when you launch from the ground you've got a launch pad that has a lot of complicated electronics on it and you're going to light a rocket engine that's strapped to it yeah and doesn't necessarily treat the launch pad all that well and so you've got to go and you have to go in and re-certify your launch site yeah support the the next flight as I say people really don't realize just how much ground support equipment is like not only just expensive yep complicated but also like necessary yeah for your for your launch vehicle can't do it without it it's always overlooked by people yep it's uh you know it doesn't necessarily make it into the into the Hollywood scenes or into your your flip books about space or anything but it yeah you're not going to get anywhere without that stuff and when you take that stuff and you sort of torture it on every single flight you got to have a bunch of really good people that go in there and check it out and maybe repair it or at least check it out once over with the wet paper towel right yeah exactly yeah so for us we launch from an airplane and we drop the rocket off the wing before we ignite the engine so when it ignites it is affecting nothing other than itself so if we had the rocket built and sold the aircraft could land and take another rocket and fly you know a couple hours later right and so that's really nice for us to have that flexibility as well so as we sort of thought about that kind of unique bit of value that we think we bring to the market we said well hey none of that would be true all these nice things I've just told you about the value of having a flying launch site is totally bogus if I have to go and build a mission control at every one of those facilities and I have to build a payload processing facility and I have to build a fuel farm and I have to blah blah blah right so we said everything's got to be mobile yeah everything's got to be mobile so that's what we've done we've made everything mobile so our entire launch site in a box is an airplane and a couple of trailers and that's what surprised all the fuels and gases into the vehicle it's what allows us to mate the rocket to the wing it's allows us to do you know all those checkouts and that includes now our ability to encapsulate our payload into the payload fairing so when you've got a satellite with sense of electronics you think a lot about how you physically adapt it into the rocket and then how you keep it from getting dirty when it's on the road or in the air moving from place to place right so we built this cool trailer here that you see to carry our rocket but we have another one that's that's designed for us to do that final encapsulation of the payload and this is this is a clean room on wheels where you can do the final checkouts of your system this thing can drive up to the back of or to the front end of the rocket and mate to the rocket in the field so we can have all this ready to go and do this wherever today's launch site is this when I was a kid yeah holy moly this is amazing so I think that answers quite a few questions that's folks are asking in the chat room um but grand w on youtube is asking is the rocket reusable because obviously that our word reusable yeah that's like yeah the big word and especially with just the recent announcement yeah rocket lab as well yeah they're going to reuse their first stages yeah are you guys looking at that maybe somewhere in the future or is that not economically viable or does it just not make good engineering sense a little bit of all of the all of those things so right now we have one really important launch system that is reusable which is the aircraft we sort of call it our zero width stage it's not a rocket stage but it does again it gets us up to mock just under mock one and 35 000 feet and sort of heading in mostly the right direction it's pretty reusable we've reused it about 8 350 something times but who's counting right so so so we so we do have that and obviously that's a critical part of the system in terms of the rocket itself the two stage expendable liquid fuel rocket i gave away the answer there already so that for now is not reusable we we think about reusability from time to time and it may be something that we add in the future in fact we think there there might be some benefits to knowing already how to do horizontal launch and landing that might make reusability a little bit easier but what we found in general was when you look at small affordable rockets particularly if you've invested a lot in your manufacturing facility if you're able to build them at rate and you're able to build them at low cost we start to look at the point where of okay how much does it cost us to build a first stage versus how much would it cost us to buy and operate a drone ship how much does it cost us to build a fairing versus how much does it cost to build and operate a mr steven or mistree right and and you get to the point where like just the fuel cost of operating a boat like that particularly in a launch service like ours where it might be launching from mojave today and guam next week and england the following week so maybe i don't need one of those boats i need lots i need a fleet of those boats or i need to move that boat around the world um you get to the point where yeah you probably still save money if you do that but it's no longer like a transformative world changing business plan rewriting effect it's like oh that's nice like we we sort of save that and i watch with great interest um the announcement that the rocket lab team made recently i have huge respect for for peter and the whole team at rocket lab they've done really amazing things i thought it was very interesting because peter had been so vocal about not wanting to do reusability we might have a a dollar or two coming back all right from him it's all right fair fair enough so remember peter we got you but i found it really interesting when when uh when he talked about in some of the follow-up interviews about that announcement he sort of said hey we're not doing this for cost reasons we're doing this because we can't keep up with our manifests you know we're there in the great position where they've sold a lot of flights and they can't build them quickly enough and so he just said hey if i recover a rocket i'm not interested in the money i'm saving i'm interested in the fact that i just built a rocket in an instant yeah uh effectively there so i thought that that was that was that was fairly interesting and sort of matches with some of the analysis that we've done as well again it might save you some money but it's that's not necessarily the main reason to do it for a for a small satellite yeah i mean even with spacex's recent announcement that they're going to start doing like dedicated small sat missions yep with that even with that if that kind of cost so uh so yeah um you know that that's was a pretty interesting announcement as well spacex having left the small satellite industry now sort of coming back in a major way and dumping a lot of this capacity on the market which has been interesting to find what we find uh as we sort of look at us versus them is really we're we're they're an apple and we're an orange or you know pick your produce of choice it's again it's somewhere where i'm glad that we really leaned into this air launch capability because the flexibility comes with that the the what's called the responsiveness in the field so the ability to go from i've never wanted to do this mission before to i absolutely must do this mission and completing that mission as quickly as possible we think there's some real unique capacities that come with a small mobile dedicated launch platform that you just can't get on a big rocket no matter how awesome that rocket is and no matter how affordable that rocket is so we're sort of selling a slightly different product we definitely paid attention to that to that announcement and and and and i'm sure it'll have some impact on rocket lab and us and everyone else that's trying to emerge i think it'll be really interesting to see how that affects the hundred and fifty whatever um uh small launch companies that are at a relatively nascent or early or even earlier stage right now how that impacts their ability to secure investment and to to go through this sort of long slog of of technological development um but for us yeah we're we're sort of saying hey let's let's lean into the things that we can do differently that we can do better uh and sort of focus on our our biggest strengths and you guys are obviously looking at very high launch rates because of your launch pad cosmic girl allowing you to do that yep have you do you have the manufacturing capability yeah the moment to do that yeah yeah so uh it will continue getting better in time but yeah that was one of the big things that we did was we invested the money and the time up front we didn't wait for a first flight or second flight to start that we moved into our manufacturing facility before we bought the airplane okay and we moved into a manufacturing facility it's got about 150,000 square feet of manufacturing floor we think that that building eventually will be at a rate where we can build about 20 rockets per year from that facility right now we're producing at about eight a year so we're at higher rate by rocket standards but not quite where we want to be for sure but we're in the process of ramping up compared to most small sat companies that's a lot that's a lot that's a lot particularly for someone who has zero launches under their bell today yeah right that that's a lot and we're sort of getting new equipment into the facility not literally every day but but every week or so that allow us to make that a little bit faster and we built rocket three a little faster we built rocket two and built rocket four a little faster than that um so yeah we we're already um I would I would love to think we're already past the hardest part of that of that scaling up process I'm sure there's some surprises that lie in store because that's how our industry always works but uh but yeah we we certainly aren't at the beginning of that road we're pretty far along it yeah and Lupien our our own chat room is asking so if you're building eight rockets a year yep how many do you already have built uh so we've got all the structures built for sort of our next five and then bits and pieces built for for others beyond that gotcha yeah so and obviously you know a lot of people would want to know when's the first one going you know I never get asked that yeah it's funny never right so yeah uh because you did the drop test yeah I imagine that was a very big the drop very big hurdle that was a big freaking deal yeah that was uh that was a nice day for us as a company and it's one of these things again comment to our industry you spend you have a lot of very smart people spend a lot of time predicting exactly what's going to happen that day and there's no substitute for going out and doing it yep yeah it worked how we thought it was going to work thank you that's why you test right so um that was sort of the last test that we needed to do to demonstrate that the system worked what we're really focused on now was buttoning up the first rocket that we'll try to send orbit uh and that is getting ready to leave our factory in the incredibly near future um and then really it's all about the people it's all about rehearsing you know we're about to have the debut of of of of an amazing and complex show on a huge stage uh and we have a pretty young workforce yeah I did notice that yeah I visited is that everybody seemed to be younger than I was we have a we have a relatively by aerospace industry standards we have a really young workforce so we have a lot of people who have only worked a few launches we have a lot of people have never worked a launch before we want them to uh feel super prepared and confident on flight day yeah uh so what we're going to do is we're about to ship this uh our first orbital flight rocket out of the factory really really really soon uh it's going to go up to Mojave and we're going to hang it on a custom built test stand that we've just finished building up there and we're going to just rehearse the heck out of it so we're going to practice tanking it and detanking it we're going to practice turning it on we run through uh we've been doing this already in the factory but we'll keep doing what are called sequence events tests where basically you make all the onboard computers and software think that it's flying to space and have it run through a full mission and and do that do that on the ground just to make sure you know if there's things that are if there are valves that are supposed to open and shut make sure they open and shut their flaps that are supposed to move make sure that they move so we'll be doing a lot of those we'll then strap the aircraft the rocket to the aircraft and we'll we'll probably do what we call a captive carry flight where we fly with the rocket and we don't drop it on purpose we we just want to test out and take off and flying and make sure that we are getting all the data that we want from the rocket during all phases of flight that's probably not something we'll do on missions in the future but because this is our first launch a little extra practice seems to make sense and then when uh when when uh we feel comfortable we'll fly so it's one of these things like you know like in any other endeavor whether it's whether you're rehearsing for a play or you're practicing for a sporting event or you're getting ready for a rocket launch you always know you would get better with one more practice you'd get better with one more rehearsal but at some point you gotta gotta lift the curtain and and and have the show uh and so that's really the the mode that we're about to get in is okay when do you know when does Dan Hart our CEO and Kevin Sages our chief engineer Richard Branson all of our other technical leaders when they say okay you know we can you can never guarantee anything you particularly can't guarantee a maiden flight but we've done what we can do it's time to get up there because hey even if the flight doesn't go perfectly and it's a maiden flight I can pretty much guarantee it won't go perfectly because no one's ever has we're gonna learn a lot so let's get out there and learn and you know with those rehearsals especially you know getting people comfortable uh with flying the rocket you know what's what's sort of you're looking at because I mean tech there's always the technical side of everything but there's also the people side of everything yep and then how are you looking at having your people ready with those rehearsals like what does that entail how do you do give the feedback to the folks that need it you know what are some of the things that you do with that so a lot of it is what happens on the ground in the couple of hours before flight so making sure that we've got all of our procedures for how do you mate the rocket to the wing how do you go in and access it and you got to get down to the point particularly if you're a company like us that really wants to wants to have our thing be how quickly we can do that you have to think down to the point of where does this truck park versus where did that truck part and can I open my door widely enough and when I need to go in and service thing is there enough space for me to reach my hand in there or am I in some weird awkward position where maybe I don't do it as well or it takes me longer or I can only do it for a few minutes before my arm gets tired right you have to think about all that stuff which seems super boring in mundane in the context of a freaking rocket launch but it's critical to how you actually as human beings do this stuff and keep your human beings happy and healthy and and productive and don't just do it once but start doing it all the time all over the world with a bunch of different people so that's that's really what it's all about it's like okay let's yeah let's do it again let's we just fill out the rocket let's drain it let's figure out how we do that because we might have to do that in an abort scenario and then let's fill it back up see if we can do it a little bit faster this time what if we you know we had two people doing this last time can we have just one person doing it or we had two people doing it and they didn't really feel comfortable maybe we need to add a third one in there who do we get how do we train them you know so it's it's a lot of that a lot of that kind of uh it's really in many ways I have to imagine it's a lot like a big theatrical production it's just sort of yeah let's put the market tape on the ground and park the truck exactly there and make sure the ladder is exactly there and make sure that the fan is exactly there and and whatever else is needed and Lisa in our youtube chat room actually wants to know what will be on the first launcher one so what do you guys do you guys have a payload for yeah we have a payload it's something that we built ourselves it is not a tesla or anything else like that okay you know this first flight is is an unusual one we are we're a virgin company we work for Richard Branson Richard has hundreds of companies over the years that do just about everything you can ever imagine he's been in every business from you know starting out with a magazine and then a record shop and a record label he pivoted the next natural step was airlines obviously you know nowadays he's got everything from banks to healthcare to rail lines to casinos to spaceships and and rockets the thing that connects all of them well first of all it's Richard but beyond that the thing that connects all of them is a focus on the customer this is the one launch that we will ever do that is not focused on the customer it's focused on us and it's focused on the technology and it's focused on our processes so although we actually had a lot of interest from customers that wanted to fly on it it's one of the unique things about the small satellite community it is in many ways more risk tolerant than the traditional satellite community because the satellites are so inexpensive relatively speaking that we had a lot of customers say I will fly on your first flight I will even pay I won't pay full price but I'll pay a little bit on your first flight and we said you know what I don't want to give you crappy customer service on this first flight I want to be so focused on let's do our own thing so really we set up an internal team and we have an internal customer because actually that's a way for us to rehearse our customer service as well yeah what information do you get and how do you get it and how often does it get updated and where do you go if you have questions and all those kinds of things so we have an educational payload on board it's cool and we're proud of it but it isn't the main focus and so you won't really hear us talk about it until hopefully we've deployed it gotcha and are you guys gonna stream it stream we're not gonna live stream it I would love to live stream it we're not gonna live stream it we will be live tweeting it we actually have some technical challenges to live streaming you've heard me evangelize for air launch and how much I love that it is awesome in so many ways it ain't great for live streaming no it's not because you know when we when we drop the rocket off the aircraft we're a thousand miles away from anything yeah and I would imagine you also have to like you know the plane's rolling yeah exactly you gotta get out of the way of the rocket which means that you're no longer really on there with a with a signal on a satellite because I know having been on you know flying before and you know I'm watching TV on the plane and then you know it moves a little bit and there goes the TV for like a couple minutes yeah and if you've if you've watched our drop test video or if we're able to pull that up now you know when we when we're carrying the rocket under the wing and before we release it we put the aircraft into quite a steep climb and then what happens is when we release the rocket from the wing the rocket weighs about 60 000 pounds fully fueled 55 60 000 sort of depends on on the mission but always in that range so when you drop the rocket your aircraft has just gotten about 60 000 pounds lighter on that side so it's it it veers off which is good because we want to get the airplane very very far away from the rocket as quickly as possible just in case so it's in a very steep climb and then goes into a very steep bank and gets the heck out of dodge very very very quickly so yeah when you think about radomes and and antennas that are on this aircraft they're not pointed in the optimal direction no for for high definition video streaming or anything else looks good after the fact looks good looks good after the fact during not so much yeah so uh so sadly as much as i would love to it will not be live stream but we will be live tweeting it we want the world to know what's going on in success or in failure we want to be really open about about everything that we're learning as quickly as we can so what we need to do is we need to get put Tim Dodd to rent a boat there we go and then get out there with a really long lens and i have been looking at that kind of thing live stream oh we'll see i don't think i'm for live stream but okay how do you get the best photography possible yeah definitely now uh just i kind of have like a hypothetical here which is which you guys are so focused on doing things so rapidly um with this if i'm a customer and i've got a satellite built and i call you up and i say hey uh i'm based out of seattle yep and i want to launch to a 97 degree sunsynchronous orbit yeah 560 by 560 kilometers yep uh when can i get that launch uh so though so there's a bunch of different things we have to consider and we're trying to make every single one of them faster um so we got to consider how do we get your satellite to us how do we get it integrated and ready for flight we got to consider where is the ideal place that you would fly from that gets your satellite into its exact orbit right away you know there might be other opportunities where you could launch very soon to a different orbit and then move but often that repositioning in addition to consuming fuel consumes time so what's when is your really door-to-door delivery date uh and then and then when can we have that rocket ready for you um so we have to focus on all those things you know we talked a little bit already about some of our mobile trailer equipment so we have some ability to go and pick up satellites and move them we could actually in theory do that with the aircraft although that sometimes submits them to vibrational loads that they might not want but it possibly does exist perhaps if if we ever have a customer that really prizes this the speed of things um so so we've got that um we already talked a little bit about the advantages of a flying launch site um because it means it gives us way more flexibility than really any ground launch system could ever have to get into exactly the right orbit at the right inclination at the right altitude at the right time of day at the right everything um there and also with our system because of the way it's designed from the ground up not only the rocket but the aircraft and the ground support equipment if you have a need to fly from a spaceport that maybe isn't even a spaceport today uh we think we can move pretty quickly from there is nothing we have an empty field or we have an airport or we have something else like that so we wanted to make it a spaceport you know we basically need a runway and we need regulations um that's that's the nice thing you could have a spaceport on the other side of the world that we've literally never considered and from a logistics perspective we could kind of be there tomorrow so it becomes a okay how quickly can we work the export regulations and the local fa equivalent and environmental assessments and those kinds of things which take some time but it makes us as fast as we possibly can be because that the one step you can't change the one steps out of your control is the only limiting step there and then the other part is the manufacturing facility and we thought a lot about that from the beginning it's one reason why we started investing a lot of time and a lot of money into those big machines at the at a very very early age we're very fortunate that we had the financial backing where we could do that and that's a big differentiator um but we I think we started thinking about that much earlier in the process than most others uh I have you know I have one um sort of story that always comes to my mind when I think about this um there's a a friend of mine who's the CEO and co-founder of a small satellite launch company I won't say the name because I haven't asked for permission but um uh every time like literally every time I talk to this person on the telephone because we're space nerd so we're talking about space stuff basically literally every time they they they'll tell me the same thing they'll say you know well if I decide right now that I need to be in London on Monday morning I can do that right I can go down to LAX and I can buy a last minute flight and I can get to London in time for my meeting or my date or to go see Hamilton or you know whatever else it is I can get there by Monday and if I'm buying my ticket the last minute I know it costs more and I know I might be sitting in the middle seat rather than the aisle seat and I might be on an airline I don't like rather than being on Virgin Atlantic which is obviously the best airline and I might not have my choice between Heathrow and Gatwick right but I can do it why is there no equivalent of that for space because this is a person who owns a large number of satellites that are already in space who is serving customers and is saying well what happens when one of my satellites break and now I'm not meeting my obligation to my customers and I can build the satellites quickly I actually even have some spare satellites but how quickly can I get that satellite to orbit they're saying okay most other places I go if I walk in with a fully built satellite and a suitcase full of cash and say I want to fly ASAP it's ready to go here's the money how quickly can you get me up usually the answer is like well we typically do it in 24 months but given that we could probably do it in 18 months and you say okay that's 18 months of me not fully satisfying my customers that doesn't sound very good to me I want a last minute ticket that I can fly you know tomorrow or next week or maybe next month but anything further than that so we thought because of our air launch architecture we had the technical ability to do that if we could have the manufacturing ability to do that and so we said let's go and let's again let's spend a little bit more capital upfront let's think about how do we give you know Andy Short our head of manufacturing and Dan Hart our CEO that flexibility to say to call down to the shop floor and said hey team I know I told you to build eight rockets this year guess what we're building nine right and that's one reason why like a lot of other companies these days it used to be you know 10 20 years ago when folks were building rocket companies most of them were doing integration and they were saying you know what I'm going to buy tanks from the tank people and I'm going to buy engines from the engine experts and I'm going to buy avionics for over here because you know what the tank people are really dang good at tanks and I'm going to let them do that and and there's a couple of them so I can have them compete against each other to make sure my pricing is good and same with engines and same with everything else there's some real upside to that there's some real downside to that in terms of how do you keep your talent on board when you're not doing that kind of work there's some real upside about yeah okay maybe you can compete initially between different engine providers but once you've designed your rocket around one engine it's really hard to change and your supplier knows that so what happens to your pricing pressure there but the other big thing is let's say you decide you wanted to do a surge and build one more rocket than you were going to well now I've got to call 20 different suppliers and convince them all to build one more widget than they were going to and if any one of them says no I can't do it so we now build everything in house and we bought some extra fancy equipment and we try and keep extra material on hand and have the right people where Dan can say yep okay we're building another one it's you know one person can kind of make that decision and allow us to to really surge and do that definitely yeah and see fit in our in our own chat room is asking how many customers are lined up and no specific numbers yeah needed you know in order to get that so well we've sold a couple dozen launches and we got a number of customers around the world both in government and in the commercial world to date it's been mostly in the commercial world although we do have NASA as a customer we expect them to be the customer for our first sort of revenue generating orbital flight so NASA is a customer we also have sold flights to the U.S. Department of Defense we do that through a subsidiary but but we've sold that as well but that said the majority of our of our sales have been to private companies places like OneWeb, Citadel, GOMSpace I'm trying to remember all the ones we've announced recently ExoLaunch, Spire yeah there's there's I can't even you know keep track of all the names I'm sure my sales team will be will be disappointed me for not remembering all their names in perfect order but yeah so we've sold a bunch to a pretty wide range of companies from you know young startups that have never flown anything to veteran companies that fly stuff all the time to to space agencies what we're also starting to see now is sort of the realization of some of this the flexibility that we've talked about already where what's starting to happen is we'll have customers who are based in other countries who call us inquiring about buying a launch and we'll have a nice conversation hopefully they'll come into the factory and see the hardware that's always our best sales tool and then what often happens is they'll call back and say I know we already asked you about this launch but is there any way that launch could happen from here because in my country we build satellites but we don't launch satellites and I would like to launch satellites from here because that has nice inspirational and social benefits that some maybe has some efficiency in business things it maybe just allows them to tap into a different budget line than that we were already tapping into and so we've we've sort of noticed that because of this huge proliferation of small satellites there are so many more countries now that have a native satellite manufacturing capability a lot of them are still thinking about having a native launch capability they look at let's design our own launch vehicle and launch site oh my goodness that costs a lot of time and a lot of money let's look at adapting a ground launch vehicle to fly here that costs much less in time and money but still a lot it takes a lot to build a launch site as we see in Boca Chica and lots of other places around the world or they're these guys that I call them up and they bring their 747 and they're here tomorrow and you know they charge me the price to ferry the aircraft to the other side of the world isn't very much right yeah so so you may have seen we did some announcements recently we've done now several announcements over in the United Kingdom about flying things both for the UK space agency and for the Royal Air Force as well as the thriving small satellite manufacturing industry there I've got some of my colleagues off in Japan right now we made an announcement relatively recently about bringing our system over to Japan which already has some launch capability but doesn't have an air launch capability and is pretty interested in that as well so we're starting to see these customers that are sort of customers but also sort of becoming regional hubs or partners in a way and allowing us to to bring the capability to a part of the world that doesn't have it so for the future of Virgin orbit what are you guys looking at is there like how do you see things playing out is are we going to have more air planes with more launcher ones is launcher one getting bigger or is there is there maybe something beyond launcher one yeah yeah so the main focus right now is let's do the dang flight just get it going let's earn the right to be a full rocket company and you know we are we try not to talk too far ahead of ourselves but we do work for Richard Branson so that happens sometimes and we want to go and back it up and we've been working damn hard to do that right and and now let's go out and prove it so that is overwhelmingly the focus of everyone in the company but we are thinking about all those things you mentioned so one relatively simple thing to do we've already bought and converted to 747 we know exactly how much it cost in time and money it wasn't that much the first time it'd be less the second time so the thought one thought is okay let's go get a couple more 747s as we talked about 747s could fly 20 hours a day every day that that they're amazing in that perspective but every once in a while they have to go down for scheduled maintenance and maybe if you're doing enough flights you you start to worry about even the time that it takes to reposition one from Guam to Cornwall so you might want to have one that sort of serves Europe and one that sort of serves Asia and one that sort of serves the Americas so you could imagine that so that's one thing that we think about we also think about larger vehicles and we always try to keep our finger on the pulse of this of this community and always be asking that question what does small mean and what does affordable mean and is that getting a little bit bigger does that tell us that we want a slightly larger vehicles that mean we want to stay at the same size and just really focus on driving down costs does that mean we need a smaller vehicle does that mean you need a fleet of you know do you want the two-door hatchback or the SUV kind you want launcher one light or launcher one heavy right so we try and keep all those things in mind and have and to know if we see the demand for that how do we move very very quickly to go and deliver on that let's have the plans already in place let's have considered those when we make technology decisions in generation one because maybe you might make a different decision if you want to keep the door open for this other thing in technology generation five so let's let's spend always spend some time thinking about that and try and balance doing that without taking our eyes off the ball wow so a lot coming up for you guys especially just you know with launcher one and the test campaign you guys are going to be doing and getting everything going you know all that work you've been doing for years finally coming together and making that happen no pressure yeah yeah no no pressure at all I'm sure just neither from anybody nor Richard I'm sure so yeah nothing at all so one thing I do want to talk with you about two that's sort of separate yeah or at least a little bit separate yeah from virgin orbit is that you do this really cool thing called the Brook Owens fellowship yeah and we actually did do an episode last orbit in orbit 11 where we talked about the Brook Owens fellowship so if you want to you can go back to that catch that episode and watch it but for those who don't know about the Brook Owens fellowship won't you tell us a little bit about it yeah so that is a program that I co-founded along with Lori Garver and Cassie Lee and it's a program that the three of us created to try and really empower young women and gender minorities who are excited about getting careers in aerospace I deeply love the aerospace industry I love the community I love the people one thing that it hasn't been great at historically is diversity right obviously you look at pictures from the Apollo era and it's all white dudes with skinny black ties and no women and no people of color and no you know anything else other than that that's starting to change but not nearly quickly enough the last number I saw for gender diversity says that we're at something like depending which study you believe something like 12 to 14 percent of people in the industry don't identify as male right that's a really really low number and that's not I have seen because through both my virgin orbit job I'm also the chair of the board of advisors for the world's largest student space organization a fantastic group called SEDS I spent a lot of time on college campuses I can tell you for sure that's not for lack of interest there are a ton of incredibly passionate and incredibly intelligent and hard-working young people who aren't white dudes who want to work in this industry and they're just having a hard time getting their foot in the door so we created this program called the Brook Owens Fellowship to go out and find those people and to help them get that start so those who apply and get in and it is extraordinarily hard to get in there's no way in hell I could get in if I were a student I applied these young people are way more talented than I am but if they've made it through those that gauntlet what they do is they get a paying summer internship job sorry first of all say they have to be undergraduate students when they apply so it's not for high school students it's not for grads it's only for for undergrads if they apply and they get in they get a a meaningful and a living wage paying job at one of the coolest aerospace companies in the world and we've got all of your fan favorites are in the program so your space x's and your blue origins and all the virgin companies a lot of the cool small satellite companies like planet inspire in there we also have aviation companies we have think tanks so we've got business analysis we've got you know investment funds all kinds of different jobs so not just for engineers so you get a hand-picked paired job that is customized to you and your skills and your interests your career goals you get a one-on-one relationship with an incredibly senior executive mentor and our mentor pool includes eight astronauts it includes a bunch of CEOs it includes at least one billionaire and this is a person who's going to be on the phone with you at least two hours a month for the next year and then you get this fellowship of like-minded colleagues I shouldn't be surprised by this because I sort of know it intellectually from reading about it but I am shocked over and over again in this program how many of these young people that come through are still like the only woman in their class or one of two or the only transgender person anyone's ever met in this aerospace industry we have one of our fantastic fellows it's just completing the program this year who is literally going to be the first woman to ever graduate with an engineering degree from her university and it's 2019 how the fuck is that still happening pardon me for swearing so we we want to change that and and having this tight-knit network of about 35 or 40 of them a year that form these really really close bonds and now are going off because they're also talented and incredible they're going off and they're already making waves and they're pulling each other up along the way and having that sort of peer-to-peer network of support that benefited me and so many other people that I know early in their careers so it's been a it's been a labor of love the program's been way more work than I would have ever imagined it being because it's been been so successful we are accepting applications now so if you consider yourself an undergraduate gender minority who's interested in aerospace I really encourage you go to brookownspellorship.org and apply if that description doesn't match you maybe it matches someone you know so please do spread the word we are open to applications from all over the world you're not required to be a US citizen I'll be honest the odds are better if you are a US citizen because some of our employers can't can only employ those people but we are we are open to to people from other nationalities as well and it's a time-consuming and challenging application but people seem to find it fun um actually so uh so start start early take a look I think their applications are doing mid-november and what are some of the uh uh who are some of the people that have come through the brookownspellorship like what are some of the amazing things oh some some of our great success stories uh oh boy now this is like asking me to pick one of my favorite children this is tough so I'll I'll pick some of the ones that uh that that make uh some of the best stories and also maybe that some of your audience know so I'll pick some of the ones who are active about their story on twitter I think I think the one that maybe more many of you are familiar with is a fantastic young person named Karen Rucker Karen who we all adore is just incredible she had a really interesting path through life that was a little bit nontraditional um she found herself sort of in her late 20s having not gone to university working a job as a telephone operator for the 911 emergency response system and sort of had a moment where she said oh my god what am I doing with my life I actually uh I actually love math and science and I let other people tell me that that wasn't what I should do in life so I get emotional about this stuff sorry uh so she actually uh is awesome she went back to school worked on another degree um was applying to places and I think was having a hard time getting in because she was a nontraditional student at a school that isn't super famous a good school but it's not like a super famous traditional feeder school and had this kind of weird gap on her resume as far as aerospace companies are concerned and so I think was having a tough time getting getting the kind of roles that she merited with her talent fortunately we were able to come up with an application process that finds candidates like that um hired her she went and worked at an awesome company called Hawkeye 360 a small satellite company based in the DC area a small team of I think 10 or so people I believe at the time she was the only woman there just crushed it absolutely rocked it they loved her thought she was the coolest and then all of a sudden what she found was basically all of our host companies including virgin orbit were competing with each other to try and hire her so this person who couldn't get an interview was now sort of fighting people off and saying hold on I you know I've already made up my mind stand back so yeah so she's at ball aerospace now doing amazing things um if you have ever been interested in antennae in any way uh follow her on twitter because she will nerd out about that and uh at a level that I can barely even understand because of her uh her incredible enthusiasm electrical engineering is wizardry it really it's the field of engineering I understand the least that for sure are there any other groups that are sort of like brook owens uh so we have our first spinoff program which is called the Matthew isakowitz fellowship program um it is in many ways kind of a cut and paste of our basic model with some really important differences um so the first one is that they are open to men and the second one is that they are open primarily to graduate students so whereas our program is undergrads only their program I believe is rising seniors through second year graduate students um we also we're engineering focus but we have business jobs and policy jobs journalism education and they have much more of a an engineering focus and a little bit more of a focus than we do on entrepreneurialism um so they have more of the sort of early stage startup companies or in the venture capital world as well fantastic program a lot of the same kind of core um tenants that uh that the the the brook owens fellowship has as well I don't think they've posted their applications for the next class just yet but I uh I believe that's coming soon so encourage you to go to matthewisakowitz fellowship dot org I believe is their website and check that one out as well all right well there you go a fellowship for women a fellowship for men uh hopefully that staves off nasty youtube comments for randos there's nothing that staves off nasty randos but uh but you know you got all the bases covered so that's pretty good you know enabling everybody because space really is for everybody so it's really is for everybody so have you been reading the back of my shirt I might have been reading the back of your shirt I was going to say your shirt's pretty awesome oh thank you and I kind of want one or seven I could probably make that happen I know guy I think we should make that happen anyways well I folks would like to know more about you or any of the programs that you're working on now where should they go uh the internet is probably a pretty good place so um all these programs are pretty active on twitter and pick your favorite social network of choice so I'm on twitter I'm just at pomerance um virgin orbit is on there as well virgin underscore orbit brook owens fellowship I think is at owens fellowship that one is maintained by our alums who are much cooler and hitter than I am um so they use all the right internet slang uh so yeah check check all those things out and and really in all these programs um we value transparency um you know we do work an industry that has itar and other regulations oh yes and so we can't say everything all the time and it is also a competitive industry so we don't always want to say everything all the time yeah but you know one thing that has always been a focus of mine personally and professionally is because I I'm so those of us who get to work in this industry are so stupidly lucky that we work in an industry that we love that most people love right I've never told someone I work in aerospace and they're like oh but you know everyone's like oh rocket yeah right exactly so everybody loves it and almost all and want to hear about it and also the other thing I encourage you uh the fellow space nerds to keep in mind is like a huge number there are really intimidated by it um because they've all heard the jokes their whole life about how about how smart rocket scientists are and it it it it breaks my heart every time I hear someone say I could never understand that I'm not good at math oh man it kills me every time because usually what it means is like I got a bad grade in math when I was 12 right and so I've just decided I'm bad at math and I will always be bad at math and I ignored the part that like I was going through puberty and I'm a totally different person and maybe I had a bad teacher or maybe you know whatever else was going on in life so um I think hopefully you'll find if you look into any of these programs we try to do our best to explain stuff in a way that makes sense even if you aren't familiar with all of the acronyms and jargon of our industry and we try and do that without in a way that's boring or belittling to people who are in the industry and know exactly what specific impulses or whatever else we try and try and thread that needle I'm sure we don't get it right every time um but it's something we think a lot about if you got suggestions for how we could do it better hit me up I would love to hear and if you think you're doing well uh hit us up as well and I'll share that with the people who actually do it and give me a pat on the back all right well that uh essentially concludes our episode for orbit 12 dot 27 and of course before we wrap up the show we do want to thank all of you who helped make this show possible we wouldn't be able to do this without you you know we wouldn't be able to bring on will and talk to all of these amazing people and allow you to talk all to all of these amazing people as well with all of your great questions that you had today so if you'd like to help our show uh you can actually head on over to patreon.com slash tmro or you can also head over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join where you can literally as little as a dollar per month contribute to us so if you get something out of the show feel free to give something back we're more than happy to take that also if you don't have anything financially but you still do want to contribute to the show we encourage and welcome and love that as well and you can head over to community.tmro.tv to do that as well so that's it orbit 12.27 we're wrapped up for that so until the next show we see you for tomorrow's space make sure to keep exploring