Talkin NASA's Plans With Jared Isaacman at MAX POWER [33:57]

Transcript (very little manual spekchek)

Chapter 1: Exploring the VAB

Hello, it’s Scott Manley here and I am in NASA’s vehicle assembly building which is just um ginormous. Uh you may have heard these facts like it’s one of the largest buildings in the world. It’s got so much vertical development that you can actually sometimes get clouds forming partway up because uh we all know about the lapse rate of the atmosphere. It gets cold and stuff starts condensing. But uh you of course I’m not here to talk about the weather. I’m here to talk about the SLS uh for Artemis 3 which is currently being stacked right up there. It’s hard to see. So yeah, that was one part of a very long weekend in Florida for me. It was NASA’s Max Power event. It was the air show. There was the UpSummit. And there was also a whole bunch of stuff over at the visitor center, but I am all human and I couldn’t actually get to all of these. In fact, the weekend was packed with so much going on that some people went to some real extremes to make sure they got to the right place at the right time. There was this person actually skydived into the event. You might have heard of him. His name is Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator. The famously long shuttle runway had been taken over by the air show. That meant that you couldn’t fly a plane in. Now, technically, you could have probably caught in any helicopter, but where’s the fun in that? And by the way, as someone that grew up with the space shuttle, I kept having to remind people how cool it was that we got to hang out on the space shuttle runway, although I do not envy the person that had to do the FODWalk after this. It’s a very long, very wide runway. So, as media, I got special access. I got to visit the vehicle assembly building, and I got to compare this model of the SLS, which in no way resembles the real thing, to the real thing, which at this point is just the core and two boosters. But if you think about it, they’ve stacked everything they can because the next item to stack is the thing that they actually have to build. Since Aremis 3 is only going to low Earth orbit, they don’t need the upper stage. And so they’re building a structure to sit between the booster and the Orion spacecraft so that they don’t need to waste this one-of-a-kind stage.

Chapter 2: Artemis gala and air show

And speaking of Artemis, there was the Artemis Gala the night before, which I got invited to as a media representative. So, I got to sit at the back of the room and take pictures of Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schwikert giving the crew of Artemis 3 some sage advice. Well, except for Andre Douglas, who couldn’t make it, so he had his backup replace him. Charlie Duke was also there, and they both had a conversation with the crew of Artemis 2. Oh, and the whole dinner was underneath the Saturn 5 rocket at the Kennedy Space Center. This may not be your kind of party. is probably not my kind of party, but it is the kind of party you want to put on when you’re a political organization and you have people that perhaps can help you uh acquire resources that will help you know fulfill your agency’s mission. Everyone else just had to make do with the actual public shows which were a lot of fun, especially if you’re the NAS administrator who decided to perform three different times during the show. He came up with his squadron of F5s. He came back in his Mig 29 doing a solo display while burning coal and there of course skydived in at the end so he could give a speech and that was just what he did at the air show because afterwards there was a NASA update on the moon base and there was some serious like important stuff that happened here.

Chapter 3: Moon base planning update

First of all we all know about clips the commercial lunar payload services. Well now clips 2 is the future and this is going to be and so clips 2 is now on a different scale. the payloads that they’re talking about bringing to the surface of the moon are starting to get up into the multi-tonon region. This is, you know, the kind of stuff, the logistics capability that you’re going to need to actually build a moon base. Another interesting thing was that they announced the acquisition of six launches through the Vader program. And that program is usually reserved for payloads that can tolerate a high level of risk. This is how they put like the Escapade mission on top of New Glenn, which was at that time an unproven rocket. But most of these flights are on things like Falcon 9 that are now definitely well proven. The whole Vader uh contract design affords a lot more flexibility to both the launch provider and NASA and allows them to swap payloads if say a lander is not available but a launch vehicle is. And I think the message I’m getting here is that Moonbase wants to be serviced constantly by you know large number of launches. This isn’t going to be like one launch a year. this is going to be maybe a launch every couple of months or even more often. But I think the thing that I saw that h said you know moon base really is happening is that a number of the payloads that were announced were sort of basic infrastructure kind of things that you need to support the cool science being done. They’re not rovers that are going to explore the surface and do science. These are things like we’re going to have power towers, we’re going to have communications, and they’re also going to come out with the interoperability guidelines so that we can make sure that one person’s payload can talk to another person’s power system. You want to avoid a situation where you’re having to carry dozens of different adapters eating into your total payload capacity. Developing good interoperability standards is uh, you know, unglamorous but essential to this kind of thing. Finally, they announced that the Promise rover is a go. So, this is where they’re taking an old engineering model of the Curiosity rover and they’re tooling it out to go to the moon. Now, that’s going to require a bunch of changes because the thermal environment on the moon is different, but this is going to be a nuclearpowered rover on the moon. And an interesting part of this is that the radioisotope thermmoelect electric generator on the back is actually one that was built 30 years ago. And it’s basically, you know, been slowly generating power all that time. It was built for the Cassini mission and I guess NASA held on to it hoping that they would find the perfect mission for it. Well, now, uh, it’s lower power and it’s not really good thing to send that out into deep space, but sending it to the moon so it can enter into permanently shadowed regions, that would be a perfectly good use for this. There’s definitely a lot more analysis to be done on how the moon base is shaping up and I may get to that at some point, but I just thought it was, you know, cool to actually get to one of these press conferences given I’m usually on the wrong coast.

Chapter 4: Interview with administrator

Uh, but even better, after the this press conference, we had all the questions and I got a chance to sit down with the administrator himself. And I have to apologize in demand for the sort of rather unflattering camera angle, but um, you know, I was tired. I sat in the wrong place and uh the wonderful camera person did the best he could. We’re at Max Power and I’m sitting down with Jared and he just put on an amazing show today for the crowds and the crowds absolutely love him. Did you love what you’re doing? I uh I was just pleased that this so this is the start of the weekend air show, but this has not been like the start of our week. This has been a heavy week here. Um, so we had several days of VI, you know, kind of the upsummit portion of Max Power of which endless stream uh of VIPs wanted to come and attend, which is fantastic. And I say that all the time. Regardless of your politics, if you love NASA, then you want the president, the secretary of state, all your congressional leadership, the office of management and bud budget, the office of science, technology and policy, everyone coming down here to see what’s going on at NASA, which meant tours of the VAB and some of the other projects we have going on. So, it has been a heavy week. So, I will say that some of that behind us now and the black tie event so you could just get in a flight suit and have the time is somewhat of a relief, but uh got to get we’ll eventually catch up on some rest. But yes, it’s been uh it’s been a heck of a week here at Kenny Space Center. Yeah, echoing us like I I love the fact that NASA is one of the the real things in America. Unites us, right? You know, United States celebrate the things that bring us together. But yeah, I mean, you you know, I saw you fly in the the F5, the the MIG 29, which um first time I actually saw it flying in person, and you’re skydiving. What was your highlight for that? Uh, I’m gonna say it was the MIG flight for sure. Uh, the skydiving was a surprise. Um, which was which was great except the schedule doesn’t have a whole lot of time in between. So, after I landed from the F5 flight, we went right into the Mig29 flight and then I landed from that and they’re like, there’s there’s no car here for you, but you can you can skydive back into KC. I was like, where do we land? What a brilliant idea. And I was like, this has got like the the I I do try and do the, you know, the upside down side thing. And it’s like the upside is minimal, which is they expect me to land and I stand it up. The downside is everything else. I land in the the creek where the alligators are, the swamp. I stumble. I roll around in the in the swamp, marshy land before I we before I go on the stage. There’s a lot of downside to this. But anyway, that was the only way to arrive and it was it was reasonably good. But it was I mean, all of this is super cool. You had the Thunderbirds that are that are here. We we brought out so many of the great NASA aircraft uh to all this, the T-38s, the F-15, the F18. I mean, just just a great time at a at a at a part of the uh you know, of of of NASA that’s not very accessible outside of launches. Yeah, I was really loved seeing all those NASA aircraft in person. Yeah. Not just like the T30. I saw the Orion and the the U2 or the P er whatever that Yeah, we have P3 here too, but we have the ER2s as well. Yep. Yeah. Um and of course, you know, we also had all the other NASA stuff out for to showing off.

Chapter 5: SR1 mission design analysis

Um but but yeah, I want to we just had this Moonbase update and uh one of the things that did come over on my socials I guess in the last few days is we saw well I was at the at the press site and we saw this model of SR1 and uh I I made some comments about redesigns [laughter] and you intercepted me. Well, I’m not so I I uh cuz I didn’t see it until you posted it and I was like the hell is that? I mean cuz you know there are certain rules like the first rule is it has to look good and I’m like who chopped off the boom and and the thing is like yes of course everybody there’s a lot of uh design iteration that’s going on right now and a lot of trades right now with mass and it would um obviously be ideal if we could delete uh some or even all of the problem is it’s going to cook the skyfall avionics that’s kind of a pretty important payload to the to the to the whole thing but um they were still trading that and it’s likely going to be a much smaller one because this is also an example of even if it closed and we we’ve been I just got sent some hilarious uh videos today in my update on uh on Skyfall of all the avionics that failed its RAD testing and it it failed. Um but like even if it passed, right, like you still got to get your your hands dirty on on boom design because you know you’re going to need it for SR23 and and and beyond. So it it seems like the compromise is going to be uh there is going to be uh you know an an extendable boom but uh probably not as long as envisioned or as ugly as what you spotted. Yeah. Well I mean like the boom length it is literally your archetypal optimization problem where you know the longer your boom is the more mass you have but the more radiation or the less radiation shielding you need. And yeah so you there’s a perfect length in there that satisfies everything. Well, if you find that perfect length, we’ve let our team know because they’ve been working on it. And you mentioned the radiation testing. Like this is a big deal for SR1 because it’s going to be generating neutron radiation, which is different from your classic solar proton radiation. So, you got to go back and look at everything you’ve already done. Yeah, this is this is this is a this is somewhat of a new one for us, but that’s the whole that is the whole point of doing an imperfect mission, by the way, to get as much data as you can to roll into next one. Obviously, you don’t want to you don’t want to cook Skyfall. you you don’t want the you don’t want the the reactor to have a a very brief life because it uh it it overheated in this environment which is also a possibility. Um you want it to work for as long as you can and then break it after it releases Skyfall would be the ideal outcome. Um so yes there’s a lot of work going but it’s meant to be somewhat imperfect. Yeah. But you know set controls for deep space after it leaves everything behind right. Oh yeah. for for that that that is like the the current thinking is we’re just going to keep sending it and running it as sound as we can. Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. So, I mean that’s that’s the mission that I’m, you know, super excited about just because I’ve spent so long watching nuclear in space not happen.

Chapter 6: Moon base strategy overview

But yeah, we had the moon base update. Um, and we’ve announced a whole bunch of new uh clips missions, which the launches are under the Vader program or whatever, which is a, you know, difference, I guess. Um, because previously we didn’t have Falcon 9’s launching under that. Yeah, I I think that what you’re what you’re seeing is a lot of creativity being exercised right now. So, you know, coming out of the gate, uh, leveraging Eclipse 1.0 was fine. again when you’re launching a mission a year or two and you like the whole thing end to end is what you’re trying to procure some of but like that’s it that’s like completely unmanageable when you’re trying you’re putting lots of words like the right way at some point approach this is yes we need five you know uh you know um uh tower you know solar towers that are coming and three comm demonstrations you have now but like oh this rocket’s not available but I can I can do this demonstration on something else transportation you want I mean if you really love space to be very commoditized And I I told the team here like we want to work to a a just a space transportation office where your your research and technology mission director comes in and says I’ve got this and it needs to fly and they’re like well this guy’s late and move things around. Eclipse 1.0 did not give you the flexibility to do that. We have a lot more flexibility now especially when you get 78 nations contributing science payloads. Uh not to mention calls that we put out to industry. We need we need a lot of agility here to move things around. Yeah. And the other things I I heard it’s like with the early day the first time we were talking about moon base it was taking like a bunch of eclipse missions and saying these are you know moonbased but now in this latest one we’re hearing it’s like oh we’re actually looking at the interoperability of stuff and that’s you know you’re going to need common standards for your power your fluids whatever right there’s all these things that need to be solved. So, so think and so think about that, right? Because that was that you’re you’re absolutely right. Like very early on people were just like, “Okay, so you rebranded a couple clips missions that already existed as moon base.” Well, it would have been weird not to when you’re you’re putting a lot, but but we put a demand signal out to industry where nothing changed from from now until then in terms of the things they need to do. Long lead items for COPVs, uh getting hyperall thrusters on orders, all these things that take an awful lot of time, scaling up their operations, right? And then you now we can give them an update of this is this is how we’re going to evolve into you know interoperability the architecture that we we want to at least test with phase one and then and then bring online for phase two is in terms of like the the power grid that we might have or the communication systems on the surface. So, so think about like how maybe we would have done it differently, right? On that we would have done a lot of studies and we would have we would have come up with a grand design of what the phase three would have looked like and there would not have been a phase one and two and then you would have put out some RFPs except now these aren’t these aren’t $200 million things. These are extremely expensive things. So, it’s an extremely long RFP process and then one person maybe wins it and then the other two protests like hell and that drags out another two years, right? And then maybe the next administration says this is a bad idea and I don’t want to do it anymore and it gets canled. That’s guaranteed how we would done before instead of like out of the gate. We’re going to buy a ton of clips landers and rovers. So start scaling up right now and we’ll give you a demand signal for the next 3 years and then each time we’ll learn a little bit more. And now here we are 9 months later. A lot of that analysis has been done. We’re giving you a little bit more guidance and direction on how we want. Yeah. It feels like don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, right? Like whatever you do, don’t do nothing. Do something. And this is what I’m feeling with NASA right now. I’m liking it.

Chapter 7: HLS and flight autonomy

Uh yeah. So actually I flew VMS recently and and you mentioned it was you know great uh experience but so I I did the lunar landing manual lunar landing and uh you know I I really want to get your take on the manual control requirement for landing for the HLS obviously. Yeah. Uh so first of all when I was in VMS I it was the tilt rotor that I flew which had a uh absolutely wild um autonomous flight mode capability where it was um it was constantly building its picture through a a a sensor fusion event from LAR uh even it was taking groundbased uh sensors that were feeding in through data links and and it was crazy cuz I was flying around like this is the greatest sim ever and they’re like but you’re really here to see what it does when you don’t touch it and then it went like 10 ft into a canyon. And it was like hands off and it activated and this is um this is homegrown software that we did that was really cool and now partnering with you know defense customers and other sport and I was like this would be extremely uncomfortable and they brought the ceiling down to 50 feet overcast at 50 feet in a canyon. So this was like a Star Wars type event here and it was beyond cool. Uh I don’t know how long it would take me to get. So I I mean I just I wouldn’t be in a canyon with 50 ft overcast, but it was it was pretty uh pretty impressive. So I haven’t seen it from the lunar landing uh sim, but uh you’re not the only one who went out recently and was giving me some feedback on it. Here’s the thing like in again in terms of you know um perfect being the enemy of good enough here. We have to do things in some phases, right? And uh and from my perspective the uh the phase phase one if of like Artemis 4 and five getting back to the lunar surface the whole constant computing impact point this is where I want to go I don’t like this move it down range or pull it uh pull it in which is capabilities that exist in Dragon really well um that should be okay for our first one if there are actually like and I’ve had this conversation with the astronaut office tell me what faults you envision where you would want more direct input of uh translation attitude control with some of these things that could be the size of a uh you know here um and where the actual right call is to take control of that with those faults instead of saying let’s let’s come back another day because America’s space program’s on the line here now that’s not dismissing that the importance of having that over time because right now we want to get to one destination we haven’t been to in a very long time and just show we can do it uh eventually when you see some of the advanced concepts we’re we’re doing with the moon base right now of really spreading out our reach and having multiple outpost. You don’t know where you can go. A the pressurized rover broke down here and we need to go there. And it’s not like a pre-programmed waypoint. Okay, I’m with you. Over time, we should progressively challenge ourselves to add more capabilities, but to hold up America’s return to the moon because we want to build in a series of capabilities where if you can’t tell me the fault that makes the most sense, why you need it at that particular moment where the better course of action is to continue verse, then I I don’t think it should be the priority. We will get there. We’ll have people flying on the moon again, right? No, no, of course. I mean, I’m I’m just looking forward to I’m just trying to think like, you know, we can have Artemis 4 and five and then uh we don’t know what the plans are next.

Chapter 8: Future of space operations

I guess they have ideas and I I mean, you’re going to you know, I said this in uh the flame trench when people I was like the we put an RFI out at during ignition for a commercial lunar transportation system. No one came back and said we’re ready before the early 2030s. So, yeah. Um I’m not here to predict like an end date of, you know, SLS being an Artemis 6, seven, or eight. Orions can be around for for a very long time. No one’s working on a a deep space spacecraft right now. Um, and then the question is, are you going to learn enough from Moonbase where a lot of you’re going to need transfer stages? You’re certainly going to need transfer stages for the Mark 2. Every Mark 1 lander is essentially a transfer stage without uh but with landing legs on it. um you know, you’re gonna probably get to the point where you’re feel going to feel comfortable. Either you’ve got an Orion low Earth orbit, rendevous with a mega lander like Starship, or you’re going to use three transfer stages and push Orion into low lunar orbit and rendevous with another lander there. Um and when that day comes, you you could you could be certifying Orion on a new blend or a Vulcan or something. And I I think that’s like that that work is going to begin not too far out. It’s it’s going to happen. Wow. Not building a moon base, you can’t go to it with some frequency. And if everybody’s right and those costs do drop materially and we are doing a lot to make our current vehicle not cost as much which means like actually just using it more, right? It just means you’re paying for it, fly it more, faster. I you see it and that’s like to me like it’s a it’s an automatic bubble up for uh administrator approval if the answer is let’s just slip it another year to the right to make it close on the budget because that always costs more. Uh so we are trying to be a little bit smarter on that but uh we’re going to build a moon base and it’s going to cost less with alternatives to SLS. Great. Let’s go there more often then. I was really happy to be in the the VIB this morning and see everything except for the spacer. Yeah. Right. So, it’s like the bit that you actually had to build is the only thing that’s not stacked and it looks great at but uh but Orion needs Orion is still like that’s it when I say like everybody needs help. So, it’s not a big pile on to the landers right now. Orion needs help. We we’re we’re putting a lot of people on a third shift there. TPS experts from um from uh out at uh at AS are coming. Marshall just as we’re doing across just like we’re doing with suits and everywhere else. No one picking on anyone but Orion’s got three months. It’s got to pull in the schedule and uh and we’re actively helping drive that too. So everybody needs some help. I will give you a touch more since you brought nuclear. Nuclear is and even though I joke in there I say it’s going to happen. We are we are getting there.

Chapter 9: Nuclear power developments

Um DOE is DOE is there’s a lot of NASA love in DOE. Um Debac Danley was here for um uh for for Max Power. I think he’s still here all weekend. Actually, I’ve been to many labs with him. Obviously, Secretary Wright loves what we’re doing because we signed the bigou. I mean, like, fighting over 20-year-old leftover Cassini uh PU238 like is not the problem anymore. Like, there we’re going to be just fine with PU238 produ like nobody in this administration or anytime recently has thought we should be uh you know uh having overseas dependencies on any of our fistal materials. So we are we are we are man bringing a lot of manufacturing and enrichment capability down blending capability back and obviously plutonium production. Uh not to mention you actually have a lot of surprisingly international partners maybe in a way to try and solve some of their own um uh you know uh nuclear waste materials saying hey you need amoresium we’ll we’ll we’ll donate a bunch to it’s great for heaters right so uh I really don’t think we’re we’re uh I one we’re not going to be in a problem in terms of ruse and RTGs that we’re going to need for uh you know deep space and moon base applications but far more importantly there is support the president said it in his address uh last night he said it at Johnson like OM is there, OSTP is definitely there and DOE is there is that for long-term game plan in space. We need to build vision spacecraft and NASA needs to do what industry is not has no reason to be jumping to right now. Uh and I think it’s going to happen. I think there’ll be a long uh series of spacecraft follow. Yeah. Sci-fi future we dreamed of, right? Yeah. Great. Thank you. Good to see you, man. Great to see you. So, thanks to Jared and everyone else that made that possible. You can probably tell from that video that I was pretty tired after a long day and I didn’t fly two planes and jump out of one. The big thing that I really forgot to ask was uh what’s going on with that SR71. So yeah, no update on that just yet. Anyway, the other side of Max Power was the upsummit which brings together you all sorts of aviation technology.

Chapter 10: UpSummit and VTOL testing

So of course we had a bunch of NASA stuff out there. We had a bunch of presentations from various NASA people and uh and even the odd flight demonstration. although a lot quieter than those at the air show. I see that Dys from NASA’s spaceflight actually got to take a Jetson up 30 ft into a little bit of a hover and come back down which is cool because they have absolutely no flight experience. All of the big American EV tall makers were there. Pivotal had their helix. Archer brought Midnight. Uh Joby had their S4. And then Beta brought uh their aircraft to show. They also brought a simulator. And there was absolutely no line when I got there. So they let me set up a camera and uh take this thing for a flight. So this is the V tall version which has lift props and a pusher prop at the back for acceleration. And all the throttles are controlled through that rever lever in my right hand. You pull it up and down for the vertical lift. And then there’s a roller which you slide up to actually push the prop forward so you start to pick up speed horizontally. Air speed is alive now on the left hand side. Yeah, I need a little more. Let’s get over the runway. Okay. So, we’re now It still says stall. So, it gives us a stall indicator, but that’s just basically indicating that we’re at a speed where or angle of attack. So, what I need to do is pitch my nose down and just get that green thing close enough to the angle of attack of my wings. So, yeah, that stall indicator will go off here because we’re going faster now. And so, now I can start to drop the power here and I should be able to pick up the the green thing. And so what is this is going to use like standard stall rates and stuff. Okay, we got a little bit of a side thing there. What is that all about? So right now we’re going through transition the transition period between thrustborne and wingorn flight. Okay, this is one of the hardest aerodynamic problems to solve in aviation, right? It’s like you have two things keeping you in the air right now. It’s the lift from the wing and the lift from the As we go fast 100 knots now. See those rotors stow? Okay. Now you’re getting on the wing. Those rotors are stow essentially to like uh this is not good. Why am we picking up some What? What is here? So once you’re over 100 knots, those lifters turn off and you have to fly strictly on the way, right? Wow. I It’s fascinating that that went off like that. As you can see, I was utterly humbled by this. And actually, you know, other people around me didn’t have this problem with their first transition. I just managed to do something. My best guess is that I tried to like compensate with the rudder and I somehow induced a pilot induced oscillation and that ended up going out of control and bringing me down. And so on my second flight, I made a point of avoiding using the yaw during this transition period where apparently things may not be as stable. Now, I did talk to the controls guys and they said, “Yeah, this year you’re running with a much more direct law than they’re planning for the final version, which meant that you my controls were much more directly coupled to the motor speeds and controls.” An interesting thing I found out on the second flight was that uh as I initially took up and I tried to yaw I I couldn’t actually yaw the aircraft until I reduced the power a bit because you know you need some excess performance so that you can actually change the speed of some props up and the speed of some down. But yeah, my second flight went a whole lot better. I’m going to point out that unlike the other EV tall makers, um Beta have actually taken journalists and influencers up in their fixedwing electric aircraft already. So they’re further along in the certification process for their fixed wing version, the one that has a VTOL capability that is still, you know, in in development. Despite my catastrophic first flight, I was actually able to bring it through transition to cruise and then bring it back out of cruise and bring it down to a well mostly vertical landing. I think I still had a bit of forward velocity, but uh I’ll call that a win.

Chapter 11: Spacecraft and aircraft exhibits

Coming back to the space side of things, Blue Origin had a New Glenn upper stage out on show. They didn’t have anything covered up here and somehow I can’t find the really good photos I thought I took. And this was sitting next to a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, a very blackened Falcon 9 booster. I believe this is booster 1067, which is the life leader. has 37 launches and recoveries under its belt, making it second only to the Discovery space shuttle in terms of numbers of reflights. Yeah. Uh you know, you can see this is a very much battlecard vehicle and VA had one of their Winnebago spacecraft on display. I think this was actually just returned from orbit this year. You can see the the scoring the the you know the burn marks on it from its re-entry. Now, another high-flying, high-speed aircraft that was on show that wasn’t part of NASA or the US government was the F104 Starf Fighters owned by Starf Fighter Space. They own a fleet of supersonic Mach 2 capable jets and they use that for research and they’re also talking about turning it into a space launch platform. Tell me about this plane. Do you know can you tell me like uh who originally flew it? This this aircraft we we acquired from the Italian Air Forcemen that retired their fleet back in about 2004. Um are they still we got a package deal with uh five aircraft and several engines spare parts. Yep. Uh so the aircraft that we had been operating prior to that the 104s were CF models. Absolutely. And they’re all still in our inventory but basically ready for pedestals. They’re museum at this point. military life. So, uh we’re kind of changing directions from uh being in the astronaut training. Okay. So, you research now, right? That’s you’re basically stepping away from tourists to doing like actual science where you can, right? You still take tourists if they’re around. [laughter] I think it can be done by it can be done for the right I need to do some research on my on physiological effects. Yeah. [laughter] put me in the back seat and fly me I’ll I’ll give you the number to call on [laughter] I think we can make it I can’t yeah but yeah no mostly we’re just shifting gears towards research development and can you do can we do what you want us to do oh here’s uh admin was developed for us by engineering company called Robbie oto in Italy and we’ll fly it and what we can do for people is basically they’ll have their own designs for the cap for whatever they want to get out into the slipstream. Yeah. And uh sensors inside and we can do real time we can do uh real time uh you’re just going to hang this off the plane and fly it, right? You’re not going to launch it. No, this is an Yeah, it’s it’s an instrumentation pod, right? Yeah, basically. Yeah. And so you’ll be can take that off the shore and fly supersonic if necessary, if needed by the customer. Yep. Yeah. We uh we can fly anywhere up to probably about 2.2 with something. And you can probably go really high altitude as well, like zoom climbs. Yep. Yeah. I mean, the issue right now is trying to get into a wind tunnel and most wind tunnels aren’t capable of Mach 2. Yeah. Access to Mach 2. Yeah. So the 104, I’m sure you know some of the cool things that the Lockheed engineers figured out that if you took any given F104 off the line, you stripped all the paint off of it and took the radios out that weren’t necessary for the flight and minimum fuel, you go from a dead stop through 40,000 ft in 54 seconds. Yeah, it was a missile with wings and and barely has wings. I mean, one of my favorite things about the F104 is if you come up, these are like razor blades, right? You can cut yourself if you walk into these things. The way that we like to put it is these RVFs are not for the aircraft’s protection. They’re for our own protection. Every person that has ever worked on this aircraft has hit their head on this and cut it at some point. Big cut. Yeah. But I mean, you know, it’s got these skinny wings because it’s really designed for speed and that it was supposed to be an interceptor, right? To get somewhere fast. Absolutely. Um and then of course there was the the XPlane version where they put the rocket engine on it as well and Chuck Yeager crashed it. Yeah. and and at its thickest point, this wing is only about three and a half inches thick. Yeah, you’re not putting fuel in there. And uh what was also some heritage between this and the U2 as well, if I remember rightly. Well, you know, it’s kind of fortunate because we got our airplane sitting right in front of the U2. And you can see it’s it’s basically right over in the other. Yeah. Yeah. The the U2 is an F104 fuselage. It’s been modified obviously. Yeah. I have a question. They were both in development about the same time. Well, most of the experiments that we’re going to do with this are going to actually be on our single seater. It’s a little bit faster, a little better range. Yeah. Um, but for air show purposes, we mounted it on this aircraft. Totally. To show off our our newest wear tank holds 150 gallons. Uh, and then our internal fuel in this is about 560. So, and that you how much flight time? [laughter] Let’s just put it this way. You better be about 15 minutes away from touchdown if you’re an hour and 15 minutes into the flight. [laughter] Yeah, not a lot. And that depends on how much uh supersonic stuff you’re doing. How do you get this into this up? This is We’re based here. This is our house, right? You’re based at the shuttle landing. This launch right there. Oh, that’s your So, you didn’t have to go far. You were like, you have to make way for other people. That’s uh that’s that’s home base and we just had to get out of the way. So anyway, that is just a small sample of what really happened over my weekend. Now the hard work is that I have to go through and basically follow up with all the people that gave me business cards. So, you know, inviting me over to look at their cool tech cuz well, there was a lot of cool tech on display and there was a lot of love for NASA. I’m Scott Manley. Fly safe.

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