UAS News Podcast — 2013-06-26
Transcript
Welcome to the next installment of the UAS News Podcast series, where we interview newsmakers and discuss the news and applications relevant to the global unmanned technologies community. I'm your program host as always, Patrick Egan. Again, this week it looks like we may be flying solo as Mr. Gene Robinson is out in the field flying for NIST.
They're doing some testing out there. He was going to try and call in from the field, but they may be outside of what we would call acceptable cell service. So we'll stand by. He may call in during the show.
If not, we'll hear about the NIST exploits next week. Anyway, before we get rolling and bring our guest on, I want to talk a little bit about the Small Unmanned Systems Business Exposition that SUAS News is producing here in San Francisco on the 25th and 26th of July. I just want to give you a small sampling of some of the speakers. We've got Dr.
John Appleby from DHS. He's going to talk about some of the work that they've been doing to expedite the COA process and some testing that they've done with small unmanned aircraft systems. We've got Professor Ken Giles from UC Davis. PhD.
He's been in the news pretty recently here. He's flying a Yamaha Armax for some agricultural work. We've got Ted McGeer. He's the CEO of AeroVel.
This guy started in situ and the ScanEagle, Aerosond, and also I believe was a founding member of Aurora Flight Sciences. This guy's got tons of good stories. Gary Mortimer. We're going to try and bring him in live via internet from the Zulu Kingdom in Africa.
We've got Ted Wiersbanowski. He's going to give us the F-38 update and a couple other people I suggest you get over to the website, susbexpo.com. Registered tickets are going fast. It's going to be a history-making show and you're going to want to be there.
All right, is this Mr. Gene Robinson?
In the flesh. Finally made it in. How are you, Patrick?
Good. You're getting later and later each show. It's great. Sorry about that.
I'll get to it a couple weeks from now and I'm going to be doing the wrap-up. All right, well, we'll see everyone next week. Hey, it's Gene Robinson. Hi.
It's a pesky thing. I had to finish that last landing approach. Flying is easy. It's the last little bit that you've got to get right.
I had to concentrate on that. All right, well, let it go this time. You couldn't just drop everything and be on the show. I understand.
I ran over some of the stuff about the show, the Small Unmanned Systems Business Expo, which is going bananas. It's pretty involved, but it's starting to shape up. People are getting excited. Actually, we're going to actually, I confirmed Gretchen West also is going to give us 15 minutes of, let's say, the benefits of joining AUVSI.
That ought to be interesting too. Tell us a little about what you're doing out there for NIST. Of course, we're out here flying and trying to collect some more data. I think some of the things that we're doing out there have never been done before, especially when you talk to some of the manufacturers of micro-bilometers, infrared cameras, and that sort of thing, doing orthorectification to video and that sort of stuff.
We're really doing some pretty incredible stuff. I think we're going to end up with some software and some technology that are going to be kind of groundbreaking. I'm not going to flip the kit out of the bag yet because we're still working on it, but it's looking really, really good at this point. The Texas summer has kicked in at full force while we're out here.
Ground temps are up to 35 degrees on the old parameter there. The soles of our boots are kind of getting a little gummy, but we're still out here. We're flying and we're still making them go. That sounds like fun.
I miss heat like that. Is it a little humid down there or is it dry?
No, actually we're probably getting real close to what they call red flag. The humidities have been really, really low and it's just sucking the moisture out of everything, including me. The trees and the grass are getting real dry. That's why what was one year we have 174 counties and 170 of them were on fire at one point.
That's the kind of stuff that we're looking at for the summer. Of course, Colorado has already kicked off the season with the biggest fire in their history. Yes, I've been following that. It's hot.
That black forest is close to the battle lab. I've been kind of following that. Well, I guess I should at least feel good that I'm indoors. I've been spending a lot of my time getting ready for this TED show that I'm going to do Friday.
I had to go to hipster training. Hipster training was interesting. It's not your typical presentation, but I'm going for it. I think it's going to be good.
Got to hang out all day. It's a big commitment for a small presentation, but it should be fun. Hopefully, I'm hoping all the stuff that I go out there and do these talks that people realize there's good uses for this technology. Moving along, this one, this show we're doing is Show 52's commercial space.
Our guest that we're going to bring on here, she's the director of the New Mexico Space Grant and New Mexico EPS-COR, which we're going to have her break that down, and also the chair for the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Space Flight. I'd like to welcome Dr. Patricia Hines. Are you there?
Good afternoon. Yes, I am. Hi, Patrick. Did you meet Gene, my co-host?
Yes. How are you, Dr.?
Well, if you'll call me Pat, I'll call you Gene. We have a deal?
Works for me. Well, I think I did. I know I at least wrote an article, and I think I talked about it on the podcast last year when I was out at White Sands for NIE, working for the Space and Missile Defense Command. I had the opportunity to come to your symposium, and I enjoyed it.
We'll get into that in a little bit. If you could, Pat, would you please introduce yourself to the audience with a little bio about what you do, how you got here?
All righty. I have a day job, let's say it like that. I work at New Mexico State University, and I am the statewide director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium. That is a congressionally funded program.
There are three of these in the nation. There's the land grant program, the Sea Grant, and the Space Grant program, each funded by Congress. Land grant was established in 1862 during Lincoln's administration. And all the county extension offices are supported, for example, through the land grant program.
And the idea there is for agricultural and mechanical arts research that is done in higher education to get out into the communities to benefit economic development of our country. So are you guys familiar with the land grant program in California, in your state, right?
I'm not aware of any grants. I'm grantless. Well, you know, like if you go down to get your soil tested, or get a... Those are the ag extension offices.
They're funded through the land grant program. Okay. Okay. And that's interesting.
Yes. And so you, Miles, go ahead and tell us a little bit about your part with the Space Grant. Okay. So if you can take the same idea that research that's done at the universities that benefits our communities, and, you know, how do we get that research into the communities and get it to the point where it creates products or services that help the communities that we all live in thrive?
Okay. So the public education system in our country includes public higher education. And so these three programs, land grant deals with agricultural and mechanical engineering arts, sea grant, in order to be involved in sea grant, you have to have a be on a seacoast or a large body of water like the Great Lakes or the Chesapeake Bay. And the intent there is to take marine research on fisheries, wildlife, pollution, et cetera.
That research, get that into the communities that live and exist on those bodies of water. So that's a sea grant, and that's administered by NOAA. And space grant, there's a space grant program in every state in the district in Puerto Rico, just like there's a land grant program in every state, the district in Puerto Rico, funded by Congress, ours is administered by NASA. So I'm the director in New Mexico of space grant and NASA F-Score, EPSCOR, another NASA program that's strictly a research program.
And it stands for experimental program to stimulate competitive research. So what we're trying to do there is increase the ability of the states to do research that is highly competitive technically. And to that end, NASA sets guidelines for us to look at what NASA's research roadmaps, their technology roadmap, the human exploration roadmap, for example, science mission director roadmap, what does NASA need?
We're there to support, to research their mission and their needs so that research universities do that. And that was one other, okay, and that was one other thing I noticed at the symposium was that the space grant, and I was talking to a gentleman there and I forget his name off the top of my head, but he was talking about how this goes down to like the high school level, right, the space grant and research. What I do is I take the ISPCS funds and I involve high school students and middle school students in creating, designing, building and flying experiments into space.
We just flew six on Friday from Spaceport America. Yeah, now, Sam, I thought my school was kind of special. We had a radio station. You know, and then, but now that's what I was learning is that these, even the high school and middle school could actually have experiments and launch them into space.
That's pretty impressive. I was really impressed with that. Thank you. So that's really cool.
And I do want to talk more about the ISPCS, but I do, you kind of gave us an overview of what you do now, but how does someone, how does somebody get to be in your position? Well, I don't know. I'll tell you how I did it. You know, I had my own business years ago and one of my clients was the Dean of the College of Engineering.
And I, it was my third or fourth recession and I finally decided that I was going to sell the real estate part of my business. Sold it, the check cleared and my, I went around to all my clients and said, okay, well, I'm not going to be in that building anymore. I'm going to operate out of here. And in the meantime, somebody decided they wanted to buy my business too.
And so I told the Dean, you know, actually, I think somebody is going to buy the business. And he said, well, what are you going to do?
And I said, I don't know. I think I'll go to California and do some consulting for General Motors because they were trying to figure out how to get women to buy trucks because they became trucks became the new station wagon for women in the, in the eighties, you know, the late eighties. And he said, well, would you mind helping me on this one NASA project we've got?
And that started it. We wrote this, I helped write the proposal that, you know, we got awarded the Space Grant program. I wrote my part in that proposal and here I am. So I did it.
All right. So right place, right time. Now, you know, sometimes it works out and it's a good thing. Now, the one other thing I know, when I was there, I was kind of busy.
I was working over there at White Sand. So I didn't really get a chance to go to the spaceport. And, you know, I was going to run out there and have a nice cup of coffee at the Starbucks. Maybe you can tell us a little bit.
I don't think so. Don't tell me Starbucks is not open out there yet. Not yet. Now is it, the other thing is, is how often is that open?
I mean, do you guys have events out there often? People going out there once a month, twice a month, every six months?
I'll be going out there tomorrow for my third time this week. So it just depends. It just depends. For example, we had the launch last week, so it was a very busy time for us.
It was the first NASA Flight Opportunities event at Spaceport America. So this was Friday, June 21. And that was our next launch. Well, no, actually, it's a commercial spaceport.
You could come to the event. We had an open registration if you wanted register online to come. You could pay for your seat on the bus and come out and observe the launch. And we're in the vertical launch area, the horizontal launch area, which is where Virgin Galactic has their facility, is another section of the spaceport.
But yeah, it's open. We had a lot of press out there, you guys, so we would have loved to have you. But I know that you all are very busy, so you can't just drop what you're doing and come out there. Someday.
Someday I want to come out there. But that was a private company that launched, right?
What we do is NASA bought the rocket, and the rocket is built by UP Aerospace. And so that is a private company. And we had, let me see, five schools on there, because I had two NMSU experiments on there. And then we had other experiments and payloads on the rocket.
We had an FAA experiment that I'm involved in. ADS-B unit, we were flying, we've flown that unit three times. Really?
We're tracking it. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah.
And it works. We tracked it ground station tracking, as well as we had an antenna over in Alamogordo that we used to track the rocket. And we were able to pick up signal from the rocket from three ground stations, Phoenix, El Paso, and Alamogordo, I believe. So we're just trying to refine that, our data analysis process there.
We want to use the ADS-B unit, and we have an enhanced ADS-B unit we're going to fly next flight that was developed by Embry Riddle and MITRE. So it's constant improvement. Well, that was another thing that I did want to talk about, too. And it's kind of interesting, is we talk about some of the same people that you just mentioned, like MITRE and the FAA and whatnot.
And you guys are also, you like the FAA Center for Excellence for Space? Yes. Yeah. The FAA has a Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation.
There's nine universities that are members of this Center of Excellence. And I'm the director, or whatever we call ourselves, for the state of New Mexico. But it's actually a national center. So we, all of us, all the nine core universities, work with universities and industry across the United States.
Well, you know, it's kind of one of the other things I got into commercial space a little bit, because I'm involved with airspace integration for unmanned aircraft systems. And, you know, we have a mutual friend, you know, of course, Doug Davis, who used to be at the FAA. And a lot of those guys that were working on the unmanned aircraft system airspace integration were also working on the commercial space deal. And so there was a little bit of, you know, let's say, interaction between me and some of those guys.
And I really thought, I mean, my hat is really off to the commercial space people with the, well, I guess, what got pushed through Congress and how the FAA interacts with the commercial space sector, I would say. It's enviable from the unmanned aircraft systems side of the fence. You guys have a much more difficult problem in many ways than commercial space. Just a huge problem.
And Doug helped me understand it. And I wish there was some credit I could, you know, give myself. I had nothing to do with working on the Commercial Space Launch Amendment Act way back in the 80s when those folks in the community understood we were going to have to really work on getting this, get this division of the FAA set up and start looking at big picture things like indemnification, cross waivers, all of the airspace corridor questions have not been resolved at all. But the research is ongoing.
And, you know, George Neal, who is the associate administrator and head of AST, have you all met him? I have not. He'll be at ISPCS this year. No, I haven't met him either.
So he is very astute and he is well versed in the international business as well. So we are in a good position in some cases, but in other cases we are impacted by things like the export control regime. And now, as I understand it, the rules are they are moving some of the satellite technologies off of the US munitions list and putting manned vehicles on the US munitions list. What?
Yes, what? That seems kind of crazy. Yeah, I know. Well, sometimes the government, I don't want to bash anybody, but it seems a little, let's say, counterproductive to technology.
But I want to step back one step because you were talking about, you know, basically insurance issues and whatever else. And that was another thing that I gleaned from last year's show was the people who will be, let's say, going into space as, well, they're not passengers. They're participants. Is that correct?
Correct. And so it's going to be a little bit different than, say, buying a ticket on a Part 121 aircraft. That's correct. Correct.
And so I thought that that was pretty interesting how that's worked out. I think that one of the other things I gleaned from the show is the community is very pragmatic and understands that, I mean, we're talking about very complicated, let's say, technology and issues to overcome to go into space and reenter the atmosphere on a regular basis. Fair enough?
Yeah. Correct. No, it gets a little hotter than Texas on the way down. One more time, Gene.
It gets a little hotter than Texas on the way down. It can. It can. That reentry can heat up real quick.
Okay. Well, before we get too much and delve into that, I do want to talk about the ISPCS. And like I said, I did get to go last year, and I really enjoyed myself. I thought it was great.
But maybe you could give us a little background before I go into waxing nostalgically about 2012's event. Okay. The ISPCS was one of the XPRIZE Cup events. We started the show nine years ago as a part of the XPRIZE Cup that was held here in New Mexico.
The XPRIZE itself was won in 2004. And the follow-on annual event to grow the commercial space flight industry was going to be the XPRIZE Cup. Now, this was founded also by the XPRIZE Foundation. There was an international competition to host the XPRIZE Cup annually.
New Mexico won the competition. And the first year, we did the symposium as part of the XPRIZE Cup. XPRIZE Cup was competition where you could take off vertically, articulate over a certain number of feet at whatever height. I forget the height.
Land, take off again, articulate over land again. If you did that, within a certain period of time, you won a prize. And the prizes were like $50,000, $100,000, $250,000. And that was funded by the state of New Mexico.
But what that also did by us getting the XPRIZE Cup, it triggered the legislation that we had a concession from our state legislature to build what is now Spaceport America. And there were a number of different milestones we had to hit to trigger access to that $210 million. First one was we needed an anchor tenant. The anchor tenant was not Virgin Galactic.
It was the XPRIZE Foundation and the XPRIZE Cup. And so ISPCS, the first year was 2005 of ISPCS. And I've been working on what is now Spaceport America since 1991. And I had been at those NASA meetings and other space meetings where we would talk about commercialization of space, increased access to space, single-stage to orbit vehicles.
And they were never part of the conference. These discussions were never part of the conference proper. They were never part of the session discussions. The closest we would get is discussions on updating ranges.
We never really got into examining issues related to the regulations, what we would do to have government as a partner and increased access to space. None of that discussion. So when I talked to Bill Govitz, I don't know if you guys know Bill Govitz, but he was the program manager for the Delta Clipper program. And he and Pete Conrad and Nancy Conrad was at my launch on Friday, by the way.
So Bill and I had always wanted to do sessions within conferences that could bring students into this business of commercial space. But then when Bill came here as part of the XPRIZE Cup to tell people at the Chamber one night what was going to happen with the XPRIZE Cup, I said, you know, Bill, we ought to do something. And Symposium is what we came up with. And it started that way.
And I had so much background, there was so much demand and need that was unmet in the marketplace to talk about what it is we're doing. That symposium room the first year was full all the time. And you know, sometimes you go to meetings, you know, and there's like three people in the room, everybody else out playing golf or going shopping. Right.
It depends on who's funding the trip. Just kidding. Well, it also depends on the symposium or the show. It depends on what you're doing and who's talking and what you're talking about.
My symposium room is used. It's all held in plenary. And that room is full all day long. Talks are quick.
It's like TED. We have multiple talks. They come and go. If you don't like one topic, there's going to be another one in 20 minutes.
And very timely topics that we talk about. And it's a dialogue. It's an interaction. It's a full contact sport to go to that symposium.
It's like going to TED. Yeah. Well, I didn't see as many hipsters as at your show. Has it?
Tell me about the hipsters thing because I've been to TED and I've done TEDx events. Tell me about the hipsters. What's this?
Just the younger technology set. It seemed to be pretty cool and hip and whatnot. But just kind of a little bit inside joke. But the last year's thing, I thought it was pretty interesting that you guys were at the Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces.
Yeah. The people from Japan who come to the meeting, you know, they're going to be there. They drive in the gate and they've got their ISPCS program and they see Longhorn cattle and they look at the logo that's up on the gate and they say, man, this is the place. What are those cows doing here?
It's very, very fun to have this event out in that beautiful museum, that gorgeous location. People can wander around the site. It's a large 16-acre site. It's beautiful.
Then, of course, you know, the New Mexico embrace true New Mexico boys and girls. We do have good food and the baristas and the handmade chocolates. I don't want people to leave. I want them to stay there.
I want them to network. So we make sure everybody is taking care of the whole two days. After two days, people are just exhausted. They got to go.
Right. Well, I did like the venue. I thought it was great. Then, you know, we're moving into the future with space.
I thought there was a lot of very interesting people there and talking to people about, you know, some of them were surprised to, you know, oh, you're an unmanned aircraft guy. What are you doing in a space ship?
I said, well, you know, a lot of these, I think a lot of this unmanned technology kind of dovetails with space. I mean, most of the launches, are they like the one that happened the other day?
Is that unmanned or manned? Unmanned. That one's unmanned. We even had UAVs at the site for students to learn about unmanned aircraft.
And yes, we had the, yeah, we had balloons, high-air balloons and unmanned aircraft demonstrations at the viewing site so that students could learn about remote sensing and they could learn how to monitor weather. They could, there's a lot of things that I wanted students to understand about how we track the rocket with radar, how we track it with GPS. So I used the time between the launch, we retrieve the rocket, we bring the experiments back. And so within an hour and a half, the experiments are back from space and we start downloading data.
So I had 300 people there. I want students to realize during that time, we used that time between the launch and the return of the experiments as a time to teach students about what we're doing, what the business is about, what's going on while the rocket is being tracked, retrieved, etc. So you have an educational component there, an educational outreach as well, right?
Yes, I do. Yep, you got 300 kids, got to do something with them. And I had parents there and school district officials and I had Virgin Galactic people there. I had Alan Lockheed Jr., the son of Alan Lockheed who started Lockheed Aviation.
I had, you know, Nancy Conrad was there. We had a lot of people there to speak. I had people from the Air Force to help students understand if you want to get in the space business, the military is a good way to learn about it. Earn while you learn, as it is.
And this guy was an Academy graduate. Yeah, the Academy is nice. Now, you know, and so I do think that there's some definite crossovers in the two sectors and I do think, you know, we've got like the Mars rover and whatever else. So I do believe there's an opportunity for unmanned systems in space.
And I got to tell you that, I mean, space as far as I'm concerned, the commercial space thing is really wide open. There's a lot of opportunity. It's hard to get in, cost a little bit of money, but it's, it seems wide open. And one of the things I wanted to touch on as far as some of that opportunity, and I believe there was a gentleman who was talking about actually creating commercial space in space, where it would be like a commercial space station where you could go there and do experiments.
Is that correct? Is that Bob Seagold?
Yes, Bigelow. Bigelow. Okay, Bigelow. Okay, I thought that that was a pretty...
Oh, Bob Seagold with Aerospace Corporation. Yeah, him too. Yeah, I thought that was a pretty, let's say, lofty goal to create commercial space in space. What are some of the more exotic things you've run across in your tenure there?
Well, it's actually a reality. NASA has bought one of Bob Bigelow's inflatable habitats to connect to the International Space Station as a technology demonstration. So Bob Bigelow is actually building what's called the Beam module. They're under contract for $17.8 million to build this commercial habitat, and nobody's going to live in it, but the company, Bigelow Aerospace, is structured to build commercial space stations.
Really? Yeah, Bob Bigelow has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money to construct the facility. He has licensed NASA technology, the inflatable habitat technology, and he has a plant that I've been to in Las Vegas. Right.
And very credible man. He has two of these subscale space stations orbiting right now that he launched from Russia, and so you can go online and look and see they're still on orbit. So he's a very astute man. He's a businessman.
He sells space on Earth, the budget suites, and he also will sell space to space. But Bob is very pragmatic, and he can speak for himself. He has spoken at ISPCS. The man you were speaking about last year, Bob Sebold, with the Aerospace Corporation, he was again alluding to space commercialization, but we also have this year, ISPCS 2013, Duane Ratliff, who is the chief operating officer of the Center for Aerospace Science in Space, CASIS, which is the national lab portion of the international space station, the U.S.
portion of the international space station that NASA is not using has been designated by Congress as a national lab. And Duane Ratliff is the chief operating officer for CASIS, and Duane will be speaking about what companies are doing in commercial research on the international space station and what are those financial instruments that we are using to help those companies succeed in their developing the research. They're doing research. They're not doing development on the station.
We're doing research right now. So that's one of the discussions we're going to have next year, or ISPCS 2013, which is October 16-17. We're going to be talking about the importance and the interdependence of NASA's Commercial Crew Program and the International Space Station. And I didn't want to lose track of one of the things you were discussing regarding the relationship of unmanned aerial systems to space is the communications with those unmanned aerial systems is all space-based.
I'm sorry, go ahead. If there is that interdependence, it's certainly a very important relationship. Right, right. And I think there'll be some more opportunities too in the future as that moves forward.
Now, you know, I did want to give you an opportunity to mention the website for the symposium if you'd like to go ahead and do that. ISPCS.com. That was pretty easy. And are there any other websites where people can get more information about what's going on down there in New Mexico?
Well, ISPCS.com is the website for the show. This is the largest commercial space show in the world, and it's the one that is most focused on our industry. Now, there's another website called Launch NM, L-A-U-N-C-H-N-M.com, and that's the website where we talk about all the projects we do in the student launch program. All the research, our research results, the schools that are flying, videos, all kinds of background on that program.
That is another website there. So, yeah. I'm actually checking it out right now. It looks pretty good.
Education Launch Out of This World Learning. Looks, I didn't know about this site, so I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to go through this because this looks pretty good. You know what's another good one is the Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation. That one, it just depends on if you want to get into this, you know, and look and see what we're doing on that thing.
That website is COE-CST.org. I'm going to have to see if I can find that one as you're doing it, but I'm going to definitely have to roll the tape back and check these out because I didn't know that this was out here. I'm really interested in, you know, let's say furthering STEM education. I prefer STEAM.
I like to add art to it because I think that those, the kids that are artists are really good as far as design and whatnot with the rest of engineering and science. So, that'll be pretty cool. I'll have to check that out in my spare time. Now, some other things about the symposium that people would want to attend and not miss.
You got any more hooks that, I mean, I know you got lots of interesting speakers, but last year there were like mock-ups of actual space vehicles. You had the guys out there that are actually out here from Davis that have the flying car and I don't know why I don't have one yet. Me either. Well, I do know why.
There's a couple of issues that I've heard from the FAA that there's sense and avoid issues with the flying cars also. Much a crybaby. That's right. Who needs that?
We were very, very fortunate to have XCOR bring out the full-scale model of the XCOR Lynx. It was a 24-foot vehicle. It was on its way to Florida and Andrew Nelson asked if I want, here's a great question. Pat, you want me to drop by and drop the vehicle off during the FCS?
And I accept cash. Right, exactly. We don't want it down here. I had to reconfigure our exhibit hall, but it was great.
Everybody loved it. They had a great time. I just got off the phone with Andrew about an hour ago. And see, the thing that these companies are doing is these strategies that Andrew has.
We were talking about the Apollo X space camp that Unilever is doing in Florida in December. And Unilever has bought 24 seats on the XCOR Lynx. And over a million and a half people have registered for the lottery to win one of those seats. And they're going to award them in December at the expo in Florida.
That's another space tourism event. I just think it's so remarkably ingenious for Florida to be supportive of this. They don't have the shuttle program, but they're very proactively creating these large super events that are attracting the young hipsters, by the way. You're latching onto that hipster thing.
You're going to have to look them up online. What's a hipster?
They're drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and they have their knit hats hanging off the back of their heads. You'll see. Well, Patrick, just because they called you Pops, you know, no, come on. All right.
You let the cat out of the bag. You know, hipsters actually, it's probably an early 50s term. Yeah, recycled. But probably from the generation all the way back then.
Probably. Now, I did have a conversation with Andrew at the 12 event and he did say, oh, hey, I've got the mock-up. Go back there. Go sit in it.
And I did sit in the links. It was actually roomier than I thought for a spacecraft. Got to be honest. I was like, wow, it's a little tight in here, but a lot roomier than I thought.
There's definitely room for an overnight bag. Yeah. And there will be experiments being conducted on that vehicle that is a hand-flown vehicle as well as the Virgin vehicles hand-flown. They are going to be very engaged on those vehicles.
So pilots love the idea of these vehicles because they're the way they are designed. Well, that and then, you know, maybe a little, you know, you could be a, you know, space plane pilot or astronaut in the future, you know, more opportunities. Great for everyone. Well, the conversation was extremely interesting.
I really find commercial space very exciting. Again, thank you for, you know, I enjoyed it. If I'm out at NIE 14.1, I will definitely stop by for a second round. But I want to thank you very much for being on today, Pat.
Thank you. It was my pleasure. And I'm glad I also got to meet Gary. Gene.
The late one. The late guy. Yeah. Late man, Gene.
I'm going to remember that dig. The pops dig, Gene. I'm just kidding. Anyway.
All right. Well, until next week, everyone, we'll see you then.