 Coming up, Schiapparelli splats on Mars. Cygnus, birth to the International Stay Station. I have an interview with Emery Stagmer about small sats. And I've got comments from Mastin on the Moon. All that and more coming up on this episode of Tomorrow. Hello and welcome to Tomorrow, Episode 9.35 for October 29, 2016. Now before we get started with the show, we of course want to thank our Tomorrow premiere patron members. These folks have given us ten dollars or more per episode as we crowdfund our shows here of Tomorrow. Now these folks get access to everything including our Slack channel and if you would like to help crowdfund the shows of Tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. And I am your host for the news portion, Jared Head. And next to me, sort of next to me but not in person, is Space Mike, our reporter from Arizona. So very glad to have you on today, Space Mike. Thank you very much. All right. And we're going to go ahead and get started by going to a place that looks a little bit like Arizona, which is Mars. And some of the bad news coming from Mars unfortunately about the European Space Agency's Schiapparelli lander. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged the area that was originally seen where a black spot appeared. And as you can see, it's a little bit more than just a black spot. It's more a black splat. And in fact, that is the area where the Schiapparelli lander impacted the surface of Mars, likely exploding. And data shows that the supersonic parachute was deployed for landing but then it jettisoned early and the retro rockets fired for much shorter than expected. So I think that there was some sort of a software issue there. So we're going to get these three images there. On the left, you have the back shell with the parachute. In the middle is what is left of Schiapparelli. And then to the right there is the forward heat shield that was deployed. Now the crater left over is about 2.5 meters across and 50 centimeters deep. And it's consistent with the high speed impact of something the size of the probe. So there you go. That's where Schiapparelli ended up on Mars. Now speaking of some good stuff, let's get back to some good news over at Space Mike. What's going on in orbit around the Earth? Well, the Cygnus vehicle, Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo vehicle docked to the space station on Sunday. And it had to loiter in orbit for a little while. This one is designated OA-5 and it was birthed to the International Space Station by Kate Rubens and Takuya Onishi using the Canadian robotic arm on Sunday, October 23 at 1128 Coordinated Universal Time. Now this was Orbital ATK's seventh Cygnus vehicle first to launch on the upgraded Antares 230 rocket as well as using the Castor 30 XL upper stage. And as I said, this Cygnus had to loiter in the area around the space station for a few days waiting for the Soyuz MSO-2 spacecraft to dock to the International Space Station first, which we talked about last week. And even though Cygnus launched before the MSO-2 before going through the final rendezvous procedures, but it was able to rendezvous with the station and birthed successfully and it will remain at the space station until November 18 when the spacecraft will be used to dispose of several tons of trash during its fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and conduct the spacecraft fire experiment that Lisa Stojanasi has talked about in her space pods quite a bit. So, very cool stuff and this is probably my favorite shot of the spacecraft just being wheeled right into place. It looks like something out of a science fiction movie, but that's real footage. And I'm just really happy for this and congratulations to NASA and Orbital ATK for this successful mission. Yeah, great to have them return to flight and we're always great to have more cargo showing up. So, I want to talk a little bit about Juno because we hinted about it last week, but we didn't really go into too much detail, which is that Juno, the spacecraft and orbit around Jupiter for NASA went into safe mode and it's now out of safe mode thanks to work by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and prime contractor Lockheed Martin, who are both now investigating the root cause for this they think, which is a software fault. Now Juno was set to fire its main engine on October 19th, the place itself from its current 53 and a half day orbit into a 14 day science orbit, but valves in the engine are continuing to react slower than needed. So, mission scientists and engineers are confident that if Juno does have to stay in this 53 and a half day orbit that it will be able to accomplish its goals, but a little bit of a setback there because they were wanting to get a little bit closer. There's also some advantages to having this higher orbit where that you'll have more time to get the data down and other things like that, but overall seems like every spacecraft we send to Jupiter there's a little bit of a technical glitch with it just like they had with Galileo where you have to overcome it a little bit and we'll see how they do with Juno. So, knowing NASA, they'll be able to do a very good job. Alright, going back to Earth orbit. Space Mike, what have you got for us? This is actually a little bit of bad news. The Air Force on Monday announced that one of their Defense Meteorological Satellites broke apart in orbit and this was the satellite that was designated DMSP for the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 12 and it launched on August 29, 1994 and had the same faulty battery assembly as their F-13 or Flight 13 satellite that broke up last year in February. Now when F-13 broke up last year it was still in service but F-12 that just recently broke up had been retired in 2008 which means that the Air Force burned off the satellite's remaining fuel it released compressed gases and it discharged the battery and this also meant that they had no telemetry when the spacecraft broke apart. So figuring out why it broke apart was really hard to determine. Now part of the good news about this is that the Air Force is only tracking one additional piece of debris in the vicinity of F-12 satellite whereas the F-13 satellite that broke apart last year produced 150 pieces of debris and this is actually the third one of these this series that broke apart the F-11 satellite broke up in 2004 and it produced 56 pieces of degrees so it's one pieces that broke off of F-12 I'm glad that it didn't create a huge debris field but there is still the cascade effect and there are still six orbits excuse me, six satellites that are currently in orbit right now that have the same sort of faulty battery assembly and that still might be at risk of breaking apart even if they are in service or not. Got a little bit of bad news but I'm glad it didn't produce more damage at least not at the current time anyway. I want to talk a little bit about one of my favorite spacecraft which is not in orbit around the earth it is on its way out of the solar system and it's NASA's New Horizons spacecraft which after 16 months of downlinking it finally finished downlinking all of the data from its flyby of Pluto now that's over 50 gigabits of data and that ended at 948 coordinated universal time this past Tuesday which marked the last fresh data packet came down. Now the reason that it took 16 months is because the average downlink speed is somewhere around 2000 bits per second. So in other words it's really slow and also that signal takes about five hours for it to reach the earth after leaving the spacecraft. Now the 16 months was built in to the mission to allow the downlink and it's now on its way to fly by a minor Kuiper Bell project in 2019 but just the amazing stuff that brought us back from Pluto and we're still going to be analyzing that data probably for the next decade just mind blowing stuff in what it was able to do and just fantastic I really like Pluto even though I don't think it's a planet but you know it's still a fantastic place and great that we now have all of the data back from the highly successful flyby mission so very very cool stuff and a little bit about some other cool images too Mike? Tell us about this one. This goes back to Earth orbit. We're having a little battle here going back and forth between Earth and the solar system but this is actually from the Tiangong-2 space station they deployed a micro-satellite that was about the size of a printer that was able to take pictures of the Tiangong complex with the Shenzhou 11 dock and it returned this picture here that you see on screen. Now this small spacecraft had a visible light camera and an infrared light camera and it took over 300 images but this is kind of the best one that they've at least made public so far. Now this spacecraft also has an ammonia based propulsion system and it will linger around the station taking more pictures in the next few days of Tiangong-2 with Earth as a backdrop. I don't know if those are going to be color photos or more black and white photos. This is called the Bong-Jean satellite I believe it's called this is the second one in the series and it's an upgraded version from the first one that flew with Shenzhou 7 back in 2008. So cool picture and I'm really excited to see the pictures of that and it really reminds me of the Russian Salyu program back in the day so it's cool to see those pictures and that they're already having a lot of success with this. So congratulations to China for the successful mission so far and I hope everything else goes well with Tiangong-2. Yeah looking forward to what they're going to be able to do with that. So we are going to go ahead and go to a break and when we come back from break we've got Emery Stagmer who's going to be talking to us about small stats. So stay tuned, tomorrow continues right after this break. Actually now before we get started with our interview with Emery I want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who helped make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are people who've contributed $10 or more to this specific episode they're going to access to our Slack channel. We've also got our tomorrow producers either people who've contributed $5 or more to the this specific episode and they're going to get access to free worldwide shipping from our swag store. So thank you to everyone who contributed. If you'd like to help crowdfund, this is a shows of tomorrow. Head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O easy for me to say. Alright this week we bring on a long time viewer and multiple guest Emery Stagmer he's going to be talking about small stats which I think is appropriate based on the number of launchers that we've been talking about and all the different innovations that are happening in the small stat market and this is actually Emery an area that you you work in like daily is it not right. Yeah I'm a flight software engineer for satellite systems and for the last three to five years we've been talking to internal and external customers within Northrop Grumman about making really really small satellites using the CubeSat form factor I first became aware of the CubeSats about ten years ago. There's a CubeSat conference that's held every year at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and I went like ten years ago and saw that the universities were doing some really interesting stuff with these super small satellites and then at the small sat conference in Utah three years ago we started to hear about people who were looking starting to look at this form factor for more operational units where you could start to talk about you know high reliability the kinds of reliability and longevity on a system that you know you would normally expect that of something the size of you know maybe a refrigerator but here I've actually got a prop you know like props right. This is the size of a satellite that we're talking about actually this is a little bit bigger. Wow CubeSat standard right the CubeSat standard is 10 centimeters this is 11 okay and it's 10 centimeters tall this is 13 because I just measured it with my you know handy dandy caliper um and and so this is not like the power box or the the um you know the avionics or the propellant tank this is the whole satellite a one unit CubeSat now they make them in multiples okay so they make you know three tall and that's a 3U CubeSat and if they make them you know three tall and two wide that's a 6U CubeSat right so we're talking about something you know this big and that wide right so you're talking about uh you know two serial boxes for an entire mission what can you do with something like that though I mean you traditionally think of these giant satellites with huge solar arrays and huge powerful antennas trying to shrink that into something that is smaller than a Kleenex box seems like you have to give something up so what utility do these CubeSats have that's been the real interesting point is that the electronics the optics um and the kinds of science instruments that you want to be able to fly are getting smaller and smaller and it's kind of like the reverse of the of what we call the tyranny of the rocket equation where every time something gets bigger on a rocket everything else gets bigger and then that thing gets bigger and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger right well the reverse of that is also true as soon as something gets smaller everything gets smaller and then that gets smaller and smaller right so it's kind of like the reverse the smaller it gets the smaller it gets and so when you can start saying oh I can take out the mass of the optics or I can take out some of the mass for the electronics oh well then I don't need as much power or I don't need as big a reaction wheels or I don't need as much propellant and so the satellites then get smaller and you start to get from you know a cubic meter satellite to a cubic foot satellite sorry I'm mixing units I know that's going to drive Jared crazy but but you get that people understand you know something this big then you get start to get down to something this big and then you start talking about well who's making systems who's making electronics for these things and what we found over the last three to five years is that there are multiple producers who are making electronics for these and unfortunately the the reliability and the success of those missions has been significantly lacking they have a better than 50% failure rate sometimes the missions are put in orbit and prove that you got it in orbit and talked to it okay and that mission fails which means you never heard from it at all you know they deployed it in orbit you never got it back you never heard anything so you don't know what happened things like light sail 2 for instance had a software problem and so you've got these kinds of both hardware and software failures that really limit the reliability of these kinds of missions and generally they work for six months or a year but they eventually you're flying low cost low quality components and so you just can't have a reliability for sadly the last three, five, eight years with a predictable lifetime so that's where Northrop Grumman started to take a look in the last couple of years at well what would it really take to take the kinds of reliability that we've built into systems for the last 20 or 30 years where we've never had an on orbit failure you know I've worked on I've lost count 12 or 15 missions in the last 20 years we've never had an on orbit failure we've never had a piece of hardware fail we've never had a piece of software fail and so if you can bring that kind of reliability to the CubeSat environment now you're starting to talk about being able to have a satellite that has a three to five year reliability that only costs single digit millions where they used to cost 100 million plus so Northrop Grumman right now is working on taking in my notes it says 24 years 30 missions of heritage of successful satellite missions but they're generally these larger satellites that you know fill up a good chunk of this studio space but taking that technology and compressing it down into something that's more of a CubeSat size so you can actually reduce the size and cost of everything and potentially deploy a lot of these all at once instead of just one permission yeah absolutely and the kinds of deployers that people are building people like planetary systems and some others where they can bolt these things onto almost everything that's flying including the space station the Atlas V rockets Falcon 9 rockets the Soyuz rockets I mean just everything and so we're starting to see numbers on the order of a couple of hundred satellites a year that are getting put up into low Earth orbit in these CubeSat form factors so a couple questions from the chat room if we could which is you talked about a greater than 50% failure rate on a lot of these CubeSats what is the collision this is from Destructure 1701 what is the collision risk on these little things do they have is there like a keep-out zone for these or is it just kind of you launch it and just hope for the best well they launched them on a sequence and so the deployers will pop them off at a predetermined time in the launch profile so they're not interacting with each other they're generally ejected at some numbers of meters per second single digit meters per second away from the rocket so they're not interacting with each other they're just either things aren't deploying or the electronics fail to operate generally those are always launched off and so there's a deployer pin puller inside the the ejector that shoots these things out essentially but it pulls a pin as it goes right and so when you pull that pin closes a switch and the thing turns on but if it doesn't turn on you're mission over you know but then we still have a space debris problem with something like that are these at a low enough speed in altitude where they just kind of come back after a month or two or not even that just burn up in the atmosphere sure the total orbital inertia mass and is very involved in the amount of energy that the satellite has and so the smaller the satellite is the more that atmosphere and things like that will affect it and so it'll come back in you know re-enter the atmosphere much earlier than a larger satellite even in the same orbit at Northrop Grumman you're working on more than just the software control side of it right it's kind of a whole package for control is that correct yeah exactly we're building an entire avionics system that we can use as the central of computer hardware and power systems in these super small satellites being able to bring you know the larger engineering organization and with a deep understanding of space physics and physics reliability means that we're able to do some things that are pretty fancy the biggest most expensive processor that you can fly in space right now is made by BAE systems and it's that processor card there's a whole card it's got memory and everything on it but that processor card is multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars and runs at 100 megahertz and has a single core processor I know that's just mind boggling your phone your phone has more power than that my phone has 30 times as much power than that and I don't even know how much more memory it has but that's the processor you're using to do you worked on things like L-Cross is that a similar processor to what you used for going to the moon? That was the processor we used on L-Cross that's the processor that we built the avionics not only for L-Cross but also for LRO L-Cross was essentially a copy of LRO's avionics and power system right we basically just duplicated it and bolted it on what's called an ESPA ring I don't remember where that stands for I'm sorry it's an acronym but it's basically politely known as a sewer pipe that hooks onto the top and then we bolted boxes around the outside it's the same diameter it's essentially the interface adapter ring that goes in between the upper stage and the primary payload so it was the adapter ring that sat in between the centaur upper stage and the lunar reconnaissance orbiter and what we did is we bolted electronics and thrusters on the outside of that ring and made a satellite out of it but it's the same electronics as L-Cross so L-Cross and LRO both flying this Rad 750 processor so what we're doing in the CubeSat environment is we're taking a new processor by a different company and we're making our own processor card we make printed wiring boards not only design them we have a manufacturing facility at our location we made to say that we made the avionics we made the processing cards and the power system cards that went in those boxes so we're applying that same level of understanding, reliability engineering to a processor card that's this big and that thick and so you have a processor card then you have a mezzanine memory card and then you have a solar array module interface card and a power switching card and you can stack them up in kind of multiple you need more memory you need more power, you need more solar rays you can add more slices that simple stack is three quarters of a unit of a CubeSat so it's 7.5 cm by 10 by 10 cm so one of the reasons you have very large satellites is when you're out in space you don't have a magnetosphere to help protect against radiation so you have to protect big heavy boxes to protect against radiation because radiation whipping through a processor can really screw it up it comes from anonym I believe is how you pronounce that in small sites do you use any sort of radiation protection for hardened controllers or processors or do you use redundancy or do you have something to protect against space based radiation a little bit of all of that you have two different kinds of radiation that you have to worry about you have single event upsets which is an ionizing piece of radiation that can flip a bit in a satellite and then you have something called an ionizing dose and that's how long a piece of electronics essentially can survive in a given radiation environment it can soak up so much radiation and generally that's in kilorads thousands of rads so we start talking about having a reliable thing that will live in space and we start talking about 100 to 300 k rad the processor some of the processors that we've used in the past are mega rad but the new memory systems that we are now putting on these cubesets are mega rad so you're talking about a million rads of total ionizing dose before those things will have a problem so they can survive a very long time and their tolerance to single event upsets is very very high this one comes from blue glaciers you talked about the light sail project which is a planetary society solar sail essentially there you go so they flew that mentioned there was a software fault but it was essentially successful missions other than sails are there any propulsion systems that can send cubesets from low earth orbit to lunar orbit because there's a lot of change in velocity required for that and in fact they're looking at both ion drives and I've seen one that actually uses instead of xenon uses iodine that one is stupendous the iodine drive is really cool I've seen some systems that have many hundreds of meters of change in velocity so you could actually fly these small cubesets out to lunar out to geosynchronous that's a big idea right now like the Chinese satellite that you just showed along with the new segment along with the the little satellite that's a probably they didn't really say how big it was but it's in the cubic foot range you know multiple maybe slightly bigger than a cubic foot and yeah being able to then do that kind of observation it's one of the things that a lot of the agencies are looking to do is have these super small satellites they're less expensive they're a little bit more expendable they're harder to detect for now for now if you're actively broadcasting you're fairly easy to detect because you're emitting RF radiation because that's how you have to talk to the ground but yeah so people would like to be able to go inspect other satellites and any agency and any commercial entity that's looking to do anything in space with earth observation science observations satellite to satellite kinds of things everybody's looking at CubeSats so I got two questions that kind of relate to each other one is from Peco De Niro which is why aren't people trying to send a CubeSat to the moon although I think maybe they are and the second one is from Kergin 7 which is are there any plans for Lagrange Point CubeSats so maybe people are planning on sending CubeSats to the moon but why haven't they gone there yet I think it's just a matter of you had to have a satellite that had sufficient reliability because to get to the moon especially with a CubeSat unless you're hitchhiking on something that's already going to the moon you've got to have a lot of delta V you've got to be able to have a large change of velocity in order to get from earth orbit to lunar orbit even to lunar flyby and so it takes a long time it takes months if you're going to use an ion drive to get that far so you've got to have a reliability that's going to not only take you months to get there but then be able to survive months once you're up there and the moon's a much more harsh radiation environment you said you're outside the magnetosphere you have a lot more direct cosmic rays you're in the solar wind solar wind hits the moon at a million miles an hour and has all kinds of ionized particles on it including protons so the moon's radiation environment is pretty harsh are there any plans to take what Northrop Grumman is doing and just allow anyone to buy it is that kind of how that works right now so tomorrow wants to build a CubeSat and I want to use what you guys are working on am I able to do that or is this for more government agencies larger customers kind of thing no it's pretty much any customer but it's still a fairly expensive proposition right price of CubeSat's down to $5,000 we're still in the $100,000 million range here if you want to buy a CubeSat from an organization like ISI Space or Pumpkin they have a CubeSat kit is the Pumpkin place to go buy CubeSat systems and CubeSat shop is the place to go I think that's ISI Space you're talking about being able to buy all the pieces that you need to fly a satellite for I think the number is about $65,000 for a turnkey piece of hardware that's a lot lower than I thought you were going to say actually but the reliability it doesn't come with flight software it doesn't provide an instrument it does provide power and I think that price might even include solar rays trying to remember off the top of my head less than $100,000 however if you really want to be able to talk about oh I want a satellite that's going to last me three to five years or eight years you know oh I want to go to the moon or I want to go to Mars now you're talking about single digit millions of dollars but that's still far less so if you're going to the moon or Mars that's a slightly different mission profile right that's still far less than what we would ever spend on anything else that we've ever used oh yeah by a large percentage oh yeah L-Cross was probably one of the cheapest missions that ever went to the moon and that mission was $100,000,000 so you can do this for 100 times less potentially 100 times less using CubeSats that have the capability of staying out there for quite a while would you be able to do the same things that L-Cross was able to do or would you have to limit the scope of that mission just due to the size of the vehicle I don't know about the optics that we actually used for the of course with L-Cross we had pretty good size thrusters right because we were trying to control the Centaur so we were moving the Centaur upper stage around and it weighs two tons so you've got to have a lot of propellant when you're going to do that and that starts to drive your mass if I just wanted to go and take pictures actually you can get a pretty decent camera with electronics and optics that'll survive and you can put that in a 6U CubeSat and do a pretty slick mission to the moon man I'm seeing a Kickstarter campaign here wouldn't that be cool? A crowdfunded mission to the moon grab some pictures of like an Earthrise type thing that seems like it'd be all sorts of awesome and you could do it for probably a million or less not including the launcher right so the launcher is kind of the hard part but we've got all these small CubeSat launchers coming online we've got the Electron rocket we've got launcher one from Virgin Galactic there's a number actually I think you sent me the number it's something like 30 different launchers I can't believe how many launchers we're currently in development it's crazy is that because there's a huge new market for these small satellites now that we're able to make these CubeSats is everyone kind of clamoring to have these lower cost satellites is that where all of this is coming from or is this just a bit of a bubble it's coming at us it's right on the horizon time wise you're talking about a year or so away and you know like I said there's hundreds of those CubeSats flying now you know so people want to be able to launch those things today actually the launch vehicle market the launch vehicles are actually they're actually running behind that market exists for them today NASA's paying to launch things every other government agency is paying to launch things it does anything in space is paying to launch this so NeuroPilot asks do you think the 12 you in quotes large CubeSats have more utility than several smaller CubeSats it all depends on the science package right the size of the optics that you need to fly or if you have to have a lot of power for things like say you wanted to fly a radar mission on a CubeSat you could potentially do that so its power and its heat and its optics are really driving the size yeah so it really depends on the science that you need to do Dada actually asked from our control room are the orbits of a CubeSat predictable or is there any way to adjust the orbit and or attitude now you mentioned some drives but they're fairly low powered so can you make course corrections with the current propulsion systems on board or is that very limited you can make course corrections and the thing about the CubeSats is they only weigh 1 kilogram per CubeSat unit on average right so a 6U CubeSat is only going to weigh 6 kilograms which is about 14 pounds rough and dirty so I mean you're talking about a satellite that you can pick up and hold in your hands I mean at least that big it doesn't weigh tons it weighs 15 pounds and so being able to move that around you know there are stock CubeSat size propulsion systems that people are selling today that you can bolt on to the avionics and the science package that you want and be able to get a pretty significant delta V those things are commercially available for both large and small changes in velocity. Alright we're going to have to break in a moment but there was a really interesting comment that just came in something that I hadn't considered before and this comes from K McCoy which is is there any sense that maybe the CubeSat framework could become the standard for even larger satellites that everything will start to be built in multiples of 10 centimeter sizes so even these huge huge satellites for say the national reconnaissance office will actually be built on a common CubeSat framework and they end up being huge still but there's this common framework between all satellites that go all the way down to 10 centimeters does it seem like a viable thing or by the time you get to these large satellites are they so specialized that that doesn't make any sense? Yeah I think when you get above about 27U which would be 30 by 30 by 30 centimeters beyond that then you start to talk about it doesn't make sense to use those stock frameworks although it may make sense to use the kind of avionics that we are building our avionics system is really quite capable and will use the exact same flight software that we've been working on for two decades it's flown on I don't even know how many 17 missions I think is our stock marketing pitch it's 17th generation flight software it already runs on this CubeSat architecture the other really the other really fancy thing we did our electrical engineers are some of the best anywhere and we can now look at using power on these satellites that's greater than 500 watts on a 3U CubeSat generally those things have been 10 watts to 50 watts now we're talking about 500 and above So are you guys providing so you're providing more than just the software and prop you have an entire framework for the CubeSat then as well sounds like right so you have power generation all I need to do I buy your package from you and all I need to do is put my instrument on board it sounds like Yep we can provide that integration for you all the way up to integrating it for you and can you provide my instrumentation as well including my optics so if I want to just buy the whole thing from you I say make it like this and you'll you'll just sell me the whole thing or do I need to do that last step of course so normally I have people just kind of go where can I get more information on Northrop Grumman although that's fairly simple but where can people go for more information on Northrop Grumman and what you're doing with CubeSats as well as more information on you because I know that you do a lot of things in the kind of the new space community I'm pretty readily available twitter.com.vaxheadroom facebook.com.vaxheadroom my you can see behind me the various electronics and things that are running behind me I'm actually up in my recording studio at home and so my recording studio is untiedmusic.com and untiedmusicstudio on YouTube as an interesting note I think you're one of the few people who has music on the moon right now yeah I had we got to put a piece of music as a memory test pattern on the processor card on the L-Cross mission so yeah if the double E-Proms survived it's on the moon I don't think they survived that was a fairly energetic event on purpose it was a fairly energetic event but still very cool that you were able to do that vax always a pleasure having you on the show for those who don't know vax also came on it did a segment on C-Dragon which was an absolutely we need to do another one of those because it felt like you only had time to do some of the information it would be great to do like a refresher and compare C-Dragon to SpaceX's BFR that they announced I think that would be a lot of fun just to kind of do size comparisons and power comparisons but that is a fascinating episode I think that was last year if I remember right it might have been two years ago but yeah so search for TMRO C-Dragon you'll find it vax as always thank you for taking time out of your Saturday and coming on the show it was fascinating and awesome absolutely love being here alright we're going to take a quick break when we come back comments from last week's show stay tuned we'll be right back out there when we look up it inspires us we long for something we don't yet know we yearn to go there so we venture forth the eagle has landed it's one small step for man one giant leap for mankind the exploration of space will go ahead whether we join in it or not many think we stopped exploring but we know our journey didn't end we've only just begun come with us and explore tomorrow before I do the Patreon slates you should see what Jared has to do go to the other camera to stay out of my camera shot so here's me sitting regularly here's your camera shot oh look it's me right here he does that oh look magic my camera shots I looked over and saw him go right as we came on screen it was hilarious I want to give a huge shout out to all the patrons of TMRO who've dealt to make this specific segment of this episode happen and to all the people who've contributed $10 or more to this specific episode they're going to get access to absolutely everything including our Slack channel we've also got our Patreon producers these are people who are contributing $5 or more so they're going to get access to our swag store free shipping from our swag store which is pretty awesome and then we've also got our Patreon plus subscribers these are people who've contributed $2.50 or more they're going to get access to After Dark early available on demand and we've also got our patrons these are people who've contributed between $1 and $2.49 for this specific episode they're going to get access to their Google Hangouts when we have those and of course their name in the show for more information on how you can help crowdfund the shows at tomorrow head on over to Patreon.com slash TMRO alright that was a lot of fun I would love to have totally covering Mike sorry you just need to lean like Jared did you just need to lean there we go alright Capcom I have officially derailed the show you're welcome internet get us started with some comments from our last week's show which was Mastin On Moon yeah so this first comment comes off of YouTube from Rocket Cat I like this comment it says I want to be a Dave Mastin when I grow up I really can I mean he just loved doing rockets and so he kind of did some stuff and then put all of his money I'm putting words in his mouth he's never actually said he put all of his money into it but put his own money into Mastin Space Systems and started it on his own you look at someone like Elon Musk did PayPal did X.com built these things and then built SpaceX.com you don't have to be a billionaire to start a rocket company especially with all of these satellites coming down and with that we need to reduce the cost of launch services to coordinate you don't want to have a $65,000 CubeSat and then spend $100 million to launch it that's absurd so we need these low cost launchers and we're going to need a lot of them because as these prices come down I'm of the opinion a lot more people are going to want to do cool things with them as Chris Radcliffe said in the last segment what Patreon level do we need to reach before tomorrow actually there is a level where we could do that it's probably 10,000 in episode which is a lot that's not quite 10x what we're at right now but is a viable number it is a number we could reach and then imagine we could launch a CubeSat using some of the technology that Vax mentioned from Norfolk Grumman and actually have it the citizens tomorrow launch a CubeSat we would send it to the moon we would take pictures of our future tomorrow's studios on the moon and we get that perfect because we want to get the earth rise in the background right so we get that perfect shot of where we're going to put the studios and the nice thing is because of the way it all aligns the earth rises just like constantly be there it would be great fantastic next up Capcom go ahead no what it would be cool to have one in geosynchronous orbit with some sort of transponder that we could have some sort of dedicated signal with too you mean studio or just CubeSat but both we should do both both yes maybe one at a little grand point just looking for upcoming fuelings actually you know be really cool be really great although I'm not sure if we could get the optics because optics are heavy right glasses heavy so but it'd be really cool if we could get a CubeSat that could then kind of look at where rockets are launching from and traditionally when you watch a rocket launch you watch it from the butt end of the rocket go away from you wouldn't it be cool if you could see it come towards you instead if you could if you could get the launch from space so it actually have to be like as low as we could get it kind of like low horizon sort of thing and probably only the last few years we'd have to launch these once every year or so I don't know that I haven't figured out the timing but wouldn't that be cool maybe sweet yeah just be able to watch the rocket come at you that would be way better than my streaming of going there I don't know you bring a fun element to that fog fog next up capcom next one comes off of YouTube this is from TNM001 is that tomorrow no no tomorrow tomorrow once well that's what it is now I like the comment about it's always 20 years away now let's be clear it's not the 20 years that's bugging me it's the knowledge that they are not serious about it it's just far and of a way that they don't have to actually do it so musk may not get to mars in 10 years but he may actually do it in 20 years or leave something behind then we'll make it the next guy to finish it yeah yeah there's this kind of I'm of the opinion that if anything's over 10 years away then it's just not they're not similar they're not serious about it right you look at the JFK speeches we choose to do put a man on the moon in the next decade how did he pronounce it decade and there's something magic about that 10 year number if you can do it less than 10 years that's even better but anything over 10 years we kind of lose the ability to care not care it's difficult to see that far down the line it really is at that point it's just like oh well that's so far off I don't need to worry about it now it loses its luster the moment you say it's more than 10 years away even at 10 years that's still pretty far the more we can compress that time and be like this is going on now which is where I have a love-hate relationship with Blue Origin because I realize that I talk out of both sides of my mouth and that it's a conundrum so I know right this side and then this side is weird so the argument I make is I want an organization like Blue Origin to be more open we want to cheer along we want to be a part feel like we're part of it and I could argue that that helps you get better engineers or more engineers or whatever you need because people are aware of it but they're excited for what you're doing they're doing it for the cause on the flip side of that is if you're talking about what you're doing but what you're doing is so far off that you can't again kind of comprehend it and you don't care that's just as bad that's just as bad I don't know why but the advantage of that is now when they go to release something it's really compressed timelines so they're talking about hey let's go to the moon or let's go to an orbital vehicle their timelines are a couple of years as opposed to 5, 10 years somebody in the chat room citizen87515 said I was married for 10 years and it seemed to last forever hahahaha anyhow yeah we've said a lot there's you damned if you do, you damned if you don't you don't say anything for a really long time and then you do stuff and they were like why did you tell us before and then if you say stuff ahead of time and then you don't actually produce it it's like well I can't believe you now we're so finicky about that apologies to Blue Origin but at the same time do what I want, not what I say yes do as they say whatever here's what it really comes down to what we want is we want them to announce something, begin working on it and complete it in under a year no matter how grand the plan is that's what we want and that's a super duper unreasonable request but we can still want it nonetheless pretty much thanks Apple yes thanks Apple they're the ones who caused this problem because of the yearly iPhone refresh and then they refresh the iPhone and were like this super computer in my pocket is uninspiring at least I do next comment first world problems comes off of Reddit from Brandon Mark loving the imagery of a super tanker seen in the distance beached in the desert slowly being converted into a spaceship that quote-unquote pops a wheelie in order to launch the Mastin Space Systems logo on the side and a pirate flag atop well the pirate flag was my idea but I think you can't have it without the pirate flag I feel like that's required paging user bag tag or if you're looking for a fun idea to add to your gallery maybe try this one out Dave Mastin was talking about converting the super tanker also I found this out I'm going to call everyone out I apparently misheard him I misheard him say that they were looking talking about this over a launch and there had recently been an Atlas 5 launch and I thought to myself well I guess it's interesting that you went as a group to that launch I didn't think it was from Bandenberg but alright maybe it was he said lunch not launch they all went out to eat which makes way more sense for like that midday meal but he rolled with it anyhow thank you Dave for making me not look like a total idiot clearly but they went out to lunch not launch in all fairness we are in the space industry and there is a chance they went to launch too I was about to say going to launch is often the thing that you actually do yes absolutely so that is what I heard but that's not what happened they went to lunch and talked about this still a very cool conversation to have over lunch turning the super tanker into I'll say we went to lunch after the fact and our conversations were equally as intriguing it was pretty awesome last comment comes off of Patreon from a Michael Franz thanks for the reminder Benjamin I was reminding them that it's a five month show five show month which means that there is an extra payment this month so are there any more pictures in the new studio that are the first I have seen but maybe I missed them one of the advantages of being a patron is that you get access to some of the behind the scenes now your level of access depends on your patronage so the neat thing is that the citizens that are premier members they get access to our Slack channel for better or worse you get real time data from all of us I'm just laughing because maybe we'll talk about tomorrow maybe we won't I was at the Tesla event the other day and I'm just posting pictures of the Tesla event in the Slack channel because it was awesome don't even apologize for that as soon as you said that glass was heavy and you were talking about small sets you could take the photo of all takes and the glass because of the thing and then you could make the small sets out of the same thing so that's at the premier level which is $10 per episode and then as you go down we have been building our new studio which you can't see but we're staring at it right now right so we're looking at the cameras and on the other side of it what's hilarious actually gotta go to that he's trying to bring up the image he told me to stretch because he doesn't have the image that's fairly accurate though it is a big gigantic black hole that we're staring at so that's pretty great if you're not a patron that's basically what you're going to see but for our patrons we actually did Dada you don't have to call it up at this point for our patrons we did unless you have magic superpowers we were almost there for our patrons we did release a single picture of the studio after we had gotten through we've got the background of it complete it's too strong of a word we've got the background painted black so if you remember you actually have seen the CAD drawings like the financials on all of it and everything else for our producers and below we actually simply said hey look isn't this cool and we released a time lapse which is pretty awesome so if you're at the actually I think all patrons got access to the time lapse so you can actually see it now this is what it looks like now so we are on the left side of that screen and it didn't have that curve on the right hand side which is pretty cool now that's just part we're obviously nowhere near done that's just kind of the background initial work that needed to occur there's going to be a lot more stuff in fact when the set's done you really won't see much if any of that black paint which just goes to show how much work is going into this brand new interview set it's going to be awesome and part of the reason we keep mucking and kind of playing with the format is that it gets its own set as well and it's going to actually not be part of that set it's own totally different set and I think it's going to make it a more fun and dynamic show and we're using the rest of this season to play with the format to see what really works before we drop them in the new set and go okay here you go because when we hit orbit 10 episode 1 I want it to be one good cohesive like oh my gosh that was awesome kind of show so to give me we're going to misstep between now and the end of December and we're going to do things that work and we're going to do things that don't work but your constructive criticism on what works and what doesn't work is appreciated and why not just like I don't like that because it's different that's a dumb reason to not like it there has to be a legit reason like it didn't flow because this was you know X Y and Z I would love that feedback Benjamin at TMRO.TV you know what you think for those who are premiere members drop it in the Slack channel or of course feel free to leave it in the comments on YouTube wherever else and speaking of that we're going to close out the show after dark is up next for those of you watching live just stay tuned you'll get that for everyone else it'll be available on demand in about four weeks unless you're a Patreon plus subscriber and we'll make that available as soon as possible and next week we have Jim Kentrell from Vector Space Systems and that's I'm super excited for that I've been talking a lot about small sets and the reason we're talking about that is this is an industry that's just getting ready to I exploded the long flourish flourish you don't want to say explode in the rocket industry but it's getting ready to flourish so I'm really really excited about what Vector Space Systems is doing so that'll be up next week and last comment I realize is we have two guest shows slots available for December and that's it that's the rest of the shows for this year so if you have someone that you want to see we've contacted a few different people who haven't been able to quite fill the slots yet but if there's a company that you work for, a company that you're aware of or something you want us to see bring on the show leave it in the comments or email me benjaminatmro.tv thank you so much see you next week