 Coming up, Moon Express gets ever closer to the moon. Astronauts complete a spacewalk for the second battery swap out. And then I conduct an interview with our very own Lisa Stojanowski about International Space University. All that and more coming up on this episode of Tomorrow. Welcome to orbit 10. This is episode 2. I am Carrie Ann. Of course, I've got Mike and you can see Dada now because Mr. Jared is actually off on an excursion. So, but before we get started, I want to make sure that I give a huge shout out to our Patreon members. These are escape velocity patrons and these people are giving us $10 or more for this particular segment of this particular episode, which is really great and fantastic and thank you. And we changed the font a little bit, I think, so you can actually read your name a little bit better. These people, of course, get access to our Slack channel, which is really, really fun, particularly as we keep adding those tiny little touches to our set. So you guys are getting first access to all of those sorts of things and, you know, kind of joining us on this orbital journey, if you will. I hope Ben likes that particular part. This, of course, is January 14th of 2017. And a lot of really interesting, fun things have already happened. Even just today, I might have done a little bit of screaming and a little bit of crying before the show. So, excuse me for that, but... Oh, man. Right? I think I got my dogs all excited jumping up and down out of excitement. Ah, awesome. Oh, just the thought of that makes me laugh because then I think of Jared laughing at your dogs. So, there's that. But of course, we want to, as we always like to start off the show, because how awesome is it that we can always start the show with a launch mic? Yeah. And not even the launch that we just launched. Not even the launch that we just watched. Which we don't have any footage of that to replay for you yet, but I'm sure everyone in the chat room has just seen that already. But the launch that we did want to show you guys is actually a Chinese launch. They had a second launch. They are the second ones to launch this year. And this is from a kind of really interesting rocket. It's called the Kaizhou 111. This is based off of an old mobile launcher ICBM. I wanted to show some footage here of their preparation of the rocket before we watch the launch itself. Now, with this rocket, it's a three-stage solid rocket booster. And it possibly has a secret fourth stage that's a liquid fueled as well to boost the payloads into its intended orbit. And with this, the rocket is marketed by a company called X-Space. And you can see on screen how it deploys from the mobile launcher. Now, this footage of this rocket and a similar type of rocket, the Long March 11 has been secret. This is the first time they published it. Let's check out the footage. That is really cool. So this is the launch itself. Yeah, just like a lot of solids. It takes right off the pad, right off the pad. And so what we're seeing here happened on Monday, January 9th at 411 U-Coordinated Universal Time from the G-Quan Space Center. The one that's in northwest China in the Gobi Desert. And it had three payloads on board. The primary payload was a Earth imaging satellite called the Lingqiao-3 satellite. And then there was also two experimental CubeSats on this launch as well. And it went into a polar orbit, orbiting around the poles rather than the equator. So that was a successful launch. And China is hoping to market that rocket more and get a lot more commercial launches with that. So congratulations for that successful launch. And I'm really happy that they decided to share footage of it this time. So last time when they had a Long March 11 launch, at the end of last year, as you remember, all we had was just the one picture. That was really cool to see. That is really cool to see. It's one of those things that didn't quite sink in. You said that this is like a modified ICBM. And I was like, oh, and then I watched it and I'm like, oh, and it's really fast. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, good job. I'm still learning, so there's that. And in any case, so the other thing that we have to talk about is a little bit more earthbound. How's that for a segue? Yeah, that's very good. We're getting better at this. So tell me a little bit more about things happening here on Earth, Mike. Yeah, so with the whole earth imaging thing, there's two American companies that are both in the earth imaging business commercially, and that is a company called Planet, formerly Planet Labs, and Terabella. Now, some of you may not know, but actually in 2015, the founders of Google started a new umbrella corporation called Alphabet, which would manage Google so that Google can just focus on internet services, and then all these new different companies, including Terabella, can be managed by Alphabet so that Google can do Google. And with this, they recently have... Can I just chop you for just a nanosecond? Because you imagine saying that phrase or that paragraph five years ago, it would sound like complete gibberish. Google made an umbrella company called Alphabet, so Terabella can just do its own thing, and Google can do its own thing. If your grandparents could hear you now, they wouldn't know what you're talking about. All right. Anyhow, sorry. Keep going. I understand. Well, Alphabet's trying to sell Terabella. I guess they're trying to get rid of that, and the whole reason that they started, that they bought Terabella in the first place, they used to be called Skybots Imaging, was to help improve Google Maps as well as to sell commercial images. Now, there's a lot of rumors going around that Planet, or formerly Planet Labs, is seeking to acquire Terabella, and that would be really interesting. Now, I'm going to show just real quick. Terabella has 61 Dove satellites that are in orbit currently, and it also has five other satellites that it acquired from a company called Blackridge that it acquired last year, actually also in 2015, and then there's the satellites that Terabella has. Those are images from their satellites, which I've actually spaced the name on that, but they have five of those in orbit currently, four of which launched on the Vega rocket last year in September, and they're planning on launching another four of those later this year on Orbital ATK's Minotaur Sea rockets. That would be really interesting if both of these commercial Earth imaging companies were to merge and to produce more beautiful images and to be able to get a lot of data. There's so much stuff that you can use it for. I think mainly of agriculture and stuff like that, but that would be really interesting to see, and I hope that that would actually go through, but that's just an opinion. That would be really cool. That would be really cool. All right. So I get to do some news now, which I haven't done in a really long time, so bear with me on that. So Moon Express that you may or may not have heard of before, and Google Learner XPRIZE that you definitely have heard of before, because I know we've talked about that. The Google Learner XPRIZE for those of you who are unfamiliar is talking about trying to get companies or groups together to launch a payload to the Moon, a rover hopefully, or some sort of vehicle that can move around a little bit, and they want you to be able to land, and you have to traverse about 500 meters or so, or more if you can do that, and then spend the night, stay overnight and survive their night, and then you have to beam down some pictures and or video from the Moon, and then you can win a really gigantic prize, which is really cool. And one of those companies is called Moon Express, and they have that really cool logo that you saw a couple of seconds ago. And Moon Express just announced on January 13th that they've closed a $20 million financing round, which is really, really great. They actually have been able to secure $45 million or so. This is, I think that's total, and they're actually looking for another $10 million just for kind of contingencies and what have you, because things go wrong, this is a rocket thing. Right? But the nice thing about having that $20 million is that it secures them a spot on a rocket, actually with Rocket Lab, which is really great, New Zealand slash American company there, that they can launch on Rocket Lab on an electron vehicle, is what I'm trying to say. And then their lunar ladder, which is called an MX-1E, will be able to do the traversment of the 500 meter, which is one of the requirements, in a kind of hopping kind of maneuver, which is sort of cool. I don't think it'll be hop along like a bunny, but it will do a couple of hops. Oh, look how cool that vehicle is. It's so neat. Kind of like, almost like one of the vehicles that Mastin has, where they'll take off and kind of hover over and land again via engine power, is what I was able to take from back. Yeah, here you go. Here's a little bit of video, which is really amazing of them doing some tests. They're doing a lot of this testing down in Florida and they, when the electron vehicle launches, it will launch from Launch Complex 17 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. And then, I wish, I would say that this is footage, but this is, of course, a computer generation idea simulation of how they think everything is going to go once they're on the moon. And then you just kind of hop around and move over and then land and all that other great stuff. And like I said, spend the night, take some pictures, you know, typical stuff that you do on a vacation. That's what we're looking for. So that's really great. So they've secured the money, they will be able to launch, and hopefully, hopefully, win the Google Lunar X Prize, which is really super exciting. Super exciting. Go ahead. So would you say, Carrie Ann, then, that you're rooting most for Moon Express or do you have any other favorites? It's one of those things. You know, it's funny that we have this sort of all ships rise to the tide kind of mentality because that's totally true. But it's also a really great thing for me to hide behind and say, it doesn't really matter as long as somebody does it. I like all of them. I do like all of them. I think I have more of a personal connection to Moon Express for a couple of different reasons after having sort of gotten into covering the space news business, if you will. You know, formerly Space Big Cast. Now, of course, it's tomorrow for, this is orbit 10, so about 10 years or so. I feel like I've been following Moon Express for a little bit longer, or I don't know if they've just gotten more face time or if I've met more of the people on their team or kind of what happened there. But yeah, I do sort of, I have this little bit of a soft spot for Moon Express and they have a really cool logo, which just totally helps. I mean, let's be honest. So there's that. But yeah, no, of course. I think it's one of those great, what's that word? Co-operative sort of moments, right? Where it doesn't have to be Moon Express for me because it's not one of those like Packers versus Vikings NFL sort of situation. It's like, I just want somebody to win. I just want somebody to do it. I want someone to figure it out. And I want somebody to win. And it doesn't matter to me who it really is. Ultimately, I just want it to get done because what these teams are doing and however it is that they're going about doing it is just laying the groundwork for the next people to be able to approve upon it, right? Absolutely. No, I totally agree. And it's like, no matter who wins, all of us who have been following this, we all will win, as long as somebody will win the competition. As long as somebody does it, we all will win and more and more opportunities will come about. You know, Moon Express wants to do all this, you know, lunar mining and stuff like that. If they were able to win or even if someone else wins, that's going to bring a lot more attention and hopefully a lot more investment and even more cool things are going to happen. So, yeah, I'm right there with you. I'm sure there's a cheesy line that Ben would say throw out right about now, something along the lines of, you know who wins? Humanity wins. So... Yes. That's right. I'm going to channel the Ben credible a little bit there. I hope he's still watching and I hope he ground a little bit. Any case, let's talk about something a little bit between Earth and the Moon. Let's talk about spacewalks. Mike, what do you got? Great segue. Great to have you back on Space News. Oh my goodness. So, yeah, we're talking as a follow-up to the spacewalk that happened at the International Space Station last week. This week, actually just yesterday, on Friday, we had the second spacewalk to complete all the installation of the new lithium-ion batteries to swap out for the old nickel-hydrogen batteries. Nice. And this time it was NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and ESA astronaut Tomah Pesquet. And this was actually the first time that he was able to go on a spacewalk and he's only the fourth French national who's ever done a spacewalk, so that's pretty cool for him. And they were able to complete the task that they needed to complete the installation so that a little bit later, they can churn all of it on and restore that solar truss into the power network. What they had to do was install the two remaining adapter plates that were able to connect the new lithium-ion batteries to the station's network and then also removing and stowing the third out of the 12 of the old batteries into a position that will remain there at the station and then getting the rest of them ready to be which most of them have already been loaded onto the Japanese HTV-6 cargo vessel which brought up the new lithium-ion batteries. And next month, actually February 1st is when it's scheduled to re-enter the atmosphere and all of those will be disposed to those old batteries, as well as any other trash that they've loaded on board the vehicle. So that was really cool that they were able to complete all the tasks and they completed it early. Even better. Yeah. They were able to complete it two hours ahead of schedule and start doing a lot of kind of get-ahead tasks and get things ready to go. I mean, they have their robotic arm that has a really cool robot called Dexter that has lots of different arms and tools on it that they can do a lot of stuff without astronauts having to be outboard, excuse me, outside the station doing a lot of the work. But there's still some things that they can't do. Even on this spacewalk, before they went on this second one, the Dexter robot wasn't able to screw some of the bolts on the new lithium-ion batteries into its adapter plate all the way in. They weren't able to screw it all the way in. So one of the tasks that they had to do on this spacewalk was to go and just kind of finish tightening it up. Most of the work was done, but just the last couple of tweaks to get everything good to go. So there wasn't a whole lot of information on what the get-ahead tasks that they accomplished because they cut the live feed after they completed their schedules tasks. But whatever those are, I'm sure that's probably in preparation for the next lithium-ion battery swaps and also some investigations on some of the experiments that are outside the space station on those trusses like the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. They need to do some investigation on that because they had some faulty instruments. But in any case, that's just me theorizing. It was nearby, so that sounds like something they could have done, but I don't know exactly what they did. But in any case, very cool, and hopefully they won't have any problems with these new batteries, and hopefully they don't have anything weird, like the Galaxy Note problems or anything like that with it exploding in fire or something like that. Too soon. Yeah, too soon. It's funny because when I think lithium-ion batteries, I know that lithium-ion batteries are in a lot of things, but that was one of the first things I thought of was like, oh, like a cell phone. I won't mention that. Never mind, just kidding. So, let's just move on. But no, in all seriousness, the Japanese Space Agency did a lot of quality controls on these and really pushed them to the limit to try to make them explode. So I'm fairly confident that nothing like that would happen. I hope I didn't jinx anything by the way. No, goodness, no. But no, they really did do a lot of work on them and tried to really push them to their limits. Perfect. Yay. So in classic Carrie Ann news stories, I had to bring up something that was just pretty because that's just me. This is you. It's just pretty. Look how pretty that is. It's so amazing. So wait, that's an image of what we were just all talking about. Everything in between right there. Exactly. So this is Planet Earth and Planet Earth's moon. And this image is actually a dual image. It's two different images that were kind of stitched together a little bit. So you could see them very clearly and beautifully as they are taken from 127 million miles away or 205 million kilometers away. This was caught on November 20th, 2016 from the high-rise imaging. What am I trying to say? Camera that is on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. So this is image of Earth and its moon from Mars. So if you're a Martian. From an orbiter around Mars. Yeah. If you're a Martian and you have a telescope, this is how you see us. Does that make any sense? Yeah, that's really cool. That puts it in perspective really well. And this wasn't just done just for the prettiness of the picture, although it is an absolutely stunning picture. This is actually how one of the ways that high-rise uses to calibrate the image. The camera, the instruments on it. Thank you. Because, which is something I didn't know, the reflectance of the moon side that faces Earth is actually like a known reflectance. So you can go, oh, well, that should be X, Y, or Z, which means if I can calibrate that way, then anything else that I'm looking at is now calibrated. Does that follow? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like how on the Mars rovers, how they have an American flag printed on it and they'll have the cameras pan down to it and kind of color correct so the flag looks correct before looking up and making sure that they have everything color corrected. Is that in the same ballpark? Kind of in the same ballpark, exactly. Thank you for those words, because apparently I'm failing. But it's just a really amazing, it's one of those things that, it's a perspective that we don't typically get because we're not Martians and we're not hanging out on Mars. And it's just a really beautiful, gorgeous image. And I thought, you know, why don't I just show off a little bit on how we look today, which is not today. Wow, that's awesome. It was November 20th, but, you know, I'm sure we look like that a lot. Oh, actually, Dada, can you go back to the image really quickly? Because there was sort of like a weird, not quite Easter egg. It's hard to see, but bear with me for a moment. There's a darker reddish land mass kind of on the lower end. And that is Australia. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. I'm laughing because I... So we're seeing a picture of Minnie Stoge right now. Pretty much. Isn't that amazing? She's waving. For those of you who don't know, I will be interviewing Minnie Stoge or Lisa Stojanowski in our second segment of the show. And we already have her on Skype up, so she can kind of follow along as to what's going on. And she got really excited when I mentioned that. So, yes. So the little reddish, kind of brownish land mass there, and that happens to be Australia in that image, which is really cool. That's awesome. There you go. All right. So let's get off of Mars. Let's talk about other things. Mike, what do you got for me? So I did just have one more quick kind of follow-up. I'll try to get through this quickly. But if you guys remember, last year on December 1, Russia tried to launch the Progress MS-04 cargo spacecraft at the space station, and it failed. It failed to reach orbit, and they lost telemetry before the third stage engine was supposed to cut off a couple of minutes before the third stage. There was a lot of weirdness going on with that. So we have some answers now. Is that what's going on? Yeah. The Roscosmos has completed their accident investigation on that. And from all the data that they were able to collect from the telemetry before they weren't receiving any data anymore, they were able to determine that there was an explosion in the third stage. And you're seeing the third stage on screen right now. And what they're thinking is that some sort of debris either entered into the engine and then got into the fuel pump, or there were some quality control issues. And that's the theory that they're leaning most towards, is that there was something that went wrong during the manufacturing because the origin of the explosion started in one of the fuel pumps, and then that caused the engine to underperform and then ignited the oxidizer tank. And that explosion is why they believe they lost telemetry with the spacecraft, but it partially survived because they did receive a signal for a little while before they completely lost contact with the Progress spacecraft. Now, they did have a similar accident like this last year, or excuse me, back in 2015 where they had a kind of, the third stage didn't separate from the Progress vehicle, so it just spun out of control because it caught all this extra weight on the end. At first, when this happened this year, I thought it was something similar, but this was a full-on explosion. And since then, they have decided to take lots of steps to investigate the third stages on the remaining Soyuz-U rocket variants that the Progress was launched on, so that the next Progress vehicle can hopefully launch successfully, as well as inspect and do some quality control on all of the other more modern Soyuz variants. And I'm really hoping that they can either get through the rest of the old Soyuz-U rockets successfully or just scrap them and reuse parts for something else, but just like, ah, man, they've had a couple problems with these old ones. These are the ones that use the old analog flight computers on them. So another example of the kind of workforce declining in Russia, and I really hope that they're able to figure out the problem and hopefully not have any more issues like this in the future, but we'll see. Since this was a cargo vehicle, I can kind of understand why the quality control isn't as good as, say, the Soyuz rockets that are used for the human spaceflight. Those are, is what they give most of their focus on, because, I mean, failure is not an option when it comes to the human spaceflight, so. Yeah. But in any case, hopefully they'll be able to recover from that soon. They haven't gotten launch, well, they haven't given themselves launch clearance for Soyuz rockets, but they hopefully will be launching a proton rocket soon. But there are a couple of Soyuz flights coming up within the next couple of months that hopefully will be cleared for launch and launch successfully. So just wanted to give a quick update on that. Really nice. All right. Well, and as well as other sort of quick updates here, one of the things that we didn't get a chance to cover because we just don't have footage yet because it's just entirely too fresh and too new was that there was a SpaceX launch and it seems like everything there is going very well according to their webcast. So congratulations there, of course. It's all very, very exciting. And 2017 so far seems to be looking up and up and up and up and up into space. I guess, wow, I just keep your bend in the back of my head. It's really, really terrible there. Oh, goodness. Anyway, wanted to make sure that I ended this segment on a light note or at least a happy note, if anything else. And so while we close out this segment, we're going to go to a really quick break. I'm going to run over the observation deck and then I will be interviewing our very own Lisa Stojanowski about all kinds of fun things and that little brown patch on the picture you saw, which I think is kind of cool. All right, so we'll be right back and enjoy the break. That's the way it is today. But I also have the support of the person I'm interviewing, which is Lisa, but before we get to the get, I want to make sure that we can give a huge shout out to our, you know, another huge shout out. I always say huge shout out and I do actually mean a huge shout out, but I actually never do the shout out. So I'm going to do the shout out. Ready? Ready? Go to the slate. Woo-hoo! There we go. To our escape velocity patrons, these are the people who have given us $10 or more for this particular segment of this particular episode. But hang on. We have more people who decided to support us, which is really amazing. These are our orbital patrons. These are people of giving us $5 or more to this particular segment of this particular episode. And these people get access to free worldwide shipping off of our swag store. Just really, really cool. You can get really cool pens. You can get really cool mugs. I almost said pens again because I forgot I said pens, so that's really awesome. And in any case, if you would like to contribute to the show and become a patron of tomorrow, because that's really what this is about, right? We are help creating the future. Hit up Patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. Eh? Tomorrow without all the extra letters. And in any case, like I said, I'm Carrie Ann. I'm going to be interviewing Lisa. Hello, Lisa. Hey, how you doing? Fabulous, I think. This is Lisa Stojanovski. Some of you may recognize her as being, she does some space pods for tomorrow, which is really amazing, because she has to do them upside down. That's the bend joke of the segment. And she does a really great job with all of our space pods, but she also does a lot of really interesting things like International Space University, also known as ISU, right? That's right. Yay! And we both got haircuts and now we match. So this is really exciting for me. Except your hair is blue and mine's not, but that's okay. Well, that's the only way they can tell us apart now. Yeah. So actually right now it's still travelling, because I was just at the International Space University, or ISU's Southern Hemisphere program. It runs in Adelaide every year in the Australian summer, which is very hot. So I don't know why they choose to run it then. But it's a five-week program with ISU, and I actually did the course last year. And I went back for the first week of this year's program, so I could take some footage about everything that was going on and about what the program is all about. And I wanted to share that with you guys, because it's a fantastic program and it's teaching the next generation of space explorers to be intercultural interdisciplinary and international as well. And that's the kind of three eyes tenant of ISU is to have those kind of three different focuses to kind of give you a whole different perspective on the space industry, which I think is really, really cool. It is really cool. I have a weird quick question. So International Space University is obviously international and open to anybody international. But this one is particular to the Southern Hemisphere. Does that mean that as an American I am unable to attend this particular International Space University? Not at all. In fact, you're encouraged to come to this particular program. So ISU kind of has three programs that they run. They do a master's course, which is in their campus, physical campus in Strasbourg in France. And that's just a kind of traditional master's course. Then they have a summer space studies program, which is a nine-week program that travels around the world. And that's the kind of flagship program of ISU. But the Southern Hemisphere program is open to everyone. It just happens to be in the Southern Hemisphere in Australia every year, and that one doesn't move. And it's slightly shorter at five weeks, which makes it kind of more accessible, I guess. So there are lots of different countries, people from countries that come around to this Southern Hemisphere course. In my year, there was 11 different countries, and I've actually got some footage of the different countries that are present in this year's course. Because I believe we had about nine different nationalities that were represented in the opening ceremony of the ISU Southern Hemisphere course this year. So we've got some footage here. We've got Australia, of course, a nice big contingent from Australia. And these are the participants of this year's course. We've got Australia as well. China is actually the largest contingent of participants this year, which I think is fantastic, because it's great to see different countries collaborating with China in space, because as you guys might know, China, unfortunately, is not involved with the International Space Station. But it's been great to make connections with China here. We have France as well, Germany. We also have India, and five participants from Mexico, who heard about the course through going to the IAC conference last year in Mexico. We also have Nigeria. And finally, a participant from the Philippines as well. So there's a whole different range of both established space countries being represented, and up-and-coming space nations as well. So it's a really good chance for these participants from different countries to network and start collaborating with each other to hopefully go back to their own home countries and build on those collaborations and networks that they've made through doing the ISU program. So what can things get covered in the ISU program? Because space, as we both know, is a fairly big topic, right? Any time that I mention that I have this cute little video webcast, and we talk about space, and then somebody will say, like, oh, you mean like aliens? And I'll say, no, no, no, not like aliens. And somebody will say, oh, you mean like Planet X? I'll say, no, no, not really like Planet X. I'm like, oh, so you're talking about NASA history? No, not exactly. There are so many things that we could talk about. And when you have something like International Space University, not even just like, oh, we're only going to talk about Australia space, or only going to talk about American space, or only going to talk about China space. What are the kinds of things that somebody can expect by attending International Space University? So one of the three eyes of ISU, I mentioned International before, but interdisciplinary is also one of the big focuses. So for one part of the program, you have a lecture series that consists of 40 lectures, which are usually given by experts in the space industry. So for example, Dr. Ray Williamson from the Used to Work for the Secure World Foundation, regularly gives the space policy lectures because he's an expert on space policy, specifically with most experience in the US. And you don't just learn about policy, though. It's all about being interdisciplinary. So you learn about policy. You learn about space law. You learn about engineering. You learn about biology, life sciences, and space medicine. And you even cover a little bit on business as well, because, I mean, the commercial side of space isn't up and coming, and there are so many space startups around there. So it's all kind of about building that wide holistic view of the space industry from all those different perspectives to build a greater awareness of all the different opportunities that are happening in space. So I think that's a really cool part of the program because I'm a scientist and when I did the program, I didn't know much about engineering. I knew hardly anything about space law. But when I came out from the course, my knowledge in all those different areas and my own had grown so much and I could see how they were all related as well. The other things that you can do in the program, well, the other parts of the program besides the lecture series are the workshops and finally the team project. Now, the workshops that you do, in particular, one of them focuses always on team building. And this year, the astronaut that was running the team building workshop was the Korean astronaut Soyeon Yee. Actually, the first Korean astronaut in space. And she was able to run a team building workshop with our participants this year, which might seem kind of strange that there's such a big focus on team building and you can see that she's teaching the students here. What they had to do is get amongst themselves and they were actually blindfolded, which we'll be able to see now. Then they had to spin around, disorientate themselves and form a square with equal sides. Now, how do you think you might be able to try and find other people to make yourself a square in your team without even being able to see? It was all about who became the leaders, who became the followers and ultimately how to become a good listener because if everyone was talking at the same time you couldn't get anything done. They tried lots of different ways to do this and natural leaders came out into the group and were able to kind of become the one that organized all the people but it was really cool to see the group dynamic side had formed and these guys took maybe ten go-go's or more to finally get themselves in a bit of a square shape but then the corners weren't good. So then they had to get someone to come along and fix the corners so it was all about putting your trust into other people so that you could get the job done that you needed to do. Now, why does that relate to space? Well, the first space explorers that we had the Eureka Garans and the Jung Glens were the kind of super confident pilots that could do anything but when we want to go to Mars or if we want to colonize space or live in space for a long time we really need to be really good housemates and have really good social skills and good teams so that's why the focus is so huge on building those strong team connections and being good leaders and good followers so I think that part of the course as well is quite stunning. That's really interesting. Really, I am a fantastic follower. I will totally follow directions. I have no problems just like not making decisions and just but I also am slightly rebellious and if I think that my leader is making a bad decision or a very detrimental decision then all of a sudden you'll start to hear me which is exactly how Ben and I get into fight sometimes but that's okay. That's gosh, that's really fascinating. So you've attended International Space University for at least one course. One, what are they called? Is that a course? Yeah, it's just a short program I guess you could call it. A program? Okay, so I imagine the way that I know you that you would go on to go on to more International Space University courses for short programs. Would that be a fair assessment? Yeah, I mean I've considered it. You can always take your experience from the Southern Hemisphere program or just the regular space studies program and you can take that through to the masters. In fact, you get credit for the lectures that you do in the short programs as part of the masters as well which really saves you time. But I guess one of the things that you can kind of take with you when you leave the ISU course is from some of the other experiences that you can do. For example, we launched a stratospheric balloon to, I think it was 34 kilometers high in the sky and I've got a video here to show you guys that kind of summarized our balloon launch which I was running the webcast for which was pretty cool. So again, this is how ISU brings the teams together and you kind of have to do this from scratch. You have to plan out where you've got to put on this balloon, you have to build it, you have to launch it and hopefully if you're really lucky you get to recover it as well. So you can see here that they're attaching the payload to the balloon that we're going to send up into near space and this carried two cameras. It carried an infrared camera and a visible light camera which we were able to collect the data off and do a bit of analysis on the vegetation around the area where we launched it. So something that I had no experience in before and now I can take that knowledge and explain it to people when they ask me like, what's so cool about space? What can you learn from space? Well, you can find out how healthy plants are for a start. So here's the launch of the balloon. It launched pretty quickly actually. Yeah. We've got some images coming through there. It was really cool. I was in the car that oh, here's some images from space. It's pretty cool. Well, space near space. I was part of the team that had to go and collect this balloon after it came back down to the ground. So there was radio tracking on there. So we could follow the balloon as it burst which you can see here. As it was falling down, we had to track or it was going to land. So we had to jump in the cars race through the outback as you can see here which is quite dry and quite dead looking. And then we had to track through the bush to go and find this payload. So we learned a lot about radio tracking as well just through this hands-on experience. And it did crash kind of hard as you'll be able to see. Oh, oh goodness. But it survived which is amazing. And this is how far into the bush we had to go to get the payload pretty far. And oh, I wonder who that is. So that's another one of the projects you can do with the ISU Southern Hemisphere Program. And you also write a white paper as well. But I can tell you guys a bit more about that later if you'd like. It's quite a large project that you do at the end of the course. Is that something you do at the end of every course? Like every five weeks or every nine weeks or what have you? Yeah, so each course whether it's the five-week or the nine-week program as a kind of deliverable at the end of it they produce a report. So for example in my year our report topic was Space Solutions for Food and Water Security. And I believe I have a picture of the beautiful front cover of the report that my year actually produced and we kind of just it was a 50 page report about what space can do for developing nations to help them manage their food and their water resources from space. So there are so many countries especially in the southern hemisphere that are quite underdeveloped and there are lots of different ways that space can help them in terms of providing better lifestyles and better standards of living for their people. Which is pretty cool because a lot of people think that space doesn't help the earth but when we do research like this through ISU we're showing people how space can help people as well. So that's a 50 page report that the participants have about three weeks to write so pretty great achievement to get all of that done in that really short amount of time. What does a typical day at International Space University look like? Because what you just told me was there's a ton of lectures there's totally like group projects there's all this team building stuff you have to write a paper which first of all still sounds like a university so good they named it correctly are you getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning and going to bed at 4 o'clock in the morning? Pretty much so at the beginning of the course it's not too bad. The beginning of the course is when the lecture series is so a typical day with the lectures is breakfast of course the most important meal of the day and then lectures from 9 o'clock until about 12 o'clock have some time for a very quick lunch then you'll do a workshop in the afternoon whether that's team building or some hands on experience with things like STK a computer program which stands for Satellite Toolkit I believe and then you'll have some dinner and then the late evening is for things where you're working on your balloon that you're going to launch or you're doing research for your paper or doing some editing for that paper or any other multitude of tasks that need to get done so it's a typical day from when you wake up to going to bed at 10 o'clock maybe even later that completely even gets worse during the end of the course where you're trying to get this 50 page report finished, edited and graphically designed into a nice looking booklet and so your day then looks like waking up at 6 and then working on that for the whole day and then maybe going to bed at 1 or 2 and then getting up at maybe 6 again making shifts with the other participants of the course on who gets to sleep at which time and maybe bringing food to the editing team that is still frantically editing like 3 hours before the printing deadline so we call that ISU time because it's basically fitting as much into one day as you possibly can and challenging yourself to a level that you've never challenged yourself before and pushing yourself to learn and do things in a kind of next level of brain usage so that's an unsustainable way to work in the long term but over 5 weeks it sure does get a lot of stuff done and so yeah the program kind of shows you how to work at your very very best that sounds awesome actually it probably sounds like super super stressful for a lot of people and it sounds like it would still be stressful like I understand going into it would be stressful like to have that kind of perspective but it sounds like so much fun so much fun I guess one of my favourite parts of the whole course is the fact that we get to live with an astronaut for the first week of the course so on my course we had two astronauts we had the wonderful Bob Thurst from Canada and we also had Jean-Jacques Faville from France and this year's course had the astronaut from Korea as I mentioned so young Yi and absolutely amazing that you get to be so close to these astronauts and kind of really get to know them on I guess a personal level and hear their space stories and just be kind of immersed in that experience and kind of share that experience with them which I guess as just a regular person in the space industry maybe you don't kind of have that close of a relationship to those kind of people in fact so Yi was telling us a really cool story about how it was her first space flight she went to the window she was so excited to try and find her country or her hometown because I mean anytime someone like for example there's a really tall tower in your city and you go up to the top of the tower you're trying to look for something that's familiar so you try and find where's my school or where's my house the same thing for my country you want to find that familiarity so you can connect with the earth again and so she could see they were flying over Europe and then they were flying over China and it took so long like 10 minutes for them to pass over China because China was just so big and then finally they got to Korea and she was so excited she went to get the camera and she came back and they'd already passed Korea because it was so small oh that's that's completely something I would do that's something when you're like right Europe okay there's the boot alright that's oh man this is yeah okay cool oh there it is ah that's pretty hilarious oh I love it how amazing that's very very cool okay so I don't think that we've ever asked you the standard set of questions no you have not alright so before we do that really quickly if somebody is interested in going to International Space University how how do they do that well for a start they could follow ISU on Twitter at ISUNet and they can also visit the ISU website which is isunet.edu and you can get all information on all ISU programs there whether it's the masters program the traveling space studies program or the southern hemisphere program as well very cool alright you ready I'm ready alright so moon or Mars first both this is yeah I know both the Amanda's Corporation ah ah ah you know before before coming on the show though what was your perspective then because I assume it changed a little bit oh dear I think you know I think it was moon first for me like before the show and before really getting back into space because like you can see the moon like if I was to go outside and try and point out to like my mom where the moon is it's pretty clear she knows where it is but if I tried to like point out Mars she'd be like oh that one or the one next to it like it's almost infinitely harder to kind of have a connection to this tiny dot compared to this huge thing in the sky that you've seen since you were a child so I was moon first um but now the more I learn about Mars and the more I want to go there and grow plants on Mars I live there and die there I've kind of shifted to Mars first as well but I think there's benefits to doing both of them totally so the next question is would you go I guess you've already answered that would you go oh yeah I'm gonna die on Mars yeah nice for sure I like it when do you think humans will first land on Mars 2027 yeah not earlier no and 2027 is still really ambitious that's only 10 years from now yep it's already 2017 that's so crazy oh yeah it's really close isn't it oh my gosh how exciting yeah right when do you think humans will set foot on the moon again 2022 really interesting I'm quite ambitious yeah no I mean I like it I like it I'm totally into it and then I believe we probably have covered this one but in case people didn't see your last interview why space oh because I mean space is just that symbolization of everything that humanity can achieve and everything that we can do to expand our knowledge of an awareness of the universe and to get ourselves out there in the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of exploration it's kind of it's kind of the final frontier and it's I guess really a noble quest if you will because we've explored pretty much as much as we can here on earth except for the deep oceans and to me it kind of feels just really natural it's the sky has always been above us since we've been born since we started to learn how to walk and there's just so much potential like to be looking at something since you were young and then realizing that you can actually go there when it's felt so far away for such a long amount of time so that's why space it's you know I won't talk necessarily a whole lot about my day job but my day job is pretty awesome and sometimes you get lost in the everyday stuff right like you're having a fight with a co-worker or you've run out of something that you need or anything along those lines and anytime I have the opportunity to give a tour of my place of work it brings back all of that because it's that perspective again of oh right I actually do have an awesome job I actually do work in a really awesome place and I think space when you talk to somebody else about why they got interested in space or how they got interested in space or involved or you know when you talk to somebody who is passionate about what it is they do regardless of what it is I suppose but I I really like space it brings back all of that right definitely for sure it always kind of it makes you kind of put everything into perspective about you know these are the everyday things that you're doing in your life but why are you doing them? why do you do the things that you do for everyday why are you slugging away in this nine to five job and how can you help humanity to be a better version of itself kind of space I think really helps me to always remember that awesome perfect okay I don't want to ruin it we're just going to end it there and we're going to move on a little bit thank you Lisa so very very much for helping me out for this segment I appreciate it more than you know what we're going to do next is we're going to take another little bit of a break and when we come back we're going to have comments from last week's show so stay with us we'll be right back you know what's really sad is that Mike is not an actual hologram because or any sort of virtual assistant here not that I don't like Mike the way that you are I'm a real boy but it would be really cool if I was just able to like kind of wheel you into like with Lisa or wheel Lisa into here and then I would just have everybody all the same time and it would be really cool sadly that's not a thing she's little though she would fit and it would be amazing okay so wheels for my little robot legs it would be so cool alright I won't scream this time because I am in the control room with Dana and I don't want to blow his ears out although I probably did last night sorry for that but we have a lot of people to thank and it is so amazing that we have this many people to thank and I am so very very very grateful these of course again are our skate velocity patrons these are the people who have given us ten dollars or more and have gotten access to the slack channel we of course also have our orbital patrons these people have given us five dollars or more and have access to the worldwide swag store free shipping which is really really cool but then there's more we have our suborbital patrons these people have given us twenty two dollars and fifty cents or more they get access to after dark early access to after dark which is really cool it's the show after the show we can talk about space things we can talk about not space things how Mike isn't actually a hologram all those different things you get more access to this which is really great but there's also the still very very important ground support patrons these people have given us one dollar or more you get your name in the show of course you get access to Google Hangouts and these people ground support I think is a really really great term for these people because they really are laying the foundation for everybody else to kind of build on top of that so thank you really very sincerely thank any single person who's ever given us anything through patreon thank you thank you thank you you are making this happen hopefully we are making you proud if you would like to become a patron in the ground support suborbital orbital or escape velocity variation hit up patreon dot com slash T M R O thank you because good job it's a great way of putting that it's uh it makes me humble to be able to say thank you to you so I appreciate that moving on we have our previous show topic was discovering our universe is that really what we called it we called it this yeah okay I don't know that's what it says in the chat in the show notes though so discovering our universe with Frasier Kane not Frasier Crane but still just as good uh Frasier was an awesome thank you Frasier again uh for being our first guest for orbit 10 and having the patience with us uh in our our bumpy road there uh so first comment comes off of youtube this one comes from I did not read these names this is Harry Andrew Andrew shak shak Andrew shak Harry I apologize for butchering your name yeah for uh says uh note on that first china launch that might not have been insulation you saw falling off but ice does china use liquid oxygen that could cause ice to form as we've seen many a time uh in many a launch vehicle uh but you would know better than I Mike so uh ideas on that one so uh there are a couple of uh long march rockets that do use a um liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen upper stage engine kind of uh the same cryogenics but the lower stages are um you know the kind of more toxic uh fuels that that they have been using in the past um the the launch last week was a long march uh uh 2D I believe I think so um yeah um so I believe that that one does have um actually no I don't think that that one you know I'm gonna have to do some research as far as I know the 2D is a uh two stage rocket and does not use any of the liquid hydrogen or liquid oxygen but I could be wrong on that I'm gonna have to to look into that it's a very very good question I should have read this ahead of time as well so I could have been very sorry that's alright that's alright I mean it's one of the best parts of the show being live that being said though that very well could have been ice that was falling off and not insulation however the reason that I said that it was insulation was some other footage that they had of the the launch uh processing and it looked like there was just a bunch of these kind of white tiles on the payload fairing that um it didn't look like that later on in flight I couldn't see the details of that so all that stuff that was falling away from it that's why I might have mistakenly said that that was insulation but uh that's that's why I said that China doesn't uh broadcast their launches in 4k yet? Not yet they're just barely getting to 360p man no actually every once in a while they'll have really good quality like uh the long march 5 inaugural launch last year that was in full HD that was awesome so we'll see if they uh I'm sure things will get better and better for that but uh I think it really depends on the launches I'm sure we'll still get really grainy low quality uh for a lot of their military and secret payload uh type launches but uh we'll see how things go it's getting better all the time from everyone not just China and you know India's launch footage is getting better everyone I'm sorry we're focused on this way too much I got you I totally understand okay so uh next question or question comment also comes off of YouTube this one comes from Theodore Wharton Wharton uh how will the information from a mission uh to a trojan asteroid differ from that of a mission to an asteroid in the normal asteroid belt how do these groups of asteroids differ from each other this is a great question for Jared uh who is not here uh do you have any insight on this one because I really don't unfortunately so uh I am not the resident astronomer but to my understanding the trojan asteroids are a little bit different because even though the the main asteroid belt and the trojan asteroids might have formed at the same time and possibly even in the same place the main asteroid belt has had a lot of the the heavy bombardment so a lot of pieces have been hit I mean we can just look at some of the bigger um asteroids or rather dwarf planet uh series and uh the very large asteroid Vesta um in the main asteroid belt just to look at the bombardment there um so there has been a lot of activity in the main asteroid belt whereas the trojan asteroids have been relatively undisturbed and also some of them might be captured asteroids that were not from the main asteroid belt but from somewhere out in space you know a rogue asteroid that wasn't originally formed around our sun so to my understanding the reason why we want to check out these trojan asteroids is a to get a better more pristine sample of the asteroids that did form in our solar system to you know kind of get that you know let's go back to the source uh type of information and also if we discover any others that uh did not form here and to you know get interesting data about that but it's more about getting the the better samples to my understanding I could be very wrong about that and hopefully Jared isn't uh cringing as he's uh hearing this and I'm sure he'll correct this if we're wrong I was just going to say worse comes to worse when Jared comes back next week uh and Jared will be hosting next week he uh he can he can fill in the details there on that one yeah uh so next question also comes off of YouTube this one comes from Rico 61 says big fan of Frazier in the universe today he's an excellent science communicator you know what that's a perfect way of awarding that uh good choice for an interview uh it wasn't even necessarily a choice per se and so much as saying hey would you mind doing this and he said gladly so that was really amazing uh again you're ruining the magic I know I know uh I mean I would love to say that we have just our choices it would be like ah I shall interview you this day and I shall interview you that day uh one day I think maybe we will get there people will be calling us to be interviewed as opposed to us having to to reach out and touch somebody else but at the same time yeah really great interview uh he was like I said very patient with us I appreciate that very much uh and yeah really it was nice he has a very excellent science communicator that was a very good good way of saying that um okay so next question or question I keep saying that comment comes off of youtube from our very own destructor 1701 I had to laugh at this one destructor quote unquote before I go into break just a few questions that we ask everyone unquote then 11 minutes of answers before the break love it great interview yeah it's funny go ahead you know I'm sure it's been incredible would say you know we will go over if the content dictates you know we were having a great interview we were having really great discussions and there was really great answers of that Frasier Kane gave so you know I think that it's okay sometimes when we go over like that and just like destructor said love it I mean you know it was good stuff that we were talking about so there wasn't any issue there but it is funny how we will say that a lot you know even today during the news segment it's like oh just real quick I want to say this we're done with that topic because I did read I didn't read who wrote the comments but I did read the comments themselves beforehand and that really sincerely got into my head and so I was like hey what how am I doing on time you guys and in the other room and I'm like because I feel like I've been tired Lisa a while like I feel like it's doing good but I don't know how long I've been talking to her for and I have these other things I'm going to do and that's all I could think was like oh great questions no big deal that Lisa and I would just talk thank you of course to Lisa for keeping me on track for that one so that was hilarious destructor you got into my head stop it okay last comment comes off of patreon actually this one comes from Tom Westcott says dark energy dark matter like I tell my third graders who just discovered infinity it's not a real thing just means that if you think that's the answer there was something wrong with it's a fascinating way of looking at that and I'm going to watch out Jared trigger warning I'm going to leave that one for Jared to answer as I have no information about dark energy other than anything that Jared has ever taught me which he has taught me a lot don't get me wrong but I don't want to speak from an area that I really am just not secure in if you will Mike did you have anything to add to that nope we'll let Jared talk about it I can't wait this is going to be amazing that will be amazing so what's going to happen is that next week I will also not be here sorry Mike I guess it shows all yours Mike and Dada will be here and Jared will be back here which will be very very cool and Jared is going to be not only answering that question he will also be interviewing Dennis Wingo which for those of you who know that should be a really great interview I'm very excited for Jared to be able to do that that will be very very cool so we are not going to be having an after dark I apologize so those of you who get access early access to after dark I apologize for that right now but what you do get is some really great content that we created here today if you will so thank you Patreon patrons one more time and Mike I think that's about it I will see you in two weeks enjoy your annual Disney pilgrimage that's what you guys are doing right yep it's birthday so that's what's going on there and thank you to Dada for keeping everything going thank you once again to Lisa for joining us and giving a really great interview you were so easy to talk to I appreciate that on so many different levels and thank you guys of course for joining us every single week live and even you know on demand it's great to have you we couldn't do this without you and when I say that it's not just like that we wouldn't do this without you but we can't continue to make it better every single week without you so thank you one more time that's it for me I'll see you guys in two weeks have fun next week and thanks for hanging out with me