Coming up, Tori Bruno appears where you'd least expect him. Europe prepares its Mars mission in an ambitious plan to manufacture structures in space. Plus, we're going to be talking about the Space Leadership Preservation Act, or SLIPA. Stay tuned! Tomorrow begins right now! Welcome to tomorrow. It's a 9.07 for Saturday, February 27, 2016. My name is Benjamin Higginbotham. I'll be joined by Mike, Jared, and Carrie Ann in just a moment. But before we do that, I'd like to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who've helped to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are the people who've contributed $10 or more to this specific show. This is a crowdfunded show, and you can help us out by heading over to patreon.com slash tmro. All right. Now, you may notice that Carrie Ann's not right here where she normally is. That's because we've got her sitting in the Capcom chair right over there. She'll be maintaining social media for us saying hi to the chat room and funneling the information our way throughout the entire show. Trying something new. We'll see if it works. The only other problem with Capcom is we made this decision earlier today. So her area, like, this is beautiful. We've got the nice lights behind us and everything. And then you cut the Capcom, and it's clearly like curtains. Well, if you guys like it, we'll fix that move. Capcom in an eight-year-old's bedroom. All right, let's go ahead and get started with some space news. First up, this is less news and more just kind of an interesting thing that happened on the SpaceX subreddit. That is Tori Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance, popped in and actually helped explain the ELC contract. Now, so now I'm going to go back and I'm going to explain all of this. So what is ELC? ELC is an acronym wrapped inside of an acronym. It stands for the EELV Launch Contract. So what is EELV? That's the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle. So what the heck is that? Okay, let's go way back. We're going to start with all of these things are. Okay. Back in the day, before the space shuttle, we just had rockets. There was no ELV or RLV or anything like that. Reusable launch vehicle, expendable launch vehicle. No, it was just you had rockets. Then the space shuttle came by from NASA. And they were kind of having some budgetary issues. And so the Department of Defense kind of stepped in and said, you know, we can help you out here. And the problem is we're going to spend all this money on shuttle. So we're not going to be able to really maintain new rocket programs. And so they kind of differentiated the two. They wanted everyone, the Air Force, NASA, everyone to use shuttle for pretty much everything. So they called that the reusable launch vehicle. Then all the old stuff, all the Titan rockets, the old Atlas rockets, those are expendable launch vehicles. They're ELVs. Exactly. Old school. Yeah, old news. Not the future. The future are reusable launch vehicles, the space shuttle. So, all right, cool. So the Air Force was like, yeah, we're kind of not keen on this. But if that's what you're going to make us do, awesome. So they even brought a space shuttle enterprise to Vandenberg, set it up, made sure that it actually fit. There are even these like lines in the road where the wings had to kind of be cut out for the wings. It's really cool. They got it kind of set up and then Challenger happened. And the Air Force said, you know, we really didn't want it before and we really don't want it now. So they said, they kind of went back to their traditional rockets except that there really hadn't been any investment in rockets because all that money had gone into the space shuttle. And so in 1995, the Department of Defense says, all right, we want these expendable launch vehicles. We want to enhance them. So we want the evolved expendable launch vehicle program, EELV, that's what that stands for. So whenever you hear EELV, that's actually why, how it kind of came to be.  I don't remember all four off top of my head. But ultimately, the two we care about are Boeing and Lockheed Martin. They're competing. They're building different rockets. Lockheed Martin has the Atlas V. And Boeing through an acquisition has the Delta IV. Then in 1999, Boeing fired an engineer. And this engineer, they fired this engineer because he had taken secrets from Lockheed when he moved over to Boeing. And they're like, no, no, no, that's not okay. We detected these files on this computer, like seven documents. You can't do that. This person's fired. And everyone's like, oh, well, that was really open and informative of you. That was very nice of you. Very nice of you to tell us that. Yes. A little bit of time goes on and they're noticing, you know, wow, Boeing seems to have a lot of proprietary Lockheed information. Yeah. Seems like a little bit more than seven documents worth. Lawsuits, lawyers, bunch of stuff later. I'm condensing this down. Turns out they had closer like 25,000 documents and they had been using them potentially illegally. So then in 2003, Boeing was barred from launching vehicles for the Air Force. This meant that we had basically one launch provider and there was no shared access to space. This is a bad thing. So the Air Force basically said, Boeing, Lockheed, kiss and make up, find a way to make this work. How did they make this work? United Launch Alliance was born in 2005. That is actually kind of the, I made this super simple and kind of went over it very, very quickly. That is basically where United Launch Alliance came from. So now we've got Boeing and Lockheed essentially working together to launch a bunch of rockets. You'll notice it's usually an Atlas V. But you know, sometimes a Delta IV. Yeah, everything as well. And now we've got one provider but with two rockets and they said, you know, Air Force, you really, you move manifests around a lot. You change things a lot. You make it really complicated.  That's one cost. And then we have this ELC contract, this EELV, Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Launch Contract that pays for the fueling, the pads and everything else. Now this ELC contract has been a huge debate for a very long time because other people who try to come into the industry, maybe Blue Origin, SpaceX, anyone else who tries to come in has to compete against this ELC contract where basically SpaceX or other companies are saying, look, you don't have to account for that and the cost of your rocket, but we do. And there's a lot of confusion over what the ELC contract, which brings us to, I know this is a very long way to get to where we're at, brings us to Tori Bruno's post on slash R slash SpaceX. This is that post and you can search for it on slash R slash SpaceX. It's actually a really great post. I'm not going to talk about all of it, but basically you tried to clear up what is the ELC contract exactly? And basically a lot of people call it an $800 million subsidy or retainer and he's saying, no, that is not what it is. There are two contracts with the Air Force. There's one to build the rockets and one to fly the rockets. The ELC is the contract to fly the rockets. What does that mean? It means it picks up the, once the rocket is built, ELC is what picks that rocket up and moves it to the launch site. It's what fuels it. It's what puts the fuel on it. It's what supports all the ground systems for the launch pad. It's what actually puts the people in mission control to launch the rocket itself. That's what ELC is. It's the engineer to figure out the trajectory for that specific launch, which is different every single time. ELC pays for that. It also helps for the whole idea of the Air Force going, look, I know we told you that we wanted you to launch this classified rocket A or payload A first. Really, we actually want you to launch C first and by that I meant E. And so they move them all around. And so Tori said they flew 12 times last year. Of those 12, 10 of them were shuffled manifests. ELC helps offload the cost of that. Now, is that the whole story? Maybe, maybe not. I mean, it does make ELC much simpler and easier to understand. But that is the post. Again, it's not really a news item, but I thought it was really interesting. I figured I'd throw it over to Mike and see it gets your feedback on, because I think you've read the post. I assume you've read the post. I have. I have. And something else that I found really interesting is that some of the members in that chat continue to ask questions and ask a little bit more specifics. And Tori Bruno goes on to send several more responses and I believe it's still an ongoing conversation. The last comment I saw from him was yesterday. So that's still an ongoing conversation and he's being totally cool and open about it. So I find that A in itself a remarkable thing. But the second thing is that this does help to clarify a couple of things about it. But there's still a lot of people confuse a lot of the costs associated with maintaining the different launch pads with this ELC contract. And it's where a lot of the different confusion comes from. And I admit that I even thought that it was under this, the ELC contract. But that's part of why United Launch Alliance is shutting down some of their facilities. The facility at Cape Canaveral that would launch Delta II rockets has been shut down. They still have a couple of left but they can only launch those from Vandenberg where they're still a site to launch them from. And by doing stuff like that they're going to be able to help keep costs or at least lower some of those costs. And that's still being debated right now and in the coming years a lot of that could change of how much money is given to United Launch Alliance to maintain those pads. But then I think that a lot of the costs under this ELC program would probably remain the same. But it's all situational of course but whatever those situations are I think that that would probably remain the same if not even go even further down when they're eventually just operating the Vulcan rocket when they retire Atlas and Delta. And actually I completely agree Tori's willingness to post on slash R slash SpaceX essentially one of the main competitors was really freaking cool and he was very blunt about everything. He was like, no, this is how it is. This is exact. It is the best description I've ever seen of the ELC contract ever. If you want to be more educated on what ELC is and how it works, head on over to slash R slash SpaceX and search for Tori Bruno's thing. You know, we'll make sure to put post a direct link to that in the show notes on YouTube as well. Yeah. All right, moving along Jared, talk to me about ExoMars. Yeah, well, it looks like we're actually going to have a mission that's going to go to Mars during this upcoming window that we have going on from the European Space Agency, their ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and their Schkapper else. Oh geez, there I go. You can do it. I believe in you. Schkapperally lander. They've been actually just been mated together and we can actually take a look at the lander here just to give you an idea of how big it is. So not a particularly big lander, but still going to be a mission going to the surface of Mars. Now those, the lander and the orbiter have been mated ahead of a planned lift off on March 14th at 931 UTC. They have a 12 day launch window and both of those together are about 4.3 metric tons. So that's a lot of weight going to Mars. A little bit more, a little bit bigger than even curiosity and its systems to continue during its cruise. Now the orbiter and lander are going to ride a Russian proton with a Brism upper stage and Russia as a side note here has not successfully delivered a Mars mission since 1988. So yeah, I really hope that this actually works out because this mission is going to study the atmosphere of Mars. The orbiter will study the atmosphere of Mars, specifically methane and very specifically looking for where the origins of that methane may be coming from. Is it biological? Is it just natural geological processes because either of those can work in the environment that's on Mars right now. And I really like the lander, Schkapperally, Schkapperally. Thank you, Mike. Which is going to actually act as a weather station. It's battery powered so they only expect it to last up to a maximum of eight days on the surface of Mars. But I really like the idea of its entry descent and landing system, which is that it enters just like how any other lander would with a heat shield. And then it uses a supersonic parachute like any other lander would. And then it deploys thrusters that slow it down to break it to the surface like many vehicles have. But it sort of ends there with the similarities because it then has a crushable carbon fiber structure to land on. So basically- It's got a crumple zone. It has a crumple zone built into it. So I'm very interested to see how this actually works out because that could potentially be a low cost, low weight, if you will, system to land you on the surface of Mars. Crashing on Mars might be a lower cost way of landing on it. Yeah, let's go breaking. Regular breaking. A bit more like a survivable impactor. Yeah, basically. Sort of like the Deep Space 2 micro probes were supposed to do back in 1999, which they didn't, but we won't talk about that metric mixups anyways. So yeah, we're really looking forward to this mission and I'm very excited about it because all data is great data. And man, it's just this is the only thing we're sending to Mars during this launch window because NASA's insight lander was delayed because of the instrument problem and we still don't know if it's actually going to fly to Mars. So yeah, we'll find out what happens with that. But yeah, we're only sending one thing to Mars during this one. That window is 2020, right? The next window will be in 2018. 2018 and then 2020, 2022. Yeah, it's about 26 months between windows. You know, in the last stat I heard for success rate of landers on Mars was 49.5. So we have less than a 50% success rate for landing things on Mars. Yeah, actually no country besides the United States has successfully landed a vehicle operationally on the surface of Mars. You know, they took those images of Beagle 2 with MRO and showed that some of it deployed but it didn't, you know, work unfortunately on the surface. All right, speaking of things, unfortunately not working. Space Mike, talk to us about Falcon 9. That's right. So Falcon 9 has unfortunately scrubbed two launch attempts to launch the SES-9 communication satellite into geostationary transfer orbit. The spacecraft's systems itself, propulsion systems would get it into a geosynchronous orbit. And with this launch, it seems that, well, first of all, the first launch was due to high upper winds. And SpaceX was worried that for this launch that they would not only have problems with the performance of the rocket, but it was also messed with the temperatures of the densified liquid oxygen. And the thing with that is that was totally okay and they were able to scrub long before that. But the second attempt, which was just on Thursday, they managed to get under two minutes to launch prior to hold being called. And the reason for that hold being called still isn't known, but is suspected to have to do with the super chilled and densified propellant. But in any case, a new target date has been announced to be this Sunday, tomorrow, February 28th at 646 p.m. Eastern Standard Time or 1146 UTC. So that's really cool that they're going to be able to use that launch attempt. And I've heard that this window could extend all the way to March 3rd if they have any additional problems. But if everything goes as planned with the mission, this SES-9 launch is the first time that a geosynchronous launch will make use of the upgraded Falcon 9 full thrust, which was used in the December mission. And the thing about this is that because of the densified propellant, there might be enough fuel left over to attempt the landing of the first stage, which normally when SpaceX launches a geosynchronous mission, there's not enough fuel left over to do that. And that's why some of the past missions haven't had landing legs on geosynchronous missions. But since this is the first version of the full thrust doing this type of mission, they might have enough fuel to attempt the landing, but not enough fuel to attempt a landing at Cape Canaveral. They're going to be training on one of the autonomous spaceport droneships. And the one that they're going to be using is the one titled, Of Course I Still Love You. So hopefully the mission is successful, regardless of whether or not they're able to do a landing attempt and if they are, hopefully that goes well. But of course, the main priority is to make sure that the mission goes off successfully and they're able to continue with their launch manifest for the rest of the year. So that's our updates. And hopefully tomorrow they will be launching successfully and keep your fingers crossed, everybody. Hey, Mike, did SpaceX give any chances for landing success on this one? All I've heard is that Elon Musk says that he doesn't expect it to work. And there was some reasons for that, but I think that this is really just a test to see with the full thrust version of whether or not they would have enough fuel to be able to successfully do a landing. And with this, at least by trying, they can see if, you know, who knows, it might run out of fuel, you know, while they're making their final approach or something like that, or maybe not even have enough fuel to do a burnback. So I see this more as a test to see whether or not the full thrust version with the densified propellant even can do landing attempts on geosynchronous missions. And that's why I think that he feels that there's a low probability of success, but I can't remember if he even gave out a percentage or not, but I still think that it's really cool just to test and see if this new version has that capability. So in either way, there's going to be good data from this mission. Yeah, it'll be like a first stage right on that ragged edge of performance to see what it can do. That'd be, that's very, very cool. That's fun engineering. That's fun engineering right there. That's the good stuff. All right. I didn't realize I had done this to myself, but I have two stories that involve ULA in one way or another today. The other one is the... Well, the other one's actually related to engines. The RD-180 engine, which looks like this, this is the... Just such a nice engine. Geez. I really like it. The power plant of the Atlas V rocket and variants of that are basically what they're working on for the new Antares rocket. It's like Cygnus rocket. No, that's wrong. So the new Antares rocket uses not the RD-180, but essentially an upgraded version of that. And there are changes in Nourus Cosmos that have recently happened. That whole thing a while ago, you remember where... Solidation of all of Russia's space companies. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be one. So a while ago, there was this whole thing of whether United Launch Alliance could even use the RD-180s at all for military payloads because of these sanctions. It was determined, yes, actually they can, but we kind of put some limits on that. And then those limits kind of got lifted. Well, with the consolidation of everything, Senator McCain went again like, okay, seriously, can we really be doing this? The answer is, yes, yes, we can still be doing this. The Pentagon's chief arms buyer on Tuesday said, US sanctions against Russia do not at this time bar the use of the RD-180 engines. Well, these were questions raised by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator John McCain. And he just, he really wants the RD-180s gone. He even said, I think I have something in here. Dustin Walker, a spokesman for a Senate Armed Service Committee said, McCain believed it was time to end the purchases regardless of the determination of sanctions. So he is on a warpath to get rid of the RD-180s. His thought process is basically, why are we giving Russia money for these engines? Why are we trying to punish them? Why are we sending them money for this? And I think the aerospace industry answer is because they're really good engines. So I don't know what the right answer is, but that's... Maybe he's just not a fan of dual combustion chambers. That's probably it. It's probably it.  Whatever. So there you go. So RD-180s still allowed to be used. All right, Jared, talk to me about WFIRST. Yeah, WFIRST. This awesome new space telescope that NASA is working on. There's been years of studies to figure out how we can actually make this space telescope work because right now we're still dealing with the James Webb Space Telescope that ate the budget. Budgets, plural, all of the budgets. Yeah, basically every single budget. It absorbed all of the money from everywhere. Like, hey, we'll take your money. It is the replacement to Hubble. Yes, a worthy replacement to Hubble, though. And the complications of budgets is because of the fact that literally every single part on James Webb is a piece of technology that no one has ever even attempted to think of attempting to do before. So it turns out when you do that, things get a little expensive. But this mission is being led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland with contributions from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech here in Pasadena in California and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Now WFIRST, which stands for, here we go, ready for it, Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. This is going to be the following James Webb Space Telescope with the planned launch in the mid-2020s and it will be looking in near-infrared wavelengths. Now the thing about WFIRST that makes it so awesome is that it will carry what is specifically called a Wide Field Instrument. And there's a reason why it will carry this and I'll talk about that right as we wrap up talking about it. Now it's going to have the similar resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, that incredible ability to resolve super small things extremely far away. And from that, it's going to have a field of view a hundred times larger than Hubble will. So it can literally look at a hundred times more area or field of view in the sky than Hubble can with Hubble resolution. So that's going to allow us to study things like dark energy and dark matter.  So basically WFIRST is going to be able to do detailed, dedicated viewing, direct viewing of exoplanets around other stars. And we're not thinking exoplanets the size of Earth, more like gas giants and super-Earths, but that's still very important for us to study in terms of understanding the evolution of systems. Now, the interesting thing about WFIRST is that it's a product of a donation from the United States National Reconnaissance Office. Oh, my God, this is that thing? This is that thing. Oh, my gosh. So WFIRST was originally only going to be like a one-meter telescope. So it was going to be like this little wimpy thing that wasn't really going to actually look at a big spot in the sky. There's only going to have the field of view maybe a little bit bigger than Hubble. But then all of a sudden in mid-2011, the National Reconnaissance Office was like, hey, NASA, you want some leftover hardware that we have? Like, we don't need to use this anymore. You want it? And NASA was like, do you need air to breathe? Yeah, we'll take it. So they got basically two what are essentially, we're supposed to be spy satellites, frames complete with the optics in the spy satellite. This stuff is scary. Consider how old this is. This is old enough that the NRO doesn't want it and it's Hubble-grade technology. The difference being they weren't looking at the stars. No, they were looking back at the Earth. Oh, man. And that's their old stuff they don't care about anymore. Yeah. And as you said, the optics are Hubble quality. It literally doubled the radius of the mirror for WFIRST. So we literally just were like handed a much better telescope, not necessarily for free, but for a lot less than it would have. But the price will probably still be the same because you still have to make sure everything works and have the instrumentation probably. That's going to be a lot bigger and heavier. Yeah, it's going to be a lot heavier. And they are going to put it out at the L2 point. The Earth Sun Lagrange point to put it out there. And yeah, they're finally moving ahead. It's no longer preparatory studies or anything. We are now entering into I guess what we call the initial design phase of what we're going to do with WFIRST and everyone is so excited about it. I have a dub question. Yes. So WFIRST is near infrared, you said mostly, right? James Webb's Space Telescope is basically not visible light at all. It's infrared. It's infrared, right? Yes. So, but Hubble can do visible light. Yes. So once Hubble is retired, will we have anything that can do visible light anymore? Not in space. But I guess this is the best question. I mean, part of what gets people excited about space are those visible light images that come off of Hubble. Yes. Right? They go, oh my God, this is amazing. This looks awesome. We're going to essentially lose that capability. We won't lose that capability because by the time that we lose Hubble, we're going to have gigantic telescopes here on the Earth. And we've done big advancements in a field called adaptive optics. We shoot a laser through the atmosphere.  You generate an artificial star by exciting the molecules in the upper atmosphere. You have a camera. Look at that star. How is the light changing as it comes through the atmosphere? And then it will literally actuate the mirror of your telescope so that it basically flattens out the light. And you can already get beyond Hubble capable images at the Keck in Hawaii. So when did I get that in my iPhone? OK, so probably in like five, six months. Six months. Six months. Six months. So, yeah. Have you heard of the at last space telescope? Yes. That one is that an optical space telescope or another infrared or X-ray or something like that. That at last would be optical, although they're going to want to throw a bunch of other instrumentation on there as well because Hubble isn't strictly optical. Hubble did have the capability to do near infrared. And also Hubble does ultraviolet as well. So it's not just even though most of the images that we see are the visible light ones, it does have a little bit of range outside of the visible spectrum. And at last would essentially be the official successor of Hubble. And that has been proposed from anywhere from an 8 to 16 meter mirror on there, which Hubble has 2.4 meters with that there. And for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, at last is a Boeing proposal that is currently going through the rounds of design reference missions for possible payloads for the space launch system. So hopefully that that would be go through and then we would have a successor to Hubble, not just the ground telescope. It sounds like if the ground telescopes are just as good, why would we need it? Yeah, although 16 meters up in space, that's a really good optics if you could go towards the bigger end of that. Well, treasure brings up a good point, which is the visible light images from Hubble are always filtered though.  So, well, the data that comes through the filters is then processed, when it's released to the public, it's processed in a way that the naked eye could potentially see it. It's not necessarily 100% accurate, but they usually do a pretty good job of trying to show it. Now, when you get the actual data that's gone through the filters, that's for scientists because let's face it, black and white, you don't want to see black and white images from the Hubble Space Telescope, but us scientists, we go nuts over that because it's just such great data from Hubble. So, a lot of the stuff that's released for public is not what the scientists are using. That's just for public release because pretty pictures are awesome. So, nothing wrong with that. Green Gym 2 also says maybe we could build a huge telescope away from the atmosphere, say on the moon or Mars, kill two birds with one stone. That'd be pretty awesome, right? Yeah, that would be. Bringing up in pieces and assemble it on the moon. Actually, there's been those design reference missions like Space Mike is talking about with potential, basically putting a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. So, then you basically had the ultimate no interference from any radio sources on Earth. That'd be cool. That would be very cool. We probably studied the planet Pluto a little bit better from that one. Yeah, the planet Pluto. Of course. Yeah, that's fine. You're welcome. That's fine. All right, Space, we spent a good chunk of time on that one. Space Mike, talking to me about robotic 3D printing, going to the International Space Station and then soon our lunar colony that we're building right now. Where you can watch us design it in real time here on the show, yeah. So, what we're talking about is Made in Space. Made in Space was the company that sent up the first successful 3D printer to the International Space Station in 2014. They're soon going to be sending up another 3D printer to the International Space Station to try out different techniques and different processes with that. But they have a much more ambitious program that they're working on. And this program is called ARCANOT. And they have two partners worth this program. They're working with North Grumman and a company called Oceaneering Space Systems which builds robotic arms, kind of like MDA Corps from Canada. And this partnership is to build a 3D printer that would be able to print objects outside in the vacuum of space. It would be able to build large structures. Here's a photo of, this is at least a concept artist idea of what this might look like, printing like a large radio antenna. And for this, this is actually under a NASA program that is looking at different tipping point technologies. And it's a two-year program where NASA is investing $20 million into this. And their plan is that in 2018 they'll have an on-orbit demonstration of the ARCANOT where it will be able to 3D print a large structure. And with this, it'll be working on the outside of the space station. It won't be a free-flying object like you see in this artist recreation here. But if successful, then they would be able to create free-flying structures. And this type of ability would enable NASA and private space companies to launch the raw materials used in 3D printing along with, you know, certain high-value components like sensors and different electronics and batteries and stuff like that. But once on orbit, the robotic arms could mate the parts together and use the different 3D printed elements. And engineers wouldn't necessarily have to design space hardware that would be capable of withstanding the Earth's gravity during launch, you know, and be able to fit inside of any particular rocket fairing and to withstand all of the different vibrations and acoustic vibrations that are going on during launch. So there's a lot of different benefits to this sort of plan. And if it works, then it would be able to use so much stuff. Not only will we be able to build large structures in space, but it would also give incentive to go after space debris. Because if you can go after space debris and harvest parts from old satellites that aren't working anymore that still could work, you know, all of the antennas, some solar panels and a couple of different hardware on that, especially like fuel tanks and thrusters could be reused. But all the other stuff that you wouldn't necessarily need anymore could be melted down and made into new parts. So this would really give a huge incentive if you can collect a bunch of space debris and make new stuff out of it or even take, you know, working parts off of satellites that are no longer operational and make new satellites out of it and maybe even take old satellites and upgrade them. I would love to go up to one of the old Explorer satellites that are still up there. I think it's Explorer 6 is the oldest one that's still up there and go put a smartphone on that thing and some new solar panels and making an operational satellite again. That would be awesome. But in any case, I'm really excited about this idea and I really hope that Maiden Space is able to continue with their different innovations. I don't know if their next 3D printer is going to have any type of centrifuge or anything like that. But I mean, it does work.  So I'm excited to see what their progress yields. And in two years, hopefully we might be able to see this first Archonaut demonstration. So very cool news and I'm excited for it. Now, this is still... We're not printing with materials that you could actually build a spaceship with yet, are we? You know, David asks, so we can easily build a Starship with this. I'll assume spaceship as opposed to Starship. But I mean, it still tests... Depends on what type you're talking about, you know. If you're talking about building a spaceship for humans, probably not. You probably still would need to send up a lot of different components and supplies to be able to build something that could be for humans. But you could very much build robotic spacecraft that wouldn't need all of these extra different essentials to keep your payload alive and send them anywhere and do all sorts of really cool things with them. You know, be able to make sure that we have global coverage without having to send up a whole bunch of new satellites. You know, sending probes off to the moon or to Mars or something like that. Something that I personally would love to do with this idea is go to old Russian upper stages. There's thousands of them in orbit. I mean, American ones too. But there's tons of upper stages that are still in orbit and they're in pristine condition. I would love to go to those things and inspect them, replace any parts that might need to be replaced, refuel them and stick one of those satellites that we built in space onto them and send them off somewhere into deep space. Pick a destination. We can go anywhere with that. So, I'm sorry, I'm getting very, you know, fanboyish about this, but I'm very excited about the possibilities that this type of thing could bring.  If we can get these different problems solved of how to do 3D printing in space in microgravity and in low gravity environments, then this guy, oh man, there's a limit. It would be nice to have one on a probe. Like if something breaks on the probe, you can fix it. Like with Galileo, the NASA probe that went to Jupiter in the 90s when its high-gain antenna broke, it would have been great to have had some type of 3D printer there in order to fix it potentially. That would have been something really easy to make too. That's like the stuff that they're talking about making for these demos is antenna. So, well, they are still using thermoplastics, so Vax Hadroom says Arcanite is still using thermoplastics. Northrop Grumming is building the electronics. So, you know, you would not be able to, I don't believe with this demo, at least you'd be able to build an antenna because you would not have the material necessary for that. Yeah, not at the moment. But in the future. Yeah, in the future. It sounds like near future too. Maybe, I mean, so printing with thermoplastics is very different than printing metal parts though, right? So, but as you mentioned, Space Mike, you know, if we can centrifuge something and potentially do laser sintering of sorts, that might be pretty cool too. Yeah, it's really cool. And that goes into some of the other demos that Maiden Space is planning to do before doing this Arcanite idea is figuring out how to do laser sintering additive manufacturing, not just working with thermoplastics. So, I think that's the real game changer because once you can do that, now you can print metal parts and you can print them like with incredible resolution and incredible strength. You could 3D print your entire rocket if the printer were big enough. I would be super slow, but you could do it. So, when we're going to Mars and we're becoming a space variant civilization, I think that is going to be one of the key technologies that allows us to do it because we'll be able to print the parts we need on flight. We'll have to bring a spare of everything. We can just print whatever is missing or broken right up there in space. All right, awesome. Thank you so much, Space Mike. The chat room is very excited about that particular story. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to be talking about the Space Leadership Preservation Act or Slippa. So, stay tuned. Slippa. Stay tuned. Yeah, we'll be right back. Back to tomorrow. Now, before we get started with our main topic this week, I didn't want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who have jumped to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are the people who've contributed $5 or more to this show. If you'd like to find out how you can help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow, head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. We are a crowdfunded show. Every single dollar helps. All right, let's go ahead and get started with the Space Leadership Preservation Act. How much do you guys know about this one? This was actually my first time hearing about it. Really? All right, not a lot. You? Very interested. Like, two days ago, I think? Yeah, so... I've read briefly about it. Here's the problem. The problem is that every time politicians change or presidents change, NASA gets a new marching orders, essentially, right? So, a great example of this is George W. Bush. He said, NASA, you're going to build a constellation. You're going to go to the moon. I'm not going to fund it, but that's what you're going to do. And so... Well... Cool. So, he started with a constellation. He started building Aries 1. They had Aries 5 in the plans. They had Altair.  And then, because he didn't fund it, it was this huge boondog. It just wasn't going anywhere very fast. So, the Obama administration came in and immediately, like, nixed it. They're like, nope, no more constellation. And we're not even going to the moon. Instead, we're going to go to an asteroid and you're going to build... Oh, no, they didn't even want to build anything. You're going to go to an asteroid and you're going to use existing off-the-shelf stuff. And Congress said, no, no, no, we need a rocket. And so, Space Launch System was born. And now, we're about to change presidents again. So, what is that new president... What's keeping that new president from going, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're not going to do Space Launch System. We're not going to do the asteroid. Instead, we're going to go back to constellation. We're going to go back to the moon. And we're not going to fight you. So, there's nothing preventing... Perfect, Trump. NASA's canceled toll together. Or canceled it completely, exactly. I mean, there are candidates talking about things like that. Well, not necessarily like that, but seriously, de-scoping a lot of what NASA does. So, NASA's focus changes faster than bleeding-edge space technology can move, right? A Space Launch System or a constellation program is a decades-long kind of thing. And so, what Congress basically said is, why don't we change the way this works? Instead of giving the president control of this, let's create a team of people. Let's create a... What is the term I'm looking for? A committee. It's kind of like a board of directors. Board of directors, exactly. And Congress will pick some of the people that go on the board. And the president will pick some of the people that go on the board. And the administrator will be also chosen from the administrator of NASA. Will be chosen by the board. They will have several people selected to become administrator. And then the president has to choose from that pool, right? So, the president can't just choose anyone. They have to choose someone that the board says is acceptable. So, we're taking a lot of control and power out from NASA away from the president and essentially put it into Congress's hands. So, that they essentially control it. Really, this board would control it. But... Because the Congress would pick eight members for the board and the president gets to point three members for the board. So, if the Congress wants to pull the strings of their members, they have more power and leverage over that than the president. So, there you go. That's essentially what the problem is. And that is kind of one of the solutions. Oh, and by the way, one other addition. Whatever administrator is chosen does a fixed 10-year term. That way it's more than a single president. It's just... It doesn't matter whether the... All the politics goes Democrat, Republican, whatever. It's, boom, 10 years. You're the NASA administrator for 10 years. That's a good enough time to get a project. We went to the moon in that amount of time. Yeah. If we go to the moon in that amount of time, we can do major projects or at least get them to the point where they need to be in 10 years. And if we can't, then we're doing it wrong. So, there you go. All right, thoughts, Mike. Good idea, bad idea. Well, I think that it's a good idea if the right people are selected for this board of directors. You know, some of the supporters, probably the biggest supporter of this and I wouldn't be surprised if he's the one who kind of pushed this forward, is Mike Griffin, the previous administrator of NASA. And it's known that he wants his old job back really bad. And I think that he would be pushing for this to be on that board of directors because that's even better than being an administrator. You're in charge of it all, or at least part of the team of that. Anyway, I think he has very, very mixed motivations here for why he's pushing and supporting this. But I think it is a good idea if the right people are selected. He was mentioning how it would be really great if astronauts and scientists and qualified people would be on this board of directors. However, since it would be kind of in Congress's hands, I feel like it would be politicians put in there. Kind of the same way that the Congress is a science director and I'm sorry I forgot the whole title of it, doesn't matter anyway, is all politicians. They're not qualified to talk about this stuff. I mean, half the people on this Congress's science committee don't believe that global warming is real. And I mean, they're not qualified at all to make a lot of these decisions. And that's where I feel like the danger lies with this thing if it's enacted. If we get politicians in there who are not qualified to make any of these decisions, then we're going to have a lot of bad things that have come about from that. But if we do have qualified people who will not be pressured by politicians and other political pressures to do what they want and to choose what's right and what's good for NASA and the country, then it could be a really great thing. But that's where this all kind of balances, in my opinion, is who would be the people on that board of directors? That actually held us, brings up a good point. I think I just lost it here. Would it be a miniature space Senate bickering about whether science works or not? I think, like you said, it would be determined by the people. I was about to say we already have that problem in some respects with some of the House, Senate, or science committees bickering about whether NASA should be doing certain types of science that I shall abstain from saying on the air just to keep everything nice and happy, at least so. Chris Radcliffe brings up a good point. He says, it seems like a very political way to protect the agency from politics. A little bit. A little bit, but then the appointing of whomever would be on that board of directors and then the potential candidates from the board of directors. So what's your opinion? Is this a good idea or is this about it? Man, I don't know. This just, it sounds like a great idea when you think about it because like, hey, here's stability, some stability for a decade. But then also you've got the influence of Congress coming into that. And we all know how great they've been over the past five years in determining the directions that things should go. And even now, there's certain parts of NASA that certain congressional representatives feel that NASA shouldn't be doing that are very important to actual science with it. So I'm very skeptical of a program like this. I guess is how I would put it. I don't feel very great about it. I don't feel like completely pulled away from it. Like, I don't want this whatsoever, but... Well, what's the answer then, right? So how do we fix this? Because we've got problems where some senators in some politicians use NASA as their own personal jobs program. And that's bad. That's bad for science. It's actually bad for everyone involved. But they don't care. I mean, they're just gonna check it off their little box of I Save Jobs. So how do we fix that? What is the right, what is the, what's a better way of going about it than the Space Leadership Preservation Act? I'll put you on the spot. In YouTube, I think you got an idea. I do actually. I feel like the unifying thing behind this that everyone can agree on, both the people that support and don't support this plan, is that NASA does need to be protected from administration changes. NASA does need to be protected from political arguments and political motivations. That is something that everyone who's discussing this topic in Congress can agree on. Even the people who do wanna have their personal jobs programs. They wanna make sure that personal job program would be able to go forward and wouldn't be at risk of canceled. So everyone has different motivations for that. But that is the unifying thing. And so even if this particular plan doesn't get enacted, I think that it's a good thing that at least Congress is talking about it. It's being talked about. They all know and agree that it's a problem. And even if this isn't the solution, maybe the solution will be talked about. At least it's being debated. So speaking of talking about it, go ahead, where did you have one? Oh, I was gonna say NASA's always been looked at as like a crown jewel in the ability to do the United States and our science and technology to do that. And it is something that does get impacted from presidential administration to another. Like back in the 90s, you had George Bush's, George Bush One, or George Bush Mark One. George Bush Mark One, George Bush Mark Two. I love that. His administration really was about, hey, we're gonna get people to Mars by 2019. That is our target date. This is what we're doing. And then Bill Clinton came in and said, no, we've got to get NASA better, faster, cheaper. And we all know how that worked out, metric mixed up. But you know, yeah, there really does need to, we need to find stability and not just the political stability, but also the budgetary stability too. Because after all, if you're not giving an equivalent amount of money to go to the moon, you will not be going to the moon. Anything good from Capcom? Anything good from the chat room? Or are they just? So much, so much.  You're like, oh, is there stuff good in the chat room? I'm like, at least 20 messages behind trying to star things, pushing the stuff to you guys. A lot of interesting debate going on. A lot of interesting ideas. Honestly, I'm afraid of losing my place. I'm afraid of going over to the other chat room to talk about all the things that are coming up. So a lot of people are concerned about, you know, everyone I think inherently likes the idea of, I guess I should talk to the camera. Everyone seems to like the idea of, you know, there being some sort of stability there, but it sounds like the way that it's going, that this process is going about it may be the wrong way. The idea of a tiny little Congress having to answer to a larger Congress doesn't really seem like that's the way that we want it to go. It was a little bit of mini-stowage brought up, well, why don't we just do a NASA and make, or do a Russia and make NASA a state-owned corporation? And then immediately got- Never do a Russia. Yeah, exactly. That immediately got a lot of nos in the chat room space. We'll go to Wicked, obviously, Mike. But then Chris Reckley brought up an interesting point and said, yeah, but for all their thoughts, faults, NASA is still launching people into space, which is a very good point there. So it's interesting. Green Jim actually says, if private space takes off, then the whole discussion will be moot. So it's a little bit different. It's interesting. There's definitely a lot of debate about it. People are very passionate about it. I think in general, people, again, like the stability, the idea of stability for NASA, because who doesn't really? I forget where it was in there. I apologize. But somebody said something along the lines of, why don't we just give NASA the money and then they can decide how to use it? Which I think is something we've been saying here on, I nearly said space big cast here on tomorrow for quite a while now. Yeah, so it's a little all over the place, but there's a lot of really great debate going on. I'll see if I can push some more to you. Yeah, absolutely. The polls are polarized. Pretty much. That's awesome. Awesome.  I guess it's an interesting idea. I think we all generally agree that what we're doing right now isn't working super well. I don't want to say that it's really ultra broken because there are great things coming out of NASA, right? I mean, NASA is still doing amazing things, but at the same time, there's also a lot of waste still in NASA and it's no small part because of this constant course correction that they're forced to do, but they're a government agency. And so as a government agency, are they more wasteful than another one? I feel like as a government agency, they're only as wasteful as they're directed to be. Yeah, and that comes down to, yeah, I mean, that comes down to, well, so I'm split on this. So if you give the every, we say a lot of like, you know, take the Congress people out of it and let the scientists make those decisions, but then you end up with a James Webb Space Telescope where they just keep throwing things at it and keep throwing, they want every feature. I don't care about price, every feature. I need to have all of the science, all of the science. I'm literally calling it right now, 20 years from now when we're reading textbooks about project management, James Webb will be like number two on there of like how things go wrong in terms of project management. And that's, I mean, that wasn't Congress really saying, hey, do this, that are the other things. That's a lot of that fault as a scientist. Yeah, and you know, it was really interesting because back in 2011, right, when the Shuttle program was wrapping up, there was a huge debate happening in Congress. Hey, should we actually like allow James Webb to continue to have money? Like we should just cancel this thing because it's already like twice, two times over the budget that was proposed and now they're telling us they need twice the money that we've already given them to complete this space telescope. So let's just cancel this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think, I can't remember exactly, but James Webb is over almost, if not over $8 billion by now and that is just a huge amount of money. I've never been a big fan of James Webb. One of the problems too is that if you want to get funded, you almost have to undershoot what your actual mission is going to cost because if you come in and you give an actual projection of what your budget could be, you may not get picked up because if you're too much, there's just not even going to look at your proposal to begin with. So a lot of these over budget situations that end up happening with missions ends up happening simply because you have to aim as low as possible, even unrealistically low in order to actually get your proposal even looked at. That's fair. Chris Radkov brings up a good point, which is stability of the primary concern though. If NASA had stuck with Constellation, where would we be now? Impossible to say, but you know, so Constellation had its faults, Aries 1, but it also had a lot of really great stuff with it. Had we funded it appropriately, I don't know, Constellation was not terrible once you got past Aries 1. Yeah. So a lot of good ideas. There were a lot of really great ideas. So I'm not sure that we would be in a really bad place with Constellation other than Aries 1. So there you go. All right. Final comments, Mike? I guess just for big programs like that, I guess that's why I would want fixed price contracting so that when the James Webb Space Telescope got over five years late and the huge price would have just been canceled. But final comments on the infection range. Hang on. I'm going to challenge you on that one a little bit. Oh, here we go. So fixed price has a place. Absolutely. Especially when you're doing something that you know how to do. Getting things to low Earth orbit. We've done that for 50 plus years. There's no reason to not fix price that, right? But when you're doing something you've never done before, when you're on the bleeding edge of science and technology, you don't know what you don't know. How do you price that? How do you fix price that? You can't. But as a company, you still need to make profit. And that's actually where some of these other contracts do actually make sense. I can see your point there where it would make sense. And that's why I brought this up last show is where I would want to allow exceptions. And it would all depend on what it is. And I think for something like this where we're doing something new, if I was the one controlling this and I'd given a fixed price contract for James Webb, once it got to a certain point, I pretty much would have given the contractor the option of, okay, you either need to fly a precursor mission, which with the stuff that you have working already or the program is canceled because you're way too much. And with the progress that you've made, we can still fly something. Like I said, a precursor mission. Otherwise, we need to cancel this because it's draining the program. Honestly, if James Webb Space Telescope hadn't happened, constellation might have happened. So I don't know. I'm biased about that because just so much money. And the thing is, is constellation... Yeah, but constellation was so much more money. I mean, there are different scales here, Space Mike. It's almost $8 billion. And Space Launch System is over $12 billion at this point and if you count all the money that was put into Aries 5, so it's crazy. They're both crazy. But I don't know. That's where it goes back to. Let's move on though because we're running out of time and we still need to talk about last show's comments. I know, I know, I know. Final comments from you, Jared? Just, man, we need to really rethink a lot of things in terms of how we're working it. But at least that conversation's happening and that's a very good thing. That's a good point. The conversation has to happen before something actually does happen. And I'm so glad that we're having the conversation. Maybe this isn't the right solution, but at least people are realizing there's a problem and starting to talk about it. It's nice because it allows input to come in. I mean, I'm sure, I would hope at least that some of NASA administrators, upper echelon people would actually kind of chime in a little bit about this. Like this is a good idea. This is a bad idea. Here's maybe a better idea or here's a couple better ideas and how this could work with it. And that would be just be really nice to have that kind of collaboration to figure out a good solution to the problem. All right, we're going to take a quick... We'll probably hear that on the Monday Blitz. Hopefully. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, comments from our last week's show. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. And welcome back to tomorrow. Now, before we get started with the viewer comments section of the show, I did want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who have to make this specific segment of this episode happen. These are the people who are going to get access to After Dark as soon as it is made available. They also get access to the Google Hangouts or Patreon. I don't know what we're calling those, the Tomorrow Chats that we'll be having. The Fireside Chats. The Fireside Chats. Now, we were supposed to have that tomorrow... What is that? February 28th. That will not be happening. We're going to delay that by one week. So, that's going to be March 6th instead. So, that first Fireside Chat. I do like that. But wait, there's more. If you just contribute as little as one penny to the show. The previous one, by the way, were $2.50, but as little as one penny gets your name in a show as well as access to those Fireside Chats. So, thank you to everyone for contributing to the show. Every single penny helps. We are a crowdfunded show and we very much so appreciate it. All right, Capcom. Let's take it away with some comments from our last week's show. What was the topic last week? That's a good question. I actually didn't put it in this week. So, I have no idea anymore. What? Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Wait, okay. Go to the graphic. There you go. Oh yeah, Space Tours and the State of Space Tourism. Yeah, no. Okay, now I remember. All right, gorgeous. Sorry. Hit me up. What's the first one? Oh, my goodness. Okay, this one comes off of Reddit. It's from Talo Kfar. Says, the Space Adventures circumlunar mission would be, I believe, the single most unimaginably terrifying thing any civilian can pay to be part of as well as the most awe-inspiring. It truly saddens me that the option is there and we've had no takers as of yet other than James Cameron. I'm sure it's because other wealthy people don't know about it, right? Well, I think you need to understand an Apollo 8-style mission around the moon is going to be very, very expensive and like the worst camping trip you've ever had. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Don't get me wrong.  Combine. I don't know how else to describe that. So it takes a certain individual, I think, to do that. And I believe most of the citizens of tomorrow would do that if they had the money in a heartbeat, but you don't need the normal mere citizens of tomorrow. We need the billionaires of tomorrow to do this and the billionaires are a little less risk-willing, I think. We need the billionaires of today to do it tomorrow. Yeah, there you go. Thank you, Dada. Thank you. Thank you, boy. The voices. The voices. All right, Capcom. This one comes off of YouTube from U5KO. If you're looking for a joy ride, that's fine. I just wouldn't call it space tourism. That term should be reserved for the sort of thing which really changes your perspective via the overview effect. For that, you need orbital velocity at a minimum. Challenge. Do you actually need orbital velocity for the overview effect? When you're far enough away from Earth to see the curvature and you can no longer see the boundaries and you're sitting there floating and you see the fragility of our planet, isn't that enough for the overview effect? What does orbital velocity have to do with overview effect? I would say the people who have flown in U2 aircraft up to 60,000 to 70,000 feet get the overview effect from their flights that they experience. You, Mike, what do you think? Do you think that orbital velocity is required for overview? I think that there are different levels because I've heard different astronauts talk about how they have been in low Earth orbit before than the ones who went to do the Hubble servicing missions which I believe is around 500 kilometers or is it 500 miles? I can't remember. In any case, they said that being that much higher up was a different and altogether new experience than when they were in low Earth orbit. So I think that you would get a similar type, maybe a low level overview effect for, like, say, the world view balloon flights. But I think that there's different levels. So I think that, yes, you're right, U5KO depending on what level or what type of overview effect there is, I guess, because there's different levels. And I mean, the overview effect has seen like an Earth rise from the moon. I think Trump's all of that. I was just going to say that, right? I mean, it feels like, I think you hit it. There are levels of the overview effect. The overview effect from the moon is going to be very different than the overview effect from the International Space Station, which will be very different than the overview effect from, like, a world view, which, by the way, Chris Bradcliffe brings up. Did anyone notice that Astronaut Ron Garand is now working for a world view? So that's pretty cool, yeah. Yeah, cool. Sneak a little space news into the comment section. All right. Next up, Capcom. This one comes from Sachinainian Yixi, I think, is it? Yeah. Well, that one. I will get this one right, because that one, that one's anyway. This one comes off of YouTube. If you give me a free ticket, I'd go to the Bigelow station on a Dragon 2. Blue Origin, on the other hand, sounds something I could potentially afford one day. Hashtag, space tourism. Yeah, I think that'd be pretty cool. I think that's where a lot of this is going to really start to solidify is when we have tourism space stations that you can go to. Which you can't do either one of those things today. But that would be cool when you can in the future. All right, next up, Capcom. Off of Twitter, this is Nathaniel Decker, also known as Novotekko. Space tourism definition solution must orbit. Carbon line definition derived from orbital speed anyway should have stuck with that. So again, orbital speed, we're stuck on speed. Geez. Stuck on speed, people. What does you all going fast? They really want to go fast. I mean, I do too. No, I think, look, I think orbital speed is awesome. But you need to run before you can walk, right? It was Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. We didn't just go to the moon. You have to run.  Flip that around, do it the correct way.  So, yeah, I mean, the space tourism industry is still way too young. It's not even essentially flying yet. There's one company, Space Adventures, that's using other stuff to make that happen. Yeah, and then even with Space Adventures, it's not guaranteed that you're going to go either. Right, so we need these other, we need the Virgin Galactics, the Blue Origins, the X-Cores of the world to actually start to enable these things. And this is going to start a suborbital. And I think, I don't, just because it's suborbital, I'm not sure means that it's not space tourism. I don't know, like, I could make the same argument. Well, I mean, is low Earth orbit even space tourism? You're not really going into space that much. Maybe that doesn't count and maybe you have to go to the moon.   So then maybe that doesn't count. And then by the time you're at the moon, well, that's still part of the Earth Moon system. Yes, it's... That's not really space tourism. You actually have to go to Mars before you're considered a space tourist. I mean, how far out do we pull that? No, because if you go to Mars, you're still within the Sun sphere of influence. The Sun sphere... You need to leave the entire solar system. Alpha Centauri? No, because you're still in the Milky Way sphere of influence. I get, I think at this juncture, just like any Mercury astronaut that went up to space was an astronaut, anyone who goes up on a Virgin America... Virgin America? I'm an astronaut! Anyone who goes up on a Virgin Galactic or an X-Car Fly to this show is unraveling quickly would be considered a space tourist. Oh, Capcom, get me out of here. Go, go, please. This last comment also comes off on Twitter from Sorin, also known as Andon Cage. Apparently, I didn't read that one before reading it. Anyway, space adventures for sure. Around the Moon Apollo 8-style and seen Earthrise. IRL, hashtag space tourism. In real life. In real life. That would be pretty epic. I would love... Who wouldn't love to see an Earthrise? That would just be... That would be... Just thinking about it. Yeah, I know. It's just, you. Awesome. Tingly. All right, that was our show this week. I'd like to thank everyone so much for joining us. We'll be back with you next week as usual. However, as I mentioned, that fireside chat will not be tomorrow. Instead, it will be March 6th. That has been posted to Patreon. So, we're looking forward to doing that with all of our patrons. You must be a patron. In order to participate in the fireside chat, there will not be an archived on-demand available for non-patrons. But it will be made available on-demand for our patrons. So, as little as one penny gets you access to that fireside chat. Head on over to Patreon.com slash TMRO for access. Stay tuned after dark is up next.