This Week in Space 140 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

00:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space, we're fighting on with the University of Southern California's rocket laboratory team of students who just set a brand new record for an amateur high-flying rocket out there in the Black Rock Desert. So tune in, lift off and we're going to get into it.

00:17 - TWiT.tv (None)
Podcasts you love.

00:18
From people you trust.

00:38
This is TWiT.

00:40 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra Magazine, and I'm joined, as always, by Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief at Spacecom, and apparently, for those of you not watching the video, because he will never let us forget USC graduate.

00:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Woo, and he was in the band. Oh my gosh.

01:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
No, no, no no-transcript.

01:28
And when I say broke like by a lot, like 90,000 feet.

01:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And a 20-year record at that, we should point out.

01:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is a rocket that's like giving off sonic booms at two seconds after launch and stuff. So this isn't your father's Estes model rocket. But before we start, don't forget to do us a solid and make sure to like, subscribe and other cop podcast things to let the world know that you love us and keep us here because we love you All. Right Now, amidst more space junk, our weekly high-altitude record space joke from Richie O'Shea in Ireland Richie, hello, if I could do an Irish accent I'd try, but I'll spare you. Record space joke from Richie O'Shea in Ireland. Richie, hello, if I could do an Irish accent I'd try, but I'll spare you all. Hey, tarek. Yes, rod, what did?

02:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Mars say to Saturn? I don't know what did Mars say to Saturn? Why don't you give me a ring sometime? I love it. I love it. Isn't Jupiter closer to Mars than Saturn? Oh, sorry it, I love it. Isn't Jupiter closer?

02:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
to Mars than Saturn. Oh, sorry, sorry, I don't want to deflate our own stuff. All right Now. I've heard some jokes want to stick Some jokes. I've heard some folks want to stick their face into a burning rocket engine when it's time for a space joke on this show. But you can help by sending us your best, worst or most different space joke to twis at twittv. That's twist at twittv. And now, wait a minute. I feel an audio cue coming.

02:55
It's time for headlines headline news thank you, princes, whoever, whoever you're supposed to be, um so this, this story, warmed my heart. Ingenuity lives on, that's right. A little helicopter did 78 flights, right, uh, I think that sounds about right.

03:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
A lot, a lot of flights, a lot of, yeah, I think it was 72 uh.

03:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So our little low budget 80 million dollar, which does a lot for a drone but not much for a mars, first mars aircraft that flew for a number of years and many, many times and helped guide perseverance where we needed to go and proved all kinds of new concepts for flying on another world. And all that, uh, last year made his landed hard, snapped off part of a rotor, but fortunately landed upright, and now we've come to understand that it may last another 20 years as a weather station and fixed camera, which is pretty cool.

03:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah. Yeah, this story came from Spacecom's own Brett Tingley. Hi, Brett.

04:03
Hey Brett.

04:04
Yeah, space comms own Brett Tingley. But, but they're right, hey, brett. Yeah, but it was announced that, uh, it was announced that AGU this week American Geophysical Union meeting where NASA basically had like a, like a what is it? Like an accident analysis. They're called it like the first accident crash on another planet, and they were were talking about how they think that they figured out what really went wrong and whatnot. But there is a story there. Basically, mars looks too boring for the camera on Ingenuity to be able to parse out different details and it all looked the same, so it didn't have enough information to understand the texture of the surface and you know where it was and you know how it could land safely.

04:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Um, they basically looked down and saw like a sheet of yellow construction paper and said, okay yeah, like is it? Is it really really close or is?

04:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
it really really far.

04:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, it was really really close, that's like jumping into a pool that you thought was seven feet deep from a diving board and it turns out to be eight inches and empty, empty, right. Yeah, that's true.

05:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But one of the really interesting things in Brett's story is not the fact that they know what happened to the helicopter they had some nice diagrams about how they think that it like how it landed hard, how it snapped the rotor, et cetera but the fact that because, as you mentioned, it landed upright, the solar arrays are actually on, they face up underneath the rotors or above the rotors, and so they are able to keep this little helicopter powered and use its camera as a weather station. Essentially, they can know what the conditions are like at this spot and, according to Brett's story, it could last something like 20 years 20 years, yeah, and if the dust conditions allow which is crazy, because it's already been on Mars for like over three years and so the fact that it could last a lot longer than that, it's just like amazing that they've got this tool. And this is I mean, we talked about it before. It's a mission that almost never made it to Mars And-. Yeah, but this is JPL.

06:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So we are usually amazed. These are the guys that took a 90 day rover mission and drove it for 14 and a half years. That's right, that's right, all right. Um, this isn't a big story, but but it's a good one for today, since it's happening tonight. Tomorrow, the geminids are here, so if you want to go, freeze your little meteorites off, uh, head out to the desert or somewhere dark, although you don't have to worry about being as dark as you usually would, because the moon's going to be up. But apparently this weekend's going to be a promising time for them.

06:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, this weekend is the peak of the Geminid meteor shower, that annual rain of space dust that comes from asteroid Phaethion. It's got the numbers in front of it. What is it like? 3,200 Phaethion, something like that. 3,200 Phaethion. 200, something like that. 3200. Faith on, everybody knows that, I know right. So, and uh, and, of course, as always, there's a caveat. So in order to see any kind of meteor shower, you have to be very far away from, um, from city lights. You don't want to be like on your suburban street with the street light out in front, like on my street, um, but you could see up to 120 meteors an hour. This uh normally um, uh, from the gemini, which is always really great, and the sad part is that those meters are actually still there, but the full moon peaks on Sunday, as we're recording this oh, it's full this weekend.

07:34
It's going to be a full moon this weekend, so it will wash out a lot of the faint ones, but you could still see some really bright ones. In fact, we were talking about Brett earlier. Brett said this morning that he saw like three or so overnight, even with the full moon or the nearly full moon. Did he actually stay up to see them? Well, you just stay up at night and he's looking up at the sky.

07:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, yeah, but I mean, it really picks up after midnight.

07:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, well, because after midnight the sky lets it all hang out.

08:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right, right.

08:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No after out, right right, no after midnight. The earth turns into its orbit and slams into it faster. Okay, so that's a song for people that roger's like skipped right over it. No, I didn't skip over it.

08:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
My musical knowledge stops at 1939.

08:13
That's my problem among many um one thing I wanted to add about the geminids uh, because you know, any meteor shower other than the sporadics that you just see on random nights, is the earth going through a part of its orbit where an asteroid or a comet has gone by and left this gravel bank. Basically that we slam into. This one, I guess has some slightly unique uh characteristics or elements in in the the asteroid phaeton, because there's a lot of green and different colors in the larger fireball. So I remember once seeing basically a horizon-to-horizon bolide, which is a fireball, come up over the east and set in the west. It was like watching a fast-motion sun, amazing, and it was bright, green and it blew off fragments and stuff. It was breathtaking and that was a gem and it's, uh beast, probably the size of a basketball or something. So that was pretty cool. All right, I'm sorry, I'm well, no, no, it's good.

09:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
The reason that I think it's really good to point that out, because there's always been like a back and forth of is is faith on even an asteroid, or is it a comet, or is it something in between?

09:21 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
well, it's an asteroid yeah, so, uh.

09:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So now we know what's next but you know, as we found the last few years, a lot of asteroids aren't big rocks, they're big gravel banks that are just held together by mutual attraction, sort of like you and me, tarik and um. You know, as they, as they travel through space, stuff can come off and that's what we slam into. All right, oh gosh, another NASA update. So I don't mean to sound discouraged, but this is kind of like. So it's a humans to the moon and Mars update, because moon to Mars is their mantra now, at least until the new administration comes in, where they might do something else. This feels kind of like a DRM light.

10:06
So over the years we've seen let's see what I say since 1988 there's been 12 major studies, including design reference mission or design reference architectures. Which are these big, formal, expensive studies? They do to say, okay, how are we going to get to mars someday? When we finally decide to go, they come, they go, they come, they go. Prior to 1988 there was probably another, I think of six or seven since ron braun back in the 50s, major studies. So if we just stack the paper, you know where I'm going from these studies. We could just walk to mars, I know right, but we keep doing them, so here's another one, although it didn't. It didn't appear to be to be as as major as a d, as a formal drm, but it talked about, uh, using nuclear reactors for power on the moon and mars, which you assume they would. Um, there was a bunch of other stuff that I thought I wrote down here, but I didn't.

11:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh yeah, Well, we should point this out.

11:05 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, lunar cargo landers, habitats and so forth. Yeah, sorry.

11:08 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, so this comes straight from NASA everybody and this is their big Moon to Mars architectural review. So it's a 2024 update to their big architecture about how we're going to get to the moon, how we're going to get to Mars in 20 days or whatever you know.

11:24
Oh my gosh, it's like been forever and and to do that they have these 12 new white papers that touch on very specific either needs or capabilities or something that they think is either lacking now or needs to be improved, and that that covers everything. We've got lunar surface cargo. We've got lunar quote, unquote, mobility, drivers and needs. So that's like we need things to truck cargo and people around on the moon. You have Mars crew complement considerations what do you need to actually have a crew, safe to go to Mars? And then a surface power needs, and I think part of that is nuclear vision. They're talking about nuclear systems and power plants. I mean everything that you would think of.

12:07
You need there's like a white paper for these things. You know a scent propellant. You know what do you need to get off the planet right. Getting there is, you know, half the battle. So so they're touching on, like everything and the I think, the frustrating part that I'm picking up from you, ron, and please correct me if I am the frustrating part- that I'm picking up from you, Rod, and please correct me if I am wrong.

12:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
The frustrating part you're picking up is I turned into an old man waiting for our news to go back to the moon.

12:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's what.

12:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I was going to say that's what's getting frustrating.

12:32 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Is that it's just a lot of.

12:34
It's more iteration and more fine-tuning for a program that seems to just really be spinning and spinning and not really getting off the ground really be spinning and spinning and not really getting off the ground and I think that's really going to be a challenge that we see not just NASA but the United States face, as we come up to on a new administration with a new NASA administrator. They're going to inherit this architecture and then there's going to be more changes or tweaks as they refine different priorities Once that administration gets underway. So we will I mean it's good that they have this update now so that they've got, I guess, the basis of all the considerations that need to be done when they start to make those changes then. But how much this is really going to reflect what actually happens in the next, say, 10 years to get people back to the moon, or 20 to get people to Mars? I think it's still uncertain, because that new administration, that new NASA chief, that new agency is going to put its stamp on this outline, if you will, and this architecture.

13:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, so I'm going to write Jared Isaacman a letter after I get off the show. I'm going to say, jared, you know, I'm 30 years older than you or something. I think he was born in 84. And so I'm old enough to have seen the space race. I'm old enough to have seen a time, admittedly with more money and resources, but with much more primitive technology, that we started from zero and got to the moon in eight years three, three different crude spacecraft.

14:07
Dude, don't forget now, this program that we're currently undertaking started in one form or another in 2000, uh 2004.

14:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
2004 that's right, constellation right.

14:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So it's been 20 years with lots of money, with much more advanced computer modeling and engineering techniques and metallurgy, and all that and not very smartly in my opinion using legacy hardware from the shuttle that's incredibly expensive to update and maintain and so forth, instead of buying engines from Blue Origin or SpaceX, but whatever, they weren't ready at the time.

14:46
What is the holdup. I don't know man. And let me just say one more thing, if I can mobile launch structure $325 million and now it's, I think, extended out that it's going to be 2.2 billion.

15:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, this is the the carrier for for for sls's exploration upper stage it's just unfathomable which is why and we've talked in the past like are they going to cancel sls anyway? Or not like then. Then they've built all this stuff for what? For what? So I don't know.

15:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's really unfaithful you sound like captain kirk from trouble with tribbles there. What, what, what storage?

15:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
cabinets, storage cabinets, why we're out here, right so?

15:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
all right. So I have one more item here, which is a question from uh beloved listener, darren cusano. Dear tarik, what is up with the jersey drones? And from what I saw, we don't have any real answers. One expert thinks they're military swarms. All the militaries said it's not us and, uh, the main thing, the feds are saying don't shoot at them because they're big and they may crash. Now I've looked at the videos, I've seen the reports, but there's a lot of people saying, oh, it's the size of a, of a school bus.

16:04
You know, suv, yep, yep, and it's like. One thing that came up during ufo hearings starting in the 60s was, even if you talk to military aviators especially if you talk to military aviators it's really hard to guess the size of an aircraft because you have very few. It's like same thing I experienced up in the arctic when it was just sand and rocks and sky. You have no real points of reference. You don't know how big that rock is over there and if you're looking at a clear horizon, say over the ocean, you don't have any idea how big that thing is because you don't know how far it is. So your brain is you don't realize it until you've gone somewhere like that Arctic base.

16:47
But your brain looks for comparative objects and guesses based primarily on haze, like how hazy and how soft and how faded out it is. And we don't have any haze or road signs or street lamps or anything, as I did. Your 80-foot rock suddenly becomes 12 feet high because it's a lot closer than you think. So I don't think I trust the size estimates on these things, but they do appear to be flying in formation. They have marker lights which if they were, you know, chinese spy craft or something, you probably wouldn't have marker lights on them.

17:17
And these days you could do that with something the size of a bumblebee. So why the heck are these things the size of, maybe of Chevettes?

17:27 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, I've heard. Suvs is what I seen. So case in point I live near you, like New York City. I was gonna say USC. I got you, I heard that.

17:35
So so, you know, I'm in New Jersey but just outside of New York, so I'm in northern New Jersey and a lot of the sightings are all like in the southern New Jersey and like the coast, so maybe it's a different kind of place down there. I don't know. I haven't seen any of these drones personally myself, uh, and I'm sure there's a mundane explanation for them. In fact, I think I I mentioned this, uh, to them too, because I, you know, to me it seems like it would either be something that's either military, or maybe there's like some super secret film being filmed out there, you know, and they're trying to keep it on the dl. I don't know, I don't know, but um, reported in oregon, in san diego, I think.

18:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, that is so weird.

18:16 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I don't know, I don't see like what's stopping the government from like, especially when they fly over these military bases, to just go up and catch one. Do an intercept I'm sure they can just get up there with another drone that has a net on it and catch it Right. I mean, it's like the pigeon.

18:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well I mean, no, you got to make sure it's not over somebody's house or business or something, so but I fully plan to go down to the boat on Sunday and spend a couple of very cold evenings out there, because you know long beach harbor cold in long beach.

18:43
Right, it's like 27 degrees outside right now, right well, that's because you live in the wrong part of the country. Okay, chilly, but I've got 100, almost 180 degrees of visibility. You know it's it's as you know it's. It's lit pretty brightly at night, but if there's something flying around I should be able to see it, because I'm dying to see one of these things. Yeah, because they do appear to be quite big and they're large.

19:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They're large. Are they in charge? I guess we're going to find out.

19:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right, large and in charge. Talk about ourselves. So I have a great kind of a work through the question and explanation thing, but I'm going to save it for next week so that I can bore Anthony and everybody else on our special episode. Ooh, nice cocked eyebrow from him. All right let's go to a quick break and we'll be back with Daniel and Ryan in just a few minutes to talk about big amateur rockets from.

19:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Ooh in USC from. Usc Fight on roll the C.

19:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Says the guy who flunked calculus was in the band okay stand by we'll be right back we are back with dr daniel irwin and ryan kramer of the university of southern california that other school in southern california who you just fight on usc.

20:03
I'm outnumbered here. Yeah, so now dr irwin is a professor of astronautics and aerospace mechanical engineering at usc at the bitterby school of engineering, and ryan is an undergraduate student, which is which is interesting, because you don't find a lot of undergraduates reading leading things like the usc rocket propulsion lab. You know, usually that gets saved for the for the grad student slaves, so it's pretty cool that as an undergrad, you get to do that. And I know the second I released, tarek, who's wearing his USC shirt today and is going to make a bunch of noise about being in the band and all the other things, also my Hawaiian shirt too.

20:39
it says USC on it yeah yeah, all the other things that he and I did that did not get us into being in the technical end of space. Tell me a little bit about how this got started, if you would.

20:53 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Well, if you want to talk about the club's founding, doctor Erwin can definitely tell you about that. Okay, that'll be good.

21:00 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Okay, well, the whole thing started when a young student, a freshman, his name is Ian Whittinghill came into my office in fall of 2004.

21:11
And he told me that he had spent his youth in a kind of an aerospace family and he launched a lot of rockets with his dad and he'd kind of done everything he could do just as a, basically by himself and in his family, and his goal was to start a rocket group at a college. And since he was there at USC, he wanted to start a rocket lab at USC and, as it happens, I had an open we had just remodeled and redone our research lab and I had an open side and so I thought, okay, let's do this. And so the following spring, in 2005, we actually put out a call for some students. I got a little bit of funding from the School of Engineering, we bought some stuff, we used some things I had sitting around and we got started, and Ian's initial prediction was that they would get to space in about a year and a half, but it was off by a factor of 10. It took actually until 2019 to make it happen.

22:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, don't feel bad, that sounds a lot like the Artemis program. So I think I just have one quick follow-up, which is I have described myself in the past as an amateur rocketeer to people, but my experience other than you know the sds toy rockets and all that that many of us did as kids maxed out with, I think, an f engine rocket which I built in my 20s, and I didn't like kits. So I decided well, I know better than the instructions how to design this thing. So I added some retaining tabs the top to hold the nose cone in, not realizing that one would fold back and cause it to fly in a ballistic arc onto the first baseline of a little league game that was currently in play. The fathers there did not find the little charred crater I made at all amusing and that was the end of my rocketry career. I assume you're doing something a little larger and more powerful than what I did.

23:02 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Just to give idea, the uh, the current rockets um have a a thrust of around 1500 pounds. Ryan can correct me on the numbers, but the um you could use a couple of them to pick up a car if you wanted to. They're unbelievably loud yeah, yeah.

23:20 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
so, like you mentioned that, you flew an f motor and you know the power rankings go on kind of an exponential scale, so, like each next letter, it's like times two, right. So we fly like the largest motor that we fly is an R motor and yeah, like Dr Irwin said, that means like 50,000 pound force seconds. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, there it is, um, and then the 1500 pounds force. That's like on our smaller scale stuff now. But yeah, 4 000 pounds stuff like that it can get. Obviously, if we were to to send it ballistically like a missile, then it would be possibly more than a crater, which is why you why you got to be safe playing around with these yeah, that would probably end the Little League game for sure.

24:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's impressive rocket. So for those who are listening and not watching the video on the video stream, we have a clip of their how many 4,000 pounds you said for this one or 1,500?

24:23 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
It peaks a little under 4 000 this one you can read it on the thrust tab up top yeah, oh well.

24:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
If I was an engineer I'd know that. But it's called shockwave, I think, which is which is whimsical and fitting. That's something elon would probably like, and uh it's a solid rocket right right, yeah all solids. Okay, Tarek, I'll shut up now because I know you're bursting at the seams.

24:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I just want to ask my standard question that I always ask every guest on the show, and maybe, daniel, we can start with you first. But then, ryan, please feel free to jump in. And that's basically what's your path to either space or to engineering? You know, doctor, whichever you'd like to start with, you know what got you there. Was it something that, like, grabbed you when you were a kid, or is it something that happened through an evolution of interests and academics? I'm just curious, like what that path was that led you to this moment where now you've got a history-making rocket under your belt.

25:34 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
I did draw astronauts in space stations when I was a kid, but my relatives were largely doctors and I just assumed as a kid I was going to be a medical doctor. But then I hit ninth grade biology and dissection and oh no, that's not for me. So meanwhile I was realizing that what I actually could do was math and science. So I did applied physics as an undergrad and I majored in electrical engineering as a grad student. So still nothing to do with arrow and rockets grad student. So still nothing to do with arrow and rockets. But then, um in uh, as a young professor, we were in a place where the Apollo generation was starting to retire and the industry Hughes and TRW, those kind of companies were around.

26:19
Then this is in the 90s they told USC that we needed to amp up our space research and education and we started a whole astronautics group. So I started teaching rocket propulsion, which was a big change for me and I still probably wouldn't have started a student group on my own. It really took the, the students like Ian. And then a year later another guy came along, a guy named David Reese, who was really good at solid propellants. Ian was good at structures and between the two of them. They got the whole thing started and then we've been lucky, every, every couple of years, a couple of really new students come along. I mean really new, really good students come along, and we've kept the thing going for now 20 years. We're going to have our 20th anniversary celebration this coming February.

27:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, that's exciting. Five years too late. Five years too late, ryan. How about you? Was space always in your veins there, or is it something you found uh later, when you got into college?

27:19 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
um, honestly, yeah, like I've always been interested in engineering. Uh, the funniest story I like to tell is like in kindergarten they did this like career day, you know where you can choose what you want to do, like for college or whatever it was, and you could. There's like a bunch of different options. Like you know, art and painting and cooking and chemistry, and then, uh, so I wanted to do cooking because you got a free cake out of it how people make their career choices.

27:51
I like it but, but then because I was a kindergartner and I couldn't read, I, I chose chemistry because it started with a c, um, and then I just got into stem from there and uh, and then you know, I didn't really I wasn't interested in space much specifically. You know, I thought engineering was cool. When I actually got to usc I was still thinking I might do like electric vehicles or something like that. Um, you know, we have a good electric racing team here, but then, uh, I found the rock propulsion lab and it was kind of sold from there. You know, this club is super cool. And uh, I, I can't imagine myself doing anything else now. Okay, targ, do we want to spend any more time whining?

28:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
about where were these opportunities when we were that age or something. Well, I wanted to say that that daniel had the. Okay, tarek, do we want to spend any more time whining about where were these opportunities when we were that age, or shall we just move on?

28:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I wanted to say that Daniel had the reverse experience that we had right.

28:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I noticed.

28:43 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Right, whereas you and I hit that differential equation wall and that ended our engineering or science careers. We sailed through it, right, right, but biology was his Achilles, heel, heel. I was going to point out that, ryan, we're all in good company because, as we know, um not only um is USC home. Uh to um, uh, dr Dan, you know here, and, and yourself, ryan, and of course it was, you know me and the marching band.

29:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It was amazing, uh, but also always got to work the marching band in there somehow you know I was.

29:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I played trumpet in the band, everybody, so it was a lot.

29:16 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
I played trumpet too.

29:17 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
All right, see that I'm liking this guys get a room. Okay, those are students in the band. That is great, that is great to know.

29:26 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But of course, of course, uh neil armstrong, graduate of usc, uh school of engineering too, so there's a big plaque for him and everything it's. It's great.

29:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You're welcome, america for your Moonlander right. Usc, all right. Okay, I don't think he designed the Moonlander, but that's fine, so let's jump right in now that Tark's had his way with all of us. Aftershock 2 is the name of the rocket, correct? Yeah, so I'm sure that you iterated, iterate it up to this point. If you just tell us about this particular rocket and I don't mean to oversimplify this, but really, since we're kind of starting at ground zero, chuckle, chuckle, um, what differentiates this from, say, what I'd see from you know, a mid-level hobbyist out at Black Rock, the Black Rock range or something?

30:16 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Yeah.

30:16
So you know, that's a good point as well.

30:19
We launch out of the Black Rock desert, similar to, if you're familiar with, the balls competition, or I guess it's not necessarily a competition as much as an event where you know a lot of hobbyists get together and launch their high-performance experimental rockets.

30:34
We launch out of there because it's high performing, but I would say what kind of differentiates us from those is that the way probably that I see the club has developed its rocket over time is, you know, we we started, you know, 20 years ago, basically, like dr when mentioned, with hobby rocketry experience, but since then we have kind of been developing on the side our own design over those 20 years and each year we make it, you know, slightly better and better. Some years we make it worse and then it blows up and then we make it better. Um, so I would say one of the big things is just the continuity of those 20 years and like basically optimizing uh, one continuous design, not perfectly continuous, but then also, of course, as a team, um, you can get a bit more, you know, funding than somebody on their own could do, and it, it, it's great to work as a team because you can kind of accomplish more, spread yourself thinner, because there's more people to handle all this stuff.

31:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, you sound like you're primed for SpaceX, but we're going to talk about that later. In fact, before we talk about that, we're going to go to a break from one of our beloved sponsors and we'll be right back, so hang tight.

31:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So you know, and I'm not sure if we mentioned that BlackRock is in Nevada, but I mean you have launched right out of the like the Mojave as well, or at least the program has correct In the past, back in 2019, there was like a big launch there with Traveler 4 too. So I'm really curious. By the way, traveler is the name of the mascot, the horse that rides out during the games, and so I'm curious compared to that launch, what were the big advancements that you and the team were trying to make, or that you did make right for Aftershock 2 to kind of hit the targets that you were able to? I'm not sure if we talked about how high everything went. We didn't Rod right, not yet. So maybe, ryan, that's a good place to start.

32:40 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
It's on 938.

32:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You're here to talk about this record launch. What happened? What happened with Aftershock 2? Walk us through it.

32:51 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Kind of like Dr Wren mentioned is it took them 15 years after the club was founded to launch Traveler 4. And the goal with that was, like so far, in 2004, actually, I don't know if maybe Ian was inspired by the GoFast launch, but in 2004, a group of amateur hobbyists they were adults kind of all in their careers already amateur hobbyists, they were adults kind of all in their careers already they got together and launched a rocket called go fast to 380 000 feet, uh, space, like the boundary of space. The carmen line is like like around 330 000 feet, um. So yeah, it took our club 15 years to to do that, um, and they launched to basically 340 000 feet with traveler 4. That was actually out of spaceport america in new mexico.

33:41
We launched all of these videos that you're showing right now, like our smaller vehicles those are the ones that launch out of mojave, got it, um, and then we get the bigger rockets in more more remote locations, basically, um, but yeah, then after traveler, you know, the pandemic struck pretty soon after and we wanted to go back as soon as we could.

34:01
But then, you know, because the club relies on transfer of knowledge, we just needed to make sure because you know, people are graduating. That's one of the main challenges with the club is people are graduating. We wanted to do something bigger and better but it just took us a bit of you know, honing our skills, passing on the knowledge all those people who had been there, um, for the time of traveler for taught us everything they know and then it took us like another five years but we got there and it was like so I mentioned, go fast was 380 000 feet and aftershock 2 went to 470 000 feet and that's like then those are the only three rockets by amateurs that have made it to space. So we think we crushed the record pretty well, so well almost that we don't know if we should attempt to beat it because it might go over the legal limit.

34:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, and and they're beating Virgin Galactic and, I think, blue Origin. So that's pretty impressive because those guys have a little more money.

35:00
So, dr Irwin, I have a question. Oh, and I wanted to mention, you know it's comforting I was watching the video yesterday. It was comforting to see that from your little inside camera, that the nose cone came off to release a parachute, just like my rocket did, before it slammed into those kids playing little league, um, who just stood there with a shocked look on their faces. Anyway, I'm sorry, get it carried away. Um it. It's unusual for a lab like this or program like this, to be run and staffed by undergrads, isn't it?

35:29 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
this sounds kind of, uh, kind of groundbreaking well, here's the thing it's undergrads who have time and motivation to do things that are kind of for glory or for their own purposes, as opposed to grad students, who are busy working for, typically, a PhD thesis, and so grad students have a lot less spare time.

35:52 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Now undergrads.

35:54 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
You have to realize that when they graduate and they go out into industry, the industry people interview them and you can't really tell from somebody's grades how good they're going to be. What you really want to see is what they've actually done. So students who have worked on hands-on student projects like Rocket Lab there's a whole bunch more, by the way, in the School of Engineering, but the Rocket Lab is perhaps the most famous now but students who have worked in Rocket Lab and can show what they've done have kind of a golden ticket in the industry. The experience is very, very valuable and there are a lot of student groups that are designed around national competitions. So USC has, for example, the aero design team that flies aircraft for a national competition run by the Aeronautics and Astronautics Association, aiaa.

36:49
But RPL is unusual in that there's no specific competition. They were founded with the goal of being the first student group to get to space and that they pursued the goal single-mindedly all these years. So it isn't actually unusual. I can think, in fact, it would be more unusual if this were a grad student organization. That's true.

37:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know I'm curious where Aftershock 2 lands up in the program's achievements. You know I'm curious where or Aftershock 2 lines up in the program's achievements. You mentioned that you passed the Carmeline. You kind of shattered it. I think you hit like 90 miles, which is crazy, right, so that's actually higher than Blue Origin 2, now that we think about it right, and I think it's what it's about 13 feet tall, 330 pounds, and then you were able to reach like what, 3,600 miles an hour or so, just over that. Where does that line up in the vehicle evolution? I mean, did the rocket just get bigger and bigger? And that's what lets you get higher and faster? Is it lighter? Is it lighter, Is it smarter? Where does it line up for the evolution there?

37:59 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Yeah, so if you look actually at Traveler 4 and Aftershock 2, our two biggest, most successful rockets, they have the exact same outer dimensions. Meanwhile, aftershock 2 went 1.4 times higher than, uh, traveler 4, and there's, like you know, there's a lot of things. It looks basically the same on the outside, but everything on the inside is essentially what allows it to go higher, and some, you know, more thermal stuff on the outside. But you know, we, we it's actually used a completely new propellant that we formulated, our club formulated, and you know we cast that propellant it uses, kind of we, we kind of squeezed together all the rest of the systems so that we could fit more propellant in there.

38:48
Um, and then we, you know, made everything lighter that we could and uh, yeah, it's just it's we actually didn't work entirely by making the rocket bigger. It was mostly by optimizing things, because we actually have like a kind of limit on how big we can make things, just based on the infrastructure we have in our lab space. Um, and actually in the future we're considering making our rockets smaller, uh, but still achieving the same height. So we'll see how that goes.

39:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So one of the problems I had in my brief and unimpressive career as an amateur rocketeer like many, because there were no electronics involved at the time, because I'm old was tracking the thing down range. You know, the parachute goes up, you lose sight of it, parachute pops. You kind sight of it, parachute pops, you kind of might track it for a second, then it disappears. And because I was doing this in southern california down orange county, it was critical to find it quickly because they tended to start fires and of course we were always launching in the summer and whoosh, and that did happen a couple of times, though we put it out. Uh, I assume you had some kind of radio tracker on this so you could uh go track it down.

39:59 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Yeah, we have a lot of different tracking systems. The main ones that were successful on this flight were GPS-based, so they talk to the satellites wherever they are on Earth. Of course, gps actually locks out if you're going so fast and so high, because the government doesn't want people using gps for missiles or anything like that. So we're only able to get a gps data low to the ground, which is important because you know that's where you want to find the rocket. Um, and yeah, it talks to the satellites and then radios us back that information as well. So, um, the satellites tell us and then the the, the radios, tell us.

40:39
We have a system that tries to trilaterate the rocket. You know, basically, from the launch point we send a few groups of people out a few miles away, each in different directions, so they can point radios, point antennas at the rocket and, based on you know the time that it takes for the signal, tonas at the rocket and, based on you know the time that it takes for the signal to go to the rocket and come back, you can tell how much distance the radio signal traveled and that way you can get a position on the rocket. It didn't work on this flight, unfortunately, but it's worked before and we're that's like one of the cooler things we're hoping to get working in the future for sure. So it it's like science.

41:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I was going to say that's like when you know how to do math and you have computers more advanced than those crummy calculators we had, they can triangulate things.

41:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I was going to say when I launched my Estes rockets. That's like the funnest part is just to go run after it. Most fun I shouldn't say fun, that's not a word To go went after it and tried to catch it out of the air, but I guess something that's 330 pounds. You wouldn't want to be underneath that when it came back to earth. You know, dan, I'm curious.

41:39
This record setting launch was on October 20th and October is like the start of the school year and that's when people are just getting their feedback for academics and whatnot. And I'm curious how the program and the students that you oversee adapt to that schedule. I mean, is this something that's just always going on in the background, that you have students that you're overseeing throughout the summer and the year, or is there a really specific time where you have to get them into gear, like Ryan and the rest of the members, to go out, you know, to go out to Nevada and Black Rock to to have everything ready? I mean, I'm curious how you kind of wrangle those cats to get to space when, when, when they have finals and everything else to worry about.

42:29 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
You're. You're acting as though I'm in charge of the students. Actually, the students are very self-motivated. They. They pretty much schedule their own, their own trips. But, by the way, October is not the start of the school year for us, that's more of a UCLA thing, because we start in August, so by October we're well. Some of the students are taking midterms by that time, so we don't do much over the summer. By the way, the summer is kind of a downtime for the Rocket Lab because the students are all off doing their summer internships, so the lab tends to be fairly empty. But fall and spring semesters are when everything really happens. One year they were a little late in their launch work and they actually did a launch during finals week. That was a really oh my gosh. That worked out very badly and we made a rule that that could never happen again. But in general, when students are going to go out and, by the way, this is a big group, I think Ryan correct me if I'm wrong, but I think about 150 students attended this launch, oh really.

43:26 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Wow yeah, 130 came out here this time.

43:28 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Oh, I had a little okay, I was a little overestimated, but still a pretty big group and they have to miss class because it isn't just a one-day trip, it's a long drive plus they camp, they set up, it's a multi-day trip. The launch is actually over the weekend but the earliest people leave in the early part of the week so they miss a bunch of classes and in some cases they had to miss midterms. So part of my job is to write to their professors and say this is a USC thing. It's considered very important by the School of Engineering. Would you please do the extra work that it takes to give these students makeups or do something to accommodate their missing the work? And the other professors are universally very nice about it because it is extra work and they gladly do it because they've. I don't know how it is for other clubs, but Rocket Lab gets really good press and I think all across the university people have heard of it, so the students get a lot of leeway.

44:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, it didn't. Good Lord, his name escapes me. In a moment, the guy that started Relativity Space came out of your program as well, Tim Ellis.

44:38 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
There were two and they were both from Rocket Lab One's Jordan Noon, and the other was Tim Ellis. Okay.

44:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wow, that's a respectable crew there. All right, we're going to go to another break and we'll be right back, so hold your launch until we return. So the other major I don't know if you want to use the term amateur, because you guys are semi-professional in a way but a non-professional rocketry guy that we've had on this show is steve jervison, who is a big investor in spacex and many other things, tesla and so and his idea of going out and flying a hobby rocket at least as he described it to me was yeah, I get my first stages by buying surplus cruise missile booster stages, which I thought was interesting. I don't think it's as powerful as what you're doing, but it's kind of scary when you hear it that way. So what kind of licensure do you need? Clearances Monitoring Is that tough? I mean, we know you know the pains that Elon has described with the FAA. I assume you're less stringent, but still you're going high. A lot of airplanes can be up there.

45:48 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Yeah, exactly, we the license. The main license that we need is the FAA. The main license that we need is the FAA. They give a certificate of authorization for you to fly, however high you say you're going to fly. We give them details on the rocket, on where we predict it's going to land, how high it's going to go, and, yeah, they have to approve it. We have to send them all of all of our like data and stuff like that.

46:22
And then the other group we have to work with is really just a Bureau of land management who owns the Black Rock or who, like you know, oversees the Black Rock desert. Um, so we need a land permit from them and we need a flight permit from the FAA. And then, once we have the flight permit from the FAA, then we go and talk to air traffic control and we're like, hey, I'm going to be launching on this day. Can you set up a no-fly zone around our launch site so that no planes come in? But then, as it turns out, people ignore the no-fly zone a lot of the time.

46:50
So then we have to wait until the airplanes are out of our space uh, before, before flying, not even the students are safe from you wouldn't want to hit one of those jersey drones now showing up over southern california and oregon.

47:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We don't know what's causing them oh, aliens, stop, stop, stop can I?

47:12 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
can I jump in here I want to say something about? I want to say something about jordan noon, who was the head of Rocket Lab at the time. They did the first space shot. So in addition to doing the engineering lead stuff and there was a lot of stuff that only Jordan could do reprogramming stuff over a weekend and anyway.

47:28
But one of the things that he actually did was, because it was the first space shot, he actually had to get the bureaucratic infrastructure going. He was the guy who talked to the Bureau of Land Management and talked to the FAA and this was a new thing for them, because student groups don't normally get permits to go to space. So he had to figure all that stuff out. But ever since that time the students have made sure to kind of keep up the politics and when new students graduate or the FAA guy retires and the new one comes along, they make sure to renew the relationship and, you know, send along a case of whiskey or whatever it might be to keep the relationship up, which is not bribery, it's simply encouragement.

48:14 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, it's networking.

48:15 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
I'm joking.

48:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know, I have to ask both as a supervisor, as a teacher, dan, and as a student, about the dangers involved in this kind of rocketry. I was stunned just in finding out that hobbyists, that folks like the Joe Barnards and whatnot on YouTube, are making solid propellant in their garages and those types of things, and it seems to me that when you're actually talking about rocket science with these students and making their own propellants, that there's some inherent dangers that you have to, you know, set up safety guidelines for and uh and appropriate safeguards, and you know what. What are like the dangers involved? Or is it as easy as ordering a fuel from the internet? But, ryan, you mentioned that you came up with the new picture, so I'm just curious how dangerous is it to put this stuff together? Um and then um and then make sure that no one you know makes a mistake, a pretty costly one um, Okay, first of all, the solid propellant itself is not just stuff you can casually mix in your kitchen.

49:37 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
One of the key elements, for example, is powdered aluminum. You don't think of aluminum as something that burns, but that's because it's big and doesn't have much surface area. When you grind it up into a tiny powder tens of microns then it has so much surface area it's actually an explosive, and you can't just buy it without a permit from Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Powdered aluminum Powdered aluminum, yes, so powdered aluminum is the stuff that actually burns in the rocket propellant, and then to go along with that, you need an oxidizer, and the kind of oxidizer that's needed is kind of like what was the guy's name, Timothy McVeigh who blew up the building in Oklahoma City.

50:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah.

50:23 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
He filled his Penske truck with our Ryder truck, I forget with a whole bunch of fertilizer. It's basically the same stuff. So basically, you mix powdered aluminum, an oxidizer and something to hold it together, a binder, and that makes something kind of liquid, kind of a doughy-like, and it has to be mixed and cast and then it becomes solid and this cannot be done. Well, okay, it can be done by yourself in your kitchen, but it's very dangerous. In fact, the Rock Lab students do it under professional supervision at a uh, at a company that does this for a living. The company's called x squadron. There's a lot of driving involved because they're way out of victorville, so the students have to put a ton of miles on their cars going on.

51:05 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Even though we we do it under, like, supervision, a lot of people always try to nitpick us and be like, well, okay, you're just buying the motor, then right, but it is still like our formula and it's supervised. But all of our students, we send out about a dozen students and they're the ones actually doing the mixing. It's mostly a safety thing that we, you know, we go out there and we just want to be, you know, safe and professional about it while still getting the learning experience. So that's like, yeah, that's what we do and, like Tanner said, it involves a lot of driving.

51:38 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Is it like a certification that you need then, like do you have to be rated to be able to handle that stuff? Or is it? The supervision is what lets you proceed, because everyone knows what the safety requirements are or the protocols are.

51:56 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Well, the supervision has to be done by a licensed pyrotechnic operator, and that's part of what the professional company provides, as well as the appropriate equipment for making sure that, if anything goes wrong, any fires or explosions can be contained. By the way, the solid motor, once it's completed, the solid itself, is not that dangerous. You can take a piece of it in your hand, you can light it with a lighter. It just kind of sparkles a little bit, but on the other hand, if it gets hot and under the presence of high pressure atmosphere, then it burns very rapidly. That's a whole different story.

52:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's kind of like the weird thing about plastic explosives the C4, that you can actually mold it, eat it, light it on fire, use it to cook your dinner Just don't put a plastic cap in it. You know, Tarek, it's funny. I'm having trouble visualizing this. From everything you've told me about your time at USC, I have this picture of students in their Maybachs and Bugattis and Aston Martins driving out to Victorville to pick up the rocket. Is it still like that, or have we kind of?

53:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
rounded the curve into more normal civilization. What is it still? The University of?

53:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Spoiled Children. Is that what you're asking, Ryan?

53:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Did I say that? I'm just saying I'm getting that vibe, I'm getting that vibe? I don't know. I think Ryan and dan are probably better. You know, I was at usc back in what? When did we go to the the conference? Was that last year? 10. Right, the, the, the we. We were back there. I was on campus and it's it's so much different now than it was when I was there in, you know, 2000.

53:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh, uh, uh, graduating jesus and and what dan where did you go to go to college, if I may ask?

53:37 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
I was an undergraduate in the late 70s. I graduated in 1981 and then I went to to grad school in the uh from uh 82 to 86. My wife laughs at me because all this stuff from the 80s I don't even know about it because I was busy being a phd student. So represent.

53:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I started at ucla in 74, was invited to stop attending in 77.

54:04
Invited, I like that I had racked up too many units and I was taking so many classes, they said you're not going to be able to graduate the way you're going. I was like but what do you mean? I can't say. I didn't realize that if you hit a maximum number of units, they just said you're out of here. We've got other students who want to come in and actually finish stuff. So, not to get into a long, boring story, but it ended up taking me 17 years to get a bachelor's degree. But I took a lot of classes, which is really cool. And, speaking of taking things, we're going to take one more break and we'll be right back. And, tarek, you're up, so get your baseball ready.

54:39 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I had a question and Dan, you kind of mentioned this early on about what the atmosphere is like for one of these launches. You mentioned that the students go on out. You had over like 100 folks there 130 I think Ryan said and that they camp and whatnot. I think Ryan said and that they camp and whatnot, and that paints a picture to me of like a Burning man atmosphere, like around a pyre that will hopefully go to space. And so you know, I know that this is a student project, is a student club, that this is a student project as a student club, and I'm wondering what that atmosphere is like, because it's very high tech stuff that you want to go. Well, you have to make sure that everything is set up properly, but you're out there in the desert and you know, is it just a bunch of campers? Is it tents? Everyone has to bring their food. What is that like to kind of have that atmosphere? And then, what's it like on launch day to know you're going to go to space?

55:56 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
in the old times. I would say I'll preface his story with uh we've. We've probably got a lot more boring than it than how it might've been at uh other days, because we want it to go well, but I I'm curious to hear what stories he has.

56:07 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Oh well, um.

56:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I think he's censoring right now in his head. He's saying let's see, what do I want to?

56:12 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
tell.

56:12 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Sorry, go ahead.

56:14 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Well, okay, there's two parts. There's the part where, during the mostly during the day, when the students are actually setting things up, doing large amounts of technical work, and there's the time at night when there's campfires and students are sitting around shooting the breeze, and I will neither confirm nor deny that there was alcohol consumed at that time. I will say something, though, about modern times. Compared to old times In years ago, when students would go to launches, there'd be a ton of work last minute work to do, basically because there were always delays in getting the rocket finished, and so there's a bunch of work to do out at the launch site. In recent years, the students have gotten so much better with their organization and a bunch of things which we collectively call systems engineering which is kind of a long word for planning and getting things right that there's much less to do actually at the launch site. So they actually finished their rocket with a little time to spare before their launch trip this time. So, ryan, did I say the right thing?

57:22 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Wow, yeah you said whatever, and I, yeah, the thing is like we used to probably have more fun about things, you know, because it's a camping trip at the end of the day, right, um. But but then we realized, like, maybe things will go better if, unfortunately, we, we don't have as much fun and we do focus more on just not messing anything up. Uh, I can, I can deny that currently we, we don't, uh, do any drinking. And then we, yeah, it's a lot of like script following. Now, we made a script, we follow like all the correct procedures for getting it right, and then there's still a lot of you know, shooting the breeze.

58:09
There's a soccer ball. You know, people are playing soccer in their spare time at this past launch, because obviously 130 people, there's not going to be work for everyone. Ball, you know, people are playing soccer in their spare time at this past launch. Um, because obviously 130 people, there's not going to be work for everyone. Um, but yeah, it's. It's very exciting, of course, then, on the day of launch, once you've done all the annoying, grueling work to to see it go up so I have a question for both of you.

58:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh, so for ryan for the short term and daniel for the long term future prospects for the club, future plans when do we see a trojan going aloft on one of your rockets? What's the trajectory here?

58:47 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
um, I mean, yeah, I'd say the the big thing we're working towards right now. I guess there's kind of two big things we're working towards, um. One is just, you know, continuing to optimize our, our rockets performance. Um, we're making more energetic, a new propellant formula, a better burning geometry, um, our structures are going to be lighter. There's even a chance that. So aftershock 2 was 8 inches in diameter. There's a very strong chance we could make a rocket work and go to space, uh, of six inches in diameter with all of our optimizations, um.

59:24
But then the other thing, and the probably more, like, you know, forward thinking thing that we're going towards is, um, payloads. So we're going to be launching, you know, any sort of scientific research devices. Currently we're mostly testing the infrastructure for that. We're not going to do any of it in the immediate future, like on a flight that we're planning for this April. Actually, we're going to be deploying a little capsule. It looks like a mini space reentry capsule, like a dragon or like the capsules they would use in the Apollo days, and it's going to come down after Apogee and then fall down on its own, ideally, so that maybe in the future we could put some role control on it or something that allows it to point at a certain star, whatever somebody wants to do research with. That's kind of the exciting future, because not only would we then be the only student group to have reached space, but then we'd be the only non-professional supplier of space payload slots.

01:00:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wow, you know, tarek, he looks substantially lower mass than either of us, but I think we'd both volunteer to go. Sorry, daniel, your turn. I didn't mean to usurp your answer. Big picture.

01:00:42 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Well, yes, the idea of launching scientific payloads, I think, is quite an exciting thing, because there's a big role for scientific experiments that go up briefly into space.

01:00:56
And if you have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to spend, then you do it on a spacecraft that orbits and might have a mission duration of 10 years or more. But if you have really a lot less money and a much smaller experiment, then you can be on the tip of what's called a sounding rocket, which is something that goes basically just up into space and then back down again, like the rocket lab vehicles do. And once you're above the boundary of space, you're outside the atmosphere and you can do the kinds of experiments where you don't have the intervening atmosphere. So you can do x-ray astronomy, you can look at the sun, you can do all kinds of things that you cannot do from the ground, and with the advances in miniaturization of electronics, there's good science you can do with a very tiny payload. Now, at the moment, the risk factor would be intolerable, because you want a success ratio well up into the 90% in order to be insurable and be spending your money well Right now. Rpl launch vehicles, space shots were at what?

01:02:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
25% or 30%?

01:02:06 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Yes, oh, so there's a little story there about prior efforts, huh Well in the video you showed showed a bunch of of a sequence of missions all the way from 2006, all the way up.

01:02:21
Um, they were mostly successes or partial successes. Uh, you did show traveler, one, which we didn't talk about it at the time, but it it blew up and there have been there have been a lot of failures and the the majority of motors that are tested on the ground, the majority of rockets that go up, they result in big fireballs and pieces go everywhere. But the cool thing about this, it's often said as a cliche that you learn more from failure than successes. But for the rocket lab that's really true. It's kind of a joy to see when there's kind of a letdown, when there's some kind of failure or explosion. But on the other hand, the students go, they find everything, they find all the charred pieces, they diagram it like a, like an airliner crash site. They figure out what happened and every single time, within a few days, they, they figure out what happened and they move on from it and fix whatever went wrong.

01:03:17 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Yeah, like you know, traveler 4 is the one that worked and Aftershock 2 is the one that worked. That might make you what happened to Travelers 1, 2 and 3, and then, to Aftershock 1, which is none of them worked. So yeah, it's like you said, it's not even a cliche. We learn the most about engineering. When one of our things doesn't work, we realize kind of how stupid we might've been, and then we fix that Well and just so it said, and I'm sure, sure Daniel knows all about this.

01:03:49 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But I wrote a book years ago that included a chapter about the development of the f1 rocket dynes f1 engine for the saturn 5, that big 1.5, a 5 million pound thrust beast, and I don't remember the exact number but I think the number of engines destroyed in the development of that thing was something up in the 50s or 60s. They would just fire this thing up tremendous, thrust, huge exhaust plume and it would shake itself to death and explode. And you know, the engineers, their slide rules and their mechanical pencils and stuff would go stumbling around the field and pick up the smoking pieces and say, well, looks like this one bent before that one did. Uh, they finally got ahead of it by putting an explosive charge in it so that they could decide when to start the acoustic vibration that was destroying the engine. But so see, you're way ahead of the curve. It only took you four or five.

01:04:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's hard to get the last shot. Well, yeah, I just, you know you asked that question about, like, what's ahead for the club and I'm just curious if, if folks want to get involved either future students, current students or, you know, dan, someone to support the club Like, if, how can they get involved, you know, to either help raise funds to kind of cover all of these expenses that I imagine you have to fund to build the Rockets themselves. You know where would you send people to try to get involved with the club? You know where?

01:05:14 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
would you send people to try to get involved with the club? Okay, to begin with, I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout out to the dean's office of the School of Engineering, because they've actually been dominant in funding the Rocket Lab all these years and we do get a fair number of donations from companies so like Boeing and Lockheed, and places will give us a few thousand dollars every year or two and, as you might expect, it's actually quite easy to funnel your browsing toward giving to USC. They work as hard as they can to make sure it's an easy thing to do. So if you just Google give to USC or something similar, you'll be directed to a site where you can find all sorts of places to direct your money and you can endow scholarships. There's all sorts of line item things and the Rocket Lab is there. You can say I want to support USC rocketry and you can give money.

01:06:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah.

01:06:10 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Oh sorry.

01:06:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Go ahead.

01:06:13 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
I was just going to say, to make it even easier, on uscrplcom. We have a link for that.

01:06:19 - Tariq Malik (Host)
There you go, there you go.

01:06:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Excellent, tarek as an alum. You need to get this Week in Space on that donor page. That's right, you can't do that for me, and then you asked about students getting involved.

01:06:32 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
maybe you asked about, like, students getting involved. Maybe, and I mean, yeah, anybody. If you're listening to this and you're, you know, applying to colleges, you're going to be applying to colleges. Unfortunately, the only barrier to entry of being in this club is being a student at USC. I wish I could admit students directly to the club, obviously, because there's a lot of people who reach out to me who want to join and they're passionate about it. But then yeah, just, usc is a great place to be and we're happy to have you if you're here.

01:07:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Do alumni count? I'm asking for a friend, right, but that's great, that's great. Thanks so much.

01:07:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us for another episode, episode 140 of this Week in Space, entitled the University Rocketeers.

01:07:20 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
Gentlemen, I think you've mentioned already, but one more time where's the best place online to keep up with your spectacular efforts? Instagram.

01:07:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
USCRPO and then USCRPOcom, our website. Okay, and Daniel, do you have any other work you're doing that would be of interest? I'm sure you do.

01:07:42 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
Oh, I have bits of research, progress, research projects here and there, but they would take too long to even say what they were and you would be bored at the end, so I won't even go there.

01:07:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, we'll just bring you on again so we can talk about that. Tarekik, where can we find you playing, playing with the toy rockets these days?

01:07:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
well, you can find me at spacecom, as always, on the x as well at tarik j malik, also on blue sky now. But I have to figure out how to learn how to use that. So it's a whole new thing. Uh and uh. And then you know, the big, big thing that we're looking for is like the holiday season, getting getting ready for Christmas in space, product placement, all that fun thing.

01:08:27 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You've got two weeks of product placement to look forward to. Nsssocietyatnssorg, where you can buy Christmas memberships in our organization, which will get you, among many other things, copies of the wonderful magazine I put together every quarter, and we should do an article on these USC guys. Make sure to drop us a line at twisttv if you have complaints, suggestions, comments. Love sonnets, whatever you want. To send jokes please, and we love getting them, and Tarek will answer all the emails because I've been doing it for two years. New episodes of this podcast published every Friday on your favorite podcatcher, so make sure to subscribe like, give us thumbs up, flying rockets, whatever you want, icon, just to tell the world that you love us. And speaking of love, don't forget we're counting on you to join club twit this holiday season. Besides supporting twit and twists, you'll help keep us on the air and bringing you great guests and horrid space jokes. And, of course, in addition to that, you get all the great programming with video streams on the twit network ad free, as well, as some extras are only available there, which I won't talk about this time for just seven dollars a month. You can't even buy a crashed rocket for seven dollars a month, so look into it and, for a limited time, if you refer new subscribers, you get free time for your own club twit subscription. I think that's how it works, and you've heard leo talking about how important this is to the organization, so please step up and be counted. You can also follow the twit tech podcast network at twit on Twitter and a Facebook at twittv on Instagram.

01:10:06
Gentlemen, thank you very much. It's been a real treat talking to you, dan boundless administration, admiration for your work and administrating this thing, cause I'm sure that's not easy. And, ryan, congratulations for the accomplishment for you and your team, your large team. And what's that? I hear a little birdie saying something about a future job at SpaceX. Double congratulations. That's about as cool as it gets, thank you. And, by the way, I haven't gotten a tour down there for seven years, so once you're there, please put in a good word.

01:10:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Me too, me too.

01:10:41 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
I never got one.

01:10:41 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
It's been 20. If you're willing to go to Texas, then that's. That's where you'll find me, but lots of our members are in Hawthorne too, so yeah.

01:10:51 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Be careful.

01:11:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Are you going to Starbase? Careful, are you going to starbase? Are you going to? I have plans to go down to brownsville pretty soon, so I'm oh, I may uh, I may show up, you're gonna watch the launch. Well, this, this is like in a year, six months, a year. See, tarik and I have this long-held fantasy. No, I have this long-held fantasy that tarik and I this is starting to sound kind of weird are gonna I don't know where you're going with this, Ryan.

01:11:14
No, we're going to rent a condo down there as our executive editor-in-chief's retreat so we can go see launches and drink and, you know, stare at the birds, or whatever, because you know we run these two publications and they should pay for that.

01:11:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, the beach is nice there. The beach the Boca Chica beach is very nice, so we'll be looking for you.

01:11:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We'll be looking for you, ryan, out there, so, uh, it's a fun place to be. Thanks very much, oh and uh, by the way, does does? Is there like a viewing range for the public when you're doing these things, or is it a closed range?

01:11:49 - Ryan Kraemer (Guest)
uh, for usc, for your, your test launches, yeah um, I mean, no, we don't really uh hope to have a lot of, you know, public attention. But technically people could come, but yeah, it's, uh, it's really just. You know, we go out to the desert, we do our own camping trip. It's in the middle of nowhere, yeah, so it's not.

01:12:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
There's not like a little corral, like if you go to a press conference at spacex. They've got this enormous facility and they cram 100 journalists into a space that's about 30 feet by 30 feet with their elbows pinned in. You guys should do the same thing to set up a corral and charge people.

01:12:22 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It would be a whole desert with like a square foot of like ropes and they could sell souvenirs.

01:12:29 - Dr. Daniel Erwin (Guest)
I don't know if we're that popular.

01:12:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, Tarek would buy a USC hat with a little rocket sticking out of it. I know okay, sorry gentlemen, I I need to let you get back, jesus, I need to let you get back to I don't know what I'm gonna do with you, son your day. Thank you very much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. We'll see you again, thank you. Thank you, take care, thank you, take care.