Main Engine Cut Off - T+199: A Visit to the NASTAR Center (with Glenn King)

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

I took a half-hour ride out to the National Aerospace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center to take a tour with Glenn King, (COO, Director of Advanced Pilot & Space Training, and recent Netflix star) ...about their training, what they’ve been up to lately in this busy season of people going to space, and what the future may hold for spaceflight training. We tour their altitude chamber, spatial disorientation device, and high performance human centrifuge along with its various cockpits.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 41 executive producers—Brandon, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous—and 691 other supporters.TopicsAudio Gear as of March 7, 2020National Aerospace Training and Research Center - NASTAR CenterOrbital and Suborbital Human Spaceflight Training Programs - Space Training - NASTAR CenterArgentinian man with disability hopes to go into outer space - Disability InsiderInspiration4 - Inspiration4 crew completes centrifuge trainingCountdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space - NetflixThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to anthony@mainenginecutoff.comFollow @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by SpaceX

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cut-Off. I am Anthony Colangelo and as you may be able to hear, I am on the road for the podcast today. It's the first time in almost two years that I've been on the road for the show. It wasn't since IAC 2019 down in Washington, D.C. that I've been able to get out and do some stuff on the road, obviously with the ensuing chaos that happened shortly after IAC. But today I'm driving on I-95 North, about 30 minutes north of Philadelphia, where I live, to a facility called the NASTAR Center out in South Hampton, PA. This is a commercial facility that offers pilot and spaceflight training. Southampton, PA. This is a commercial facility that offers pilot and spaceflight training by, sorry, I'm changing lanes here. So this is really getting the real experience. They offer training in their centrifuges, their altitude chambers for pilots and for people going
Starting point is 00:00:54 to space. And I want to talk to them about the kind of work they do. They work with NASA a lot, but in the last year, I don't know if you've noticed, there's been a lot of private individuals going to space. And if you have seen the Netflix documentary on Inspiration4, you saw them at the NASTAR Center. This is where they did centrifuge training. It is where they did altitude chamber training, I believe, as well. There wasn't much of that in the show, but I remember seeing that on Twitter, the results of it at least. And I know that they, I don't know what kind of relationship they have with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, but I know they offer those experiences in their centrifuge as well for New Shepard and Spaceship Two. So they've done a ton of training of professional astronauts through
Starting point is 00:01:35 NASA, but also private individuals going to space, including the Axiom mission that is coming up to the ISS early next year. That crew has already been through here. So I want to talk to them a lot about what they've got cooking because they have been very busy. I've been talking with them for a couple of weeks, if not months, via email, trying to find a slot that works out. And actually, speaking of that Netflix documentary, the person we'll be talking with today and getting a tour from was in that Netflix documentary.
Starting point is 00:02:02 Glenn King is the director of advanced pilot and spaceflight training at the NASTAR Center. He's going to give us a tour of the facility and talk about the work that they do. And what I'm particularly interested to dig into with them is the future of something like this facility. There's an obvious need here for professional astronauts, professional pilots to get this kind of training when they are going to be experiencing the more extreme environments than what we would hope someday private individuals going to space would experience, that they need to be ready to do more operational things than private individuals would need to do.
Starting point is 00:02:35 But if all of our hopes and dreams work out about the future of spaceflight, you know, I don't think we're all going to have time to get on a centrifuge before we take our flight from New York to China or something like that. So I want to talk to them about what they see as the future of the kind of training they do. And if it's these vehicles today or the next generation of vehicles where private individuals don't need this kind of training. And I want to talk to them about what they're trying to get out of this training when they bring private individuals through. Is it that they're trying to assess their capabilities or their reactions? In the case of Inspiration4, we have an obvious analog there.
Starting point is 00:03:12 Whereas on the professional astronaut side, you're training them on how to fly a vehicle under these environments. So there are some differences that I want to dig into with them. But I'm really excited to go there today to hang out and honestly to get on the road again because what I'm talking to you on right now is about a thousand dollars worth of audio gear that I bought, I'm not kidding, in March of 2020. I think the last photo in my photo stream before the photos of masks and everything is all of the audio gear finally having arrived at my house and I think it's like March 6th or 7th. I'll post a screenshot because it's kind of hilarious that this was this grand investment that I made
Starting point is 00:03:49 because we had DM2 coming up. We had the SLS Green Run coming up. We had some things that I was going to try to travel to that were obviously usurped by the ensuing chaos. But I'm finally getting out to be able to use this gear. And it's all thanks to you out there who support the show. I'm going to do the thanks at the end of the show because I'm currently driving way too fast on 95 to read the list.
Starting point is 00:04:09 But your support makes it possible for me to do these kind of trips and to invest in this audio gear that is going to make it sound much better than any other road shows that I've done. I've done a couple down to a Cygnus launch. I've been at the NanoRacks office. I've been at IAC, obviously, a handful of other ones. I get NASA Glenn Research Center, or sorry, not the Glenn,
Starting point is 00:04:30 Goddard Space Flight Center. So this will be much better sounding than those. And it's because of the fact that I can invest in gear for this specifically. So it's all thanks to you. And I am still about 20 minutes away from the NASTAR Center. So we will talk more when I get on the other side. All right, so I'm here. I just parked at the NASTAR Center on this gray day in Pennsylvania. I'm going to be going inside to talk with Glenn King, who's the director of advanced pilot and spaceflight training here at the NASTAR Center. We're going to take a tour of the facility. So I will pick it up with him once I get inside. I'll walk you through that with a trainee of that. That way you'll get a full view of what they're doing. But the two important things here is that
Starting point is 00:05:15 we have these two certificates issued by the Commercial Space Transportation. This is basically the FAA saying that our centrifuge is approved and our altitude chambers are approved. So this is an important thing to have. We've been in business, the company ETC has been in business for over 50 years at this location. NASTAR has been in business for about 18 years right here. And what they did, years and years ago, the Congress decided to close a lot of military bases called BRAC, B-R-A-C, Base Realignment and Closing.
Starting point is 00:05:55 So they decided to close a bunch of bases, and they did. And what happened is it left the military with very few physiology training centers now. A lot of the bases they closed were physiology training centers. So when the bases closed, the equipment that was there was sold off for scrap, you know, 10 cents to the pound or something like that. And the problem with that was that civilian pilots and civilian aviators used to go to these military bases. The FAA had a handshake agreement with the military that said, yeah, we'll train civilians on a space available kind of thing, and you can send us your people and blah, blah, blah.
Starting point is 00:06:39 So that was fine. That was working great for years until these bases closed. Now these guys had nowhere to go. So our board of directors decided, let's open up our training center. We build the equipment, we sell it to the military, we have the syllabuses, we know how to train them. Let's just train civilians here. So we have all the equipment on this side of the building that they manufacture on that side of the building. We use it for two things.
Starting point is 00:07:07 One for training of people, space crew, military crews, civilian pilots, things like that. But there's also a showcase. So when clients want to buy an altitude chamber, clients want to buy a centrifuge, they can come in, they can kick the tires, try it before you buy it, and then if they like it, they buy it and so on, and then we're good to go. That's what we do. That's what NASTAR is. My real job is in between training people here, is that when they sell a centrifuge
Starting point is 00:07:36 or they sell an altitude chamber, I follow on, me and my team follow on after installation, and then we train their trainers on how to use that that happens all around the world wherever the equipment is so this is all the NASCAR center basically just sectioned off a section of ETC the parent company and set up offices and we have classrooms over here on the left here's some people pictures of people that have been through the NASTAR Center. Winston Scott, this gentleman, actually he's on our board of directors. I know him very well.
Starting point is 00:08:13 We've had Italian pilots, space crew come through. Other shuttle people have come through. We started with Greg Olson. He was one of the first space tourists to go to the space station. And we trained him back in 2007. What happened with Greg was he was scheduled to go on a Soyuz launch and he did end up going on Soyuz but they initially disqualified him. He had a medical condition that the Russians, Roskomost, didn't like and they didn't know what to do with them. So Greg called us said well look what can I do? I said well look let's talk to them. So we
Starting point is 00:08:51 were talking with Roscomos, said look we'll put him through our training program here and see if he can endure the launch forces to go to the ISS. And he did. He passed with flying colors. So we sent our report to Roscomos. They reviewed it, accepted it, put him on a flight, off he went. So that's that story. So we figured out that, hey, we could do space screening, medical screening for launch providers. When we first started working with Virgin Galactic, this guy, you know who that guy is. Yeah, very casual Richard Branson pic on the wall. Yeah. So we were talking to them and we were setting up the program.
Starting point is 00:09:33 And I was looking at their business model. And they were hoping to target 50% of the U.S. population to be eligible to go to space. Not budgetarily, just physiologically. Physiologically, yeah. Because historically, if you looked at the old NASA programs and the Soyuz programs, the astronauts that were chosen to go were extremely fit, extremely conditioned for that purpose. They had been medically screened for years,
Starting point is 00:10:06 and have history on them. But with the space tourism industry starting to blossom back then, a 50% population target was pretty optimistic in their eyes. But then when people like Greg Olson started coming through, we've had several other people come through here, and some with debilitating conditions,
Starting point is 00:10:37 but which didn't necessarily disqualify them for going to space. So all we did is we were able to expand their business model to up to about 95% of the general population. We think with proper screening, with proper training, can be conditioned to go to space. I just recently trained a gentleman from Argentina who's had polio since he was one year old, walks with crutches. Upper body strength is amazing. But you don't really need your legs a lot except to ingress and egress. So with a little bit of help, he can go to space. We trained the Inspiration4 crew that recently went to space.
Starting point is 00:11:26 Haley Arsenault was here. She has a prosthetic leg. She went to space. And loved the Gs, apparently, right? They call it the G monster from the documentary. The whole Inspiration4 crew trained here. They loved it, had a great time. But she's an example of expanding that business model to include those types of people.
Starting point is 00:11:47 And I love doing that. So was Greg Olson the first of the kind of individuals that came through your program? Right. He's the one that kind of kicked off this program and made us sit back and start thinking, hey, wait a second. We're on to something here. Let's start doing it. It took a little while, but now you've been quite busy, I'm sure. There's been a lot of people that went to space in the last six months.
Starting point is 00:12:07 Yeah, and we're getting busier. I'm getting phone calls two, three phone calls a day. Hey, I want to come to space. It's a great thing to have. But, you know, we've had Richard Branson come through. This gentleman here, there's a funny story behind this guy.
Starting point is 00:12:23 This is James Lovelock. He's a British scientist who developed a Gia theory that the Earth is a living organism. And he came through here in 2007. And back then, he was 88 years old. The space training community and the centrifuge training community is a very small community. We all know each other, we all work together, we send emails out, you know, what's going on, what are you guys doing, what are we doing, blah blah blah. When they found out I was going to spin an 88 year old person in my
Starting point is 00:13:01 centrifuge up to 6 G's, I started getting a dozen emails. What are you nuts? This guy's 88. You know, come on. You gotta be kidding me, Glenn. You're risking your reputation. I don't look guys. Calm down. Let's see what he can do. We have a very stepped progressive program that can take an average person off the street and regardless of your age I'm more concerned about your general health age has nothing to do with it up to a point okay but it's basically your general health is what I'm looking at he was very healthy so we put him through the program did very well I was really proud of that so I sent that back emails. See, I told you so.
Starting point is 00:13:47 So you're not worried about Shatner going on this week. We have a new Shansari. She's come through here. She was the first Muslim woman to go to space. Here's Branson back here again. He's been through here, I don't know, half a dozen times. More times than you would hope, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah. So we know him very well.
Starting point is 00:14:02 Then we've got dignitaries and other people. This gentleman, this is a team from Malaysia that trained. This guy actually went to the ISS. Then, you know, we've had other guys on shuttle astronauts and stuff like that. There seems to be a difference between the professional astronauts that come through and the private individuals. Like you sort of were talking there that a lot of it is trying to figure out if they are capable of handling the experience whereas the professional side more seeing if they can also operate under those circumstances. Yeah, when you say professional astronauts you're using a term that throws back to the old NASA space training days. It would take
Starting point is 00:14:41 two years to train one of these astronauts, male or female. Two years. That's a long program. With the advent of space tourism now, we're talking hundreds of people that want to go to space. We don't have the luxury of two years to get these people trained. We've got to get this down to days. Not more than a week. For me, I'm thinking days. And we're doing that because, one, they don't need to know all the stuff that these old guys, well, I don't want to say old guys, but former astronauts used to know. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:19 But, you know, they're going to be going into pretty much autonomous vehicles, you know they're going to be going into pretty much autonomous vehicles uh have to know a few things uh need to know what the g-forces are into like because they've never launched the space before they have this is like nothing on earth so we have to replicate that and that's what we do here so i think with a two to three day training program, 99% of the people go to space. Yeah. Okay. As computers get more powerful, get smaller, lighter, systems become more autonomous. You know, anybody can go, basically.
Starting point is 00:15:59 If you can endure the G-forces. Those things we can't change. Right, exactly. Well, at least now, hopefully. So anyways, I'm sorry for this but the um they're waxing the floor in our lunch room but all trainees come into here and have lunch every day there's pictures on the wall and you'll see flags on these pictures from countries all around the world uh some of our clients who have come here to train. But coming out into this area, this is our training bay area. And you can see what they did was just put this big wall up
Starting point is 00:16:32 to separate the factory, the manufacturing side, from the training side. This first thing you see here on the left, let me turn the lights on in the chamber. This is an altitude chamber. Well come on inside we'll show you what this is. Basically an altitude chamber is a big steel box. Watch your step coming in. It's a big steel box with acrylic windows. We'll put trainees in here and we'll evacuate all the air. What that does, because it's a sealed system, the vacuum that's being created drops the pressure and when you go up to altitude in an airplane, the air pressure drops. And that's
Starting point is 00:17:25 what we're doing is simulating an ascent to altitude. Most of the time training occurs at 25,000 feet. Trainees will come in, take off their mask at 25,000 feet and start to experience the symptoms of hypoxia, which is a very dangerous problem for pilots. And space travelers also. They're going to higher than 365,000 feet. Inspiration4 did orbits around the Earth. So you're very, very high. If a leak were to happen, if a decompression were to happen, that's a serious situation, especially for space travelers.
Starting point is 00:18:02 This chamber is capable of going to a hundred and twenty thousand feet which is just to the bottom of space. We've tested David Clark spacesuits. They have a CHAP suit which is a commercial suit that's available for space travelers. We've tested that suit up in here to 120,000 feet. We've tested the space shuttle suits. You'll see a picture on the wall of a orange space suit. That's the David Clark S-1035 suit that all the shuttle crew wore. Okay, we've tested them here to 120,000 feet, both unmanned and manned. Okay.
Starting point is 00:18:42 You see these clipboards on the wall of things to do when you're hypoxic to see how you respond. We have a worksheet that they work through. And as you become hypoxic, like being drunk, your brain doesn't function as well. So you have simple math questions like, you know, what's 2 plus 2? People, 5, 10, you know. As we get down further in the sheet as you become more and more hypoxic we start messing with your brain here is the word green but it's printed in the color blue what i want you to do when you're hypoxic is write
Starting point is 00:19:19 down the color of the word so your brain is thinking green green green because you're reading it and you're having a very difficult time writing the word blue which is contradicting what your brain's thinking and so on down the list here. And then also what we'll do to you is we have some simple mazes which is kind of easy to do when you're not hypoxic. When you're hypoxic very difficult. And then we give you one maze that's in color.
Starting point is 00:19:48 And the reason we do that is because the cones in your retina, that C color, have a difficult time seeing color when they don't have enough oxygen. So when people try to do this maze, they're like this, I can't see it. You know, it's all different shades of light gray and stuff. So we mess with them that way. Then we give them this little toy at the end. Looks like something my one-year-old has. Yeah, and basically what the toy does, it's a simple thing of trying to put the square peg
Starting point is 00:20:20 into the round hole. What they'll do is they'll try to put the square peg and they'll pound it and it doesn't fit. And then they throw it across. You gave me a trick peg, you know. Belligerence, that's a symptom of hypoxia. So we just, we're used to it. We laugh and we'll pick up the piece and say, look, it fits.
Starting point is 00:20:38 But you'll be surprised at how difficult a simple task like that can be. So if you're a pilot or a space crew member you're gonna have a very difficult time doing your job if you're hypoxic. Okay and then down here we have an injection seat trainer. This is primarily for my military pilot training. Basically it teaches them how to eject from a stricken aircraft.
Starting point is 00:21:11 What we'll do, we have a pneumatic system in the back and then a cylinder that when the guy pulls this ejection handle like that, the seat will eject up the rail. And it'll give them about nine G's of a shot. It's a pretty good kick in the pants. You know. I got nervous when you pulled that.
Starting point is 00:21:31 So it teaches them to get into the proper body position. Everybody saw the movie Top Gun. Oh, yeah. Goosed it and make it. Still waiting for the second one. Yeah. All these years later. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:21:42 We're all waiting for that second one to come out. But, yeah, this is what that does. It basically gets them in the right posture, pulls the handle. This device is a disorientation trainer. And what we can do with this, we use it for pilot training, both military and civilian pilots. But this round drum you see here is the cockpit. Person goes up the ladder, goes down into the cockpit, the door closes. This drum, the cockpit, will pitch 360 degrees in both directions all day long. Okay, so this is
Starting point is 00:22:19 a pitch axis. The pitch axis is mounted on this horizontal roll frame. It will roll 360 degrees in both directions. Okay, so stay with me on this. Now I have pitch and roll mounted on this U-shaped yaw frame. You can see it turning. It'll yaw 360 degrees in both directions while you're pitching and rolling. Now you're yawing. So pitch, roll, and yaw matter on this planetary arm down below. So the whole thing... very strong pushing this around... will go around the room while you're pitching, rolling, and yawing. So from a pilot's perspective, think about doing an inverted flat spin at two and a half G's going around the room, then I tell you recover the aircraft and you're trying to recover. So it puts you in these what's
Starting point is 00:23:18 called aircraft departed attitudes and teaches you recovery techniques for almost any attitude. High attitude, low energy, low attitude, high energy, anything you can imagine we can put you in that situation and teach you a recovery technique. Okay. So inside there the interface is specifically for aircraft? Is that configurable at all? Yeah, this one's specifically for an aircraft. Do you trust Neil Armstrong on the Gemini mission to get off the Agena stage and get it back. Yeah, because we're not going to go back in retro 50s
Starting point is 00:23:50 to the old Gemini or Apollo type cockpits. And the newer spaceships, you know, the Blue Origin, the SpaceX, the only one that's different is the Virgin Galactic. They have a human flight crew. But for the SpaceX and the Blue Origin, they're basically what we call a vertical launch. Very autonomous. Goes up, comes down on its own. Everything happens automatically. There's not a lot of hand flying. But the Virgin Galactic program is a lot different. You've got two crew and they hand fly this. It's not an auto flight or autopilot. And it's more aircraft like.
Starting point is 00:24:27 It's more like a little airplane. So how about if Disney calls and say we want the Gemini simulator experience? I can't do that. I can give you a Virgin Galactic experience. I can give you a SpaceX experience. I can give you a Blue Origin experience. I can't do a Gemini experience.
Starting point is 00:24:44 One, I don't have the flight data or what we call a flight profile for that. I'll get into their flight profiles in a minute. These are pictures of people and some of the equipment that we've sold through the years. This is the Air Force centrifuge that's currently installed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, training Navy and Air Force pilots. If you watch television, U.S. Air Force has a 30-second ad, you know, join the Air Force, and you'll see about a 10-second video of that device on that ad.
Starting point is 00:25:17 We built that here. I commissioned that into service about five years ago. I see there's a lot of different pictures right here of the different stuff you shipped and are the differences the arm lengths and the capabilities of them are they pretty standard systems? Yes arm length and capability basically starting with our first centrifuge that we built for the Air Force this one was installed at Holland Air Force Base over 25 years ago this one was installed at Singapore Air Force and the
Starting point is 00:25:47 difference going from this generation to that generation is that from here is basically a powered arm with a cockpit that's passive, meaning it rolls out under centrifugal force and comes back depending on the speed of the arm and the centrifugal force applied. This generation onward has a powered pitch and roll axis. We have motors that will pitch and roll it like you'll see in that picture to keep the G vectors aligned and that's the purpose of that. With the onset of new generation aircraft, fourth and fifth fighter generation aircraft, now going into the sixth generation fighter aircraft, these airplanes can onset or go
Starting point is 00:26:31 into a banked turn very, very rapidly. If you ever watch the Blue Angels fly or if you ever watch the Thunderbirds fly, they perform a maneuver called the minimum radius turn right over the airfield. And you'll see that airplane up 90 degree bank staying level cranking around the airfield that pilot's pulling a 9g turn which is nine times his body weight i'm 200 pounds times nine that's 1800 pounds pressing down on my body while i'm doing that maneuver that's a lot pressure. So what these devices do is train them to endure that pressure. You'll see the cockpit on that one is cranked out almost horizontal. That's about an eight
Starting point is 00:27:15 and a half G spin when that picture was taken. That one's in Singapore, there was one for the US Navy in Lemoore, there's one in Japan. So it went from a 20 foot arm, 20 foot arm to a 25 foot arm. And this is what we have in Korea, we got another one in Japan, we got one here at NASCAR, which you're going to see in a minute. And then we went to a 31 foot arm for the US Air Force. So they're kind of growing and the purpose of the longer arm is that it goes from the short arm like this one to longer and longer and longer up to the 31 foot arm. It increases the radius to make it more linear, less of a curve. G-force is a simple matter of speed times radius and you get G-force. You have a short arm radius, you have to go real fast to make a G-force.
Starting point is 00:28:11 You get a longer arm radius, less speed to get the same G-force. Okay, that's what we do. So coming down here, we have famous astronauts and cosmonauts on this side, you got famous pilots on this side, and there's a nail on the wall at the very end right here. I tell everybody it's for my picture someday. Okay come on down here. Now as I said earlier, oh this horrible, I can't take any pictures. We're doing some maintenance work on our centrifuge because we have a week down so they want to do some touch up on the paint.
Starting point is 00:28:55 But this is our centrifuge that we use for space training. So 25 foot arm, high-performance human centrifuge. Below the deck we have a 6,000 horsepower DC motor driving a right angle gearbox, which sends power to that arm, which the arm is attached to, which spins you arm around the room. Okay, right now they're touching up and painting the cockpit at the end. Hey Kyle, do you know if the space cockpit's in here or is it in the room? In the room? Great. Thanks. So basically the same principle applies here. We have this arm
Starting point is 00:29:40 and we have a roll frame with the cockpit nested inside the roll frame. So as this spins around the room, the cockpit will pitch and roll to keep the G vector aligned. Now why is that important? When you drive your car, you step on the gas and you accelerate. You get this G force pushing you back in the seat. We call that a GX force. There's an X fore and aft, there's a Y side to side, there's a Z up and down force. Those are the three axes that you can experience a G force in. When you launch with SpaceX, when you launch with Blue
Starting point is 00:30:18 Orgy, you're sitting in a supine position, basically laying down almost. You're on your back. When the rocket launches, you go straight experiencing a force this way which is a GX force. Okay, hit apogee or you hit suborbital whatever, then you just come back down vertical again. Okay, vertical up, vertical down, GX force. Different when you fly Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic you're going to be attached to the mothership, you go up to 50,000 feet or so, you drop, rocket motor ignites and you accelerate horizontally for a few seconds. So you're sitting upright so you're getting a GX acceleration. Then you have to make an
Starting point is 00:31:00 angular acceleration turn to go vertical to get suborbital space, okay? Well, during that angular acceleration turn, you're getting both the g-x acceleration back in your seat and now a vertical one as it makes that turn pressing you down in the seat. That's the difference and that's the most difficult part of that flight is that angular acceleration turn. So what we do during training, we manipulate the position of the cockpit to give you that combination of GX and GZ vector. There's no other centrifuge in the world that can do that. We're the only ones. Now the military ones can do it. However, they don't grant access to civilians or space people to their centrifuges.
Starting point is 00:31:45 They're strictly for military people. So why do you think it is, if you're shipping these out to all the different military sites, is kind of day is gone where NASA would be interested in buying one of these for one of their research centers or they just have such a good relationship with you anyway that they don't see any reason to these yeah these are from congress essentially yeah these are available for sale to research centers to civilian centers uh we've been in discussion with virgin galactic axiom space about them buying one of these for their personal use okay which is fine use, which is fine. The issue with centrifuges is that because we're a DOD contractor, we build stuff for the US military, we are subject to what's called ITAR regulations. And these high performance centrifuges fall under ITAR regulations. So whenever we sell one of these
Starting point is 00:32:43 to a foreign government, we have to go through an ITAR approval process saying, yeah, we're going to sell it to this country. So we have to apply to the State Department, give them our technical specifications, give them our training curriculum, give them everything they want to know about that centrifuge that we're going to install in this foreign country. So that's the issue with a high performance human centrifuge. Now we have applied to the State Department saying we want to do space training using our centrifuge for people all around the world. They said, okay, well, what levels of G-forces are you going to? So I give them the entire curriculum.
Starting point is 00:33:17 This is what we're doing. This is what we're teaching. These are G-levels that we're training them to. And they gave us a blanket approval saying, well, as long as you stay within these parameters you're good to go so that's what we use and so that means for astronauts that are going to fly that are from other countries exactly someone like uh oliver who flew up on new shepherds first flight that he came over from was he from germany denmark i forget exactly what but something in europe yeah he's able to come here and train i don't know if he did do you have that i see virgin galactic on the wall not a lot of blue origin picks yet but
Starting point is 00:33:48 yeah obviously just getting i haven't trained any blue origin it's kind of odd because i i know i've talked to their engineers and their director of training they don't believe in training jeff bezos is saying uh you know if you need to be trained to fly in a spaceship you've got the wrong spaceship so basically he's kind of if you're healthy enough to go like they're going to launch william shatner they're going to do it today but they've pushed it back a couple days the guy's 90 years old basically if you're in general health like i said earlier you can go yeah and they received no training other than how to get in close the door and get out yeah and that's honestly that was driving up, that's what I was thinking about that I want to ask you,
Starting point is 00:34:27 is that this kind of training makes a lot of sense when you're a pilot operating under extreme conditions or even if you're flying to space on a Dragon. It's a pretty extreme environment. But if our hopes and dreams work out that space travel is like air travel, I don't really have time to hop on the centrifuge before I'm hopping on my rocket to Asia or something. So how do you see that going long term? But the comparison of saying space travel is close to air travel, it's not. It's very, very different. We can't get around the physics of escaping Earth's gravity. If you want to get to suborbital space, it takes a certain amount of energy and acceleration to get to
Starting point is 00:35:06 that level. We're never going to get away from that. That's just physics. Unless they have some kind of a miracle plasma pull thing that can bring you up very slowly. Space elevator. Yeah, whatever. They've got a space balloon
Starting point is 00:35:22 going now. It's like, whatever. For the Blue Origin case, though, they're hitting 3Gs on the way up, right? I think it's SpaceX, similar, until you get to the second stage, you're pulling 5 or 6. Now that we have throttlable rocket motors, they can throttle them. They can adjust the G levels to keep going up. And as the atmospheric density decreases as you get higher and higher, they can use more and more thrust so you don't get the high G levels at the higher altitude. I think the difference, though, is going to orbit, you've got a second stage that's really going to kick you in the butt't get the high G level at the higher altitude. I think the difference though is going to orbit you've got a second
Starting point is 00:35:46 stage that's really gonna kick in the butt pulling five six G's on the way up and so you think suborbital in Bezos's vision it might be okay to grab somebody off the street and throw them in the spaceship before coming in this interfuge but if you're getting on something that has an upper stage maybe that's where the difference lies for you? yeah it does it does we've trained over 400 virgin galactic we've trained all their crew we trained 400 of their space flight participants we trained a lot of the axiom space spacex crew the most common comment i get from all of them is that i can't imagine going to space without receiving this training. Okay, the shock
Starting point is 00:36:25 of the launch and the sudden shock of the g-forces. There's nothing you've experienced on earth. There's just nothing like that. Rocket ships are very different than airplanes. Yeah, I mean you can go ride Mission Space I guess. That's a pretty... We built Mission Space. I was gonna ask that. I don't know if you know, we built that actually in the room next door. I tested that with my team and we commissioned that in the service at Disney, Epcot Center down in Florida. Is that one of the older models? I forget exactly how old that is.
Starting point is 00:36:52 That's a 20-foot arm, but it's a multi-arm centrifuge. It has 10 arms to it. This is a single arm. The one at Disney has 10 arms. Yeah, you're getting in all around the vehicle. On a central platform. And there's a pod of... There's a module at the end of each arm that holds four people.
Starting point is 00:37:07 Yeah. So 40 people total per ride. It's a good ride. I've had a lot of fun on it. Yeah, we built that here. Yeah. Yeah. And we did a lot of flight testing late at night on that thing, tweaking and tuning the
Starting point is 00:37:18 software. One of the other unique things of this device, you see this box at the end of the arm, and people look at that and think it's a counterweight box. It's not. Basically, it's an equipment enclosure. It has an air pump inside, has some electronics, some computers and stuff. There's no counterweights in here. From the center of rotation here to the very end of the arm and cockpit there's about 11 tons of rotational mass a lot of inertia going around the room as it spins okay what we don't want is all the added weight of another 11 tons counterbalancing it on this end now we have 22 tons of weight to accelerate which means we could do that but we need a much bigger motor.
Starting point is 00:38:07 Bigger motor means we have a higher draw of electrical power to come in. So we want to go as small and as light as possible. It's like building an airplane. You want it strong, but light. So what we do is we don't put a counterweight on the back, but we make the arm and the mounting platform for it very, very stiff. You're standing on an upper deck here. These bolts you see here and all around, these bolts, these four at the corners, go 60 feet down into the bedrock of Southampton.
Starting point is 00:38:45 There's a lower deck underneath us that houses the motor and your gearbox so there's a whole room underneath us and what these bolts do it pulls the upper floor and the lower floor into tension together much like the wires on a biplane wing. You ever look at a biplane you see a lot of wires those wires hold the upper and lower wing in tension like like a strong box. It makes it very stiff. The arm itself is built to be very stiff. When you walk into the cockpit, now we can't now because it's under maintenance, the arm doesn't flex. When it goes around the room, the gondola is pitching and rolling, we don't
Starting point is 00:39:25 want that arm flexing. Now the passenger is going to feel that. That's not a correct motion artifact. So we made it very light, very stiff. I get a lot of questions about, well, gee, Glenn, why don't you make it out of carbon composite? Composite materials are very strong, very light. Well Well that's a good question. This harmony is made out of stainless steel and the reason we use stainless steel is because steel is very predictable in its strength and in its failure mode. If you bend a can, like a soda can back and forth, eventually it'll stretch a bit and then it breaks.
Starting point is 00:40:05 You can predict that stretch. You can measure that stretch called the yield point. We have strain gauges at 150 different locations all around the arm. You'll see these everywhere. What these strain gauges do is that they measure stress and strain on the arm in real time. As it's spinning around the room there's 150 of these sensors sending information to a safety
Starting point is 00:40:31 computer saying yep everything's good down here. If for some reason an area here was to start to yield this would pick that up and it would cause the machine to stop. Then we get a warning saying, A15 gave us a warning. So we'd come down here, clean this area up, do dipenetrant tests, examine it, X-ray it, make sure it's safe. If we see a crack starting to propagate, we'll double that up, reinforce it, do what we have to do. So that's the safety feature of this machine, that we can measure in real time what's going on with the arm. Make sure nothing's happening. That's also got to be a cost thing, right?
Starting point is 00:41:09 You're selling these commercially. You want a material that is strong but still pretty affordable. Exactly. And stainless steel, popular these days for rockets. I don't know if you've been watching South Texas, what SpaceX is doing down there. But they're building a lot of rockets out of stainless steel for a similar reason. And they're doing the same thing. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:41:22 they're building a lot of rockets out of stainless steel for a similar reason. And they're doing the same thing. But if I were to build this arm out of composite material, it's lighter, yes it's as strong or stronger in some cases, but the issue is as you strain it, you can't measure it. It doesn't measure anything. It just snaps. And then when it snaps, there's no indication. it just happens very instantly so it's not predictable i need something that's predictable yeah i don't want to say yeah we're good to go we're good to go we're good snap oh what happened we can't have that so that's just a safety issue um so that's you know feature we got slip rings on top that transfer the signals to the cockpit the motors are down below deck let me show you uh what the cockpit looks like i have a lot of questions yeah one
Starting point is 00:42:13 of the unique features of this centrifuge versus all the other ones in the world this one has interchangeable cockpits now there's a couple that we built and sold to clients that have the same feature and they just buy different cockpits. Let me turn the light on in here. So these cockpits you see scattered around the floor here, basically we roll them out into the room. We have an overhead crane that picks them up. We drop them into the end of the arm,
Starting point is 00:42:41 make the electrical connections, pneumatic connections, whatever you need to do, and you're ready to go. This one is a space cockpit. This is what all my space trainees train in. If you want to sit down in there, go ahead. Yeah, we're going to sit in it. I've got to put some stuff down here. How many times do people bring audio gear into this?
Starting point is 00:43:00 Yeah, they bring in audio gear. They even put GoPro mounts on here so you can GoPro yourself and everybody likes taking pictures of themselves while they're doing this. So what you do, you're sitting on the harness. That's okay. Yeah, I'm not doing it anyway. We get buckled into a five-point harness. We have a lumbar support. We have a headrest support. We've got the rudder pedals that you have your feet on. And then this gray area in front of you is a wide field of view dome. Above your head is a wide field of view dome. Above
Starting point is 00:43:25 your head is a projector where you project the space imagery, the stars, the skies, things like that. You want to get a selfie too? Oh yeah, I'm just taking some pics while you're giving me the demo. I thought you'd be taking lots of pictures. You've got to stay in this. Stay in this. Oh, okay, if you want. Alright. So, what we do, we mount this in the centrifuge, and then the computers that have
Starting point is 00:43:50 the flight profile loaded will spin the centrifuge to give you the exact same g-forces at the right time for whichever flight you're flying. This is used for Virgin Galactic, it's used for SpaceX, Axiom Space, you know. So, what's being projected in those Axiom Space. So what's
Starting point is 00:44:05 being projected in those cases? Is it what the astronaut would see in the cockpit? It's actually the inside of the cabin? Or is it just a visualization of space? For the Virgin Galactic flights, they will see out the windows, and then there's a roof panel that has a bunch of windows on it. So what we'll do, we'll change
Starting point is 00:44:22 the view on here. You'll see the windows moving as you simulate tilting your head up to look out the upper windows. Okay. For the SpaceX, because it's a vertical launch, you're starting off on the pad, looking up at the sky and all you see is the sky turning from blue with a couple of seagulls flying by. Oh, so you're not, you don't see any of the spacecraft. You're just seeing the exterior of the vehicle? You're just seeing outside the vehicle, yeah. Wow, that's got to be immersive.
Starting point is 00:44:49 And then the same with the Axiom Space because they're flying mostly with SpaceX. They're getting the same profiles. Very cool. Now, when I talk about the profiles, when we were working with Virgin Galactic during their test flights, we would get the flight data
Starting point is 00:45:04 from each of their test flights. We'd incorporate that into the centrifuge. So when the rocket ship drops from 50,000 feet, launches horizontally, there's a certain g vector involved, certain timing involved, then when it makes that turn to go vertical, there's g forces involved, timing going up, coming back down for reentry, circling back down to 50,000 feet, and then we stopped the profile there. So we got the exact same G-forces that Richard Branson just experienced a couple weeks ago, a month ago now, I guess, for the trainees as he did on his real flight. So you mentioned, though, you haven't done Blue Origin. Is that estimated? You have that experience in
Starting point is 00:45:43 the centrifuge as well, but it's just estimated values? We don you have that experience in the centrifuge as well but it's just we don't we don't have that experience i can replicate it by looking at the videos because it's a slow launch it's a low g profile i can you know measure the timing i can see the accelerations against time which is g yeah so we could develop that but for spacex we've got actual flight data we even have the launch abort flight data. When they abort this thing from the Dragon capsule, we've got that. That's a real kick in the pants. Have you ridden this one?
Starting point is 00:46:12 Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. It's a good one. Yep. It's a lot of fun. All right. We're coming.
Starting point is 00:46:16 Is this the infamous blue bag as well? That is. That's the infamous blue bags. Yep. They use them. We like people to take them with our compliments. We don't want them back. If they use them, we like people to take them with our compliments.
Starting point is 00:46:24 We don't want them back. But so, you know, the cockpit, the centrifuge is a multi-use thing. This is a civilian training cockpit. Set up like a business jet, two-seat business jet. We'll put this in the end of the centrifuge, have pilots pull up to 3.5 Gs's to learn how to do an upset recovery and actually pull G forces at the same time. So one thing I meant to ask over here is that in the space cockpit obviously there's no controls in there. So in terms of, you know, Chris Zembrowski and Haley Arsenault were sitting in the window seat, they're just going for the ride.
Starting point is 00:47:02 Jared and Cyan were actually looking at panels. Right. And we have here you're not really doing any operational or simulation testing for the operations of the vehicle it's more of just the experience. Glad you asked that. We have a mount system that can mount a couple of iPads, Surface Pros I should say across the front here and we put in some of the instrumentation that they would need so they can actually during their flights okay so they're practice but it's a system that's configurable to whatever different exactly exactly for most of the people were training passengers most
Starting point is 00:47:38 of our training so they don't need anything from now we do give them a very basic instrument display at the bottom you know airspeed out to G meter a little profile bridge showed them where they are in the flight profile things like that very basic stuff just keep them informed but because we do a lot of passenger training it's mostly autonomous they don't need to have instrumentation functional in front of them. But we did do that for this Inspiration4 crew because Jared and Sian were both crew members. Yeah. The Axiom flights, slightly different that they're,
Starting point is 00:48:17 well, the first one's going to have, I guess all of them are going to have somebody from Axiom actually flying on the vehicle. The first two, I know, have former astronauts. Yeah. So is that, are you going to do, are one of those crew members also going to be going on to the same kind of pilot-esque training, or do you think it's going to be three versus one? Yeah, the, I know that some of the future SpaceX crew, half of them are going to get
Starting point is 00:48:41 pilot-type training or control training. Yeah. half of them are going to get pilot type training or control training. I know that some of the Axiom crew, Ax-1, Ax-2, all the way up to Ax-4 crew, half of them are going to get pilot training. Okay, we do, watch your head, we do a lot of military pilot training. Okay, and a lot basically pilots from foreign militaries come in. They need the G training but they can't afford a centrifuge. So they come in. This is an F-16 cockpit. If you've watched the Thunderbirds fly, this is the exact same cockpit the Thunderbirds fly in. Side
Starting point is 00:49:16 stick, throttle, everything in this cockpit is operational. The radar system, the weapon systems, the flight control systems, the comm system. We have a wide field of view visual display set up. And we use this to train pilots and we take them up to 9Gs. The difference between our G training program and most other centrifuge users or trainers is that the cockpits aren't as complex. They're very basic and rudimentary. So the pilot will hold onto a stick, he'll put his hand on a throttle, but there's no control.
Starting point is 00:49:50 They're fixed. And they'll sit there and strain up to 9 G's. That's one method of G training. Pilots hate it, okay, because they're not doing it. They're just sitting there in pain, not doing it. They're just sitting there in pain not doing things. What I do is I still have to take up the 9Gs, but I'll put a MiG-29 on the screen. The pilot will see that. Every fighter pilot in the world is trained to shoot down another airplane. So when they see that MiG, the fangs come out. I'm going to shoot that MiG down. So I'll be flying the MiG from upstairs at the control room. So I'll pull into about a 6G turn to start with. He'll come around into a 6G turn
Starting point is 00:50:31 trying to get a firing solution on me. When I see him lined up, my radar warning receiver goes off that he's locked on. I'll pull into a 7G turn. He's like, darn! And he'll come around to a 7G turn. I'll keep doing this up to 9G. Now he's not thinking about the 9G. He's busy trying to shoot down the MIG.
Starting point is 00:50:52 So when I get the 9G, I'll hold him there for the required 30 seconds. And I'll say okay shoot. I'll let him shoot me down. Then I'll say hey look you were just pulling 9G. Really? Wow. Yeah, so they're getting the G turning and they're having fun with the tactical part of it, and I get shot down a lot. Now is that the software that's running that? Is that something that you've built, or is that something that was available? Well, the software runs the machine, but in those type of engagements, the pilots are in control of the G loads.
Starting point is 00:51:22 The harder and harder you pull on the stick, the more and more G's. So the software that's running all that, that you're flying somewhere else, is that something that's available? Right, the software will run the instrumentation, the visual display, all that. The software will also allow me to fly under control upstairs and fly and fight in the same environment as the pilot down here. So he'll see me, I'll see him, and off we go flying. Harder he pulls that stick, the more G's he gets. So it'll go through the safety computer, go into what's called the aero model computer, it'll figure out what he's doing, and give the appropriate G-load for that. Very cool. Then we got another cockpit over here,
Starting point is 00:52:04 which is an F-15. How long does it take to switch these modules out when you you know like what's the time between? About 45 minutes. Oh that's it. I can do space training in the morning and military pilot training in the afternoon. During the lunch break I make these guys work and I'll swap out a cockpit and we're good to go. Wow. Yeah so this is a center stick cockpit. Same principle, everything in the cockpit works. Overhead projector, wide field of view display. Very cool. That's what we do. This is a control room. Operator sits here and he's in charge of the devices. A lot of closed-circuit TV
Starting point is 00:52:41 cameras that watch everything, including inside the cockpit. Right now what you're seeing is inside of the bare cockpit with no module installed. Okay, I would sit here as the instructor, training physiologist, using my flight controls and I would have my instrument display my windows out here. So I would be able to fly the airplane from here, So I would be able to fly the airplane from here, pilot would fly down there, and we'd go 1v1 together. Okay. Then we have an observer's deck back here. So some of the clients that bring in trainers, doctors, people that want to watch, stick them back there. Netflix crews.
Starting point is 00:53:22 Netflix, yeah. They were, actually they were from Time Magazine. Oh, that's right. And they published that on Netflix. Yeah, there was kind of a zoo that day. We had the Inspiration4 crew, who were great, by the way. Loved them. Haley was just so... Their smiles and enthusiasm was contagious. by the end of the day I
Starting point is 00:53:46 had my entire crew cheering for these guys yeah yeah go go go it's just so so much fun most time it's working we're very serious here because this is serious trying to taking people up the elevator G levels so you know this is why I have gray hair but when the Inspiration4 crew were here, they were just so enthusiastic and fun to be with. And they just were just eating all this up. Yeah, give me more. Give me more. I'm like, yeah, put another quarter in the slot.
Starting point is 00:54:16 It'll keep spinning you, you know. How many times did they go? Is it one session each? Well, each go through a series of profiles that we provide. Well, each goes through a series of profiles that we provide. Basically, one, two, three, four, five different flight profiles, which mimic profiles we're going to fly during the actual launch. It breaks down the G conditioning profiles.
Starting point is 00:54:40 Then we do a launch entry profile, a launch ascent profile. Then we do a reentry descent profile, which includes splashdown in a sea state mode. I saw that in some of the clips. It looked like it was floating there. That's floating in the sea state. And then we do the emergency escape launch abort profile which is the kick in the pants one. And that actually ends up in sea state also. Of all the different space experiences that you can do on this, what is your favorite one to ride? My favorite one Is it Virgin Galactic? My favorite one is the Virgin Galactic one. I've heard that from multiple people who have done this.
Starting point is 00:55:09 Because of that turn, it's very physically challenging. The SpaceX one, because of the dynamics of the vertical launch and you're laying supine, your hydrostatic column, that's the column of blood from your heart to your brain. When you're standing or sitting it's vertical so if you G force this way vertical G force the heart's trying to pump the blood upward but the G forces are pushing the blood downward with the SpaceX Blue Origin flights where you're laying supine the hydrostatic column is horizontal so even though G forces there the blood still going back and forthforces aren't stopping it from being pumped horizontally. So it's a much
Starting point is 00:55:48 easier ride. Even though G-forces are higher, it's much more easy. That's why shuttle astronauts were laying down. The Gemini, the Apollo, all these guys were laying down to keep that hydrostatic column horizontal. This is the, we call it the waiting room. We fly one person at a time. It's like when Inspiration 4 here, the other three would sit up here and cheer them on. Now when you're in a cockpit, your communications are restricted to me, okay, and so I'm focused on you. But they can hear, people in here can hear us, although they can't talk back. But they're all cheering. I could hear
Starting point is 00:56:25 them from my room in here cheering, and my team was cheering. So that is just great. Very, very lively group. So that's kind of the NASCAR Center. That's who we are and what we do. Very cool. I have a question here about, so we're, I forget what you call this system here, but you can do a lot of control, you know, in this smaller unit, and you can do a similar experience over on the long arm. Right. What do you use them for? Do you use this and that for any of the same reasoning, or are there differences? No, very different applications for these two devices. This one, it could be used to replicate a space launch because of the motion platform that we have and because of the g-vep forces. But because of the length of the arm
Starting point is 00:57:15 and the stress and structure that's applied, this is limited to two and a half g's. I need to get up to six on some of these flight profiles. Just can't do that. Yeah, can't do it. They can give me the motions, but just can't give me the G-force. So when you need just a little G-force, but you need a lot of control to work on actual pilot control, then you're using a smaller thing that's less intensive to run. Probably requires less people to get up and running. That's exactly right. Then, you know, you saw the big one down there. Something more intensive, intensive. We use that when I need to go up to 9g anywhere under that. Actually it's rated to 12 but we limit it through hardware and software for 9g for human use then up to six and a half for space use. Because the highest profile I've seen was a 6gx profile on the Virgin Galactic
Starting point is 00:58:02 reentry which is pretty intense. So just imagine yourself laying here, having six of you piled up on top of you, and then being told to breathe. That's what it's like. It's a shame that it's my least favorite spaceship, because it sounds like the most fun to ride. Yeah. I took a trip down to Goddard Space Flight Center a couple years ago, and they have a centrifuge that they mount satellites onto. Okay, yeah. I don't know, do you do that kind of work as well, where you don't have a cockpit at the end,
Starting point is 00:58:28 but you're mounting something else? No, the equipment centrifuges are very different. Okay. They're smaller, they don't have the huge motors to spin them up real fast, and they don't care how long it takes to get to that G-force. There's a lot of other types, it's like there's laboratory centrifuges
Starting point is 00:58:44 that spin blood samples to separate the blood cells from the plasma, you know, little desktop types. There's equipment testing ones. One of the other uses of our centrifuge is for research. We can take the cockpits in and out, and you saw the bare shell where we'd install the cockpits. What we've done in the past for one company is we put a shaker table inside the cockpit and what that does is it shakes and vibrates and what we're able to do is take an exact launch profile because there's a lot of vibrations involved on a launch profile there's
Starting point is 00:59:20 g forces involved and vibration so we can replicate the exact vibration levels on the shaker table and the same G forces in the centrifuge going around simultaneously. So they had an LRU box that they wanted to test under a real profile. They can't afford to keep putting it up on a rocket to send it to space. So they said, look, we can do that here. We'll give you the exact G-forces, the exact vibration profile for whatever time there is, whatever you need,
Starting point is 00:59:49 and we'll replicate that. Oh, so we're able to do that too. So what they do is people that do that type of testing versus the old shake and bake type test, the classical, you'd shake it and bake it and go back, fix what breaks or make it stronger and heavier, blah, blah, blah. We can actually lighten up the load to see exactly where the weak spots are on an actual launch profile.
Starting point is 01:00:15 You don't need to stiffen up areas and make them heavier. They don't need to be. So every pound is money on a space launch. Yeah, certainly, especially for that size. You can fit a lot of payloads going to space today in that cockpit. Yeah, so people are going toward that type of training where it's an actual launch profile to see exactly what the vibration levels are. Yeah, so we can do that.
Starting point is 01:00:36 Awesome. Well, we're back to the start here, so thanks very much, Glenn, for having me out and hanging out. This will be fun for everyone to listen to. Before you leave, let me load you up with a couple more things. Oh nice, I have all sorts. I'm running out of room for my audio gear here. Too much swag. You can show it to your audience when you're blogging. But yeah, thanks for coming in and like I said, if you want to come back
Starting point is 01:01:00 during a Virgin training or SpaceX training program, just let me know. Talk with them, yep. And let them know, of course. All right, I am back in my car, getting ready to head out on the road. But before I do that, I wanted to close out the show here, our visit to the NASTAR Center. It was a lot of fun. Got to sit in the cockpit, space cockpit, as you might have heard. Hopefully I'll be back soon.
Starting point is 01:01:23 My plan is to try and get back here when one of the next crews comes through. So either that be an Axiom crew or SpaceX crew for one of their upcoming free flyer missions that could be happening, or even one of the suborbital crews. I'm going to reach out to the various companies and see if I can arrange a visit when they actually have people here. I think it'd be cool to come back, see it in action, and talk with people going through it. But it feels like that would complete the experience. I definitely wanted to do this today, where it's just me walking through, getting up close and personal with some of the hardware and some of the facility. But maybe come back when they're
Starting point is 01:01:56 actually doing training and see if I can get inside one of these centrifuges. My ultimate goal here, unabashedly, is trying to ride this centrifuge that is very close to my house. So that would be great. We will see if we can make that happen on any given schedule. So stay tuned on that front. But as I mentioned in the intro, I could not do these kind of trips without your support out there. This is entirely listener-funded, listener-supported. If you like what I'm doing here and you want more of it, head over to mainenginecutoff.com
Starting point is 01:02:23 and join the 732 people there supporting the show every single month. And there are 41 executive producers who made this particular trip to the NASCAR Center possible. Thanks to Brandon, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everdy Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Heymanth, and Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support as always.
Starting point is 01:02:56 If you want to join that crew, support the show, and get an extra podcast in your life, I do a podcast every weekend called Miko Headlines for the supporters at $3 a month or more. I run through all the stories of the week, give you my thoughts on them. It's a great way to stay up on Space News and support the show. So if you want to get part of that, head over there and join the crew. But for now, that is all I've got for you today. I'm gonna hit the road and get back home so I can start editing this and post it. I will talk to you soon. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.