 Coming up. Space is hard. Jupiter is pretty. And space planes! Stay tuned. Tomorrow begins right now. Hello and welcome to tomorrow episode 9.27 for September 3rd, 2016. And let's go ahead and get started by looking at our tomorrow premiere patrons. These are folks who have given us $10 or more per episode for the show. And they get access to the whole enchilada. They get our Slack channel. They get early access to all of our YouTube videos. And they are wonderful people and we are very glad to have them supporting our show here. So if you would like to help the crowd fund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. And I am Jared Head and of course I've got my co-host today, Space Mike. And we are going to have to start off on a bit of a somber note this week because there's something that happened a few days ago. So Mike, go ahead and take it away and we'll talk about this. So yeah, at approximately 1307 Coordinated Universal Time on Thursday, September 1st, SpaceX unfortunately experienced an anomaly during a fueling operation for a static test fire. And the ramifications of this aren't fully understood yet, but we do have some footage of the aftermath of this event. And all we know so far is that the anomaly started somewhere around the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. And unfortunately both the Falcon 9 and its payload, the AMO-6 satellite were lost. And with this, the anomaly started at T minus 8 minutes before the test was supposed to begin, while the propellant was being loaded into both stages of the rocket at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Thankfully though, the pad was clear of all human activity when the anomaly occurred and there were no injuries. And I did want to quote directly from a press release issued by SpaceX yesterday where they say, To identify the root cause of the anomaly, SpaceX began its investigation immediately after the loss, consistent with accident investigation plans prepared for such a contingency. These plans include the preservation of all possible evidence and the assembly of an accident investigation team, with oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration and participation by NASA, the United States Air Force, and other industry experts. We are currently in the early process of reviewing approximately 3,000 channels of telemetry and video data, covering a time period of just 35 to 55 milliseconds. As for the launch pad itself, our teams are now investigating the status of Space Launch Complex 40. The pad clearly incurred damage, but the scope has yet to be fully determined. We will share more data as it becomes available. SpaceX currently operates three launch pads, two in Florida and one in California at Vandenberg Air Force Base. SpaceX's other launch sites were not affected by yesterday's events. Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base is in the final stages of an operational upgrade, and Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center remains on schedule to be operational in November. Both pads are capable of supporting Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. We are confident the two launch pads can support our return to flight and fulfill our upcoming manifest needs. So as I said, the ramifications of this are still not fully known. SpaceX did plan to launch eight more satellites through the rest of this year, 2016, three of those from Vandenberg Air Force Base. And however long it takes to return the SpaceX vehicle to return it to flight, they can at least still do some of those missions from Vandenberg Air Force Base if cleared to launch this year. But until the company and all of the investigation teams has more information, there's just no way of knowing when SpaceX will be able to return to flight. And about the payload itself, the Amos-6 satellite, which we actually have a picture of during its initial launch preparations, it was built by Israel Spacecom, Spacecom Limited, who's going to be operating the satellite, who was going to be operating the satellite. And they were going to be leasing capacity on this advanced communication satellite to Facebook and to UTEL-SAT. And Facebook was going to be using this to provide internet access to sub-Saharan Africa. And it was fully owned though by Spacecom, and fortunately the satellite was insured both pre-launch operations and in-flight operations in the event of the loss of vehicles. So at least they're covered for that. But this launch does put into question the sale of Spacecom Limited to a Chinese conglomerate. And even so, there are several companies who are associated with SpaceX whose stocks have dropped. Even Spacecom has dropped, but other companies such as SES and Intel-SAT have dropped in the stock market. And it's going to be a while before this recovers from this, but until we have more information, that's really all we know at this point. Yeah, and that's a really good point to make, Space Mike, is that we're still just barely 48 hours after this anomaly has occurred. So if anybody says right now that they know what happened to the SpaceX rocket, I can guarantee you 100% that they have no clue what they're talking about. Because it simply just has not been enough time to allow proper investigation to go forward. So the bottom line is that, frankly, I'm fairly confident in saying that I don't know what happened to the rocket. You don't know what happened to the rocket either, and I'm pretty confident that most of the people who say they know what's going on, you don't know what happened to the rocket. It's just been too little time since then, and we're not going to speculate on the show what happened to the rocket either. We're just going to wait for that report to come out whenever it eventually does, and then we can talk about it then. But until then, it's a big question mark as to what occurred, and we'll let SpaceX handle their investigation as they will. And that's how we'll look at it for now. But also, talking about the Cape as well, we've got an upcoming mission going to be occurring from the Cape with OSIRIS-REx launching on September 8th. Now NASA has said that initial checks of the launch site, Space Launch Complex 41, the OSIRIS-REx in the United Launch Alliance Atlas V411, that they are okay and that they are set to fly. And this was a very big deal because Space Launch Complex 41 is only 1.1 miles away from SpaceX's Space Launch Complex 40. So the flight readiness review was held on this previous Thursday, September 1st, and it was to evaluate the launch vehicle and OSIRIS-REx, and both were given a clean bill of health allowing for launch processing to move forward. Now it will be launching on an Atlas V411, which that means it has a 4-meter payload fairing, one solid rocket booster, and a single engine sent to our upper stage. It's set to launch at 23.05 UTC on September 8th, with the window extending 2 hours to 1.05 UTC on September 9th. And for those of you who are on the East Coast, that is from 7.05 to 9.05 PM on September 8th. And for those of us on the West Coast here, that is going to be at 4.05 to 6.05 PM Pacific Daylight Time. So everything's looking fine there, and that was a little bit of a worry because the launch pad was so close to SpaceX's launch pad, but everything looks fine there, and we're looking forward to seeing that mission launch this Thursday. And Space Mike, back to you, because it's not just a problem that occurred in Florida this week at the Cape. It's also something on the other side of the world, too, that appears to have had a problem as well. That's right, it's been a weird week. So just the day prior to this SpaceX anomaly, China apparently suffered a launch failure. And this was on Wednesday, August 31st, at 1853 Coordinated Universal Time from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. They were launching the Long March 4C rocket, which is the type of rocket that has no boosters. We do have a photo that is unclear whether or not this is a stock photo or a photo of the initial launch. And that is a 4C, Long March 4C configuration, though. No launch footage has surfaced as of yet, but strange reports have been coming in from Twitter that the rocket failed in flight. During Chinese launches, the first stage booster and any side mounted boosters have predetermined landing zones where those stages would drop after they're separated from the upper stages. And as normal, a lot of the locals and the Chinese government recover those pieces of wreckage. And the reports coming in from this is that not only are they looking for the expected wreckage from the first stage, but they're also looking for wreckage from the payload as well. And something else that adds kind of a bit of mystery to this is the Chinese government and Chinese media have been totally silent as to whether or not this launch was a success or a failure. In fact, even the initial articles reporting that the launch was initially successful have been taken down. And that picture, these pictures that you've been seeing in that first picture of the night launch was the only thing that still remained from those articles. So with this, again, we can't really speculate. We do not know what happened. And we'll have to wait and see if there are updates about the survival of the payload, which was the Gaofan-10, the civilian-operated high-res Earth imaging satellite. So until we know information, it looks like just from the reports coming in that they might have suffered a launch failure. But unless we hear anything else, they might have been able to do this successfully or maybe these are just old pictures that are somehow being spread as new information. We don't know, but that's what's been coming out of China this week. Yeah, so overall not a very good week for space flight, at least in terms of launch providing. But I do have some good news from the outer solar system. So let's kind of turn it around here and talk about something really, really good, which is a Juno, the NASA probe that is orbiting around Jupiter right now has returned its first data from its first close pass. So we talked about the close pass last week because our show actually happened several hours after its closest approach to Jupiter. And now this week, we have the raw data to show you. Now let's take a look at this unbelievable image right here. This is the first high-quality imagery of Jupiter's polar regions. Now, the spacecraft that previously visited Jupiter, the two pioneer spacecraft and the two voyagers in the 70s and Galileo in the 1990s, Cassini in the early 2000s and New Horizons in the late 2000s, they did not really get great imagery of the polar regions of Jupiter's atmosphere. But here we are, we've got a wonderful imagery because of Juno being in a polar orbit around Jupiter. Now, this shows us that there is nothing like Saturn's hexagonal cloud structures near the South Pole. And Juno also viewed Jupiter's atmosphere in infrared to take a look at the aurorae in incredible detail. And you just look at this and you compare this to the best of the Hubble images that we have. And this is just absolutely stunning. And they're talking about this aurorae actually appearing to sort of spiral upwards in and on itself there. Jupiter's just a pretty dynamic place to begin with, but the scientists are saying that they are initially quite surprised with just how dynamic the aurorae and some of Jupiter's polar atmosphere is looking compared to what they expected. So Juno has one more 53-day orbit around Jupiter and then it will perform an engine burn on October 19th that will place it into its 14-day science orbit, which it will stay in until February 2018. And of course we'll have to see what happens at that point because it is flying through those intense radiation belts around Jupiter and basically we're expecting it to fry the spacecraft by that point in time. So we'll probably dispose of the spacecraft in February 2018. But you know, it might have been built exceptionally well as we seem to do with spacecraft and there might be a slight extension to that mission. So we'll have to see. And also some more good news as well, space Mike. Go ahead and tell us some really good news from New Zealand. Yeah, this could have turned out to be some really bad news. But meanwhile in New Zealand there is a new launch pad that is under construction from Rocket Lab and about 266 kilometers or about 165 miles off the northeastern coast of New Zealand there was a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. The strongest earthquake that has been felt in that region for over 20 years. And there was no damage to their new launch site. We have the footage here that was taken from a still video a while ago from a new video that Rocket Lab updated. And with this it was completely undamaged and there have been no reports of any injuries or fatalities or major damage in New Zealand itself. So very good luck and I'm very happy about this. And with this Rocket Lab is hoping to be launching their electron rocket from this site. They're hoping to begin test flights at this site later this year and begin commercial launches with customer payloads including Moon Express early next year. And so very good news. This could have churned out very badly but thankfully everything was okay. I'm glad that New Zealand itself didn't suffer anything. And not to be a downer but I did just want to give a shout out to the folks over in Italy who unfortunately suffered a lower magnitude earthquake but there have been some fatalities there. But again this is another way that space is able to help with disaster relief. They've been able to use GPS and satellite imaging services to inspect the rubble and even some lives that have even been saved already because of satellite positioning. Some people whose cell phones were on. So just another way that space affects our daily lives and is able to help even in the darkest times. If I remember correctly it's part of the European Space Agency's ambitious Copernicus project if I'm recalling correctly which they actually allow any country access to that which is just fantastic for their emergency response. They were even using that system during the major floods in Louisiana as well here in the United States just a couple weeks ago. So fantastic just showing the amazing collaboration that space allows us to have for helping everybody in the world. Now speaking of worlds I want to go a little bit further out to the outer solar system because the hunt for Planet Nine, yes Ben, Planet Nine has revealing that there are actually these extremely distant objects that we have in our own solar system. Now a team at Northern Arizona University has been hunting for Planet Nine. They're part of the team that actually originally proposed the concept of a hypothetical planet. It was Mike Brown and Constantine Batian who did the computations that ended up determining where it may be at based upon the work that this team has done. And they have found a cache of new what they call extreme objects in the solar system's Kuiper Belt. Now looking at the orbits of these objects allows scientists to narrow down where that hypothetical orbit of the potential Planet Nine may be. Now two of these new objects, 2014 SR349 and 2013 FT28 line up with the current computer models with an expected Planet Nine based upon Mike Brown and Constantine Batian's computations. Now another very interesting object that was found with this is called 2014 FE72 and it appears to be an object from the inner Oort cloud. That's because its orbit takes it out nearly 3,800 astronomical units. So one astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, so 3,800 times the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. So that would mean that its orbit is roughly 86,000 years long and if this really does turn out to be a Oort cloud object, this would, as far as I know in terms of astronomy, be the first time we have ever detected an object from the Oort cloud. So that may be a potential thing to go take a look at with some kind of super fast, super fast, super small probe that we were sort of talking about with small sats in some of our previous episodes. So some very exciting stuff happening on the outskirts of our solar system. So we are going to go ahead and take a break and when we come back, we are going to be talking about space planes, everyone's favorite majestic looking space vehicle. So stay tuned and we'll be right back after this break. It inspires us. And we long for something we don't yet know. We yearn to go there. So we venture forth. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize it. The body made here. The eagle has landed. The athletes have passed. 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. We'll be back tomorrow. We needed a little bit of an inspirational, upbeat, motivational, commercial segment after that super-depress-a-so news segment. But before we get into our much happier main topic, I would like to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who would be given at least $10 to this specific episode. These are tomorrow's premier members. We've also got our tomorrow producers. These people have contributed $5 or more to this specific episode at how you can help contribute to the shows. Tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com. Super-depressing! I'm sorry! Mike was like, I'm sorry, guys. It's just not been one of those weeks. It was a bad week for space. Yes, not the best week ever. Actually, in some of the videos that were posted to our Facebook channel, so facebook.com slash tmro.tv, there was some additional footage that we weren't allowed to show on this particular show we weren't able to get the rights to. And one of the comments in there actually came from Christian, who said, I think this evidence for the need to move away from conventional rockets in order to get to space. Companies like Reaction Engine, Skylon, and X-Core, which have the links, have the right idea. Space planes are the way forward. And that actually sparked some interesting conversation about the space planes and kind of paths forward and safety and things like that. And kind of start off, I'll start off by saying I'm a huge fan of Dream Chaser personally. Dream Chaser, for those who don't know, is from... Sierra Nevada. Sierra Nevada? I'm like, orbital, no. It's from Sierra Nevada. Think of it like a miniature space shuttle. They can bring up crew or cargo, depending upon the configuration. It can go to low earth orbit. It's actually an incredible little vehicle. I'm actually very excited about it. However, it launches on a traditional rocket. And that's part of the reason why I like it, because you've got your traditional rocket stick on the bottom and the space plane that sits on top. So if you have any sort of issue with the rocket, the space plane can kind of break away and you're good to go. Yeah. But then that brings up, actually, space mic, I think you're pretty well-versed on reaction engines, Skylon and the Sabre Drive. So why don't you describe for us what is Skylon, that space plane? So with the Skylon space plane, the company that makes it Reaction Engine is planning on a new type of technology to have an air-breathing engine that would pull oxidizer from the atmosphere itself. And the whole idea behind this is to have a single-stage to orbit vehicle, something that would not be launching on a traditional rocket, but that would be able to take off from a runway under its own power, and then it has enough fuel on board that once it reaches a certain point in the atmosphere and there's not enough oxidizer that it would be able to extract from the atmosphere, it's able to switch over to its own supply of oxidizer and change a little bit how the engines would be able to burn and get the rest of the way into orbit with that system. And it's a very ambitious system and they've been working on it for many years and they have had some progress over the past several years and even the European Space Agency and the British government have looked at funding and supporting Reaction Engines and if it's successful, it could be a game-changer in the spaceflight industry. Alright, so we've got those two orbital space planes, the Skylon and the Dream Chaser, but then we've actually got a couple of... go ahead. Before we move on to some of the other type of space planes, we also have robotic space planes like the X-37B, which is conducting a bunch of secretive experiments in orbit, but it also has the same type of capability and benefits with space planes of being able to land sensitive equipment at a runway in a timely manner. And although with the X-37 it's meant to be up in space for quite a long time, there are other nations who are looking to have their own X-37B. China is working on their own sort of unmanned space plane system as well as India is working on their own unmanned space plane system, which they would hope to eventually upgrade to a manned space plane. So it's very interesting the sort of capabilities that they can get from that. And the X-37B really is like a miniature space shuttle. It even looks like the old-school NASA space shuttle, just mini, and it sits at top. That goes into an Atlas... or is that an Atlas or Delta? Atlas? It's an Atlas V. It's an Atlas V in the 501 configuration. It's got a 5-meter fairing, zero solids, and one upper... One inch and a centaur. Yep, exactly. So those are all the orbital space planes, but we also have a couple of suborbital space planes. Jared, talk to me about links and virgins. Yes, you've got X-Core's links suborbital space plane, which essentially a suborbital space plane goes up and then it comes back down. It kind of more comes down like this though. It kind of bleeds off that energy. Yeah, a little bit more like that. It goes above that common line, the 100 kilometer mark, and allows you several minutes of microgravity and then returns your payload and passengers to the starting point in which you began. So X-Core has the links, which they were developing, although X-Core has kind of eased back a little bit from that and gone more into engine development from the middle point of this year. They had flown actual some development vehicles like their prototype rocket racer. So they actually did fly a vehicle with a rocket engine sort of similarly based upon what the X-Core links would be working with. And then of course we also have Virgin Galactic with Spaceship 2 being developed sort of the highly successful Spaceship 1, if you will. And of course Spaceship 2 did suffer an accident just about two years ago, but they've been working on improving the safety of the vehicle and they've actually built a second one known as the VSS Unity and they're actually now doing ground system integration and testing. And that one will be carrying, paying customers who have popped out about $250,000 per flight in order to experience the thrill of riding a rocket suborbital. So there's a lot of work going on with them and one of the nice things about a suborbital space plane is that if you don't necessarily need to launch your payload into space in order for you to perform an experiment, say you only need like really 60 seconds to 120 seconds of microgravity in order to run an experiment, this is a cheaper alternative to instead of flying your payload into space and having to figure out how to handle all of that and integrate that into say like a CubeSat or a NanoRack that would go on the International Space Station. So these are potential outlets and NASA's actually looked at both of these vehicles as well as potential outlets for running experiments on. Awesome. And there's also some international companies as well doing looking at suborbital space planes. Hopefully in a couple of weeks we'll have representatives from Swiss space systems which is looking at the same type of trajectory and also doing air launch but this time on top of a Boeing 747 I believe. And so that's going to be really interesting to get some more information from them. But there's a lot of different suborbital space planes ideas out there. We actually had a question in the chat room from Green Jim too saying is a suborbital space plane just a plane? Yes and no. The way that Lynx is looking at it is they're actually going to have tiles on the bottom of their space plane so that if they encounter some pretty strong re-entry forces that the vehicle wouldn't blow up from that. Dream Chaser of course has lots of tiles on it and other systems to help it survive the vacuum of space and re-entry forces and all of that. So I mean yes it's sort of a plane in the sense that all of these can glide in the atmosphere. Not all of them will be able to maneuver in the atmosphere with the engines or their own power. That's where the Lynx space plane is kind of unique because they can use their rockets in the atmosphere and of course in the atmosphere in order to get up to that line of space but they can also use the engines to help get back to their runway whereas in the case of Virgin Galactic Spaces too their engine will burn out getting up to that boundary of space and then will be gliding back to a runway. So yes and no is the answer to that I believe. I think the difference being, I think the marker between what's the difference between a plane and a space plane is a plane uses air-breathing engines and a space plane will not be able to use an air-breathing engine. You're going to be out of atmosphere, air-breathing engines are not viable. It's a good indicator I would say. I would also say a plane flies in the atmosphere, a space plane leaves the atmosphere. Most of the atmosphere. Most of the atmosphere. Ok, technically. We've got a lot. We've got a lot. See, it's this thin line where you start to argue well what makes space space? Where does it begin? So this brought up a really interesting discussion on Facebook talking about space planes and how they would be more safe and all of these other fun things and I thought that was a really interesting topic because I don't think that's actually true. I don't think so either. In some instances it may be. So if you look at something like the Dream Chaser where it's a top-mounted design on top of a traditional rocket it probably would be just as safe as a capsule design because it can get away from any sort of anomaly that you may have. But something like Skylon, the argument was Skylon would be its next generation engines it's a much safer technology. Actually that's not true. Skylon, the saber engine that goes in the Skylon is in fact a jet engine. It's essentially a jet engine when it's in atmosphere and then it converts, I'm oversimplifying this, but it then converts into a rocket engine as it starts to lose air and it brings with it its oxidizer, liquid oxygen. And so now you've got this airplane where the, imagine being on an airplane and the engines convert into rockets. Well unlike sitting on top of a traditional rocket you have nowhere to go if something goes wrong. If something happens to one of those engines it's going to take off your wing. That's not a survivable instance at that point. So yeah the Skylon looks really cool and it would on paper can bring a lot of payload up but I'm not sure that it's actually that safe of a design. No, it's definitely not. I would not go on a Skylon myself. But there's this desire and love of space planes more so than capsules. We look at capsules we go, oh that's 1960s technology, that's 1950s, they did that in Apollo. Well yeah, but at the same time when the selling point of a plane which is something that traditionally a lot of people go on routinely is you're sitting upright, you have a little safety belt, you know maybe you have somebody who brings you food. You see them recline this much? Sure, even if it's you know with the velcro slippers right and the little hair caps. That's a little bit more, that's something that we're used to, it's something that we're comfortable with. I've done that before. That's a huge selling point versus hey, we're going to shove you in this tin can. It's you and two other guys you probably don't know very well and you're just going to have to sit in your own diaper for a while. Is that okay? Really it's not a huge selling point, it just isn't. So I think for the average person who may or may not ever get a chance to either go in a pod type sort of or capsule type situation or to ride in a space plane. Sure. Right? Those are your two options. Then yeah, of course, a space plane is definitely the way I feel more comfortable with. I've done that before. You've seen it in science fiction forever, right? Exactly. 2001 Space Odyssey, the TWA space plane. Pan Am. Pan Am, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You should be. A little different. A little different. That was a rough one. Wait, all right. So there's that. You see a lot of old sci-fi with plane-like things that brought us to space and that was always kind of the vision of the future. It was. And you do get that added benefit of the ability of what's called cross-range. So you can actually, with a capsule, you can move the center of gravity within the capsule and from that you can actually generate lift. A lot of people don't realize you can generate lift with a capsule and you can actually aim it, but you can't generate as much lift as, say, a vehicle with wings, which you can then have a tremendous amount of cross-range. And in fact, when you look at some of the designs at the early space shuttle, they looked a little more capsule-ish than they did aircraft-ish, and it was finally moved towards a winged vehicle because the Air Force wanted that cross-range ability to be able to basically, you know, lob a very large bomb at someone and then return the vehicle somewhere else in the world besides the United States. We can either confirm nor deny. Yes, we can either confirm nor deny. So, but as I wanted to point out from one of our viewers in the chat room, Neurotakti, is that a capsule can do a ballistic re-entry and survive, but a space plane would break up on a re-entry like that. So you have to be, there are very thin margins with space planes, both in terms of re-entry and also with launch as well because you do have to worry about like aerodynamic loading on a space plane at launch. Well, you have to worry about aerodynamic loading on all things at launch, but a little bit more with that. Well, you have those wings to worry about. Yes. Consider those wings are not useful during launch. They're not useful in space and they're not useful for a good chunk of coming back. They're only useful once you hit the atmosphere coming back and that's a very short amount of your flight. Yes, and once the atmosphere is thick enough. Think of all that weight that you're wasting, all that fuel that you need to use to launch those wings, just those wings into space. Yes, and those wings have to be pretty big too because you have to design a wing not like the wings that we have on aircraft here that fly transonic or subsonic. In our era, you have to deal with hypersonic velocity, so Mach 5 and above. That means you have to make basically a blunt wing that doesn't really do lift at slow speeds very well. It does lift pretty good at Mach 25, but if you take it down to 500 miles an hour, as they say with the shuttle, of brick with wings. So is the problem that capsules just aren't cool enough? You know... Right, can we make a cool capsule? Well, Scrap Cat in the chat room says, capsules have a huge drawback and that is booster diameter. How many people can you pack in? I think the first few designs can be stretched to get more seats. Although I don't think that that's necessarily true. Look at Blue Origin, the capsule goes over the... I was going to say, you don't necessarily have to do it. I remember some of the early designs in the CST 100 actually had a really thin centaur, and it was wider than the diameter of the centaur was with the CST 100 in the early designs. Oh, is it a very insert situation? Yeah, that too. Something else that I like about Dream Chaser is that ever since they have updated with their cargo version of the Dream Chaser, originally their crewed version of the Dream Chaser would just have the wings sticking out and they would have to compensate and have a special payload adapter, but there would be a weird phases of flight and weird aerodynamic loads on it. But with the new cargo version, the wings are actually going to be folding and it's going to be encapsulated in a payload fairing. So they don't have as many of the new aerodynamic challenges as they would have of flying it without a payload fairing. That's something I like. Even though they are during the launch itself. Yeah, that's interesting. Would you put a crew in something like that where the wings aren't folded out, right? Or you build a space plane. That's actually not a terrible idea. You build something like that, a space plane, but then you have a backup landing system like parachutes. It's going to take extra weight. The idea being if the wings don't fold, come undone, they can still use the core surface to barrel through the atmosphere. Yeah, if I remember correctly, back in the 90s when NASA was developing the crew return vehicle, they sort of had the parasol idea with it, but they also had sort of a backup where if systems went wrong on the crew return vehicle, it would deploy like what's in some small aircraft. It's basically called a ballistic recovery parachute, which it deploys and it brings you straight down from wherever you might be having a problem at. So that'd be pretty neat. I'd like that. I don't know how viable that is, right? Yeah, it might be... What's going to happen if a wing doesn't unfurl and then you slam into that atmosphere, it's a Mach 15 or whatever comes out to you? That's not good. What's the aerodynamic stress on that vehicle? The aerodynamic stress is you're going to break up. Yeah, well, I guess it depends on the state of the wing, and how they fold them and what they can do in those failures. Well, I would say it would probably be too asymmetrical in order for you to put the loads... I would generally agree, but I'm wondering if there's a way... Jason 519, how much heavier are wings than the propulsive landing fuel? I don't know, but I would assume a lot heavier, right? The fuel's got weight, but it's not that heavy. Yeah, it's not structural heavy. The wings are structure, right? They're structure and you've got thermal on them as well to deal with all the thermal loading as you come back into the atmosphere. Space planes look cool. Space planes are the future promised to us in the 50s and 60s. Space planes, from a physics perspective, don't work so well. No, they're evil. They're bad, they're not safe. And while we have this vision of this safe, awesome future space plane in our heads from sci-fi, it's just not viable today. Space planes are not your friends. That's the way to put it. Here's the thing, but something that's not... I think I'm going to draw a line in saying that a suborbital space plane isn't as bad because you don't have the amount of energy going into it as you do an orbital space plane. There's a difference there, right? Just like a regular plane is going to be safer than a space plane and then a suborbital space plane. And a suborbital space plane will be safer than an orbital space plane. Anyhow. Yeah, that's a good way to phrase it. I think too that with some of the unique capabilities that space planes offer, especially being able to return something to hopefully a gentle landing very quickly is enough of a reason to go ahead and do it, even though there might be safety issues and caps that might be safer than a space plane, especially during the flight itself. But just that alone, just with the Dream Chaser cargo, having that ability to return cargo safely in a quickly manner is reason enough to go forward with it. Yeah, and when you're talking cargo, it's a little bit different, right? Because there's not human life at stake. So it would suck to lose the cargo, but still it's a little bit easier to... Cargo doesn't complain. And you're not wrong, right? Sometimes there are biological experiments on the International Space Station. They want to get them back quickly. If you're landing in the middle of the ocean with a capsule, you have to recover it, you have to put it onto a ship, then you have to get out there to pull the biological off. Whereas if you're using a space plane that's landing like an airplane, you can just go up to it, open the door and grab whatever you need right off of it. You're already on land. It's very quick and easy for you to get to, generally speaking. So here's one final point, which is space planes work great on Earth. And they don't... You want to go to Mars, you're going in a capsule. You want to go to Europa, you're going in a capsule. You want to go anywhere else. There's no runway in this very little atmosphere anywhere else. Those wings are basically useless to you anywhere else in the solar system. So, yeah, well, that's true-ish, right? I mean, you could go to Venus. You could bounce off the clouds in Venus, I suppose. This will be disintegrating as you do that. Wouldn't recommend it. Venus, bad place. Not high. If you're going to go to Venus, just walk inside of like a kiln or something. It's a good place to go. Submarine. That is a submarine. Yeah, a submarine that's at 800 degrees, excuse me, 400 degrees Celsius. Alright, so what do you think? If you had an option to go up in a space plane, say Skylon, the other advantage of Skylon, which I didn't mention is, and one of the things I think is pretty cool is that it's single-stage to orbit. The staging process is actually a risky process for the rocket. Removing that risk is a good thing. However, you're also taking all that extra weight up there with you. I mean, there are always these trade-offs. But would you go up on a Skylon? Would you go up on a capsule? How would you like to get all things being equal? How would you like to go to space? A capsule or a space plane or something else? Is there something that we didn't cover that you think makes a whole lot more sense in getting off into space? And I think part of this also comes from the idea that we need to move away from chemical propulsion to get out of our Earth's gravity well. The cold harsh reality is, that's not happening in our lifetime. We do not have the technology to do that. Earth's gravity is insane. Electric propulsion is not doing it. There's just no other real propulsion technology out there. Electric propulsion works in space because you need a vacuum in order to have electric propulsion work correctly. So it cannot work in any sort of an atmosphere whatsoever. So I mean, in chemical propulsion is really the only one we know at the moment that has a certain amount of energy density to it that allows us to actually be able to make it to orbit with that amount of weight that we want to put on orbit. And I'm sorry space elevators are not real. No, they aren't. You know what's cool about space elevators? That they're in stories. Are they in stories? Yeah, there's a couple stories with space elevators. On that note, now that he's ripping on his computer we're going to take a quick break leave your comments on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter wherever you want and speak in the comments when we come back, comments from our last show. Stay tuned, we'll be right back. And welcome back to this show. Now before we get into our comments from our last week show I'd like to give a huge shout out to all the patrons of tomorrow who've dropped to make this specific segment to this episode happen. These are people who have contributed ten dollars or more to this specific episode. Oh, but wait, there's more. We've also got our producers. These are people who've contributed five dollars or more to this episode. And we've got our Patreon plus subscribers. These are people who've contributed two dollars and fifty cents or more. Those last three groups are going to get access to After Dark as soon as we post it online. They also get access to our Hangouts and a bunch of other really cool things. And we've also got our patrons. These are people who've contributed between one penny and two dollars and forty nine cents. Although I am getting a word that you can no longer contribute one penny on Patreon. So, but somewhere in that range they have contributed to this show. So that's all it takes to get your name in the show. If you'd like to find out more information on how you can contribute to the show as of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. All right, Capcom, why don't you take us away. Last week's show was the Lunar Flashlight. Yeah, the one we almost lost. So, yeah, last week's topic was Lunar Flashlight. Oh, that's right. For those who don't know, there was no recording last week. We had to turn to YouTube and rip our own show off of YouTube. Yeah, and then edit that down and make that go. Good times. Doing it right. Everyone stare at Dada. All right. Okay. You hit record this time, right? I saw the lights going around the record deck. Is that because you pushed it? No. Okay. Just making sure. All right. First up, Capcom. First comment comes off of Reddit. This one comes from Brandon Mark. It's pressurized using this in After Dark. It says, a traditional spacecraft versus the CubeSat form factor makes me think of gameteats. How do I pronounce that word? Gamets. For baston. Basically, exactly. Eggs versus sperm. So a woman's body produces only one quality egg each month and nurtures it carefully using lots of resources. So it's made more so that it's fertilized, even more resources to bring it to fruition, and nearly takes a year. Individual eggs, therefore, are very precious and expensive. A man's body, on the other hand, produces hundreds of millions of sperm in the same time frame. And once sent down their path, there are technically no physical requirements from the man's body. Individual sperm, therefore, are ridiculously cheap. I think this analogy fits and has consequences. Cassini, Curiosity, GPS, and giant telecom birds, they're all precious eggs that give great results at great expense. However, the CubeSat phenomenon will also be an important part of space exploration because they're just so simple, easy, inexpensive, comparatively. Quality has a quality all its own. So there you go with this analogy in mind. I can only imagine what NASA's CubeSat PowerPoint presentations might look like. That would be hilarious. It's actually an interesting analogy. It is. There are precious things that are very precious and expensive and there's a lot of effort that goes into them and you should treat them as such and there are other things you're like, just see which ones work. So there is a market for both of them, I think. Absolutely. Next up. The next one comes off of Reddit. This was from Chase Iron One. Quite amazing how they can fit a propulsion system on such a small satellite. I did some research and found that one of the initial plans were to equip it with a solar sail. And there's also the planetary society has their solar sail project. Yeah, light sail. Light sail that they've flown as well. It's actually a little bit amazing how large that gets in such a tiny, tiny package. Yeah. Well, that's because the sail is an extremely very, very thin material. I mean, like micrometers thin. I think it's going to be cool getting these, because right now these CubeSats are mostly Earth bound. Yeah. Right? So they're mostly around Earth, but it's going to be cool when we're able to break from that and send them to the moon, Mars, wherever. Yeah. And, you know, near mortals will be able to send up a CubeSat. You know, it's not going to be a $10 billion project. Be able to send up a little CubeSat and send it to Jupiter and just do whatever you want at Jupiter. I think it's going to be really cool. Yeah. And, you know, just like we were, we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Mars Cube1 is going to probably be, end up being the first interplanetary CubeSat being launched with NASA's Mars Insight Lander to basically act as a communication relay. So, you know, relieve Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey from having to be in position for the landing. So. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is starting to age, too. It's over, it's like 10 to 15. Yeah. Yeah, it's 11 years old. Cool. All right. Next up. The next one comes off of Facebook. This is from Austin Downey. Book of Faces. In regards to the Ariane 5 launch, why do they seem to accelerate faster? Ah, space mic. You want to explain why a rocket gets faster as it jumps off the pad? That would be due to the very large solid rocket boosters that are on the sides of the Ariane 5. Its main engine, its core engine, is what's known as a sustainer engine. It fires at a certain level of power and without those big solid rocket boosters, it actually wouldn't be enough to lift it off the pad. So those very powerful solid rocket boosters are, they're not throttled, but they're designed to fire at a very high rate. And that's why it takes off so fast. So that by the time those solid rocket boosters have spent all of their fuel and are separated from the rest of the booster, the sustainer engine is powerful enough to continue on the rest of the way. And with the fuel, the liquid fuel that has burned within the core stage of the Ariane 5 during the time that the solid rocket boosters were burning helps increase the performance of that sustainer engine as well. And this was kind of the same thing with the space transportation system for the space shuttle. With those giant solid rocket boosters, it was able to lift off the pad fairly quickly. Whereas you watch just about any entirely liquid fueled launch and they take off the pad pretty slowly and it takes a while to get up to speed. And of course as they're burning more fuel and the vehicle becomes lighter, they're able to go faster. But if you have something that has quite a lot of punch like the solid rocket boosters on the Ariane 5, that's why it takes off at such a high speed. The other thing to note is that as the rockets are going through the atmosphere or as they're burning fuel, they're getting lighter. And so as they get lighter, they can move faster because a couple minutes into flight they're half the weight they were before, but those engines are still performing at the same amount of thrust. So they can move an object that's half the weight that it was at the launch pad. So they get faster and faster and faster as they burn off their fuel. Also you can throttle a solid rocket booster but you have to do it by taking out the surface area inside that you're planning to burn. So you can throttle down and throttle up a solid rocket booster. And that's actually something that they did for the space transportation system with the space shuttle. Submissions would require more thrust at the beginning of the burn initially. So you can tactically throttle. I guess the best way to say is you can't dynamically throttle. You could passively throttle a solid rocket booster. You have to cook it in. I just want to throw that out there. You can't do that in real time. I just want to throw that out there because there isn't a semi-ability to do it. There's a lot of hate for solid fuels and I don't know where that comes from. I don't particularly care for them. I don't understand. You get so much performance out of a solid. There's a tremendous amount of energy in them but at the same time there's a tremendous amount of risk in using them as well. There's a tremendous amount of risk in using chemical engines too. But if a chemical engine starts to go wrong you can shut it down. That's true. Assuming that the airport mode allows you to do that. That is a quasi-valid argument except that if something goes wrong and the engine, by the time it's gone wrong it's like 10 milliseconds. You're not shutting that engine down in 10 milliseconds. It's not going to be a thing. You've lost the vehicle. I'm not sure I'd buy that. Also have you seen what happens to solid rocket motors when they go kaboom? Yeah, there's actually a fantastic video. It was a Delta II I believe it is at the Cape and when they go kaboom oh man they go kaboom. That huge plume of material for those who don't know what we're talking about search YouTube for Delta II anomaly and basically Delta II lifted off the pad and at the most inopportune time it lost its solid and it just was raining solid fuel and to your point which is a fair point that solid fuel will continue to burn until it's expended itself. Which means it's raining fire down on like the parking lot it's burning out cars and often that fuel will probably follow the trajectory that all the debris from your rocket is taking which means that if you've got like a capsule there a capsule better be ready to handle trying to figure out how to deploy everything with a whole bunch of solid fuel around it. Yeah, but that's... It's tricky. It's tricky in both scenarios and I'm not... I realize that a lot of rocket scientists don't like solid fuel and that's fine. I accept that, but I think it gets a bad rap. There are certainly issues with it especially Vibe, right? It's a very vibey, noisy, acoustically intense fuel. Yeah, that sucks. You don't want to be a human. I get that. You're right. You can't shut it down. You're right. I don't think that makes chemicals that much safer. I just think that there are different set of constraints that can be near around for chemicals. So if you're smart about it you can actually build a decent vehicle using solids. Yeah. That's my only thing. This episode brought to you by solid rocket fuel! Motors! Mr. McAvar says solids are chemical. I mean... Okay, come on. Let's not split hairs here. Technically, yeah, but that's not how they're defined. It's not how they're defined. Solid liquid I guess would be. No, it's a solid motor or a chemical engine. Right? So you don't have a solid engine. Yeah, and we call it a motor because it has no moving parts. So an engine has moving parts. Well, it can... Yeah, but it can still gimbal. Okay. What? Yeah, a lot of different ones can. Well, they do. And actually, that was... Okay, apparently one like this in comments. There was a Delta IV launch... Hi Capcom. There was a Delta IV launch not that long ago. I just learned that they used to have the two solids on either side where they could gimbal independent of each other. Apparently, they've changed that and they've actually made one locked down. It's just a locked kind of like locked out. And the other one is the one that gimbals because they realized they only need one to steer the vehicle. So ULA implemented a cost saving mechanism. Yeah, I was reading too that instead of when they fly with four solids on the Delta IV, only two of them are capable of gimbaling because they only need that many to gimbal. I did not know that. That's pretty cool. Pretty neat. Yeah. Alright, Capcom. Next one comes off of YouTube. This one comes from Vertical Toasted. You know what I love about science? You almost never see people speak about it with a huge amount of passion. Yeah, without a huge amount of passion. Kind of like that solid... Yeah, we just had a very spirited discussion. And yes, if Dave Mastin were here right now he'd be shaking his head at me. He'd be like, ah, solids. He'd be like, you mere mortal. Same thing with Elon. He'd be like, no, no, you're an idiot. Solid, yeah, no. You fool. I know, I get it. It's an unpopular opinion but just the energy density. Unpopular onion. Energy density, I don't think you should ignore the energy density of a solid loader there. Well, you know, it's okay to be wrong. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Science is fun. Next up. You know Bill Nye of the Science Guys getting his own talk show? Yeah, another one. It's gonna be awesome. It is, it's about debunking the debunkers. Right? The whole conspiracy theory. He's just gonna go in and debunk it with science. Bill Nye saves the world or something. Yeah, I'm super excited for that. for that. I'm really hoping the first episode is about flatterers. That would be great. It doesn't matter. There's nothing you can say that will, you can throw science and math at them. They don't, they can't, they don't comprehend it. So it doesn't work. Yeah. So it's, it's like, you can talk to your blue in the face. You can have all the proof in the world. You could, you could prove gravity exists by dropping an apple and be like, no. So I don't think it's worth it. Yeah. And so when somebody says something about science without enthusiasm, that's like the, that was the first thing I thought of. Science! I feel it's always good to make the point to at least deliver counter points and then let somebody decide about that. I had that happen on a lift ride, not that long ago. I was, I had to use lift to get into work. I use lift now because I can tip in the app and Uber you can. Lift is like Uber. For those of you who are confused as to why I took an elevator to work. Yeah. That would be awesome. We don't have space elevators, but we have work, we have like elevators to work. Horizontal elevators. Or want to be clear. They're called people movers. Is that like another way of talking about the hyperloop? Maybe, no, maybe, no. I'm in this car ride and the, you know, we're going to company X and he realized I worked there. So he starts going off on these conspiracy theories and I refuse to acknowledge, like a lot of people just ignore it and kind of move on. I won't, like if you're gonna engage like that, I'm gonna be like, no, you're wrong. Here's why. Here's the science that backs it up. Well, what about, no, you're wrong. Here's why. Here's the science that backs it up and I will not back down on that. It's so, it was a moderately uncomfortable slash passionate car ride for 45 minutes of, no, you're wrong. Here's the science. No, you're is wrong. Here's the math and the science. Let's do that math together, shall we? So it was a... Did you give him a tip? I did because he did give me a ride. Yeah, so I'm not gonna, I mean, just because, just because he's wrong doesn't mean I'm not gonna tip him. He did do his job. He did do his job. I asked you to do one thing. You did the one thing. That is all I asked of you. That is true. I'm not gonna not tip because I don't think you're smart. Anyhow, moving on. Last comment comes off of YouTube. At least I think it's the last comment. Yeah, okay, good. This one comes from Will Bee. 15 minute episode. Wait, the episodes are getting posted in sections now, aren't they? Yeah, we're trying something new. I don't know if it'll stick, but we're seeing how it works. So as you've noticed, if you go to our tmro.tv slash live page is a calendar of all the guests. We are booked up through November with guests at this point, so I hope you guys like that. We've tweaked the format of the show a little bit, so I'll be doing the interviews and they'll be taking care of the space news. We're also extracting that interview segment. It'll be about 15 to 20 minutes or so and posting it just as its own segment on YouTube. So if you really found that interview interesting and you wanted to share that, but you didn't need to share the rest of space news or comments, you can share just the interview. Or if you wanna see the whole episode, you'll still be able to do that, so you'll have access to both. It'll be a little more, the signal to noise ratio on our YouTube channel is gonna not be as good at this point simply because we've got two of the same thing essentially going up there. But I think you can quickly and easily figure out what's going on. If you really want the whole episode, only the whole episode is being added to our playlist for each season, so that makes it somewhat easy. Then on Facebook, we're actually taking that to another extreme level because Facebook is more like quick snippets of information, right? It's like five minutes or less, just blah! So we're taking space news and slicing each individual news story out as its own video on our Facebook page. So if you wanna just share one of the news stories maybe about how Planet 10 was doing something really cool, you can, you're welcome, you can share just that off of our Facebook page at facebook.com slash tmro.tv. We'll also be posting the full episode on Facebook and possibly, it's just gonna be a whole bunch of stuff. So there's gonna be a lot more noise on Facebook but it gives you an easier ability to share just the specific thing you were interested in on Facebook. So that's what we're trying. It's actually a great deal more effort on our part for all the editing and whatnot. We'll see if it works. Thus far, it's trending like we, you know, we always kinda trend like this on our graphs. This one went beep when we did this and like huge up into the right. So the initial data tells us that this is a good thing. Yes. Maybe we're wrong. We haven't done it for long enough. We'll try it for a little while, see how it works out, see what you guys do or don't like. We always welcome feedback. So just let us know if you like it, hate it. I've already gotten the, this is a great idea. This is the worst idea ever. So we'll listen to you guys and see what works. So there you go. That's our show this week. I like to thank everyone so much for watching and I didn't put our next week's guests into the rundown. So I actually have forgotten who we have next week. Is it Swiss space systems, I believe? It might be. According to the calendar, we're having someone from Generation Orbit come on. Generation Orbit, that's gonna be a fun new one. A new space company talking about what they're doing, building rockets for small sats and nanosats. Awesome. Launchers, launchers. Keeping the theme of really small satellites going. Oh yeah. We had that shot and I'm like, this is really cool. I think this is the future. Let's drive that point home. So yeah, we've got a bunch of different companies coming on the show in the near future and I'm really excited for that one. So stay tuned next week for these who are watching live after dark is up next for everyone else to be available in a few weeks. Thank you and we'll see you next week. Bye bye.