Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - A Little Rocket Company Shoots for the Moon

Episode Date: January 3, 2017

CEO Randa Milliron introduces us to Interorbital Systems, which wants to put your payload in orbit for as little as $8,000. Can they do it?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A little rocket company with big plans, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Rocket geeks prepare to geek out as we tour interorbital systems with Random Milliron. She wants to put your satellite in orbit for as little as the cost of a decent used car. Bill Nye hopes the Falcon 9 rocket is about to return to orbit. He also wishes outgoing NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan well. Bruce Betts and I have yet another beautiful work of space art to give away. This one has a Star Trek and Cosmos heritage.

Senior editor Emily Lakdawalla is back. Happy New Year, Emily. We're getting it off to a good start with your look forward at what's coming up this year around the solar system. Yeah, I can't say I'm sorry to leave 2016 behind and welcome 2017, but at the same time, I'm so sad that this is the last year for the Cassini mission. Sad, but proud, I'm sure. Proud and also really looking forward to this year because it's going to be quite different to past years on the mission. They're already in an orbit that passes really close to the F ring. That means they're getting amazing ring views. They're getting the closest ever looks at several of the little tiny moons embedded in the rings. And then in April, they're going to get into an even closer orbit with the spacecraft in between the rings and Saturn.

They'll determine the mass of the rings directly for the first time. They'll be probing Saturn's magnetosphere in the same way that Juno is probing Jupiter's magnetosphere. It's going to be a really exciting year on Cassini. And it just comes to a sad but proud, like you say, end in September. Project scientist Linda Spilker will be back on the show very soon, probably just in the next few weeks. Now, Cassini is only one of, as I counted, 20, count them, 20 spacecraft exploring the solar system. We're not going to get to cover all of those, but give us another highlight. Well, I think another highlight for me is the fact that OSIRIS-REx is going to be returning to Earth for a flyby also in September.

They'll get a chance to try all their instruments on at Earth at the moon, and it'll be really fun to see those instruments operating. New Horizons is using the year to take observations of tiny Kuiper belt objects, so that'll be super fun. And Juno is going to be continuing its science mission, taking lots of pretty pictures of Jupiter along with its science data. MAVEN has gone into a new phase of the mission where they're going to be helping out other things around Mars. That's right. MAVEN is now in its second Martian year of operations,

which is very important for its mission to study Mars' atmosphere. But at the same time, they've also begun regular data relay for the rovers for the first time. They do two communications passes every two weeks, generally one for each rover. They've already gotten some really high data volume, 700 megabits for one Curiosity pass. And this is so important because those other orbiters

that have been doing this work, they're getting kind of crotchety, right? They're getting older. There's no disguising that. It's kind of funny, though. It's become a joke in my annual blog that every year I predict that we're going to finish the year with one fewer Mars spacecraft. And every year those spacecraft show me up, and I'm so happy to be wrong. Speaking of spacecraft, at Mars, that is, Curiosity doing okay, except for a little

problem with the drill? Yeah, they seem to have developed some little internal debris in one of the motors, the one that advances the drill down toward the ground as they drill. I think that they'll be able to get around this and use the drill again. It's just going to be kind of a painful process to troubleshoot it because it's intermittent. And that's the kind of problem that's really tough to troubleshoot, even at home, much less with a computer on Mars. There is much more to look forward to that Emily summarizes very well in her December 30th blog entry. It's actually a part two of Looking Forward to 2017. You can look for our colleague's contribution, part one. That'd be Jason Davis looking at stuff going on down here on Earth, mostly lots of big rockets getting ready to fly.

Emily, I look forward to talking to you again next week. Me too, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Also helping us start off the new year is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Happy New Year, Bill. The first conversation of 2017.

Oh, it's exciting. It is, Matt, because I think they're going to fly the Falcon 9 in the next week and a half. That's the hope, anyway, and this is a return to flight for that big rocket. You read the news reports that are carefully released. I think they may have filled the tank too fast last time, and the temperature difference between this very cold liquid oxygen and the tank caused it to crack. And then liquid oxygen found a spark someplace and off it went. Man, that was, you know, I drove by that gantry tower when we were in Cape Canaveral for the

launch of Osiris-Rex. That was a real explosion. Falcon 9. Oh, no, I'm sorry. It was a fast fire, but it was a very fast fire. To use Elon Musk's term for it. And so I'm really hopeful that they're back to flight because that means then the Falcon Heavy will maybe fly in the next few months. And that means LightSail 2 will fly again. On the second Falcon Heavy. Yeah. On the second Falcon Heavy, yeah. Yeah, and they'd released that image, the first ever image of a piece of the Falcon Heavy. So I guess it's moving forward, fingers crossed.

It's a big thing. You know, everybody, the Atlas V had how many engines, Matt? Three? I'm sorry, I just said Atlas V. This is how you end your career saturn five had how many engines five five yes ones the falcon nine had how many has how many engines 27 that's the falcon heavy has oh i'm sorry nine of course that's why it's the falcon nine it really is a different approach to rocket design and using a standard engine over and over. But when you start to lift

something as heavy as the Falcon Heavy is intended to lift, you end up with a lot of engines. And so you just wonder if your reliability is going to stay high. And you got trying to light that many fires at the same time. But one test is worth a thousand expert opinions. I've read they can lose one or two of those as long as there isn't a fast fire in one and they can still probably achieve orbit. So, you know, it's a cool idea. What's the best of luck to them? Not that they need luck. Best of success.

Before you go, a word about Ellen Stofan. Oh, yes. We love her. She was the chief scientist at NASA until a couple of weeks ago. She finally retired. She was great. or she is great. She really advanced science and exploration. And for us at the Planetary Society, kept the eye on the prizes of discovering life on another world.

And let's do real science. Let commercial companies do the hauling of stuff, of material to low Earth orbit. And NASA do the exploring out farther and deeper into space. So best of luck to Ellen Stofan in her next endeavor. And I hope we'll get her back on Planetary Radio before too long. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Happy New Year.

Happy New Year again to you as well. That's Bill Nye. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill Nye, He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill Nye the science guy. On now to a little place that is building big rockets out in the Mojave Desert. We did a feature not long ago about subcontractors, the thousands of small and not-so-small companies that make the millions of

components that allow us to reach and explore space. But there are also companies that are going it more or less alone. Interorbital Systems is one of them. IOS is a neighbor of the Spaceship Company and other aerospace pioneers that call the Mojave Air and Spaceport home. When I visited them on a windy morning last October, I was greeted at the front door by CEO Randa Milliron. Randa and her husband, iOS Chief Technology Officer Roderick Milliron, founded the organization just over 20 years ago. Since then, they have steadily pursued a singular vision,

get their own and clients' payloads into Earth orbit and beyond as inexpensively as possible, relying on the simplest possible technologies and approaches. It has been a long, long haul that Randa, Roderick, and their small staff believe they are on the edge of success, and a lot of clients around the world are along for the ride. We began with a tour of the shop floor. It could have almost been any machine shop, except... Right behind you is a cool-looking rocket. Yeah, it is. It's a flown rocket, actually. It's our first flight test vehicle.

It's a CPM. That's the core component of all our rocket systems. A common propulsion module, meaning it has an engine, it has propellant tanks, it has a payload section, also has a brain. We use these in bundles to create all the subsequent Neptune series rockets that we'll be using in various missions. So it can fly on its own or, and there are some really great illustrations on your website that show these big cubes, basically, of these units bundled together. Yeah, that's a wonderful concept that we discovered, you know, many, many decades

ago. I believe it was in Popular Science. It was a story about Lutz Kaiser from O-Trog, the German company from the 1970s, and he had come up with the idea of mass-producing identical single modules and bundling them to meet various mission requirements. We thought that was brilliant, you know, and he was actually the first person that I could think of who decided to use commercial off-the-shelf parts for his rockets. He famously used Volkswagen windshield wiper motors to turn valves or something like that. But we were so impressed with his ingenuity and his game-changing concept that we thought, wow, this is great. This guy can do this. Maybe someday we can do this sort of thing. It's a fascinating story, which I had never heard of this work. And we'll talk

about it maybe a little bit more later. If iOS had as a motto, it probably isn't keep it simple, stupid, but the, you know, kiss. But that does seem to be the guiding principle here. Yeah, it's radical simplification of systems. And that yields less parts, less things to fail, less cost. That simple system is in and of itself more robust because of that sort of safety factor that you get with using simplified systems that are contained in these CPMs and avoiding using really expensive and failure-prone parts like pumps and other things that people feel are required on a rocket. This is a simplification. It's a radicalization in terms of going to the essence

of what a rocket is. And when you say pumps, you're talking about those. They're amazing pieces of technology, the turbo pumps that we see on almost all other liquid-fueled rockets. And this is a liquid-fueled rocket. So if you don't have pumps spinning at amazing speeds, how do you get your fuel and oxidizer out the rear end? Well, there are a variety of ways, and pressurization is the simplest way. We use pressurized, in some cases nitrogen, in some cases helium, pressurized gas to push the propellants through the rocket into the combustion chamber. That is one of the ways that we keep costs down and that we can have a vehicle that can be easily mass produced without having to go through either buying those radically

expensive things like turbo pumps or building them in-house. And again, that's very labor intensive, very, very time-consuming. We're looking for really something that we can turn these things out like sausages. The most Spartan type of vehicle that has been developed to date. And again, I do owe a lot to the OTROG concept of making these identical modules with standard industrial methods. And again, I guess I should also give credit. I guess we are standing on the shoulders of giants. There was a study done called the Minimum Cost Design Study at Aerospace Corporation. I think it was in the 60s.

And there are many of those concepts that we also incorporate to the design philosophy that drives all this, like using standard industrial methods, maybe borrowed from other industries like shipbuilding, you know, because if you say aerospace and you're trying to price something out immediately, the price skyrockets, you know, they'll quote you like 10 times what it should be in a normal world, right? That's one method. And also don't use exotics. We use standard industrial chemicals for our propellants, so we don't have to pay $100 or $1,000 a pound, but pennies on the dollar for the propellants that we use.

In terms of making this, the whole con ops of this simple decided to avoid spaceports, first for the tremendous cost involved in that, second for the scheduling problems that happen when you have to get in that spaceport line. Third, we wanted freedom to launch on demand, essentially, and to give our customers a variety of orbits. We chose to go to the ocean to do our launches. So I guess we've combined OTROG, minimum cost design, ocean launch, and that's given us our winning system. And behind us here, I cut it out of the corner of my eye as I walked in, there's a whiteboard, and on it is a drawing of a partially submerged rocket,

which I assume it doesn't have to be simple to see. There's Sea Launch, which is not exactly a simple system, but this looks like it is. Yeah, well, Sea Launch used to call us Mini Sea Launch. And it is. It is that. Our spaceport is what you see in that little drawing. It's a rocket sitting in the water with a ballast unit, and that's the spaceport. We can take it anywhere we like.

We'll be licensed for a particular latitude and longitude. This gives us the savings of millions and millions of dollars over trying to launch out of, again, some federal spaceport that is in a fixed position and can only offer customers certain inclinations. Here we can move this, and it is a completely mobile type of launch arrangement. It just gives customers more options in terms of the types of orbits that we can deliver to them. You mentioned chemicals off the shelf as well. Turpentine. as well. Turpentine. Yes, yes, arty, right? Well, turpentine is our, well, it's a hydrocarbon,

not too terribly different from like kerosene or some of the other propellants that are in use. Very dense, has a high density specific impulse, as does our oxidizer, which is white fuming nitric acid. And again, a standard industrial chemical used, actually used in making a carbon composite. It's kind of interesting that the propellant is housed in something that's made from it as well. Because you've got a composite tank. Yeah, we have, well, yeah, yeah, we do. We have composite structures. All these vehicles will be made of carbon composite that is wound. We've developed a filament winder over here on the other side. Want to take a look at that? Yeah, sure. Let's walk over there. Yeah, that's the key to making really robust but lightweight tankage.

This is a pretty simple rig that we're standing in front of, and there's something that looks like an aluminum tank. Yeah, it's an aluminum shell, and then we wind the carbon filament around it in various patterns that give us strength akin to the strength of steel. Also, for rocket purposes, not only is it strong, but it's light. And that's always the problem when you're making a rocket. You make it light enough, but then you have to make it strong enough to withstand all the forces that are at play.

That's why they make professional tennis rackets out of them now. Yeah, yeah, really, really. And this is an in-house project here. We've designed this large tank manufacturing unit. We can actually vary the length of the tanks, 22 feet up to 30 feet, and various diameters. And it's kind of like a little robot. The guys you met, Owen and Bryant. They're hiding out around the corner now. They're hiding out around the corner. These are the guys who are responsible for putting this

unit together and writing a lot of the software that drives it. This is kind of a secret weapon, I guess, in terms of mass production. This helps us get to the point where we can turn out many tanks a day, then have those kind of stored on our shelf so we can do the commercial off the shelf thing, but we stock our own shelves with the components. So it's a company that's really completely vertically integrated, more so than any that I know of at this point. And this was no small challenge because up until not that many years ago, the big guys, the big aerospace contractors, were really having trouble trying to make stuff like this out of composite. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That was a huge breakthrough in, well, in aviation and in space, you know, and tennis rackets, as you point out. For us, it's, you know, it's our little robot

here, you know, and this will be one of many that are turning out the tankage. So if we are called upon to do, say, a rapid response type of mission, we would be able to pull those tanks off the shelf, bundle them in various configurations. Like a Neptune 3 would have three CPMs bundled. A Neptune 5 would have five. And a Neptune 8, which we're using in our Google Lunar XPRIZE mission. The Neptune 8 Luna, that is eight, eight of those CPMs with an enhanced engine. We're wholly into this modular thing. Everything is modular that we design. We have one set of tankage. It's identical. We have an engine that is identical. It's a 7,500-pound thrust engine for the standard CPMs. We bundle those to give us the requisite thrust that we need to lift a particular type of payload to a particular altitude.

So all of these identical little Lego parts we have there ready to assemble. have there ready to assemble with the the ocean launch aspect of that too we can do a really rapid turnaround and we could be ready with a rocket within a week we're currently in flight test phase now so we're testing the single units going through our licensing and various analyses that we need to do to get all of that to happen for our orbital missions. Also, we're doing actually a space altitude mission prior to the orbital mission, so that'll be a ballistic flight, a suborbital space altitude flight. That'll also be launched from the ocean? Yeah, yeah.

We want to start doing everything from our main center of operations, which will be the water. We're at a really critical phase now, and it's exciting and terrifying and, you know, all of those things. Well, space is hard, which we'll probably come back to when we sit down in a few minutes. But anything you want to say about the business end of the CPM, the rocket engine? Yeah, the rocket engine is designed by Roderick Milliron, my husband and co-founder of the company, and the CTO here and really the brains behind all these systems. Who has passed by a couple of times getting work done. He's actually working on the next iteration of this rocket.

So not only is he a designer, but he taught himself to machine, and he makes the initial parts. He makes the prototypes. That's kind of an interesting opportunity for any engineer to be able to design while making the part. Also, change it if something looks like it should be slightly different. This gives him a lot of freedom in doing what he does best. When we started doing our rocket work, we started with engines. If you don't have an engine, you don't have a rocket. We've seen people in the industry go the opposite way, starting with a large rocket or plane and then trying to fit an engine into that existing body. And sometimes

have to change what engine they're going to use in in midstream. Or they're stuck and they can't change, you know, so then they try to seek another path. But we started with the engines and the propulsion systems, and that was 20 years ago with the Pacific Rocket Society, Experimental Rocket Society. Got a good friend who works with them. Oh, yeah. The whole kind of framework of that group, one of the longest standing experimental rocket groups in the world, that was to push regular folks into the opportunity to make real functioning liquid rocket engines. So this was a fabulous mentor setup.

We had people from Aerojet, Marquart. set up. We had people from Aerojet, Marquart, these are the old companies, North American, you know, the people who made the original rockets. Those people were our mentors, you know, and it was all hands-on and it was completely fabulous. You know, there's a test site and also a site we still use for our test flights north of Mojave. That was a fantastic opportunity for all the people involved. Many of the people involved there have now gone on to make rocket companies of their own. You know, that group and that area still exist for experimentation. Yeah, they're still flying rockets out of there, right? Yes.

I don't know of anywhere else in the world where you can do that sort of thing if you're not a government entity. To do that as a private citizen is one of the great things of being an American, I suppose. I don't know. But this is really one of the only places that that can happen. You've heard of a tube sat, maybe? But I know you've heard of a cube sat. Cube sats, yes. Tube sats, not until I started to learn about you folks. Yeah, we invented the TubeSat. It's another form factor of a Pico satellite. This is the class of these tiny, and I do like to call them handheld because you can see it fits in the palm of your hand.

We do the same with light sails sometimes. Yes, yes. You know, that's probably the best STEM tool ever invented. And we have, at this point, I think something like 30 or 40 school systems around the world that are using our kits as the center of their curricula. And then over here is obviously a tube set. That's a tube set. Yeah, a tube set is different from a cube set. It's more cylindrical. Cube set also has an internal chassis.

That's sort of the frame, right? Yeah. But the TubeSat has no frame. It's made completely of circuit boards. So it's lighter. But it gives you almost the same amount of payload space. It's about 250 grams of, you know, put your app in there, whatever it is. You know, whether it's a camera or a micrometeoroid counter or whatever

it might be, or some art project, you know. Art project. I saw that on the website. I'll ask you about that. But also using a lot of off-the-shelf parts, like your radio equipment. In fact, when the CubeSats were originally invented by Bob Twiggs and Jordy Busuari. It was an attempt to find a low-cost student satellite that could be built, you know, was simple enough to be built, cheap enough to be built. They went with off-the-shelf items because these satellites were not meant to last

for, you know, five or ten years. They were supposed to be short lifespan items that, you know, would go up to prove a point or do an experiment or whatever it might be. And I remember Bob talking about the fact that everybody was laughing at him at first, like, what can you do with that little thing, you know? And then suddenly it's like everybody wants them, you know, the military wants them, you know, every sector of academia and the corporate world wants at least one CubeSat. We call them personal satellites,

right? Or a constellation, you know, or several constellations. So that is really the fastest growing sector in the whole aerospace industry. To date, we have 135 payloads booked on our manifest. Absolutely amazing. Yeah, it is. And I keep thinking that each one of those payloads is very likely spurring at least one company, if not more, because there's usually a group of people involved in putting them together. So it's just going to get more intense and more stuff for us to launch, right? But also school districts, right at the top of the launch manifest, my alma mater, UCI, sat? at the top of the launch manifest, my alma mater, UCI, sat? Yes, yes, yes. From, you know, from the universities, you know, all the way down through middle schools,

some in Brazil, you know, mentored by their space agency, others in the U.S., in Moldova. It's astonishing when I do take a look at that list and see, you know, how many countries are represented and how many age groups and how many sectors of thought. It's largely science, but it's also music, art, advertising. Burial service? We offer that. We haven't had anybody on board yet, but that's an option. You can buy a tube set there and fill it up with as many relatives as you like, and we'll be happy to launch them. Randa Milliron, CEO of Interorbital Systems in the Mojave Desert. I'll sit down with her for a fascinating conversation when we return.

This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show.

I hope you'll join us. Hi, I'm Kate. And I'm Whitney. We've been building a youth education program here at the Planetary Society. We want to get space science in all classrooms to engage young people around the world in science learning. But Kate, are you a science teacher? No.

Are you? Nope. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom. As a first step, we're building the STEAM team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort, check out planetary.org slash steam team. That's planetary.org slash steam team and help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Random Mill Iron is showing us around

Interorbital Systems, the company she founded with her husband, Roderick, in 1996. We've made our way back to her office where she is surrounded by space mementos, bric-a-brac, and a few pieces of prototype hardware that they hope to send into orbit, and maybe to the moon in the next year or so. And sitting at a table that is shared by this very interesting model. Tell me about this. Yeah, this is a model of the Neptune 5. It's a five-module orbital rocket dedicated for small sat use. It'll lift about 50 kilograms worth of payload. Over 100 pounds for those of us stuck in the English system. And we could lift probably 50 small satellites on this. We have a deployment unit that's sort of like a, I guess if you look

at a revolver, you know, like a cartridge set up where each of the satellites inhabits its own little payload bay or like a beehive sort of thing, a little cell for its ride to space. And then it's ejected individually out of those slots of the payload berths. But that sits at the top of this configuration of the five bundled modules. This rocket works in a different sort of way. It uses what's called parallel staging, and these outer four CPMs, or modules, serve as the first stage. When they're depleted, there's another exactly the same unit inside there nested within those four that is the second stage, essentially. So those outer CPMs, they fall away and that other stage takes over.

Right. And the rocket you see out in the other room that we looked at, that initial CPM, that's actually the second stage of our orbital launch vehicle. So we've flown our second stage already. I kind of like to think that's a pretty good technology demonstration to show that we're on the right track of being able to do space launch. As I said, we're still in our test phase. We expect our launch licenses and all the permissions we need to come in after the test flight series, which should be sometime around, I would say, the second quarter of 2017. So we're looking to go operational for orbital launches then. In the meantime, we have some buildup, a high-altitude suborbital launch or a space altitude launch that will go to our normal area of operation. That's a 310 kilometer orbit, circular polar orbit. We chose that because we

would intentionally limit the lifespan of the satellites. We don't want to create space debris, but we want to give people enough time to do whatever experimentation they need to do. So they'd be up for some number of weeks? Yeah, somewhere between three weeks and three months we're looking at. And that depends on solar activity or space weather. If the sun's very active, it'll heat the atmosphere and cause it to expand. And because that's a pretty low orbit, it'll increase drag on the tiny satellites. They will come in faster. Yep. Yeah. And this is also why light sail, when it was in low Earth orbit, it was in space, but there was still so much drag that it didn't stay up for long. Yeah.

Only about a week. But I love the whole concept. And, of course, a polar orbit means that your customers, their spacecraft are going to see the entire Earth as it revolves or rotates under them. Exactly. And that's why it's such a popular orbit for Earth observation. In the case of our personal satellite kits, right, and the people who build them, it gives those people an opportunity to contact their spacecraft with three good passes where they can actually have, you know, if they need to uplink or downlink, whatever it is they want to send or receive, they have that opportunity. It covers the world in sort of a, I've seen it described as orange-shaped wedges. We like to call it the new industrial zone, polar orbit.

For a new industrial revolution. It has. Have you flown, I don't think you have yet, have you? You called it the CPM 2.0s, those four quad units. And in fact, we were refitting the original CPM, which we flew. That carried four payloads on test flights and suborbital flights. But they were people who were building their satellites for the orbital launches, wanted to make sure that they could withstand the rigors of flight and the g-forces and vibration.

So we carried four test units, one of which was from the maker of the satellite for light sail for Boreal Space. That was Barbara Plants' company. Love Barbara. Yeah, Barbara's great. Hi, Barbara. But it actually provided real flight data from the satellite. Again, that's suborbital flight, flight data from the satellite, again, a suborbital flight, but still usable when configuring the actual experiment for in-space use. These rockets, even the ones, the individual CPMs that

are used as sounding rockets or research rockets have value, you know, not only for us so we can see how they're performing, but for our clients to check the stability and the strength of their own satellite designs. We've said it before. We say it all the time on this show. Everybody says it in the industry. Space is hard. You've been at this for 20 years now.

You're still going. Yes. But you're surrounded here at the Mojave Air and Spaceport by companies that gave it a shot and are no longer around. I mean, I told you earlier coming in, I was happy to see that that Roton rotary rocket, the prototype, is still sitting over there, even though the company is long gone. And you've had other neighbors come and go.

You guys are still at it. How are you able to hang in? I guess we'll be the last ones standing. We have a concept that really has legs. It's something that should have been brought to market many, many decades ago. But it faced many political challenges. And you're talking about that O-Trog attempt in the 1970s? Right.

political challenges. And you're talking about that O-Trog attempt in the 1970s? Right. That, you know, nobody who's making, you know, 60 or 70 million dollars a pop on a launch wants to see that kind of revenue go away. But what the modular systems of the O-Trog system, or now the Neptune system, which is the evolved O-Trog system, what that means in terms of cutting costs. And, you know, people like to throw around the D word, disruptive technology, but this truly is. We're looking at offering orbital launches for, dare I say it, $500,000. Please do. I wanted to get to that next. I'm from the Planetary Society, let's just say hypothetically, and I do not speak for the Planetary Society when it comes to this kind of thing. We're some non-profit or university or

whatever. You've got that long manifest of places that they don't even have half a million dollars. I want to put up a one-unit CubeSat or the smallest TubeSat. I give you a call. What happens and how much do you tell me that's going to cost? Well, when I mentioned the $500,000, that's for the whole manifest. I'm sorry, the payload potential of this particular rocket. You get the whole rocket to yourself for half a million. Yeah, you would get that whole payload space. If you're coming up on a rideshare, most of our flights are configured as rideshares,

you could pay as little as $8,000 for a tube set kit and launch. Not only do you get the launch, but you get a kit to teach you how to build your own satellite. And that's our academic price. And it's not much more if you're a corporate entity, government entity, military entity. It's twice the academic price. You know, like students get a student price on software, right? Yeah, of course. So they get a student price on this.

Most of the people involved here come out of the academic world. I'm a teacher. Rod's been a teacher. A lot of the other people are. We like to see actual hands-on work results that can be measured and can be savored, right, in this case, you know. Good educational principles. But for the benefit of the audience members who are now shaking their radios or their smartphones because they think there was some kind of a dropout there, you said $8,000 for a spacecraft and the launch that gets

it into low-earth orbit. Now, you have to build it yourself. Okay. But there's the kit. It comes with a very extensive guide. There's also a very active forum of people who are doing nothing but building our kits. They help if there's a problem. And we have people on staff who also help.

It's something that I always say, you know, if I were a sixth grader today and I had a chance to build a satellite, you know, I mean, it's something you'd kill for, right? You know, for 8,000, I mentioned that figure to one of my colleagues at the office yesterday. And he said, what? You're kidding. Let's do it. And this was, again, not somebody who decides what payloads the Planetary Society might put in space. Well, I think it's also the perfect Christmas gift, right? Well, it's certainly more within reach than the people who want to take whole human beings up, even though that's also getting cheaper. So you have this manifest.

You said over 100 now lined up. As of today, there are 135. We just signed on a Polish group called Sat Revolution. They were a gaming company and they decided to move into space-based communication, internet, things of that nature. And this is the first one that they're going to launch with us. And it looks like there'll be many more, in fact, a constellation. So this is the kind of the new trend. People start with one and then it ends like there'll be many more, in fact, a constellation. So this is the kind of the new trend. People start with one, and then it ends up in, you know, 100 and 200 satellite constellations. Must be addicting. But it's also, you know, in terms of cost, you're not spending

billions and billions of dollars on one monolithic, big iron kind of satellite, well, they call it disaggregation. You're taking that apart and assigning all the functions to little portions of an array or like a swarm of robots. Yeah, yeah. So if something breaks down on one, you can assign its function to another. It's also not such a headable target, you know, in terms of space war and things of that nature.

If somebody wants to take out your company's satellite, it'd be harder if you've got it spread out among... If you've got 50 or 60 more of them up there. Little robots, right? Yeah. Space art. How might an artist make use of a spacecraft? Well, there are various ways. I consider myself a space artist also, and there's a piece of space art down there against the wall. I actually had an exhibition of space art at the KGB gallery in LA. Now, this looks like a piece of rocket hardware that went

through something it shouldn't have. Well, yeah. And again, you know, art is one of a kind, won't happen again. In that case, that was a sort of a steel pyramid that was made to cover a piece of equipment that we were also testing during a launch. But that was subjected to the 7,500 pounds of thrust and 5,000 plus degree flame that hit it. And you can see that that pyramid is now a beautifully twisted and mangled piece of art that will grace my wall here soon. I haven't put it back up since I brought it in from the exhibition. That's my kind of art. Yeah, yeah. I think it's fantastic.

It's kind of action art, I guess, you know, the result. And there's a piece in the corner that was a friend of ours was making solid rockets. And he launched it and it exploded in midair and it ignited the aluminum and melted it in a really fabulous way. Yep. Yeah. It was twisted and beautiful.

And again, one of a kind. I had him sign it because I thought it was magnificent. Looking at that piece of exploded, literally exploded aluminum, again, space is hard. Yeah. You would hope to do this sooner. Like most people who do this, it's taking longer than you expected. You think this is, I mean, you were talking about this happening possibly next year, 2017. Is it realistic? Are you going to be able to pull this off? It's realistic if all our tests go as planned and all our paperwork gets through in a way that's timely.

Yeah, I think that's a realistic date for us. So we're looking also during 2017 to do a lot. I mean, we have a lot on our plate. We have a Google Lunar XPRIZE flight. Next thing I was going to ask you about. That we are trying to finish there before the end of the year. We have a precursor lunar impactor flight that we're doing with Ed Belbruno. He's an orbital designer. He did the Hi-10 mission, saved that mission.

Yeah, the Japanese mission. Yeah, his company's innovative orbital design. But we're working on something that we'd love to do somewhere around the third quarter after we do our first orbital launch. Third quarter of 2017. Yeah, to do a lunar impact with a, it's called an N3, a Neptune 3, just a brute force mission to hit the moon and to be the first commercial companies that do that. Also, it's a test mission for our trajectory, our communication. So all the things that will go into the actual Google Lunar XPRIZE prize attempt. And who are you working with for the Google Lunar XPRIZE? We're in Team Synergy Moon, and we just had our launch contract verified by the XPRIZE.

Which is a big deal. Are there only, I think, three of you now? There are only three now. We went to Tel Aviv for the summit, Google Lunar XPRIZE summit, and it was hosted by one of the other teams who had their contract verified. That was Space IL, the Israeli team. Moon Express also has a contract. Maybe there will be four at the end of the year. Another big challenge, of course, getting your launch certified, big step. But what these are going to be required to do on the moon, pretty tough challenge. Yeah, and some people think bigger is better, but we think the opposite. And we have a very, very tiny rover, which is based on one that is used by the military and made by Recon Robotics. It's called a throwbot.

I don't know if you've seen pictures of it. Guys will throw the – Yeah, like infantry will throw it into a building through a window. It has a camera and other things, and it can report and move around. So we're working on modifying that for moon use, but we're using that as a little sentinel that goes out from a base station, which is a lander. It's kind of a hack on the Luna 9 mission that the Russians did to the moon. It has pedals that fold down.

Yes, yeah. The throwbot will be emerging from that in a way that I won't describe yet. But hopefully will be acceptable. So silly question because you wouldn't be in this otherwise, but you think you can win this? Yeah, yeah. I wish we had another year, you know, but you know, that's always the case. But we've been working on this rocket system for a long time. It was always intended to be kind of augmentable or transform it from its single unit into as many units as were required for the mission. You said it's the N8?

Yeah, the vehicle configuration that we'll use for the Google Lunar XPRIZE prize attempt flight is called the Neptune 8 Luna, and it's an eight-module variant of the Neptune series. It's equipped with enhanced engines. I mentioned before our standard engine is 7,500 pounds of thrust. This is a 20,000 pound thrust engine. So we'll group eight of those, carry our very small payload to the surface of the moon.

It's roughly about 25 pounds, something like that to the surface. But it takes a lot, a lot of effort, a lot of thrust, a lot of power to lift even the tiniest amount. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. Exactly, exactly. And you're thinking beyond that. I saw on the website a sample return spacecraft? Yeah, we've always looked at the moon as a destination that we would commercially exploit and colonize. That was just a given. In fact, the year we founded Interorbital Systems as a for-profit company, we founded Translunar Research

as a scientific nonprofit. And that was always for not only that commercialization and the colonization of our moon, but for the moons in the solar system. So it's important to us to not just stay here, but to go out and out and out. Yeah, we feel the same way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of our destiny. And in fact, you get a discount right now if you want to put a down payment on your own moon rock.

That's right. You can pay 10% for the privilege of buying a portion of the booty that we bring back for the moon, right? We're looking at 2018 for that. And we do have... Gosh, I'm sorry. That still seems so ambitious. I mean, a sample return.

How many times has that been done? Count on one hand, right? Yeah. But at that point, we will have gone to the moon twice, hopefully, already. So this would be a rocket-back sort of a deal. We have a lander, and the central portion of that would be the little collection unit. How about human spaceflight?

Yeah. Our original idea in founding both these companies was to be able to fly ourselves and to go to the moon and other destinations. We like Venusus a lot too well you don't want to land there don't you want to be like a cloud you know i have an article in ad astra i think it's from like 2004 probably called the floating cities of venus definitely science fiction that's uh no not really no there's a said there's an area in the the venusian atmosphere that is uh earth-like we've talked about it on this show, as a matter of fact, and putting a balloon there or a research platform with humans on it. Or a floating city, right?

But then there's the red planet. I mean, you know, not too far from here, Elon Musk just talked about flying 100 people at a time on rockets. He can cover that. I'd like it, too. I'd like to visit there. You know, when you're looking for something to terraform, you want to go where there's an abundance, not a scarcity.

And in terms of Venus, you know, it's too much of everything, right? Yeah, yeah. But you've got all the components for life support in terms of you can pull oxygen out of the atmosphere, you can pull a variety of uh

all the all the things you need to build the civilization essentially or to live off the land even though you're in the you know the cloud layer right you've got an earth-like zone and there that can be used so we're we're we're excited about that we're planning a uh i guess it would be the first private sector venus mission well. We're busy. Busy, and your rocket's currently small, won't stay that way. Your payload's small, but you're thinking real big. Does that say something about why you and Rod got into this in the first place? Could be, could be.

I mean, we always had the vision to do this. We wanted to do it. It was a personal love of all things space. So I think that drives all our thinking. You know, you start small, right? But at least you start. One step at a time. Brenda, I have thoroughly enjoyed my visit. And it's fun talking with you as well. I sure hope, obviously, if these things come together as you plan and hope they will next year, I look forward to talking again. Look forward to it as well, definitely. Randa Milliron, CEO of Interorbital Systems at the Mojave Air and Spaceport.

We've got great images, video, and links on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. In December, a Japanese cargo transfer vehicle carried Tancredo 1 to the International Space Station. Starting with an interorbital systems tube set kit, the tiny spacecraft was built by middle school students in Brazil. It's the first iOS hardware to reach Earth orbit. Time to close out the first Planetary Radio episode of 2017 with What's Up? And Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, has joined us yet again. Happy New Year, Guy. Happy New Year, Matt. What's up? And Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, has joined us yet again.

Happy New Year, guy. Happy New Year, Matt. There's all kinds of good stuff going on, and I hope it's going to be a good year in space. How's the night sky starting out? Well, it's starting out good. If you like your bright planets, still got Venus hanging out, just dominating the western sky in the early evening, looking like a super bright star and to its upper left, much, much dimmer, orange-Mars-ish

Mars-ish, orange-ish Mars. Yeah, and then in the pre-dawn, we've got Jupiter already, it's actually rising late evening, middle of the night, and then is up high in the south in the pre-dawn. I wonder if we can get Crayola to come out with a crayon that's Mars orange. Well, you work on that. Meanwhile, we move on to this week in space history. 2004, two events happened this week at nearly the same time.

We had stardust flying through the coma of a comet, later returning those samples to Earth, and the Spirit Rover landing on Mars. That was one of the greatest moments on this radio show when I was talking live with a guy with the Stardust mission, and he saw it re-enter the atmosphere as we were talking. Wow. It was a very cool moment. On to random space. What was that little rumble at the end there?

That's my giant dog. Sing along, giant dog. That's Max. In honor of going to the arbitrarily defined new year, but the length of a year is not arbitrary. It's one orbit around the sun. A Pluto year is more than 90,000 days long. Yeah, that's a long, long year. That's a lot of days.

Move on to the trivia contest. Who was the earliest born human to reach space using the FAI definition of 100 kilometers. And this one's all complicated. How did we do? We had a really nice response, I think, because of the prize. Normally, it's kind of reduced in between the holidays or among the holidays here. This one, we got a good turnout.

You were talking about arbitrary limits or thresholds. And I guess this is also kind of one of them, right? The Karman? The Karman line, named after von Karman, the rocket science kind of guy who was at JPL. But it actually turns out when I was looking into it as a bit of a physical basis, maybe I'll talk about it in the future, that gets you where you balance things like lack of lift with lack of atmosphere and orbital velocity and stuff like that. But still, it comes out to 98 point something kilometers.

I said, hey, let's make it 100. Yeah, this is why von Karman, they named an auditorium after him because he was a smart guy. He did a lot of stuff. But yes, this is the arbitrary definition of where space starts, because, of course, the atmosphere blends into space. But it did have a little tiny bit of physical basis. Random.org picked out Vicki Knorr in Louisville, Kentucky,

as this week's winner if she got it right. And I'm pretty sure she did, because this is the answer we got from virtually everybody. Vicki, only been listening since May, has become a very enthusiastic listener to the show. Someone inspired, too. She let me know a couple of weeks ago that she is going back to school as an aerospace major. So good on you, Vicki. She said, Joe Walker, Joseph A. Walker, born February 20, 1921, that's about five months before John Glenn, was the pilot of the first two space plane flights.

He's talking about the X-15, of course, making him the first born human in space. Yes, indeed. If you go to orbital, as people may have mentioned, then it's Georgi Beregovoy. Well, as people may have mentioned, then it's Georgie Beragovoy. I'm sure I pronounced his name wrong, who flew on Soyuz 3 in 1968. He was born about three months after Joe Walker. And then comes John Glenn. Vicki, you are going to get that really terrific print from Marilyn Flynn, one of the space artists who was on the show just a couple of weeks ago. Saturn from the surface of Titan.

It is spectacular. And we've got a very similar prize this week. So stay tuned for that. We had a celebrity entrant, our friend Mark Raymond of the Dawn mission, now orbiting Ceres, actually been orbiting Ceres for ages. He said the earliest born human to reach space was Joseph Walker. flew an X-15 above 100 kilometers on two occasions back to back. He says, I presume he was the earliest born organism of any type to reach space, parentheses, except perhaps for some unfortunate and unknown ones,

blasted into space by devastating asteroidal or protoplanetary impacts. Yeah, we don't have their names. I'm sorry. And I told you that Beragoy would come up again. Mark is like the ultimate space fan, as you may know. Many years ago, he got Beragoy's autograph as the earliest born human to reach orbit. Pretty cool, Mark. As you may know, many years ago, he got Bergovoi's autograph.

Oh, wow. Yeah, the earliest born human to reach orbit. Pretty cool, Mark. That's just part of his amazing collection. We got more. Ilya Schwartz in Columbia, Maryland. The earliest born woman, Valentina Tereshkova, born in 1937. Also the first woman in space, right?

Indeed, yes. This answer from Dave Oliver, he says, actually, the real answer is Icarus. Did Icarus pass the Kármán line? Probably, yeah. Probably a lot closer with that whole sun thing. Not enough sunscreen. And finally, Kurt Lewis in Missouri, Texas, Missouri City, Texas, wants to know if we know of a slightly used X-15 for sale. No. Check eBay.

That's got everything else. We're ready for next week's contest and another amazing prize. Which is longer? Back to our theme of years. Which is longer, a Jupiter year or how long Planetary Radio has been airing? That's great. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Are we older than a Jupiter year? You have this time until

the 10th. That would be January 10th of the new year, 2017 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. Here's the prize we have from our friend Rick Sternbach, who, of course, is the space artist, science fiction designer, illustrator, worked with Michael Kuda to give Star Trek basically the look it had for decades, beginning with Star Trek Next Generation. Rick has donated a print which I think you have seen. I have. Isn't it something? Yes, it is. It's called

Molten Earth, and it actually ended up as a set piece on Star Trek The Next Generation, although he did it for the original Cosmos series with Carl Sagan. It is pretty spectacular, and it could be yours if you have the right answer and you're chosen by random.org. Very cool prize.

Yeah. I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what type of chocolate you want this new year. Thank you, and good night. More chocolate? Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I'm just, I can't stop thinking about it.

Dark chocolate, please. Of course. That's Bruce. And I didn't know he preferred dark chocolate until just this moment. He's a man of fine taste. And he's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society.

He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its Rocket Geek members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.