Off-Nominal - 258 - Not a Space Guy (with Daniel Drew)

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Daniel Drew of the University of Hawaiʻi to talk about SPARK, his concept for exploring Titan’s caves with aerobots powered by solid-state atmospheric ion thrusters. Seriously.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 258 - Not a Space Guy (with Daniel Drew) - YouTubeSPARKThis Crazy Robot Could Explore the CAVES of Titan [NIAC 2026] - YouTubeHuygens's descent to Titan's surface - YouTubeOryctes rhinoceros - WikipediaSpotted lanternfly - WikipediaSpotted Lanternfly Alert | Commonwealth of PennsylvaniaHere’s Why You Should Kill Spotted Lanternflies - The New York TimesFollow DanDaniel S. Drew - University of HawaiiThe Drew Research LabFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Go at throttle up. Negative Earth turn. Oh, hello, happy Thursday, Jake. Happy Thursday. Always a happy Thursday. It's barely Thursday everywhere on this show. Yes.

Yes, we're spanning the entire sunny side of Earth. It's almost sunset here. It was just sunrise out near you, Dan. How's it going? My Thursday has begun. Starting with the bang here. It's underway. Yeah, probably the earliest.

No, I'm trying to remember if we ever had an Australia, New Zealand type situation that went the other direction into their morning. I feel like we've had someone on here. Must have had them. Yeah. Peter Beck. Over all these years, we don't remember all the shows anymore. So you tell us. Yeah.

But, I mean, I don't know that we've ever had a topic more up our alley than unbelievable-looking robots that are going to explore the caves of Titan. I've noted Titan fan myself, Jake. Yes. Spotted history on your side of the Titan ledger. Rooting for Dragonfly not to win that one time. You were rooting for, what was that mission? The comet one. Caesar.

I was pro Caesar. I was on Team Caesar. I was Team Dragonfly. So we'll write that wrong. Yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. Well, mead? You got a meat today, Jake?

What did you got? I don't have a meat today. No, I have a regular wine. I got this today. This is Montez. Good luck. X is a mysterious letter in Mexico, so I don't know. It could be Janik, could be Hanek.

I don't know. But it's from Bach, California. And I'm making a risotto tonight, so I opened it up. I thought I'd have some of it. So don't drink too much, or else your recipe is in danger. To work in a shirt from a bottle? Yes, I think.

Excellent. I have a glass. All right. Excellent. What did you bring? You are morning time out there in Hawaii. Yeah, I've just got a coffee. There's like a ton of whiskey in it, though.

It's a rough morning. It's a rough start. Good, yeah. It's a good morning. Sun is shining. I'm looking out at some palm trees. Life is good. Love it. I've got a brotherly love IPA, Jake, which is like the most Hawaiian that Philadelphia area people sound when they're like, brotherly love, man.

And then we'll yell at you, tell you to get out of the way. So, felt like it's the right thing to channel today as we... Love it. Yeah. Okay, I could read the name of this mission. but I feel like no one will understand what the hell I'm saying. So I'm actually going to just make you, Dan, give us the rundown on what in the hell is this thing? And is it not the thing that Luke Skywalker used to train to be a Jedi on the Blenheim Falcon?

Yeah. Okay. So I mean, we can, I don't know how familiar your viewers are with the NIAX, NASA NIAC vehicle of funding. but that's probably worth talking about as a way of explaining like why am I working on this crazy thing. Yeah. But I'll do that maybe second or we can talk about that second. So this is Spark. It's the project studying solid state propulsion for the autonomous reconnaissance karst.

It's a backeronym, obviously, for Spark. And it's essentially a submeter scale aerobot, so a lighter than air vehicle that we can use to go inside potential caves on Titan. You may know, Titan is super easy to fly on. It's great. Propellers like on Dragonfly function about maybe 40 times

more efficiently on Titan, just based on the atmospheric density. But the caves themselves are small, potentially, and tortuous. And we think that these ion thrusters, that this is propelled by these atmospheric ion thrusters, which have been like the bulk of my research

for many years now, should function, crazy efficiently on Titan, just based on the ion mobility and the extreme cold and the atmospheric density, the gas composition. So we can get something like 140x more efficient flight using these atmospheric ion thrusters, this electro-hydrodynamic propulsion. Which means we can put a ton of thrusters all around this balloon, float like a little orb, not disturb any of the dust inside of caves, and do so for quite some time of limited power. See, now if I said all that stuff, no one would believe me that I said all those words in a row.

And that's why I was like, I think you need. Maybe that'll circle back to NIAC, right? It's intentionally like at that fuzzy boundary between the possible and the impossible. This is a NIAC phase one study, which is a nine-month vehicle to essentially test the feasibility of your back of the envelope calculation showing this is possible, right? So some of them are super out there. Mine is not even that out there in terms of nine proposals. This is very well-grounded science that I'm going to have experiments in my lab that prove the validity of. Some of them are just absurd and will just be simulations, right?

But still, you're just kind of pushing that feasibility boundary. But yeah, like we miss the boat for dragonfly. But somewhere down the line, we'll be looking subsurface on Titan because we know there's interesting. science to do, and we just do not have a way to get inside right now with our technology. So this could be the solution. Are these ion thrusters, are they any different than what we're used to for satellite propulsion? Because there's all sorts of stuff up there that's using electric propulsion to move

around. Is this the same stuff, or is there something kind of different about it? Yeah, great question. It's totally different. So the ion thrusters in space now can. carry their propellant gas, they ionize it, they accelerate those ions and throw them out the back. Right? You get a delta V.

You get a thrust from mass ejection. You're literally throwing gas out the back of your thrust. These atmospheric ion thrusters ionize the air that's already there. So these work on Earth as well. Imagine I have electrodes. I have a wire and a plate and I apply a high voltage between the two. I don't know if you can see my hand gestures here, but yeah. wire and a plate.

You apply a high voltage, you get a high electric field magnet. And if it's high enough, you can ionize the air. So there's like a plasma that glows purple in the, in the, turn out the light around the wire. And the plasma doesn't span the whole gap. The plasma is local to the wire. So there are ions in there that get ejected and they travel in the electric field down to the plate.

Maybe I'll go over here, gesture over here. Yeah. So the ions are leaving the wire, traveling down to the plate. There's a closed circuit. So the ions reach the collector, this bottom electrode, but along the way, they're colliding with neutral molecules and they knock them out of the way. So you're creating your own propellant by ionizing air, and then you're colliding the ions with neutral molecules to generate a momentum transfer across.

So if you put your hand below them, you feel neutral molecules, air that's just been knocked out of the way. Just like if you put your hand below a propeller, you'd feel air that's been knocked out of the way, air propeller. Does that make sense? Barely. Can I do it again with more hand gestures? Yeah, two more hands.

Okay. Okay, so wait, there's no, so, so what you have to carry on board this thing is then the fuel source to power the machine, but not the propellant that you're actually using because the propellant is already sitting out at Titan. Right. It's cool because it's fully electric.

So we, in a world where you had a super high voltage battery output, you'd be directly attaching your battery output, usually through a high voltage conversion chain to this thruster. And it's fully electric power in that you just have that electric field, which is accelerating the ions, and it's an ion current, which is your power draw. So it's a really simple transduction train, which is nice for efficiency.

But on Earth, at least, and it's definitely on Titan, the voltage is quite high. My work has been largely to miniaturize these thrusters. So how do we maintain efficiency and thrust density at small scales, like centimeter and smaller scales thrusters? The terrestrial ones that are meter scale are like 50,000 volts, which is fine. It's still low power, but it's scary, right?

So that kind of hurts development when you're afraid of getting electrocuted constantly when you're using these. My work has been to make these much smaller. They're working on more like 3,000 volts, which isn't going to reach out and shock you unless you're quite close to it and is much more reasonable to start playing with. And then do you have to have one of these little currents for each of the thrusters on all on the ball,

or can you have a single one inside that's like directional of some kind? That's a really good question. So we envision this as distributed, yeah, distributed thrusters. So individual ion pathways from a meter to collector, and they're fixed thrust directions, and we use their numbers to give us controllability. So it's pretty simple to show from first principles that you need just like seven thrusters to have holonomic control of a sphere. We're envisioning more like eight to 12 distributed around the perimeter.

And that'll let you spin in place, move in any direction. and that's important because when you're inside a cave, you don't want to be moving like a blimp, right? You've seen a blimp. You're familiar with blimps. They don't move like you'd want to navigate inside of a cave. So adding that distributed thrust is kind of the key component there, and it's one thing that these ion thrusters are really good at.

Making them small, making them high thrust away ratio, stick them all over and get that controllability, maneuverability. That's wow You said it's like a balloon So it's obviously tightened way denser Like you know The balloons are easier when it's denser But it's definitely floating

Or you need some propulsion to stay Where you are Yeah that's a good question So the question of negative versus positive buoyancy Just based on the lighter than air platform itself It's still in the air based on the scientific analysis So I have a partner Michael in Alaska of Blue Marble Space who's like the Titan Cave guy.

If you ask me a Titan Cave question and I butcher it, he'll yell at me. There's one person that will be mad at you. Yeah, there's one guy who will be really mad at me. No, he's very forgiving of all my faults in this throughout this process. Yeah, so the balloons are about four times better. You can lift about four times more mass per unit volume just based on atmospheric density. If that's enough to get us what we need, the scientific instruments we need inside a we think so so we could trim for slight negative buoyancy where you'd only need a little bit

of thrust to stay aloft there are some benefits to being slightly negative buoyancy imagine you want to keep like your center gravity lower with your maybe main computer so you don't want to be spinning constantly maintaining perfect neutral buoyancy is very challenging yeah but having again the distributed thrust to maybe like failure mode of like it set down on the ground gently is a better failure mode than it floated halfway around the world and before I get to it. Yeah, I mean, there, hopefully, failure is not an option in this case, okay? It's not floating anywhere. It's going to be, it's going to work great. I don't know what you're talking about. Nothing's ever gone wrong inside a cave before. Everything that's

happened in caves have been super, yeah, super on point. Space missions too, yeah. Too famously error-free. Especially when the cave is not a cave and it's actually the worm from the, to bring up the money and falcon twice in a show. There you go. Space slug. Yeah. Okay, now the, on this graphic here that you've got, you know, you've got a lander that has deployed this thing. So I assume this is communicating back up through the lander. Like what is the, what is the communication pathway of this thing to get data out?

Okay. So, yeah, yeah, exploring inside caves is traditionally super hard for, you know, several reasons. One of the main reasons is RF communication from inside to outside. It's really hard to get wireless signals reliably. It's even harder than getting signals from you guys all the way to Hawaii. There are lots of blockers, and we don't know the pathways inside the case. So, yeah, communication out is a question mark. There are multiple ways we envisioned it, and that's part of the study, right,

is this trade study of what are different ways we could successfully communicate? communicate. What are different ways we can enable autonomy? What are different ways we can power this vehicle inside a cave? So one conception is that you do a lot of inside out autonomy. You have enough compute on board to navigate the cave yourself as a small aerobot, collect data, store it, bring it back to a line of site. That's, that's clean, but it's challenging. Another is that there's been some exploration of cryogenically compatible fiber optic cable that can deliver power and communications. They use the power to keep it a little bit warm so that they can communicate. Titan's 94 Kelvin, super cold. It's a question mark if that'll really work, but that'd be nice and

clean as well. You'd have infinite mission duration because you'd be taking power from the lander, and you'd be communicating back. You know, Titans also really far. So we have, I think, it's a two-hour from Earth trip for control. So this has to be autonomous to some degree. The fact that it's a lighter than air vehicle helps you there too, right? It just needs to float in place if, you know, forbid something goes wrong and we need to wait for a human operator. But that's a, that's an option. We talked about, you know, dropping breadcrumbs of RF modes to get line of sight all the way back to the entrance.

We talked about having multiple robots that do similar function where they kind of string themselves along inside the cave. There are lots of ways to solve it. I mean, unfortunately, we've never seen inside a cave on Titan. We don't know how hard it's going to be. Yeah. Well, that was where I'm going to maybe go next. I'll take that prompt because you got karst in the name. And I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about some Titan geology.

Because I don't know much about Titan, to be honest, to me, it feels like a made-up imaginary world because every time I learn a new fact about it, it sounds like it's incongruous with all the other facts I've learned about Titan. So I did not know that there was. Carses on Titan. I live in Yucatan, which is a famous karst. And so I know what that is. It's like a word that's in my vocabulary. But I didn't know that there's lots of them on Titan. Are there? I don't know. You tell me. Yeah. Titan is a bizarre world, man. It's crazy. So the landmass is mostly frozen water. That's super cold. Frozen, like hyper frozen. It's 94. Yeah. And the liquid and the hydrological cycle we see, which is very similar to Earth. You know, there's super cold. It's a very cold. You know, there's. evaporation, precipitation, rivers, lakes, oceans. That's all liquid hydrocarbons. So methane and ethane that's still in liquid state at 94 Kelvin.

So it really is like Earth, but really cold. And instead of dirt, they have water. And instead of water, they have methane, which is, you know, just matter of vocabulary. It's just like it. Yeah. Yeah, just like it. So, but when you watch the video, I don't know if that seems that might be hard to pull up, but the Hoygens probe descent, I should have told you to bring that at.

We could all watch that and just stare like slackjawed at it. It's pretty nuts. Honestly, the first time I saw that, I was starting to feel like conspiracy theory vibes. Like, this didn't happen. There's no way they got that thing on to Titan. And it looked like that. Yeah, it looks ridiculous. Yeah.

So it's, it's remarkable that it's so. clearly these same processes that drive cave in cars formation on earth it's obvious from the video you know that it's happening just based on the way liquid cycling happens on titan although the scale the time scale of that is question mark the way that methane dissolves ice at this uh temperature is a question mark yeah this is the one with the the feed out from all of ground control which i guess is cool but you you focus on the um the video itself on the top left you'll see there yeah yeah it's wild like i you hear all that um the the ethane is water and water is ground thing it's like the one everyone knows but then you learn like there's sand dunes on

on sighting like it's got dune fields you're like what you know what yeah so so dragonfly will be flying around right yeah like it's wild there's all these aoleon processes like it's crazy we're talking about i don't know how to hang this like looking west one this we're talking mountain. I think it's the ESA one. You can, you can see it. My internet's so better. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, and you see as it descends those, like the clear erosion processes that have driven this terrain formation. It just looks like the desert on earth. You can see the canyons directly. You can see what these fluvial processes have done to the surface. And scientists have identified, include Michael Malasca.

When I say scientists, I mean, largely my collaborator, Michael Maleska, they've identified many potential cave entrances, which would be a natural result of something like this. But you can't actually see the cave entrances with Cassini data. So they're still hypothesized. Yeah, that landed on Titan. Yeah, it's one of those missions that I just like keep forgetting actually existed, you know? Like if you like grab any random like space nerd, it'd be like list all the planetary bodies we've landed stuff on. They'll always forget tight.

Like every time. They'll be like Earth moon. It's the only moon other than Earth's moon. Yeah, only moon other than Earth's moon, only landing in the outer solar system. Yeah. And we got video. Yeah.

That's wild. And still Jake voted for the comet mission on the other, the last time. So it's unbelievable. So how did you get to the point where you're like, this is the NIAC that I'll submit is this thing? What else, what the hell else is up in your life that this is where you've ended up? I was rock bottom. I had nothing left.

No one to let me go into any caves on Earth. I said, I'm going to go to the farthest cave out there. Yeah, life was good. I was just plugging along with my little atmospheric ion thrusters trying to make tiny robots, fly around. And actually a buddy from grad school. Herd is at least four times too hard. Honestly, that's kind of it. So my friend from grad school, who's now at JPL, Ethan Schaler, emailed.

And he was like, hey, have you ever looked at your thrusters on Titan? And I'm not really a space person. Am I allowed to say that here? So I said, I'm sorry, it's Titan. And I Googled it. He was like we landed once. Check the video, man. Yes.

So it turns out that just like very quick back at the envelope math that I can just do in my head at this point is very clear that this makes sense. The advantage that I've been touting on Earth is largely that this is silent and solid state. The silent part probably doesn't matter on Titan, probably. But the solid state part is very beneficial for the, uh, a stiction problem at low temperatures, and the efficiency is finally great on Titan. So we put together a NIAC. I think we got it rejected once or twice. We handled the reviewer feedback.

Some people get rejected like 15 times. This is actually a very selective grant. It turns out that all kinds of people have hairbrain schemes for space. They usually try them out in our inbox first, and then they submit up the NIAC, I think. Yeah, you're the course filter for NIAC. It's some weird ones. No, I've been sneaking this project onto all my presentations, my poster, here, even before we got this, just saying, you know, if you were worried about the low

efficiency on Earth, just wait, talk to you about how this thing will handle on Titan. And then they ask, what's Titan? And then I'm like, I'm really smart and know about space. And that's enough for most presentations. Yeah, that's how I got there. I mean, I lucked into it, and it just seems to work out great. Yeah, yeah. So how do you like, what is a test plan for this?

Because I feel like a Titan environment is not the easiest analog to find in order to, like, prove out the concept. Are you, how far past simulation can you get on Earth? Yeah, you'd be surprised. I mean, the pressure is only 1.4 atmospheres. So you can do that in any pressure vessel. You don't even need a scientific pressure vessel. And it's practically pure nitrogen, which again, you can do very easily.

We got a lot of that. So 1.4 atmospheres, pure nitrogen. That's super easy. We got a good head start on Earth for the nitrogen that we need. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. 94 Kelvin is really hard, especially to get all your test equipment into that. So we're not going to test at actual cryo.

we'll go down as far as we can with simple environmental test chambers. And we're going to use pure nitrogen instead of true Titan analog, which has hydrocarbons mixed in. And in phase one, hopefully the bench level experiments will just say, like, yes, we understand how temperature and gas composition affect performance of these thrusters. And it's as we predicted. and then in phase two, which is a larger, longer vehicle, we would, ideally, dragonfly is already gone, and we can maybe use the Dragonfly test chamber, Hopkins, to they have a real giant Titan analog chest chamber.

Hmm. I didn't think about that, but that makes sense that they would have some test facilities that would be very applicable to what you're doing. Yeah, and it's sad actually. So they, like, JPL also has a bunch of cool test facilities that they had for legacy missions to Titan for airship design. But I think they have like a lake simulator, a Titan Lake simulator. That's just a giant room that's simulating a mission to a Titan lake.

But the cost to turn those things back on and find the right tax, right? Yeah, it's insane. So it might be good timing where they have this dragonfly test chamber. It's all working. they've got a bunch of people just itching to stick stuff in there before it gets shuttered for forever long. So what are the pieces of this that are applicable outside of Titan 2, right? Because there's obviously the autonomous control,

some of the navigation work that you need to do. I would imagine some of that stuff percolates out to other planetary missions pretty well or even Earth use cases. Are there components there that you're looking at? to be more genericized or are you like just this is the Titan mobile? There are two ways to talk about that. I guess there's the there's the ion thrusters, the balloon concept and then there's the rest of the mission. There are lunar cave missions now which are being developed and some at NIAC this cycle and some of the autonomy work

and doing communications and power from inside a cave that carries over. But that's not where our core innovation is. We'd like to kind of piggyback on innovation there because it's too much to solve all those challenges. So, yes, we might learn about RF denied autonomy and constrained environments while doing this. And as a roboticist, I might publish academic papers on that down the line with its platform. But that's not, you know, the direct contribution of this. Yeah. Where else do these ion thrusters work well?

Venus, they work okay. They work about the same as on Earth at the habitable zone where we talk about going to Venus, right? So as you'd expect at the altitude where the temperature and pressure are about the same as on Earth and the gravity, then they work about the same as they do on Earth, which is good and bad. As I said, they're hard to use on Earth because they're not efficient enough, but they have benefits. So I'm exploring ways to pitch it for Venus. is. On Earth, a lighter than air platform might make sense, slightly larger and probably not carrying as much interesting science gear, but you don't need that. You imagine indoor robotics

right now. So they're using small drones for warehousing, precision agriculture, spying on you, all kinds of stuff, right? And waging war. They're super low. They're waging war. people's natural trepidation around drones is only going to go up as we see that they are a new ubiquitous weapon of warfare, right? No one liked drones in the first place and now they're extra scary. If you want to use one in an assisted living facility, no one's going to want that. Not only are they loud and scary with their rotors, but they don't fly very long. So we're pitching these silent solid state ion thrusters as a kind of propeller replacement. And that's good for a lot of reasons, but they're not efficient enough.

But when you add the lighter than air platform, you might get something like a beach ball that can float around inside for extended durations and you won't hear it. And yeah, maybe if you want to swing your lightsaber out or whatever, that I don't work. I mean, hell, yeah, dude. It seems natural. How about the, you know, we've got things that use propellers on the space station, right? We've got, um, I'm blanking on Astrobees, right? There's three of them up there to fly around.

Like are there, are there, you know, in space uses that, that the, like, is the ion thruster something that they would be comfortable in that environment or is there, is it better to have these propeller driven ones that they've got on station? You know, I haven't looked into whether Astroby is causing kind of a human interaction problem. I think that the, they use like impel, it's a cool propulsion system. It's not, you know, this, are they loud? I think they're noisy. I don't know if they're loud, but they're definitely noisy.

Yeah, I can imagine this being useful because microgravity plus atmosphere makes these good, right? Less crap, yeah. But they do generate ozone. So, you know, with the air handling capabilities on board an habitat, that's probably fine. but at that point you're telling some other subsystem lead like oh yeah and i'm going to be blowing out ozone in this this tiny little castle so yeah the big thrusters do smell the 50,000 volt ones that people have been trying to use for larger aircraft on earth those things are nasty those are actually very dangerous just from the ozone emission mine are so small the currents

are so low and there you know there's some other plasma physics reasons why we generate less ozone than the larger the rest of them. So yeah, maybe. It's a smaller, a smaller market. There's no market, yeah, to be clear. There's absolutely no market as we're debating everywhere else in space. Yeah, if you're not a space guy, welcome, there's no market. We're all funny about that right now. Yeah. So. Yeah. Well, if I can get some cool interviews with astronauts who say the Astrobee is just too darn loud, then I'll go that direction. Sure. Yeah. That'll work. Astronauts are tough, too, because, like, you can think of them on their face as, like, human trials.

It's like, oh, it's real humans working. But, like, astronauts are not really real humans. They're mostly super humans, robotic people that can tolerate an incredible amount of pain and say no complaints about it. So it's hard to use that as good user acceptance training. That's true. The warehouse thing you mentioned was interesting because I think a lot about how we have, like, these dark warehouses now, where there's, you know, lights out warehouses where all these, the autonomous, you know, are moving around and we don't need people down there so it can be dark.

Now I'm wondering about like a 1.5 atmospheric pressure warehouse where these can fly around easier, but there's no humans that need to go in there so they don't care about the increased pressure. I like it. Wow. So we throw like those fumigation tents around all the warehouses and just pump them up, baby. I like that. It means your warehouse needs an airlock, but yeah.

Pump them up. That's good, though. Keep some people out, you know? Don't go in there. You're thinking big here. I like it. Can we do a data center tie-in? Like, is there, are there, would these things be helpful,

zooming around a data center? Can we do, yeah, increased pressure data center? God, I hope so. I'm broke. But seriously, these, these ion thrusters have been used for electronics cooling. It's not really interesting for data centers because they're just generating so much heat. They need conduction, liquid conduction cooling. And you don't need to add any more power on using these as.

Yeah. Yeah. But I just published a paper a couple months ago that's actually using these to blow air. Sorry. Our jokes are killing your late. It works nicely, actually. You could put it in your phone. Explain that.

Go deeper on that. By just talking over everyone? I don't know. We're in the latency world. Tell me more about put this in your phone. Okay. Well, there's a reason why we don't have fans inside of modern Macs. books or inside your iPhone, and it's because we can't miniaturize them anymore. And there's not a good

way to do convective cooling in modern high thermal load electronics. That's going to be more and more of a problem as we try to put more AI on the edge. We can't rely on just like clever thermal design of these products to get heat away from the GPU. So we showed that these super miniaturized atmospheric ion thrusters can be used for direct jet impingement cooling of electronics. So we blow the air right on to the top of GPU and conduct heat away from it. And you can put it, we unscrewed the fan from a jets in nano, and we screwed on our ion thruster, a jet array, and we cooled it down more efficiently than the stock fan. And that just works.

Have you told Apple? It's silent. It's silent and solid state. There are lots of engineering challenges still, especially because reliability is the biggest driver for consumer electronics. They're not untested technology is not where the money isn't necessarily. Testing it isn't really how you write academic papers. But I think there's a path there.

This was already explored 10 years ago. They just never miniaturized the thrusters enough or matured the fabrication process enough to make it tenable. But now I think it is. Okay, so that's kind of one area I wanted to ask too, is that, is that an aspect to Spark being timed well in that there are technological trends that are helping? Or is it tightened the cheat code, or is it just the combo of those? It's a combo of those.

Yeah, Titan is a cheat code for flight. We know that. I just got lucky in that. The thing I specialize in is also really good on Titan in a unique way. The miniaturization of all the requisite electronics for a small robot has, of course, benefited everyone to make small robots. I mean, we have ingenuity helicopter, like a smartphone flying around, build a drone for better or for worse, for very little money now, and do all kinds of stuff with it. So we're seeing what that means for the world in real time. But Titan is unique in that these ion thrusters are just so spectacular on Titan.

and the end of the day it's always just physics that drives these these kind of things it's one of my favorite parts about like paying attention to tech it's just like at the end of the day it's physics when physics works the heck works unless you fight it except for commercial space stations Jake then physics does not matter at that point that that's all economics geez okay so why you're focusing on caves in your, at least the communication of this, but is there an aspect to, like, is that because that is the area where this is so much better than a dragonfly, and that, like, does dragonfly have over on this idea, the ability to fly faster and farther, the fact that it can carry more payload? What, how does the, like, I'd imagine this is more useful than just the caves on Titan, but this is uniquely useful in the caves because of the mobility.

So if these ion thrusters were a drop-in commercial replacement for a modern DC motor driven propeller, then it'd be a no-brainer. We would just use these for everything on tight. But they're not. So Dragonfly was just one of the different concepts for how we would fly on type. And it was selected because, yes, propellers are great. And also we want to go far and fast. and we want a mature technology, we understand how to deploy on other planetary bodies.

So propellers make sense. It's just too high risk for the main mission vehicle to use an untested propulsion technology, obviously. So it's more like a tech demo than anything else. Does it have to be in a cave? The answer is no. Because of the temperature and the pressure on Titan surface, the wind speed should be quite low.

So your natural worry about airship would be drag, but the wind speed should be quite low. So these should work. And in reality, what we'd love is to show that these can explore and look for cave entrances themselves and not rely on dragonfly entering a slot canyon or whatever to find a cave, right? That's also very challenging. So the karst navigation or labyrinth terrain navigation and identification of the subsurface access point could be in the mission scope. And once you've done that, then you've proven these work on the surface and then maybe you start creeping out to your mission. Yeah.

Yeah, because I think of them, they could serve a very similar role to something like what ingenuity did for perseverance, right? Where it's like scouting ahead and, you know, getting a lay of the land and then helping use the resources of the main vehicle. more efficiently, right? Because it has so much more information to determine its route and prioritize science targets and all that kind of stuff, right? So this feels like ingenuity, but for Titan in a way. Yeah. Yeah, the hard part is convincing them, why not just use ingenuity? Because it will work. I think a challenge is the extreme cold makes things extra hard on Titan to miniaturize. You have to expend a lot of your power to stay warm and alive. and that makes closing that power budget a little harder.

Like Dragonfly has the RTG, which keeps it warm. But at the submeter scale, you can't put an RTG on. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, so the size of this, you said like beach ball before, is that how we should think about the one that would go to Titan? Is that? Roughly.

We don't know exactly how small the interior of caves will be on Titan. based on gravity being about a seventh of Earths, the features should be larger, not directly proportional to that, but larger. Many of the same features will be there, like stalactites and stalagmites and those kind of stagnant pools of methane, I guess. We want these as small as possible

to explore as much as the cave as possible. If you've ever been in a cave or caving, you know, sometimes you're seeing portions of it, which you cannot go into. And sometimes you're trying to squeeze and realizing you can't get places. So smaller is better, obviously. We're driven by that size weight and power constraint of the payload budget of the scientific instruments. Submeter scales are target.

What is, like, I want to go back to the power a little bit because, you know, you got the voltage down, but like you said it was more efficient than rotors, right? So what are we talking about here? Like, can you just stick a battery in this and you're good to go for a few hours? or are there other considerations that you'll have to kind of handle with, you know, mission duration? Yeah, the temperature. Temperature. So it's hard to keep the battery alive at 94 Kelvin.

I view the primary power draw will be science, actually. The illumination, multispectral imaging will probably be just as much power draw as the propulsion at this gravity and this level of efficiency. So we're talking, we're talking. bots, tens of points. But delivering that power is challenging. The batteries won't work. So that kind of fiber optic delivery is a very clean story in that, okay, we're going to have

infinite power. But then you have to worry about the pragmatic part. Like how do we drag a fibro optic cable to a rake? Getting snagged on stuff. It's a fun planning problem. A fun planning problem. and the weight of the cable pulling you down too right if you want to connect to it well we've seen we've seen on earth that a drone can fly a fiber optic cable tens of kilometers right and trail it the whole way and actually that proof that that that pudding that that we've seen proof of like

drones can do that they can carry kilometers worth of fiber optic cable They can fly as far as they want. We can communicate over that. That's driving a lot of new ideas in the bodies. I guess no one really put it together that it's so light and so easy that you can actually do tethered power and comps that far. Whether the cryocompatible fiber optic cable will also be that kind of light and flexible. Yeah, I don't know. We're exploring that.

they'll be made on commercial space stations where there's no market but yeah that's another it's a little dual use for your stuff what would I mean how much what are we on what's that are we blasting on commercial space stations here is that what we're doing is that a thing on the show long yeah uh yeah not just us NASA took a whole poop on them like a couple months ago and then backed off immediately and said, no, no, you're right. We should give you money for it. It's been a thing.

This is relevant to my interest. So I'd like to hear more from you guys about, I have a targeted question about there. But we can finish talking about my stuff. No, let's go. Let's go. Let's get weird. Let's do some weird.

I've got some off the path questions for you. Okay. I have another project that just got funded putting a life science or biology experiment on the ISS, which is cool because it's going to be, you know, one of the last rounds of experiments on the ISS. We're doing automated plant health diagnosis in microgravity, testing the hypothesis that the data sets that we train on Earth

are not going to translate directly to microgravity conditions just because the plant health markers will be doing. So you might be familiar with like veggie, that like plant box on the ISS. We're doing it fully automated. Okay. My question is kind of, does that science have a home on current? commercial space stations ever, or is it all going to be whatever, pharmaceuticals and cool space construction things, whatever can make money.

Yeah, porn. And they don't know how to do it yet. I forgot that one. Yeah. Yeah. I don't understand where the, that kind of out there, there's definitely no market. No one cares except for NASA 20 years from now where we need to put, you know, people on Mars for their lifetime. I need to grow plants.

Is there a scuttle butt on this? Where do these kind of missions live? I would suspect that you'll find a spot for them. No guarantees that it won't be subsidized. So in terms of economic viability, I don't know if you can answer that question. But I think there'll be a spot for them, at least at first. Maybe your better option is to just go and work for SpaceX and do it privately. Great. Okay. done yeah there you go

listen you said you wanted to get involved in the data center game so there's a path there there's there definitely is like a there's going to be a valley of weirdness where the things that are definitely needed in the long term are not

not going to compete on the business model front with the nearer term gain things but but there are I think there are at least some companies that can see like oh one day this thing will be useful. So we should probably put a little bit of a bet on that, right?

Like we've seen Caterpillar kind of talking up. Like we might invest in this whole space department because like we make machines that are pretty useful on Earth. I bet one day we'll need them elsewhere. There's like someone in the company that seems to have that mindset on that longer term play. And I feel like that would be... Caterpillar stock is on like 10X from data centers.

So they're just standing there with all this cash trying to throw it at something. Let's make excavators from Mars. Like, But also, like, I said this about the data center stuff on the SpaceX front, that, like, whether or not you're a believer in orbital data centers for Earth use cases, like, we're going to need computers at Mars. We're going to need data centers elsewhere in the solar system if humans are also moving there. So when you do really long-term thinking, 20, 30, 40-year thinking, any of those fundamentals that are here on Earth will be needed out there, too. So you have to find companies that have someone in them doing long-term thinking and devoting some portion of their,

budget towards what is this company doing in 40 years. And those are the ones that would care about that stuff. So like, are they, but are they prevalent today in who's buying payload space? No. But are you the right person to then go and find who that thinker is at a, at a big agricultural company that might think that way? Because they realize, you know, and they want those like generational returns more so than, like, we're doing fine in the next 10 or 20 years, but what are we doing 30 or 40 years from now, that becomes an advantage at some point because no one else has the budget to think like that. So I don't know if that's prevalent in the next five or 10 years, but if we continue on the trends that we're doing where that we're getting more capable in

these ways, then I think you might see that emerge more and more that you've, there's a home for longer term thinkers in that way. But optimistic. I'm an incredible optimist in all, in all realms, really. And one time I tried to pay NASA $200 for a picture of a picture of tomato that floated away in the ISS. So I am the market right now for agricultural data on the space station. Okay, have I got a project for you? Yeah, that's actually one of the prior works is the dwarf tomatoes on the ISS. And I think one of the astronauts kept sneaking them as snacks and they ruined the experiment. That's the like the folklore about it. It was probably Frank Rubio who lost a couple. For sure. Yeah, he was framed for months.

Loops, another tomato disappeared. And it was gone. And then they, but they found them. the two tomatoes that he lost, they found them months later, shriveled in a little Ziploc bag, and then they wouldn't release the photos. So I FOIA requested the photos of the tomatoes, and then they released them. Not responding to my... Oh, that's funny.

Okay, so you're the expert on this. I'm the guy. We did it on the show. We did it live. I had to decide how much money I would pay NASA to give me these photos, and I picked $200. So, then they just release them...

They're pretty hard up these days. Yeah, they'll do it. I thought it would help. I thought $200 would help, but it turned. out there's bigger donations elsewhere. I don't know. Wait, so when is this plant first? And also, by the way, Jake last week unveiled a theory that he thinks the ISS is going to fly until 2040. So you may not be one of the last experiments

on the ISS if Jake is correct. But do you know when that would be up on the ISS? I think like pre-launch checks would be next year. So I have the kickoff for this tomorrow morning. It was originally slated for today, but I kind of passive aggressively. It was like, oh, that's 4 a.m. Hawaii time, but I can make it. Yeah. So they rescheduled for me. So I'll actually learn more about our real timeline tomorrow. Maybe I'll get the inside scoop if we have another surprise 20 years of ISS science to do.

But this is my first orbital mission like this. I'm pretty excited, although the checklists are crazy. So as a scientist, I'm just trying to show experiments. This is my plot of it working. But for this proposal, I'm talking about all kinds of free flight safety checks. And we're delivering this thing a year before we're ready to fly it so that we can get through all that. It's interesting. What is the actual thing you're flying?

Like, what is the delivery? Yeah, so it's a 3U CubeSat frame that has a multispectral imager and a bunch of lettuce and some. watering systems. And, yeah, we're going to grow the lettuce and we're going to water stress them over time, image them with the multispectral imager, take some, you know, soil sensing data, and compare our health diagnosis using all that multimodal sensor stream to what we can expert assess through. There's a lot of precedent for kind of like this autonomous growth in constrained environments,

but no one's paired it with the automated diagnosis and kind of shepherding of a healthy plan. Right, right. That's cool. Yeah, but 3U is small, man. That's 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters. Yeah, that's a tiny little space. That's the breadbox. People keep asking me why we made it so small.

And they had this rubric with the proposal. It's like, if you want to score well on this, you know, you have to do all the things in this column. So obviously you do all the things in that column. And one of them was three U frame. Okay, yeah, I can do three U. No astronaut intervention. Yeah, okay, fully autonomous, done. And like power needs minimal, nothing.

Okay, yes, good. And then we had to figure out how to make that happen. It worked out fine, but like it's a pretty audacious extreme system. So you fly this thing, you deploy it up there. No one looks at it or touches it or even. acts like it's there. And then are you getting data back real time or does that get returned and then you are able to process everything?

Both. So the data stream needs were another one of the constraints. So we'll probably get some like higher level heuristics out. We're not going to get raw data. That'll be saved on board and we'll recover it afterwards. And you get the lettuce back or will Frank Rubio eat it again? You better start saving money. Get that piggy jar full or when you're ready.

ready to get the photos. We'll see what happens with the lettuce. The lettuce, which is definitely going to survive, is probably not going to be eaten. I'd have that on a hamburger so fast after I got home. Oh, man. It would last longer than the lettuce head of whatever English prime minister lasted shorter than that lettuce head. What was that whole incident?

Theresa May. Is it Theresa May in the lettuce head? I forget. Yeah, I think it was Theresa May. And, yeah, the lettuce. The lettuce head, which would last longer. Jeez. Yeah.

We'll see if you could beat that record. What do you think's going to happen? Do you think, what's your current hypothesis? You said that, like, we got all this wrong. Like, we don't have the same insights. Oh, well, it's hard to know. It's hard to know. You can imagine there's intuition and then there's machine learning, right?

So when I look at my plants, I'm an awful gardener. I wait till they look just about dead and then I try to resuscitate them with water, right? So when I'm looking at them and the leaves are curled up and the color has obviously changed, those are two things which will definitely be affected by nutrient and fluid transport that produced gravity condition. So you can imagine clearly that microgravity will affect how leaves droop space. Whether, you know, our current models are, like, heavily weighting that versus weighting some kind of spectral analysis using multi-spectoral imaging. We can't directly tell. I'm not aware of any, like, good ablation studies on that.

So what this test, more than that direct hypothesis is, I think, I think what it tests is, can we really do this with this fully hands-off system in a scalable way? and that I think that's where we have to go. It's not like astronaut labor is going to be any cheaper in the near future. So once we start talking about life science in space or in other bodies, we do have to automate it. It will have to be automated. We're not going to be grown potatoes by hand on Mars. There's no, there's no market for that for the foreseeable future.

you know so the closer we get to kind of robotic gardens the better and this is a step towards i mean i'd like to have robotically done here too i think if we can automate stuff and make food cheaper that sounds like a win win yeah i don't know all the all the cool research on the indoor precision agriculture i guess got feels like the whole world just stalled out and now we're just talking about i we've been we haven't talked about it We made it this long until you're going to Well Jake and I talk about it all the time All day every day so it's not

Don't worry we already hit that today at some point Yeah I got to here's the buzzer beater question I have for you Because this is a thing We like to do when we're talking about I'm taking us back to Titan for a minute You said you're not Yourself from claim not a space guy

Even though you just list it off You're making robots that fly into caves on Titan And you're actively trying to fly a thing to the ISS So it sounds to me like you sure is space guy, I hit every good to inform you. All right, so do you think there's life on Titan and also how common do you think life is out there, not at Earth? We had a really good discussion about this at the NIAC symposium.

So they got together all the awardees. We were all hanging out in Wichita, Kansas. So I flew from Hawaii to Wichita, and that was great. And we get a few drinks in science space people, and they talk about interesting. stuff. And that was a good, someone also asked this in the kind of the context of like a buzzer beater, like, quick, I'm going to go around the table. Yeah. Life, et cetera. And people gave really good answers. I'm at 100% baby. There's life out there. Why not? Hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Like it's, it's, it feels too, I'm not so proud to say that we're unique in a way that that,

that can't be replicated in a giant universe. But then people's start, you know, constraining the problem like, okay, but what about it? And, you know, our galaxy and in neighboring. So, and then I think that's statistics at that. So I don't, I don't know. There's an answer that's not me just making something up. But now I say, yes, but I'm 100%. I'm 100% that Titan has life. I'm, I'm a million percent. Oh, yeah. That's weird as hell out. So let me, let me sell you on this. If you go deep enough in potential cave systems on Titan, you get closer to the core where it's a little warmer. You get liquid water and you have it next to hydrocarbons in the air and liquid hydrocarbons.

Now we're talking, we're talking life for sure. I'm not 100%. And I'm not a space guy. Not a space guy. No, it doesn't matter. We're 100%. If we can get really deep on Titan, if there's literally a subsurface network of caves that go deep enough, it's a good candidate.

So that we need to go deeper, mean, is going to be the flag of the spark. mission when it flies. Yes. That's it. We're going to stick go giggly eyes and we need to go deeper sticker on that thing and send it off packing. Hell yeah. I love it.

So if the plan works to do breadcrumbs, then you've got to like do a lot of inception memes of like each one of those being whatever. What was the, what were they called in inception where they were like in this world and then they went one deeper? What was the term they had for it? They were like dreams. weren't they? They were like...

Yeah, forget. But then they kicked all the way back up. But they had a term for like the... I don't remember. Later, I don't remember. When's the last time we watched Inception? The first time I went to Inception. I'd never rewatched that movie.

I went in the theaters. I guess I was, came out when I was in college in Orlando. And I never watched it again. So has anyone rewatched? Have either of you watched or rewatched Inception? Not rewatched. What if it's not even real? What if the idea of the movie?

I never saw it We gotta go deeper Now I'm gonna rewatch Inception This decided no Yeah I've got five hours to kill I was like I'm no way

I have enough time for that That was so long Man Jeez Huh Okay This was an episode of this podcast Jake It was

Yeah We went places on this show Is this normal This is what you guys you? Yeah. This is it. Yeah. This is what space people are like. Mission accomplished. What do you do? You're out there telling us this is what you do. You're making robots that go to tightness.

This is great, man. Yeah, I'm into it. My job's the best, but this just seems even better. That's a legitimate take, though. The space, the space community is a weird, like, mix of people that are very tight knit and have no common interest because, like, you'll, You can go to like a generic space symposium and there's like someone who's studying like sand processes on Mars trying to talk to someone who does like national reconnaissance office surveillance and they're both space people and they have nothing to talk about. It's an it's an amazing weird Venn diagram of people and yeah, we love it. So a lot of times our shows are just that. Like what are you working on? That's strange.

Tell us about it. Yeah. So there you go. Do you have anything to plug? Do you want to talk about Hawaii stuff? Which people know about you? Yeah, man. I'll plug Hawaii stuff.

Okay. Hi, I'm Daniel True. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii. I'm a NOAA. I started here a little over two years ago. So I'm new to the islands. Got two projects I'm going to plug that are Hawaii specific, not space. No space anymore.

All right. One is the remediation. of unexploded ordinance in formerly used defense sites. Military obviously used the Hawaiian Islands as a training ground for a lot of reasons. And they did all kinds of stuff here, ship to shore bombings, air dropped bombings, small arms fire, grenade launchers, all kinds of stuff all over the island. A lot of that land is turning back over to the state. And the problem is that existing technology is not very good at finding the discarded or dutted ammunition that litters a lot of that. It's the volcanic soil, the rugged terrain.

It's just hard here. So we have a project exploring the use of robotic platforms to put new sensors on them and go find the ordinance and classify it. That's a huge part of my research right now. We're putting cool new sensors on dog robots, drones. They're working together, finding ordinance out in the field. And it's fun because your pictures of field deployments are, you know, you're out in the most beautiful place ever with these dog robots. Everyone's having a good time.

Yeah, so, I mean, plugging it, I don't know, just building awareness for the idea that this is a huge problem and that the University of Hawaii is doing interesting work. Another is the coconut rhinoceros beetle. I don't know if enough people know about this. So if you like palm trees, which is everyone, everybody likes palm trees they're awesome something like 20 to 60 percent of the palm trees on Oahu are going to die in the next couple of years from coconut rhinoceros beetles if you can

pull up a video or image of a coconut rhinoceros beetle I think it's a pretty visceral reaction you normally get to these things they're pretty gnarly yeah it's an invasive species that has become truly pervasive in the Hawaiian Islands. On Oahu, they're everywhere. They used to be like, okay, let's hunt for them. You got to get some larva wriggling around. Do I want to do that? I don't know.

Is that it? What's that thing? Yeah, they're large. Wow. So the larva are actually bigger than the adult beetles. Isn't that gross? Yeah. So a while ago, it was a little.

like bio control, just even study these. You had to be very careful about where you put them. You had to certify with the state when you were bringing them into the lab. And now I could walk outside and grab one of these. So they kill palms. They kill all kinds of plants, but they kill palm trees. So we're developing a new robotic platform that can rapidly climb palm trees and help with pruning and pesticide application. The current state of the art is spray pesticide from a bucket truck, which is not economically feasible when there are so many palm trees and on beaches. People are exploring drones for spraying pesticide, but you don't want the pesticide on a drone. It's one, you know, drones are hard to fly in populous environments.

And two, like once you put this nasty pesticide on there, it's a bio weapon and you're spraying it from the air and a lot of it's going in there. So you want to avoid that? The certification process, certification process is totally different when you're a ground robot. So if you're climbing a tree, you're also a grounded robot and you can carry pesticide much easier. So like a landscaping company could have one of these robots. It climbs up the palm tree, applies the pesticide climbs down. Yeah.

So even if just the plug is that people learn about coconut erdosus beetle and learn that this is like a pressing, enormous problem that did get some traction. there were a couple major news articles about it last year, but then there's plenty of other stuff to write about these days, so they moved on. But is there, so wait, is there a, so I live just outside of Philadelphia, and from Pennsylvania all the way over to the coast,

we had this invasive species, the spotted lanternfly that came about 2014 or something. And it became a thing where like, there was a year at least if you were in downtown Philadelphia and you were walking anywhere everybody was stomping on as many spotted lanternflies as they could on the way

to anywhere and there were thousands of them on every street corner piled up near building entrances and it was like if you saw one and didn't smash it people were mad at you like this became a statewide like we need to eliminate this thing because it's destroying all of our crops and trees

is this similar in that like private citizens are are supposed to take action, or is it like a state run, we're going to manage this situation? I don't know. You guys got anger problems in Philly just stomping out. It was crazy. Yeah.

I've actually heard a lot of people talk about this kind of like violence against these things. Yeah. Yeah. So coconut or ostracist beetles are a little bit harder in that they bore into the canopy, like the crown of a palm. so while you can dig and find larva you're normally not encountering them your daily life so it's not it's not like those

it's not like a gypsy moth or whatever from even farther back where you could like see them nesting on the side of a tree these are pretty pretty tough little guys yeah the average person knows that these are bad and you should kill on site but that doesn't mean that they're actually like going out digging up larva and stomping on them yeah yeah

Well, you're also dealing with a two and a half inch thing here. These were, the landerflies were not very big, but they had great jump. They're awesome jumpers. It was crazy. Okay. How many did you bag yourself? Oh, my God. Let's your kill count.

Yeah. Oh, there's still a couple around. So the last couple years, some of the birds out here started to learn that they can eat them. So there's been a lot less of them around. But it took years. There was, I would say, like, 20, I forget what? what year it was. 2016,

2017 was like, Philadelphia was completely overrun. The next year it was a little farther out into Jersey where I am now. So there's still some around and you'll smash him. I was at the Phillies game a couple weeks ago and I, and one landed on my son and I was like, he knows too,

he's only six, but he was around enough during this time. Sorry, son. This is one of the ones that we got to smash. Like, uh, it's still a thing. But,

uh, yeah, they would jump and then fly. Like they couldn't, they couldn't just take flight. They, they leaped and then leapt and then they would glide and kind of maneuvered. but then they would just climb whatever they were near, trees or buildings or whatever.

So it was a very bizarre thing. But it was like Pennsylvania State University, Penn State, as it were, was their agriculture department was the leading researcher at the state. But it was like a state mandated, like, please destroy any that you find anywhere situation. Similarly, the University of Hawaii is leading research on this, but this problem will affect more places once they might. right out. And they're looking at all kinds of stuff, like biocontrol methods, so new viruses that

can kill CRB, but you have to make sure you're not really seeing anything that can harm the many endangered species or protect. And there's been a whole history of like bringing in animals to control other animals on these islands specifically and it backfiring. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about chickens in Hawaii.

Yeah. Yeah, right. If you've ever been to Hawaii, you know, I get, I get woken up by chickens all the time. Chickens are everywhere. Mungoose everywhere. The rats were actually a huge problem. Those weren't, you know, intentionally imported, but they just, like, took over. They started going in trees and eating, like, these endangered beautiful birds.

That's are the worst, right? So they're very careful about stuff like that. Yeah. Man, this was the best bonus time of all time, Jake. This was the best. Eight minutes over our time slot that we've ever done. Yeah, excellent stuff. Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, let's punch out. Let's punch out. You got to keep drinking. You want to drink off camera. This was amazing. Couldn't have gone better. I got to talk about the spotted lanternflies and be seen as a total chaotic murder of insects, which is great. So I feel great about this.

Excellent. Well, Jake, do we have a, I'm pulling up our calendar. Do we know what we're doing next week? We do, yeah. And it's a fun one. It is? Yeah. Oh, shit.

Yeah. I forgot. I forgot that we're finally doing it. We're having Chris Kemp of Astra on the show. Yeah. Yeah. I totally forgot about that. We're going to find out what the deal is with Rocket 4.

They're big fans. They are. It'll be awesome. I hear Dan Googling. Googling what that is. I'm not a space guy. I'm not a space guy. If you were, you would go, oh, shit.

Oh, yeah, well, cool, man. Yeah, I'm a space guy. Well, not space guy. Let's come back when either you fly a thing to the space station or your robot to Mars, or Mars, Titan gets accepted for a mission. I'm doing my best. I'll be back. All right, y'all.

Thanks so much. See you soon. Thanks, everyone. See you. One, two, three, four, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.