Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Extra: Ad Astra Rocket Company Audio Tour

Episode Date: January 5, 2016

Ad Astra's Mark Carter took Planetary Radio Host Mat Kaplan on a great tour of the company's facility in mid-November of 2015. Space and science geeks are going to love this mostly unedited audio recording. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Are you familiar with the guts of how the rocket works? Somewhat. Okay. Somewhat. Okay. Well, we start, it's really a two stage system. So we start with just neutral gas. We like to use argon here.

It's a good match for our magnets. It also gives us very good specific impulse, about 5,000 seconds. And that's a good, it's good and efficient to use and the magnetic fields are not too constrained. But gas comes into this first section and we have superconducting magnets around the whole system. The system then is broken into two parts. One is a plasma source, so the gas gets turned into plasma, charged so that it can respond to the magnetic field. And then we choke it through this middle section so that gas can't really escape past this. So in this region it's completely plasma and here it's

relatively cool, 10,000 degrees. Relatively. By plasma standards that's pretty cool. Your fluorescent lights are not quite that warm but they're warmer than you think in the plasma itself. But it's very diffuse. This is not like air densities. It's below, well below that for density but the temperature is very high. But in the second section, we go up to millions of degrees. And here you really do not want plasma touching any material surfaces. It really is a magnetic bottle. Like a fusion reactor. Very much like a fusion reactor. So most of us come from a fusion background. That's how we learn to, you

know, do the waves and plasmas and all that sort of thing. It's been studied since the 50s. The fundamental difference between VASMIR systems and like other types of systems is that we don't use a DC applied discharge. Most other systems apply a voltage and they accelerate, they separate the ions and electrons, they accelerate the electrons, or accelerate the ions, and then they re-inject the electrons to neutralize it. Because if you don't do that, you know, eventually your spacecraft will build up with a charge. We don't have to do that.

What we do, the electron ion separation actually occurs at the wave, in the wave process. So the plasmas are just like anything else. If you hit a bell, it rings. Plasmas if you strike it in a certain way electromagnetically, it will ring. And those are the natural plasma waves. So if you exploit those plasma waves and you understand them, and people from the fusion community have done that for 50 years, if you exploit those in the right way, you can set up a system here

where the plasma source, you're exciting the electrons. The electrons naturally oscillate, and there's charge separation, but it's all at the microscopic kind of level inside the plasma. And it's a natural mode. It doesn't mind doing that. If you try to do a DC application, plasmas don't like DC biases. They'll resist it. So I'm enjoying this enormously, the detailed description.

And in the podcast, I might present more of this. But for much of our audience, this is going to be over their heads. But that's okay. That's all right. Because for some substantial part of our audience, not so much. They'll love getting the details. I think the general public does understand natural resonant modes, you know, bells ringing and things like that. And so we're different in that we hit natural resonant modes of the plasma. That's what we're exploiting in the physics in order to make this system work. Does that take specialized sensors, feedback systems, where you're able to monitor that on a pretty amazing level of resolution, I would guess?

Not so much? Well, it's not as sensitive as you might think. It takes a lot of calculations to figure out what the plasma is going to want to do because you have to build up a system from no plasma to starting the plasma. So we have to do a lot of calculations to figure out the geometries and these things. But for the most part, the guys in the 50s and 60s got it right. You just have to be meticulous about how you apply it and be self-consistent in how you model it.

And when you do that, it tells you pretty much what to do. And the plasma responds mostly like you expect it to. Plasma always misbehaves a little bit. But for the most part, it works the way you would expect it to work. How big are those superconducting magnets? How powerful are they? I can show you. Let's go over there.

The magnet is two Tesla. And it uses a low-temperature superconducting magnet. We did that in 2008 because at that time the technology for high-temperature magnets was relatively new and expensive. The high-temperature magnets now are much more cost-effective. So this is really a research magnet that we started with. And here are the power supplies over here. When we were doing it as a research magnet we broke the coils up into different segments so we could independently control them and we did that as part of the optimization. It turned out we didn't have to do very much with that.

You just pretty much turn on the magnetic field and set it and forget it. You don't have to do anything more. So that part of the magnet is pretty easy to handle. Is this where most of the work takes place, this big high bay room? So this is our, I should start with the bigger elephant in the room here. That's a magnificent vacuum chamber. So this is a 14 feet in diameter. It's about 150 cubic meters of volume. And the reason why it's this big is because when you're running as much gas as we run we run you know 100 to 150 kilowatts of power and we're

running gas in the 100 milligram per second range that's not very much as a rocket goes that's a very small amount of stingy amount for propellant for rocket, but for a vacuum system it's a lot. It's a big leak. So the system is this big because the original pumps that we put in could only, you know, couldn't really sustain the low pressures for the whole duration of the shot, but the expansion into this volume allows you a little window of time before it fills up. So during that window before it fills up, we were able to get all kinds of good physics data. And there we had, our sensors are all in the back. I could show you some video of the processes the sensors are done. But these sensors are actually scanned through the plasma and the plasma is millions of degrees and so they're actually exposed. They can't

survive very long in that. So we would raster them back and forth through the system and collect data on longer shots. But most of the time, we would run just a short shot, about one second long. The plasma is up and doing everything it's going to do in the first 100 milliseconds. So you've still got the rest of that time. You get the data you need in a second. You get the data that you need, and you don't have to pay for all this extra pumping. I mean, it costs liquid nitrogen. It's really an expense thing. We're a private company, so we don't do that. You have expensive toys. I mean, this vacuum chamber by itself.

And it's all privately funded, too. This was all purchased with private money. Franklin has raised about $30 million in private funding. We've had some NASA general support, but not real money. This contract is the first time we've really gotten money from NASA to work directly on the VASIMIR project. You said 150 kilowatts when you're really cooking? That's a nice place for us to run. We have a 200 kilowatt power supply, DC power supply. That sort of simulates a solar array, for instance, for your power.

And if you get much above 200 kilowatts, it starts to get flaky. So we can push it there for a while, but we don't want to run there steady state. It runs nicely at 150. 100 kilowatts is also a nice place to run. Is this just what's coming off the grid, or do you have, like, you know, banks of capacitors? No, it's a – well, we bring 480-volt, you know, three-phase power off the grid and just run it into a DCc converter or ac to dc converter uh-huh so that's inside of this room so it's this black box right there so the ac power

comes in off the grid here and then dc power we we use three it's 375 volts it doesn't have to be that but that's the way we're set up to run right now and that runs on those welding cables up over the top yeah so do the lights dim when you're running tests here uh not really this uh but this system here does them we're in a hospital district so we have a lot of power off the grid but if we have brownout conditions it starts to affect this system so uh in the summertime in houston we're always in some kind of marginal brownout. So that kind of wattage, I mean, that's one of the key factors here, right? You need, if this is going to be an effective way to push rockets through space

or push spaceships through space, you need a lot of power. Yeah, you need a lot of power. The system runs well down at even 30 kilowatts or 40 kilowatts. But the thing is you have to invest in this magnet, which is what I started to show you. Oh, sure. Let's go back there. We got diverged a little bit. But with VASIMIR, you have to invest your mass.

Mass is what you're really fighting for a spacecraft. You have to invest your mass in a magnet. Once you invest it in a magnet, which is this larger silver, that's the cryostat for the magnet, that's what keeps it insulated. So once you invest your money and your mass in a magnet, you want to put as much power through it as you possibly can. And remember I said we were using natural resonant modes of the plasma, so we don't really run into any density limits per se. The plasma likes this power. The more power you give it, the more it likes it. Because you're kind of in step with it?

Because you're in step with the plasma. You're not trying to do something that it doesn't like to do. It likes to ring at this frequency. So if you just keep ringing it, it doesn't stop it. So with other systems, you run into what's called space charge limits. It doesn't stop it. So with other systems, you run into what's called space charge limits. You can only separate the electrons and the ions to accelerate them by so much before it starts to get unhappy and unstable.

But with this system, it doesn't really get unstable because it's a natural mode of the plasma. We use two different modes. So when we put the magnetic field in the plasma, that also changes. It's sort of like strings on a violin. You start to play different notes. So we're playing sort of different notes, one note to resonate the electrons and get the ionization process going. So that shakes electrons, and when the electrons get a little energy, they whack into a gas atom, knock another electron off, and it cascades up. Then you use a different sort of a lower, this is sort of a high frequency note and

this is a lower frequency note. And the lower frequency is tuned to excite the ions and go in sync with their motion around the magnetic field. And when you talk about the tuning that takes place, does this have to do with the V in VASMR, the variable? The variable has to do with how much power we put into making plasma versus how much energy we put into accelerating it. So you see here, this is the actual rocket core that ran 10,000 shots and it's accumulated three hours of time on it.

Looks pretty good. Yeah, but it's old, but it's worked well and It hasn't hurt anything. In fact, we can't detect any signs of wear. So our magnetic insulation is protecting the surfaces from the plasma very effectively. It's doing what it's supposed to. It's doing what it's supposed to do. And so the system comes in with this first resonant system here. It's a helicon derivative that's used for the plasma source. And this is it when you look through the system, you can look through the end of it, you can see

all the way through it. There's nothing that touches the plasma. Oh yeah, it's just you look right through to the other end. Right. So gas comes in from this end and in fact this hole here on this front end, we put a quartz window and we also put windows that let infrared light through. And we put an infrared camera in here, and you can watch it while it runs. You can look through this system while it's running right down the bore of it. It's very interesting looking. But the infrared signature told us where heat is going on these different sections.

And so because these sections weren't cooled, you know how much heat it takes to make the temperature change. You can determine the heat fluxes in these different areas. So that was one of the first experiments. It's not a very sexy experiment, but it's a pretty important experiment when you're going to do the steady state work, which we're getting ready to do now. So you talked about a short shot, a second, being able to give you oftentimes the data that you need. What's a long shot? Well, for this system, because it wasn't cooled, there were two things that limited our shot length. One was that the temperature for this thing would eventually just, there's no cooling, so eventually just keeps rising, you

know, up until you have to shut it off. There were seals in the system that we had to guard against. And that limit was probably, if you started off cold, could be close to a minute. The other limit that you had is in the chamber remember we're putting in so much gas that you can't really keep up with it with the pumps without shorting out the electronics. So on the outside we have these couplers that couple the power through these windows. So these windows protect any gas or plasma from coming out on this side but on this side we have high voltage or relatively high voltage RF radio frequency waves coming in. If I get gas on the outside

of this, I'll make my plasma on the outside and short all this stuff out. So I don't want gas on the outside, but I have a lot of gas on the inside. Now something that's unique about this system is that you can isolate these two sections. There's nothing on the outside that has to penetrate through to the inside. It all goes through these basically windows. This is transparent to the electromagnetic waves going through here. So this material here is a dielectric. The waves go through here.

This is very close to FM radio, by the way. No kidding. No kidding. How a lot of people are hearing this now. So FM radio, you have this radio tower that's out on the hill that's huge, but the plasma likes this particular wave so much that here the wavelengths are about this big. You know, they're just 10 or 15 centimeters long. So that's why the couplers are relatively compact. And the power can go through this thing without having to touch the plasma. So that's a real key difference. So now I have an isolation between the inside of my rocket and the outside of my rocket.

I can isolate the outside and pump it separately because there's no gas load on it, so long as I can get the gas that's going through the rocket to go into a different section of the vacuum chamber. So I'll show you over here what we're doing for that. That is an impressive door. Yeah, it's a pretty hefty door. So this chamber was made in Ohio and caused a lot of traffic jams when they brought it through Houston. I bet. And they actually cut a hole in this wall and rolled it right in. The oil rigging people, though, were able to get it from the parking lot in here and set on its feet in about an hour and a half. So once the hull was all ready, they just came in and moved it right in here. It was amazing. I guess that's an advantage of working in Texas.

Right, yeah. Houston knows how to handle big stuff. But you can see this wall that we put in. Before, we did not have a very good wall. We had one, but it was just made out of Lexan panels. And so the thing that limited our pulses most of all was that the gas going into the downstream part of the vacuum chamber would leak back through onto the outside of my rocket and then I would start to have problems shorting out my oil. You can see a few scorch marks where we shorted it out. It's not a big deal if it shorts out but you have to start over. It interrupts that particular shot, and you have to wait. So that was what was limiting us before. So

now we've upgraded this wall. So we welded in this stainless steel membrane in this system, and we have to worry about too big a pressure differential from blowing this down. That's what all this plumbing is over here to keep the pressure from ever going too big. But if the pressures that we really want to run the downstream side can be relatively high pressure and this side has no gas load except for whatever's you know boiling off the surfaces of the materials in any vacuum. So we use small pumps on this side and keep up with the gas load on the outside of the rocket components. Well in the, we're running as much gas really as we want to on the other side. There's a big blower system on the other side.

We also have some of these pumps that are out on the floor right now are cryo panels. They freeze out the argon too. So we can maintain fairly low pressures back where we're doing the rocket exhaust too, but it doesn't have to be as low as you would have to have for, say, a Hall Thruster. Because a Hall Thruster has electrodes right in the plasma, you can't isolate these, you know, the rocket side from the electronic side. And a Hall Thruster, that's the kind of little ion drives that are becoming more and more

common. Yeah, I think there's a little bit of a miscommunication about what these systems really are. They're all really plasma engines because in the end, what has to leave is quasi-neutral plasma. You have to expel electrons and ions at roughly the same speed. So within this category, back in the 60s, they developed these ion engines, which are really just derivatives of accelerator sources. So here you separate your electrons and your ions. You pull the ions through an electrostatic grid, just a DC-biased grid.

And as they shoot past this grid, then you recombine them with electrons so that you get back to your plasma state. Well, so, I mean, we talk on this program about the Dawn mission quite a bit and those amazing ion engines that have taken it to— They are awesome. They are very, very neat technologies. But it's really plasma? It is really.

What's really coming out in is plasma. And the trouble with those systems, there's not really a problem with them except as you try to run the power density up, if you try to run more and more power through the system, you'll burn out your grids. You really have materials, biased metal materials inside the plasma. I've seen that, yeah. And you're reaching very high temperatures, and inside the plasma. I've seen that, yeah. Reaching very high temperatures, and so the plasma erodes it away. So you can get around that by making

this thing bigger and bigger, but suddenly you have this huge, you have to have this huge thing to go to high power. So ion engines might be a kilowatt, one kilowatt, whereas we're trying to run at 100 kilowatts through a similar sized area. And plans to go much higher, right? This technology, like I said, the plasma really likes this power. So what really limits you is keeping all the components cool while the plasma is running. So you can probably run, without making the system a lot bigger, you could run, I'm speculating a lot here, but you can run closer to a megawatt through one of these systems if you really wanted to go ahead and build it up.

It would not be that difficult. Plasma physics people in the fusion community run tens of megawatts. I've seen it. Systems are different. But, in fact, in this system, we've done some simulations, and I don't think a megawatt is outside the realm of possibility at all. It's straightforward almost. So let me ask you, as we look at the far end of this big vacuum chamber,

what does the plasma do to that other end of the chamber? Well, it causes a lot of damage. So you've got these high-energy ions that are coming in, and the electrons are just kind of floating along with them. They're quickly moving all over the place. electrons are just kind of floating along with them. They're quickly moving all over the place. They're just kind of floating along with them. But these high energy ions, when they hit a surface, they don't really cause a melting effect.

It's more like a bullet striking a surface and it causes like a miniature explosion where it hits and sprays surface atoms off. So you can see stainless steel starting to get polished away in some places and then it's a closed system so some of that stuff comes back and redeposits in other places. These little probes that we were running across, they're graphite and ceramic type parts with – there's some stainless steel that eventually gets exposed after their armor is sort of eroded away. But it's eroded and redeposited.

So we've just gone through this exercise to clean all this stuff that we had from the earlier shots up. And we will put in sort of a disposable plasma catcher. So we call it our plasma dump, where we dump the plasma. And that has two effects. The main purpose for it is to really keep anything from hitting the sides of our chamber. But we also have to manage 100 kilowatts. 100 kilowatts is comparable to running a V8 engine at fairly high power levels.

That's about, what, 130 horsepower, something like that. So when you're running at these 100 kilowatt power levels, if you try to do that inside, imagine running an automobile inside a vacuum chamber. You're going to have to take all that power back out. It doesn't matter how efficient the rocket was. What goes in has to come back out. And so this plasma dump will take all the part that's in the plasma

and allow us to extract it. So that will get really hot and then radiate to the outside edges and we'll put cooling on the outside of the chamber. It would be so much easier to do all this stuff in space. It sure would. But there's other issues that are harder in space too. So it's one of those transitions that we have to do. In fact, we're approaching the transition where we would like to start going into space and trying to design for space. In a business, if you have the money to go ahead and do it, you always go right straight to what you really want to do, which is operation in space.

And so there are other constraints, mostly financial. And doing the ground test work has to be done too. So you have to do both. And I may ask this question again later as well, but isn't there some work that is now you're getting close to on the ISS, on the International Space Station? Well, we proposed a platform where we could test high-power anything on the platform. So you have to have a large battery.

The ISS doesn't have anything like 100 kilowatts available to give any single payload, and it doesn't even have that much altogether anyway. But the way it's set up, it's more like pulling power off your house. You have to get distributed power channels. You can only get maybe three kilowatts off of any single location. So our plan was to charge up batteries and let the batteries, you know, slowly trickle charge batteries and then discharge the batteries at a higher rate so that we could test for 10 or 15 minutes, you know, in a true space environment.

10 or 15 minutes was long enough to most things would be at thermal steady state for their operations, but it was also short enough so that the batteries wouldn't be huge. You're talking about electric vehicle type scale batteries. So that system has been proposed, and NASA still hasn't for sure said no or yes, but I'm sure it's a cost issue and priority issue for what you test on the ISS. So we would love to do that still, and we would test VASMIR or higher power hull thrusters or whatever people want to test. It's really a test platform.

Oh, so you would maybe make that available to others as well? Oh, sure. Yeah. That was the idea. We called it the Aurora platform, and that's what we still call it, but it's sort of in limbo right now, and we're not trying to push that. We need to go ahead and get, I think, confidence levels in people on the ground

testing. And so the plaza physics for me was very straightforward because I come from 20 years of background and heritage goes back 50 years but the the the overlap between the aerospace community and the plasma physics community as near as I can tell was close to zero. So it's taken a long time to get you know people to for them to get their heads around really what it is we're trying to do. And people have worried about having the power available in space.

But, you know, 30 kilowatt arrays are, I mean, they're expensive, but they're actually quite doable. In fact, I think several companies think they can do 200, 400 kilowatt arrays and manage them just fine. So I think the solar power issue is no longer an issue as far as the power is there, and we're a great customer for power. So all these things are coming together and sort of allying. All these technologies are converging now to where we can actually do all these pieces. What else should we look at here? And then I want to come back and take some pictures. Well, I can show you. I think we probably polished off all the places where we eroded the chamber itself. Here's Jared Squire.

Jared, hi. He's a little gimpy here. How are you? I'm Matt. Nice to meet you. Welcome. I heard you had kids to get to school today. Yeah, that and going slow with foot surgery, so it slowed me down. Sorry to see that. Hope you're recovering.

Thanks. I'm getting a great tour. He's going a little faster every day. We've covered a lot. This is just absolutely fascinating. As I told Mark, this has been on my bucket list for a long time, coming to visit you guys. I'm glad you can make it. Great.

Yeah, well, hopefully we'll have plasma running in a while. It's going to be a few months before we get plasma going. We have to assemble a lot of different parts and pieces. I can show you what happens when the plasma does hit things over here. I just thought we'd polish the chamber back. Again, watch this corner right there. You bet. So here is the leading edge. We've got some videos I could show you too. Wow. This is what it looks like when the plasma is running and we had these...

I've seen some of those photos. Okay, some of these are on the website. But this glowing red thing is actually a disc of graphite that was placed and there's a strain gauge off the post. The plasma abused it, it fell apart. But after for a a while, it will run and get, you know, thrust measurements. That's how I actually measure the thrust in here. So this platform here would run back and forth across the plasma, or we would just reposition it, take one of these one-second shots, move it again, take another shot. That's very reproducible, so we could actually map out the whole system by just taking a bunch of multiple shots.

And it'd make these things last a lot longer. So this is spectacular, this piece of metal. Right. You can see this is when we had Lexan front wall. This is a reflection of this piece right here that we used for protection of the platform that all this stuff is running on. It's just a table. And this is a graph oil material that's stainless steel with graphite on the front of it. So here's what happens where the plasma hits.

The temperatures are going well over 1,000 C. The power density here is very high. Most of this 100 kilowatts is coming out and getting in this fairly small area. So power density is really high. That means really high temperatures for anything that gets in the way. That's why we don't touch this plasma when we get, trust me, we know what happens if you do. And so this section here, you can see how this comes in.

It doesn't really melt it, but it just, it's like little bombs going on. It's like bullets striking on and spraying off. They call it sputtering, is the surface process. And so you can see we sputtered away all the graphite and got through the stainless steel we're getting into the table by the time we pulled this section out. Yeah, you can see it's a bad day for your lab when the plasma goes the wrong way. But our plume is really nice and tight, and so you know where it is. You can stay, I mean, it has a pretty clean line between in it and out of it.

So you can go hide and cool off and then go back in and do things like that. But you really, it's a rocket engine. You don't want to be standing at the tail end of a rocket, any kind of rocket. How long does it take to evacuate that vacuum chamber? Well, it depends on the environment, too. It's a lot of surface area. So we live in Houston and humidity is high. So we have a lot of moisture on all these surfaces.

But it takes a few days really to get it in the initial system. Once it's up and going, we just sort of keep it, you know, at low pressure. And then you run and pulse it. So we'll put these big pumps back in. They sit and freeze the argon out, but for probably the next few weeks, we'll be doing evacuation tests and seal tests for the chamber itself. When it's clean and if we cycle it quickly and the water doesn't settle in, we can be back under vacuum in about four hours.

Not bad. That's from coming all the way up and opening the door. That's quicker than I thought. And for between the plasma shots, I was talking about the leakage back before, we could run about 20 seconds before too much gas would fill up in the chamber for the front part of the rocket. With this new system, we think it can run indefinitely. Wow. Incredibly impressive. I mean, I've kind of been bouncing around all over the place,

but this rocket core loads up sort of like a shotgun shell into that magnet. Then the magnet sits over, this is just our test stand, so it just sits down in there. That then gets rolled on this cart up against this wall, and we have a little transition piece that seals the plasma side from the electronic side. So why the other nations why the other nations flags on there? Well we have a sister company in Costa Rica and they have contributed to our some of our source development and we also have worked with

I forget what flags we have on. I saw Canada and Britain. Canada and Britain are of power generation. Yeah our radios, Canadians have always been good at radio and this is no different in this case. So our radios are actually made in Canada. And that's what actually converts the power from the solar array into these natural wave frequencies that we want for these two things. So we have two of these generators.

And they're small, relatively small things. They're sort of like, I don't know, what, maybe four feet tall? They say about the size of a large golf bag. Yeah, about like a golf bag. And you know, the booster section that we have here, it's 180 kilowatts. And that's, and it's very efficient at converting DC. It uses solid state electronics. So it's about 97 or 8% efficient.

Wow. Yeah, that one's 98. So you don't really lose much converting whatever DC power you want into or that you have available from your solar plant into your natural frequencies that you want to drive this thing. So it's like a radio station. You match it to the coupler. And the booster section is closer to AM band radio. So we do really play radio. Radio waves, radio frequency waves are really what are used.

I feel right at home. And Nautel Limited is the company, and they're one of the world leaders in AM band and FM band radio. All solid state. And it's all stuff I've... There's one back there, there's a 50-kilowatt unit, one of their units back there that they sell for AM stations. It's just a transmitter.

It's just a transmitter. Except ours is much simpler. It's a transmitter. Except they don't need for AM stations. Just a transmitter. It's just a transmitter. Except ours is much simpler. Except they don't need the AM part. We just need steady power, so it's much simpler. Yeah. Fascinating. This is a weld shop back over here. We work on high-temperature MLI.

This is Lawrence Dean, DJ Dean, and Matt Jambuso. Hi, guys. So DJ's the guy who makes all this exotic stuff. So he's the guy making all these parts back here. So these are the parts for the next rocket core. So these are all ceramic parts. We have, you know, metal to ceramic interfaces that are very robust and tough. This is an early prototype coupler that we'll replace. And this is the actual one being made right here. So it hasn't been freed from its mandrel yet. It still has some welding operations to be done on it.

But he makes all these parts. In the end, the new one will look very similar to this. This is an old model we made out of PVC plastic. How much more are you going to get out of this new rocket? What we'll really get out of this new rocket is pretty much we plan to get the same performance that we got out of the old rocket, but we plan to be able to run steady state. So we have two steady state things. The vacuum system now will be upgraded, so it won't be flooding our section that needs to stay high evacuation. So we isolated the plasma part from the electronics

part in the vacuum. We're also cooling this system now, too. So this thermal interface, it couples the RF, but it also handles the cooling of the whole system. So you can actually water-cool this thing, and you can put water in here and it comes back out over there. Believe it or not, there is a tube in there. It's hollow all the way through. And how hot, I mean, how many watts do you hope to get this up to? Well, the plan to run this test is 100 kilowatts for 100 hours continuously without turning off.

And we'll have to find a nice sweet spot. We may run a little over 100 kilowatts or wherever the plasma likes to run. But it's pretty forgiving. You can sort of choose your location. And we're going to work up to that over time because when you start running these long pulse systems you have to make sure the facility can take everything. You have to have the facility and the rockets. The rocket is not the only thing that's doing it. The space simulation systems all have to be in place. So we are going to run

our system fairly warm. It's going to run at around 200 degrees C. And we do that so that when you reject the waste heat, like any rocket, it's not 100% efficient. You have to reject some of your waste heat, well, all of your waste heat. And we're going to reject that at as high a temperature as we can so that the radiators to reject that heat are relatively small. Nothing's 100% efficient, right? Right, right, right. That's basic law. In fact, that's fundamental thermodynamics. Everybody, usually that's what you run into for the ultimate limit.

Yeah, yeah. You try to minimize it. Right. Yeah, we spend a lot of time minimizing the waste and optimizing efficiency. Pretty impressive CNC machines you've got here. Well, it's, yeah, what's really impressive is the guy who runs them because, you know, he can program and do things that are simply amazing. Additive manufacturing still can't make the parts that we would like to make,

and so you have to do it the old-fashioned way, and it requires expertise that is becoming rare in this country. So having somebody like DJ to do this kind of work is a really important part of our business here. In fact, we tried to outsource things early on. People just with no bid, they're very, you know, slightly strange looking. Yeah. That's how we got DJ. That's how we got DJ. He ended up being somebody willing to take it on, and we ended up hiring him.

Right, and able to make the pieces that we need. These are not available at Walmart. Yeah, that is not a typical piece of work. No, that is not. And there's a lot more to it than really would appear. This is a very early prototype, which has some scars and ugliness, but to me it's like a beautiful child. Oh, yeah. It's pretty.

I think it's a work of art. Right. No pictures of this? No pictures of this. I was, it's pretty. I think it's a work of art. Right. No pictures of this? No pictures of this. This piece here when it comes out I think you're gonna be really amazed what that looks like. It's going to be very nice. Here we didn't, I wasn't even sure DJ would be able to make it at all and son of a gun he finished it. But we had some you know some some things that we've learned. So we learned a lot with this one. This is just stainless steel. So now we're going to other

materials. And with what you've learned this is a key component. This we learned a lot with this one. This is just stainless steel. So now we're going to other other materials. And with what you've learned, this is a key component. This is where a lot of your work has gone into. Yeah, this combines cooling of the system with the RF coupler. So we call these integrated cooling and electrical jackets. So the integrated part is the, the cooling part is that when you have RF waves, the power, the current all wants to run on the outside. It doesn't want to run on the inside. And so the inside of this system is just sitting doing nothing. So if you hollow it out and run water through it, you can cool.

You can use the inside part for a cooling channel, use the outside part for your coupler, marry those two together and get it bonded to this window and you can actually pull all the heat, all the waste heat from the rocket out through the system. The plasma source is actually the biggest source of waste heat because in its ionization process we shake these electrons and they run into atoms and cause them to ionize. It generates a lot of ultraviolet light and the ultraviolet light is absorbed then in our system, and that has to be carried back out through these water channels. So, listeners, if you're wishing you could see the stuff I'm looking at right now, you are absolutely right. You are dead on.

You would love this stuff. But maybe someday when you're ready to show it off a little bit more. Come visit us. Yeah. There's a great echo. So what are we looking at? Okay, so this is the downstream side of our vacuum chamber. We have this divider wall here, which will keep our electronic parts all isolated from the plasma,

from the gas that we're putting through the rocket itself. There will be a system of sort of like baffles through here that are sacrificial that the plasma will strike, and that'll keep the plasma from actually hitting our wall and damaging the wall itself. The main purpose of our next thing is to run and capture the plasma jet down in this section while keeping space irrelevant stuff on this side, and that's why it is what it is. I got to tell you that this is the sound in here, this is a radio guy's dream. Oh, really? Okay, well, come back and set up shop. You should rent out to local stations.