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[00:00:00] Dallas Campbell: Hello, and welcome to the In-Orbit podcast. Now, before we start today's episode, we want to take a moment to pay tribute to our dear friend and colleague Jan Skolmli. We're really saddened to inform you that Jan has passed away. Since the recording of this episode, Jan was a brilliant mind and a consummate professional. He had a career spanning over three decades, during which he made significant contributions to the development of launch technology. He was instrumental in the design and the development of several high profile space missions and was a prominent figure in the global space community. His passion for space exploration was contagious, and he inspired many to pursue careers in this field. Jan will be sorely missed, and we dedicate this episode to his memory. Hello and welcome to In-Orbit, the podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world, brought to you by the Satellite Applications Catapult. I'm your host, Dallas Campbell, and in this series, we'll be in conversation with some of the most inspiring minds in the country, exploring the ways that the UK is using space to make huge differences to our everyday lives, as well as gaining a better understanding of its role in shaping and sustaining our planet for the future. In today's episode, we're continuing our exploration of launch from the UK and beyond, and I'm joined in the studio by Mike Curtis Rouse, Head of In Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing at the Satellite Applications Catapult, and remotely by Jan Skolmli Chief Commercial Officer at Orbex and Jeff Faige, the Co Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Radian Aerospace. The launch market is changing rapidly all the time, both here in the UK and overseas. In January of this year, Virgin Orbit conducted the historic first ever orbital launch from UK soil. However, the mission unfortunately failed to reach orbit. But space innovation is never without setbacks and our journey towards becoming a spacefaring nation is showing no signs of slowing down. Well, listen, thank you very much for joining us. We're gonna talk about launch, we're gonna talk about UK launch. Hey in the old days rockets would just go straight up. [00:02:38] Mike Curtis-Rouse: They still do, mostly. [00:02:39] Dallas Campbell: And now there's all kinds of crazy things as rockets attached to planes and there's rockets attached to rails and the spinny thing. [00:02:46] Mike Curtis-Rouse: The spinny thing, the catapult. [00:02:48] Dallas Campbell: Spinning, the spinny catapult thing. [00:02:49] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Spin launch, but nothing to do with the catapult, just to quantify that. [00:02:52] Dallas Campbell: quantify that. Just before we actually start, why have we diversified into all these different, what's wrong with just going straight up? [00:02:58] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I would say in a way, Jeff's a good person to almost answer that, but what's wrong with going straight up? Probably more is, everyone's trying to find a more reliable way of going straight up, but a cheaper way. But I think Jeff based on your background, you probably can give a better answer than that. [00:03:12] Jeff Feige: I definitely can. You know, I'll wax philosophical for a minute and into a better answer. But when I was early in my career, I always remember rocket engineers endlessly arguing, would it make sense to do horizontal launch? Would it make sense to do vertical? And it was always an endless almost argument of you could get this advantage or that advantage and I always used to think of myself as an agnostic you know, whatever works was how I used to think about it. But in my time at Radian I've gotten a much more nuanced opinion and that is that essentially, the advantage of systems that don't go straight up, of horizontal systems, is that hopefully, and sort of what we're designing our company around, is that you can get a higher cadence, that you can get faster turnaround, more turnaround, out of a reusable horizontal system. But that said, vertical systems are probably at least for known technology are always going to be able to lift bigger payloads and for the really small payloads, they probably make sense too. So the way I would sort of answer that question is that for certain applications for sort of the mid size of the launch market for the human side of the launch market, the potential is that horizontal systems can have massively higher cadence than other systems. So that the real appeal and the real excitement and the reason that. At least our company is tracking in that direction is to try to get cadence, true operationalizing aircraft, like operations out of space. That's sort of how we are looking. [00:04:50] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. Can I be really stupid and ask you what you mean by cadence? [00:04:55] Jeff Feige: The number of launches, how many you get on a given vehicle, how often that given vehicle flies. [00:05:00] Mike Curtis-Rouse: So a way, we could use analogy about, Jeff you were were touching on about aviation, basically. So if you look a big airport on any one day, you've got thousands of flights taking off. For space, I mean, I think last year we touched on, Jan, you probably could comment on this, but last year we touched on about, it was a couple of hundred launches, but we're getting to that point where we're almost seeing a launch a day, but not quite. [00:05:21] Dallas Campbell: So the name of the game is more frequently and cheaper, and also depending on what you want to send up, whether you... [00:05:28] Mike Curtis-Rouse: The more frequently you can do, the more reliable you can do. The more you can move, the more it becomes commonplace. Yeah. [00:05:33] Dallas Campbell: And just Jeff, for those of you who haven't heard of Radian, for those people listening, just, can you just explain a little bit about your system? What it is, what your horizontal system looks like and what the aim of the game is for you? [00:05:44] Jeff Feige: So, in the range of space vehicles, Radian Aerospace is building what we would think of as sort of a middle sized launcher. Nowhere as big as what you see, you know, SpaceX doing, and nowhere as small as many of the small launchers that are coming into the market. So, it's a medium sized vehicle. That means it can lift about 10, 000 pounds, or two and a quarter thousand kilos into space. Think of it as an airplane type vehicle, but it, instead of departing straight up like a rocket, it launches off of a, what we call a launch rail, so think of a very robust or very heavy railroad track, and it launches under rocket power from that track, goes to space, does whatever it's going to do, and then returns to land on a normal runway. [00:06:32] Dallas Campbell: Can I just say, when you say like a rail, do you mean like a kind of ski jump? So it goes along horizontally and then... [00:06:37] Jeff Feige: No, think like a true two miles of straight rail, like a three rail railroad track is a very good way to think of it. Not, it doesn't have an angle to it. It's flat. It's just providing the advantage of allowing the vehicle... [00:06:51] Mike Curtis-Rouse: So from a UK perspective, think next generation HS2. HS to the space, basically. Long railway line, pretty much straight track. At the end of it, the space plane is going so fast, well, you're not going to hold on the track. So it's just going to whiz off, and not whiz quite straight up, but whiz off in the direction over the horizon, and then go straight up. [00:07:09] Dallas Campbell: That's awesome. I remember as a child watching pictures that, well, I had a book and I had John Stapp in the American desert strapped to a rocket sledge and his retinas becoming detached. [00:07:20] Jeff Feige: Well, well, little it's worth, for what little it's worth, we're definitely using technology that was derived from rocket test sleds, for sure. [00:07:29] Dallas Campbell: Excellent. That's great, and Jan just while we've got you, just while we're on this particular subject of shape and different types of vehicle, what's just talk to us a little bit about Orbex for those who are unfamiliar with Orbex. [00:07:41] Jan Skolmli: Yeah, happy to do that. That's a more sort of straightforward going right up rocket, and it's one of those that you assemble them horizontally and then you erect it before you launch, and hopefully you'll take off and that's the last you see of it. The size of it is you would have heard about rocket lab, which has been a... [00:08:02] Dallas Campbell: Yes, in New Zealand. [00:08:04] Jan Skolmli: Yeah, and they have a rocket that is. Approximately 150 kilograms, 150 in so called performance. So that's the sort of size we have. I mean, you could make a rocket big, you can make it small and you can make it very small. I think we have found, we believe we have a sweet spot where there is a market for that type of payloads. If you look at customers like SSTL here in the UK and others that would believe that. There is a market for that size. So that's what we aiming for, and it is 150 kilogram to so called 500 kilometers sun-synchronous, which is the most common orbit for smaller satellite, and as the name suggests, you move with the sun. So you have sunlight all the time, et cetera. that's the most attractive for especially earth observation, if you're taking pictures, et cetera. So that's the market we aiming for. We are launching from the North coast of Scotland, pretty much as North as you're going to get in mainland Scotland, which is ideal for, I mean, these satellites, you can't launch them from the UK, you can't launch south, you can barely launch east because you then get over France, et cetera. you [00:09:23] Dallas Campbell: They mind if we drop things on them? [00:09:26] Mike Curtis-Rouse: No one's really keen about anyone dropping anything on anyone. Generally it's frowned upon. [00:09:30] Dallas Campbell: No, fair. [00:09:30] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Especially first stages of rockets. [00:09:33] Jan Skolmli: I mean, it is a fact that the first stage of the rocket falls down, goes into the water somehow, but you just got to find a safe zone to do that, and that is... [00:09:44] Dallas Campbell: It's really good point, actually. I think people don't really realize the geographical importance of launch sites. There is a reason why Florida is used because of the rotation of the earth and you get a free, you get the energy, that free bit of... [00:09:58] Mike Curtis-Rouse: That gravitational boost. [00:09:59] Dallas Campbell: And there's a big ocean there. So your first stage and likewise in, you know, in Kazakhstan as well, you've got basically nothing there. [00:10:06] Mike Curtis-Rouse: But on the other hand, you find with the Chinese, for example, with Long March 5, care less. So their second stage, or their first stage, tends to fall on, over land. And that's one of the big challenges about launch, and when you touch on space sustainability, where do you put that first stage, if you have a first stage? I mean... [00:10:22] Jan Skolmli: That's it. Same, Mike, with some of the Russian vehicles like Proton that has a drop zone on the ground. So, you know, it's going to hit on the ground somewhere, but where is it? And what is it going to drop off in terms of fuel and... [00:10:35] Dallas Campbell: Well, there was lots of problems, I know, with that. Actually, one of my favorite stories is some of the Kazakh farmers. There was a particular fuel tank in the first stage of the Soyuz. I think it was a helium fuel tank, and they would rush out and get it, and they'd get all the metal and use that for cattle sheds. But the helium tank was exactly the right size as a cooking pot, and they used to make Kazakh stews in it. [00:10:57] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Interesting, we need get our hands on one of those. [00:10:58] Jeff Feige: I was going to say on this topic in general, I mean, that's sort of one of the whole parts of the story, right, is that the Radian vehicle does not drop a stage, right? We don't drop a stage at all. So while there's a lot of regulatory, yeah, right? There's a but while there's a lot of regulatory complexity, and it may be quite a while before we get there, in theory, we could depart from anywhere over a populated area because like an aircraft, we're not dropping parts along the way. [00:11:25] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Not intentionally. I mean, it's... [00:11:28] Jeff Feige: If we do, it's a much bigger problem. [00:11:30] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Exactly. [00:11:31] Dallas Campbell: Well, we're on this subject. Why is the UK a good place to launch from? I mean, given what we've just said about Florida and Kazakhstan, we offer none of what Florida and Kazakhstan can offer. What does the UK have to offer in terms of geographically? [00:11:45] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Well, I mean, fundamentally, we can answer this one of two ways. So, I mean, I know Jan will chime in here, but, I would say fundamentally the UK isn't a good place to launch from. Now, slightly... [00:11:56] Dallas Campbell: Controversial! [00:11:57] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Slightly controversial there hopefully I'll still have a job at the end of this, but slightly controversial in fact that the UK isn't, as both Jeff and Jan basically alluded to, in terms of you can only get into one orbit realistically, which is sun-synchronous. But sometimes it's not necessarily about being a good place to launch from per se, it's about the rest of the supply chain. So, the UK's had a reputation for a long time for manufacturing the highest number of very small satellites. Now, I think that number has probably been exceeded elsewhere. But only very recently. So we have a very complex supply chain of high value manufacturers, high value skills and other capabilities, which mean we do good avionics. We do good structure. We do good propulsion. We do the integration of satellites, and we have huge amounts of finance effectively support, innovation, jobs, etcetera, and other talent around it. It's not necessarily about being the best location to launch from, but it's one of the best locations to bring a really complex supply chain together so you can go from idea or innovation through to manufacture, through to test and then launch more locally. [00:12:54] Dallas Campbell: And is that launching more locally important? Does it make economic sense to launch more locally rather than having all the brilliant things you've discussed and then moving it to a launch site that's more favorable somewhere near the equator? [00:13:05] Mike Curtis-Rouse: The answer is sometimes. So if you're going for basically speed and you're going for cost, but you don't probably care so much about when you launch and who you launch with, then probably not. If you want to go up on your own launcher, and you don't want to share that with anyone else, and you want to be able to guarantee a slot in the future, then launching more locally makes sense. Is it going to cost you more? Probably. But does it mean you're not waiting for, effectively, a launch manifest of 30, 40, 50, maybe even 100 other companies to come together? Or you're dependent on another nation, so this is about sovereign capacity to an extent, waiting on another nation which says, actually, we could launch you, but we're going to prioritise something we're doing first. [00:13:45] Dallas Campbell: So it's a bit of a compromise. [00:13:46] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Absolutely. [00:13:47] Jan Skolmli: That's absolutely right, Mike, and also, there's a, there is a cost element because if you make a satellite in the UK, it's going to be easier to just stick it on the back of a truck and be at the Scottish launch site in the morning than it is to pack it up, import it to India or export it rather same to the U S that takes weeks and weeks. It is a lot of paperwork. If you're launching on SpaceX, you have to get there very early these days. So there is an element of a cost, making it easier bit as well, launching from your own country, for instance or from a neighboring country. [00:14:23] Dallas Campbell: And Jeff, can I just say, are Radian planning to launch in the UK as well, is your big super train rail. You could use HS2, because I don't think they're finishing it. You could borrow their rail. [00:14:34] Jeff Feige: We think of our vehicle as a global solution. That is, eventually, it should be able to operate from a modified airport almost anywhere in the world. Now, when we think about, you know, good places to launch versus bad places to launch, it's like Mike said, it's kind of a sometimes argument, but the interesting thing in terms of how you rethink your math from the perspective of a launch operator, and we actually are moving away from that terminology, but we'll get to that later. When we sort of rethink our math, it's that. There are places in the world where, to get to certain orbits, you're sacrificing a great deal of performance and, except for sun synchronous and a few others, except for that, yeah, the UK, you do sacrifice a good deal of performance. But the interesting point that we kind of really began to work our way through with the Radian concept was, that sacrifice is okay when you don't throw the ship away. You know, the way I look at it is an airliner operating out of the middle of the desert, where it's, you know, 40 degrees C in the in the daytime, is going to have lower performance than it is out of the UK. It's going to carry less cargo, it's going to carry less people, it's going to carry less fuel what have you. But they accept that as, that's just... the cost of doing business in that part of the world versus another part of the world, and the eventual goal for Radian is to build vehicles that are based all around the world, that are, you know, support sovereign operations and local companies all around the world and in some places we're going to be accepting significant performance losses, but if you don't throw the ship away, that's a cost of doing business not a reason to never do it. [00:16:17] Dallas Campbell: I'm interested in, Jan, the word that you brought up a couple of times, market. I just want to know, we've talked about the logistics, but why are we wanting to launch things? Why is this suddenly we've got this mad dash for lots and lots of different companies to come up with novel ways to put things into low earth orbit, who benefits from this? What is the reason for this? [00:16:38] Jan Skolmli: Well, I think it's several reasons. I think the customer, if you like, will benefit from having access to all these things, and also there is a cost element that satellites, as I think Mike mentioned the UK make a lot of small satellites, which means that they are getting a little bit cheaper. So you can build and, yeah, design, manufacture a satellite much, much cheaper than you could do before, and if the launch guys can keep up, you can also get them to orbit a lot cheaper than you could earlier. [00:17:09] Dallas Campbell: And when you, When you say these things what things are we talking about? I'm just trying to get a sense of what, how big this market is and what it is you're going to do. [00:17:16] Mike Curtis-Rouse: The market is massive. I mean, we're going for a bit of a new revolution right now in terms of previously in the last 50 years, we've been launching satellites, which basically mostly do something for the earth. So they look at the earth, they tell us about the climate, they give us high resolution imagery of the earth. They tell us about the weather, they give us telecommunications, they give us positioning. We're beginning to now move into that market where we're also looking about what do we do in space. So manufacturing things in space to use in space, manufacturing things in space to bring back to Earth, the next generation of space stations, the replacement for the international space station almost certainly will be a commercial platform. It won't be an amalgamation of nations coming together as a big science project. It will be a series of commercial organizations building space stations for commercial purposes. And all of these things need life support. We need infrastructure, we need capability, they need people. So, having the mechanisms to get people there, get more product into space to do things with in space, that's driving that demand for launch capacity. [00:18:12] Dallas Campbell: And when you say it's a revolution, is it a real revolution? I mean, it's funny, you know, when some new technology comes along, people talk in terms of revolution. You know, I was talking to someone the other day, we're talking about AI and they're like no. AI is going to be bigger than fire. It's going to be bigger than, you know, where in this sort of sliding scale of revolutions. [00:18:32] Mike Curtis-Rouse: AI is almost certainly going to take fire away from humanity so that's going to be interesting. Exactly. But it is a revolution in a way, because in the past we've looked at space as this place where we go to understand our cosmic origins or we go to get satellite data do a variety of things. This is suddenly about... A new marketplace and I was trying to paraphrase it earlier today in a different conversation of it's not so much basically saying space is a market do X space is basically this new frontier where we can do everything. So it can be pharmaceutics can be manufacturing, it can be tourism, it can be transportation, so it's like a new land and it's suddenly this new land that launch gives us access to. [00:19:09] Dallas Campbell: Yeah, that's interesting. I've heard it described the idea of low earth orbit as almost like a new continent sort of waiting to be, you know. [00:19:16] Mike Curtis-Rouse: And that's exactly it. But the key thing about transportation and new continents and new places to things. [00:19:21] Dallas Campbell: Building railroads. [00:19:22] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Exactly. If you can't get there, you don't have a canal or a railroad or a runway, you can see it, but you can't do anything with it. We can now see it, and we can now begin to actively do something with it, and that's why we need launch. [00:19:33] Jan Skolmli: I think Mike said there is a revolution in terms of time to get thithings ready, cost to get to orbit, and the uses you can give it these days. It's not just to take a picture of the earth every five hours. You can do loads of other stuff with the satellites that are now being built much, much cheaper. [00:19:53] Jeff Feige: I think Jan really captures that part of the market well, and a thing that's worth saying is there are multiple sub revolutions going on at different parts in the market a lot of what mike was just saying about sort of what I think of as next generation activities in space, whether it be the emergence of private space stations, and it's not going to be one replacement for the ISS, I can think of, offhand I can think of seven companies that have decent funding that are chasing a private space station and things like space manufacturing and pharmaceutical production and research and all of that. That's all very interesting, but there's also everything that's going in and, you know, sort of Jan's part of the market, which is going to be around, you know, miniaturization of technologies, which makes small satellites massively more capable, the ability to launch them cheaper on vehicles like what Orbex is building. So that's enabling all kinds of things in the sort of communications observation data sphere. There's a lot of different parts of the industry that are accelerating it. At Radian, we always say we can definitely do satellite launch and we can definitely do small satellite launch, but we often say that's the least interesting thing that we can do. [00:21:04] Dallas Campbell: What's the most interesting thing you can do? [00:21:06] Jeff Feige: It's a debate inside the company, but I'm going to say one of the most interesting things is that unlike capsule type vehicles that are reusable, you know, that we're more familiar with the Radian vehicle can carry two times the down mass of its up mass. So if we take X to space, it can carry 2X of that weight back from space, and why that's such a big deal is if you think about a future where we're going to be making things in space, or we're going to be sending a lot more people into space, or we're going to be doing more things than we were doing before, then a traditional type capsule system, if it brings X up, generally speaking, and the designs vary, but it can bring 50 to 60% of mass back. At Radian, we bring 2X back. So if you imagine a crewed facility, or you imagine a autonomous manufacturing satellite, or you imagine any of these new activities where we're actually making products in space, or we're moving a lot of people, or goods, or equipment that we might want to refurbish after use, the Radian vehicle is sort of fits into an ecosystem where we enable all of those things. So it really does revolutionize how big the market might be potentially and by virtue of existing starts creating new opportunities for other companies. [00:22:26] Dallas Campbell: Do you think this direction of travel of companies like yours is going the right way? I mean, very often when new technologies come along, this is great scrabble for things, great scrabble to be part of the game, and lots of companies might fail and a few will come through. Certainly in the UK, I think most people hadn't really heard of UK launch until a couple of months ago and I just kind of wanted to get a sense of what you felt about that particularly, and what you think the state of play is, particularly in the UK and the amount of companies now. [00:22:55] Mike Curtis-Rouse: So, mean, I think one of the challenges, a lot of people still believe that... You know, they read to an extent what they see in the press and read in the media, [00:23:01] Dallas Campbell: Because a big deal. It was the first time I'd seen it in some mass media, people talking launch. [00:23:06] Mike Curtis-Rouse: And there was a lot of emphasis between what Virgin Orbit were planning to do and actually what happened and whether it was a success or whether it was a failure and it was one of those things launch is a difficult activity to do, and Virgin demonstrated that you have to keep trying at it, but it's not as simple as literally just going down a runway in their case, carrying a rocket on the bottom of a 747, taking off, dropping the rocket, and it's all successful. The challenge about launch is that there were many different moving parts, and everyone has a different launch solution. So if you take, for example Orbex's launch vehicle, you can't take the components from Radian's launch vehicle and switch them over, you know, you might be able to switch the paint over. You might be able to switch the upholstery over but there's nothing basically common between the two vehicles. [00:23:49] Jeff Feige: You you probably can't switch the pain either. [00:23:52] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Yeah, you probably can't switch the paint. [00:23:53] Dallas Campbell: I hope got some nice upholstery in there. [00:23:55] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Yeah, exactly. So there's no... [00:23:56] Dallas Campbell: I'm imagining Victorian leather, you know, with like in the... [00:23:59] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I would say with Orbex it's going to be victorian leather, you know, inlay very beautiful Radian are very much you know moving beyond the Jetsons, etc So but there's no commonality between them. So if you're driving a car different analogy, driving a car down the motorway and you basically get a puncture. There's a pretty good probability that you could hail one car passing in the next two to three minutes and say, look, terribly sorry, I've broken down, I need a new wheel, could I borrow a wheel of your car? Now they're probably not going to say to you, absolutely, take my wheel. But let's say hypothetically they did. There's a better than even chance that within five to six minutes you could find another car passing where you could switch your wheels over. You can't do that with rockets, at all, any configuration. Everything is unique. So that, removing that commonality means that every lesson you learn for every company is the first lesson that company learns. Now, and a good way of talking about this is Jan's background was in terms of something called Sea Launch. Jan, could you just talk about Sea Launch a little bit? Because that's a really interesting analogy, basically, I think, between where Orbex is today and where Sea Launch were going. [00:25:02] Jan Skolmli: Yeah, I'm happy to, and it's actually every time I bring that up, people think I'm loopy because Sea Launch for 20 years was a joint venture between Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. We're all sat around the same table, how is a new rocket going to work with this bit? How are the U. S. tech going to work with the Ukrainian box there. For instance, that type of thing. It was actually amazing to observe from the sort of inside because I'm from Norway and we were also a joint venture partner because we built the two ships, the platform and the support ship. So that's a very important part of it. But yeah, that was a rather insane project and... [00:25:42] Dallas Campbell: When was, when was that? [00:25:44] Jan Skolmli: First launch was in, March 1999. [00:25:48] Dallas Campbell: Okay. [00:25:50] Jan Skolmli: And it lasted till about 14 when the last and the 35th launch was... [00:25:55] Dallas Campbell: And the idea was you were launching rockets off a floating platform or a ship. [00:26:00] Jan Skolmli: Yeah, a converted oil rig, and by 14, the Ukrainians and Russians were quite loggerhead anyway. So they didn't work very well that. time. So it sort of stopped, but yeah, it was actually a fascinating project. And as I said, it's those satellites that are so called geostationary has to be launched eastwards and the platform was at zero degree. It was the most ideal location you could get, and that gave us a lot of sort of, I don't know, free energy or whatever you call it, but it was certainly very helpful. So we launched satellites that were pretty much the size of a London bus, you know, six tons, that type of thing and TV satellites, mainly most of them are still running EchoStar and DirecTV and people like that. But that's a fascinating project. [00:26:51] Mike Curtis-Rouse: But it's difficult isn't it Jan, because you wouldn't be able to take anything realistically on the sea launch vehicles I mean you probably could pull the engines maybe the RD 10s etc which are probably the best Ukrainian rocket engines in the world actually the best rocket engines at some point in the world. But you wouldn't be able to take much in the way of that technology and apply it to Orbex today and Jeff I'm guessing you might be able to use a few fasteners, but they were probably metric and you guys are imperial, so I'm guessing not. [00:27:17] Jeff Feige: Yeah. It really is a... it. The point, the broad point you were making earlier in sort of revisiting again, Mike, is that, you know, each system has its own so much of its own technology, own approach, own elements, own bits and pieces that it really is hard to do transferability between them. But the way I think about. The market as it's developing or particularly what we, you know, what we would call the launch market as it's developing is it looks very much like early aviation where early on, the industry broadly did not know what was going to be the right solution. So, you know, you saw airplanes with one wing and two wings and three wings, and you saw everybody trying everything in the world and yes, it's true, many of those did not survive, many of them did. And then, but even once it was optimized, there was a wide range of market segments. Even today you have, you know, large numbers of. little single engine four seat planes that gets built. Let me tell you about it. I've been a pilot since I've been 19, but at the same time you have, you know, aircraft that can carry hundreds of people halfway around the world. So even though those are using the same principles, it's not strange that the market should have wildly different pieces of equipment in it. That people are going to try lots of different solutions, and, you know, even though it's aviation, again, there's probably not much that's transferable between a single engine plane and a 737. [00:28:41] Dallas Campbell: No, that's true. [00:28:42] Jeff Feige: You know, it's not like you could swap parts there either. [00:28:44] Mike Curtis-Rouse: And that's why we have so many launch companies, [00:28:46] Dallas Campbell: Well, that's exactly it. That's a really good analogy. And you know, when you look at early aviation, you see those crazy planes with five layers of wings, and you look at some of the launch. [00:28:56] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Exactly, and in the same way, you know, if you look at early aviation again, a hundred years ago in the 1920s, you had companies like Lockheed and Grumman who had emerged together, et cetera, at that point, all building both the airplane, the engine, the landing gear, the upholstery, building the runway. Today, you've got... There's still probably 50 or 60 companies building narrow and wide body aircraft. But, for example, they buy their engines, for the most part, from either Rolls Royce or General Electric. That's who you go for gas turbine engines, and there's a few other folks out there. If you want to build a rocket today, you can't go to the equivalent of kind of Screwfix and go, and I'll have one of those, and one of those, and I'll have six of those. You have to do it all yourself. [00:29:33] Dallas Campbell: When we talk about optimization, do you think there's going to be horizontal solutions and vertical solutions will kind of be the two things, if you like. [00:29:42] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I don't think balloons are gonna cut it. [00:29:44] Dallas Campbell: Balloons, spinny things. [00:29:47] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Spinny things, balloons, stargates... [00:29:49] Dallas Campbell: I want spinning thing to work. Stargate would be good! [00:29:51] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Yeah, Stargate would be fabulous, but I don't... I think, you know, I'm not putting any money on balloons, spinny things, or Stargates. Things which go up vertically are things which go up horizontally. I think there's a place for both of them. And I think we'll see probably give it another 10 years and instead of the 300 or so companies globally, because that's how many are trying to build launch vehicles. [00:30:09] Dallas Campbell: How many...? [00:30:10] Mike Curtis-Rouse: There's about 20 in the UK. I discovered another one last night, they literally come out of the woodwork and they tell you, I'm going to do this, I'm going to change the world. There's so many satellites which need to be launched, and I've got this unique solution, and Jeff and Jan and myself, and I'm sure you probably heard before Dallas, we've probably always gone. Oh, that's your unique solution. Spinny thing, balloon, vertically, horizontal, you know, it takes some really good imagination come up with something else now, but most of those are going to consolidate into probably 10 or 15 companies. [00:30:39] Jan Skolmli: But it's also worth mentioning that the horizontal thing is not new. We talk about it as if new. It's been around for a while. You can see there's some of the old orbital, you know, the whatever they call those systems they have now. [00:30:52] Jeff Feige: There were a lot of concepts looking at Horizontal early on. I mean, when we were toying with this idea, very notionally, we were looking at studies and papers and work that had been done all through the 1960s, seventies and eighties, and there's a lot of work that had been done, and the, for us, the big transition was realizing that, you know, a number of technology areas, but particularly material science had come just far enough that it really was going to be viable, you know, a lot of the members of our team, both advisors and our senior management are people who had worked on those systems and intimately knew these were the elements that we just couldn't make happen the last time some of these things have been tried. So, yeah, I think from a technology standpoint, there aren't a ton of brand new ideas, there's a lot of bringing new tools and new capability to ideas that had been flirted with in the past. [00:31:50] Dallas Campbell: Yeah. The other thing I wanted to ask you, just coming back to the UK specifically, if there's lots of companies trying to get in on this market, there seems to be a lot of launch sites as well discussed. I mean, you mentioned Jan that you were launching in Sutherland, I think up in the North Scotland, but then I, there's some on the outer Hebrides up there and North West. [00:32:11] Mike Curtis-Rouse: There's SaxaVord and Spaceport one, which are both vertical in Scotland. [00:32:15] Dallas Campbell: Presswick. [00:32:16] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Presswick is horizontal. Cornwall, Clambedder, which is a really long runway off the coast of Wales, etc. So, there's about seven spaceports, and I hear rumours of people looking at building spaceports or wanting to build spaceports off the coast of Norfolk. So, you know, there's a lot of locations. I mean, the UK's got probably slightly more disproportionately desires to build spaceports than probably almost anywhere else in Europe. [00:32:39] Dallas Campbell: That's what I was saying, have we gone a bit spaceport crazy? Are we, is it all a bit hypey and actually what we just need is two spaceports. I mean, can the market suggest... [00:32:47] Mike Curtis-Rouse: We probably could do it with one spaceport. [00:32:48] Jan Skolmli: I don't know if it's hype-y, but I think it's when the government or the UK space agency decided to support this industry properly and they backed Orbex, they backed Lockheed Martin with their project, and also they picked one or two spaceports and they didn't say, this is going to be it. This is going to be spaceport in the UK and that's it. They actually, if anybody else has a valid business case to explain why it's going to work launching from there instead of there, then they will not stop that in any way. They might even consider supporting it. So the support of the UK government and the sector has spread out quite wide if you like. [00:33:31] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I mean, in a way, it's been partially driven by regulation as well. The UK's tried set itself apart in some respects, but by not necessarily throwing perhaps the level of investment we'd like to see ideally into technology and manufacturing. But they've looked hard at regulation and said, what does the UK do really well? And actually, while it's not as exciting, we do finance really well, we do regulation really well, and insurance, and if we can set up the right regulatory frameworks for operation of launch vehicles orbital license for spacecraft, Our licenses for spaceports, then we can try and set the standards. So it's like trying to create the next standard for your recharging adapter for a phone. So what's sort of USB deal or something like that? If you can set that standard and get everyone else to follow it, that's a pretty good revenue line as well, and that attracts other industries and things to work with you. So that's why we have a loss of spaceports because anyone who wasn't a spaceport, if they're horizontal, for example, has gone. Well, Cornwall's got a long one way. We've got a long one way, you know. Ooh, Heathrow. We could be a... No, you can't be a spaceport Heathrow. That gets really bad. That's things start falling literally on us. [00:34:30] Dallas Campbell: Heathrow would be the worst spaceport ever. [00:34:32] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I can see it happening. I mean, that's tangentially in the future. I could see, you know, Terminal One being resurrected at Heathrow and becoming, you know, Terminal Space. Who knows? But I think Jeff was going to probably make a point to that. [00:34:43] Jeff Feige: So a couple things. So fun in history, if Jan gets to tell about sea launch, you know, my very first job was working for a company, a nonprofit, if you will, that was representing spaceports in the U. S. 20 years ago, when we had the first emergence of the same thing you're seeing now in the UK, and, you know, there are a lot of factors that drive it. Not the least tends to be that you know, municipalities look at a new emerging industry and they say, well, we've got some infrastructure that is lightly used or not used as much as we'd like to see. Is there a way we can take advantage of that? That's not a abnormal or even a bad thing. So I... [00:35:18] Dallas Campbell: Mojave. Mojave springs to mind. I was sort of... [00:35:23] Jeff Feige: Yeah. What do we do with a place like Mojave? That's, you know, the center of the world for aviation tests. How do we start cracking that into the world of space test? It was a logical step and, you know, it made well that hanging out at, I think I told this to Mike when I, one of my first visits, not visits to the UK, but visits to the UK focused on space. When I saw what was going on with Westcott I was thinking to myself this feels like Mojave felt 25 years ago. [00:35:50] Dallas Campbell: Remind our listeners what Westcott is. [00:35:53] Mike Curtis-Rouse: So Westcott is in the same way Mojave and other sites in the United States were kind of birthplace for the US space race. In the UK, Westcott Venture Park, which is in Buckinghamshire, is the location of where the UK originally started all its rocket propulsion research. So for Black Arrow and Blue Streak. But more recently, companies like Namo and Airborne Engineering and others are beginning to make their first steps in terms of next generation space propulsion for both launch and in space, and as Jeff describes, it's a big Second World War airfield with old buildings scattered across it and rocket test sites and test stands and facilities, but it feels very much like Mojave in its infancy in the same way. [00:36:29] Dallas Campbell: Mojave is, there's something really badass about Mojave. There's something really cool. [00:36:33] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Just by name itself. [00:36:34] Dallas Campbell: Well mojave, and it's by Edwards Air Force Base, and they've got that cool diner, and there's that kind of weird roton rockets. [00:36:40] Mike Curtis-Rouse: You've spent a lot of time there haven't you? [00:36:41] Dallas Campbell: I have, I keep going back there, just because there's, I don't know, it's got that sort of tumbleweed vibe going on. [00:36:47] Mike Curtis-Rouse: But anyone in the space and launch sector knows that, and it's places like in Kazakhstan, or if you've been lucky enough to go to Ukraine pre war, in terms of cities like Dnipro, which basically are the rocket city, they were turning out launch vehicles literally on a monthly basis, at a cadence which is nothing like, you know, anywhere else realistically in the world has ever seen. So there were these like, kind of like little historical places where if you're either an enthusiast, a company which builds rockets, etc. These are kind of the legendary places you go. [00:37:16] Dallas Campbell: I'm, I've been lucky. I went out to Baikonur a couple of times and Baikonur's a pretty, I'm sure you've been there, it's a pretty crazy place. You know, it's stuck there in the 1950s and and... [00:37:26] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Most of these places haven't changed. I mean... [00:37:28] Dallas Campbell: No. [00:37:28] Mike Curtis-Rouse: A, reflection of rockets, is a lot of things haven't changed why we've got, you know, go back into that earlier conversation we're having is why does everyone try and do something different? Well, a lot of the new kids on the block are kind of looking at all these sites and saying, well, it's not changed. We can do better than that. We can build it. You know, your spinny thing, for example, we can use a balloon or something. We can do something different. So it's that kind of drive of. You haven't changed how you're doing it. We can change how you're doing it, and we can do it better. The caveat there is, which most of these new companies forget, is it's really difficult to do some of these things, and when they go wrong, you often end up with, in the case of, for example, ABL recently, you end up with no rocket, or in the case of Virgin Orbit, you end up with your satellites somewhere else where they shouldn't be. So, it's really difficult to do. Basically, don't listen to the people who know what they've done, and they all tend to be a little bit older and more grisly as a consequence of this, then you will end up making exactly the same mistakes. [00:38:23] Dallas Campbell: I've actually, Mike, you just brought something up there, which is interesting. You had a satellite on the Virgin Orbit that sadly ended up in the... [00:38:29] Mike Curtis-Rouse: In the sea eventually, yes. [00:38:31] Dallas Campbell: Can you just sort of take us through your feelings? I mean, we all saw it on the news and we were all disappointed and then it fell off the news cycle and I'm just interested in your feelings about the whole project generally, and how you felt about [00:38:42] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Sure, so we as Satellite Applications Catapult have an in orbit demonstration program, and we were flying our third in orbit demonstration spacecraft. known as ID3, but also known as AMBERSAT, and this was in conjunction with a company called Horizon Technologies, and this satellite was basically designed to collect signals from ships, which might be conducting. Piracy based operations, people smuggling and other activities. Now, very small satellite, something about the size of a shoe box, and that's most small satellites are typically that size. That's part of that revolution. So we have that on board the Virgin Orbit launch vehicle and, you know, as with everything, as with any launch, there's always a degree of exhilaration and excitement about it. But at the same time, if you've done anything with rockets or satellites, there's always that sense of reservation of every time it happens and it goes to plan is, in a way, luck, and frequently things don't go to plan. So a lot of my team were very enthusiastic and thought this was fabulous, and some of my team and some of the wider catapult were a little bit more, OK, we're going to be pragmatic about this, things, don't always go to plan, and we knew very rapidly things weren't going to plan, and Virgin had to make that fairly difficult decision, basically, of both trying to maintain that level of interest and engagement, but at the same time, as with any launch provider, how do you convey that message of things are going wrong? You can't state, basically, very rapidly, particularly if it's very public, and the Virgin Orbit launch was very public. It's very difficult to manage that audience. I mean, Jan's got the fairly dramatic experience of, I think it was the largest insurance claim in maritime history until a more recent rig issue. [00:40:17] Jan Skolmli: In space history. [00:40:18] Dallas Campbell: That's awesome. That's a record to have. [00:40:20] Jan Skolmli: I'm not going to mention any names, but I sat next to the customer and the satellite or the rocket rather, went about, what is this, two inches up and then came down again and blew up. [00:40:33] Dallas Campbell: Words discussed and exchanged at that moment? [00:40:36] Jan Skolmli: He was thankfully a very experienced guy. He didn't jump at me and started hitting me or anything. So he took it in his stride. But it was very subdued atmosphere for a long time afterwards. The loss was well, well in excess of $400 million. [00:40:54] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I mean, and you know, for the Virgin Orbit launch vehicle, which was actually comparatively small so that, and slightly different because the aircraft went away carrying the rocket got dropped, the first stage ignited, but then things started to go wrong. The aircraft fortunately came safely back with the crew in Jan's case for the sea launch. I mean the rocket you guys launched was significantly larger than a Virgin Orbit launch vehicle basically. [00:41:17] Jan Skolmli: 20 meters long. I think. [00:41:18] Mike Curtis-Rouse: And it had a pretty bad impact on the platform you were launching from as well. This wasn't the sort of thing where you get a small explosion and you pick up the bits later with a dustpan and brush. [00:41:27] Jan Skolmli: You can, I'm not going to show it to you, but you can look it up on YouTube it [00:41:31] Dallas Campbell: Our listeners Google it. [00:41:33] Jan Skolmli: Sea launch on pad explosion. Yeah. So that's... It's a tiny piece of metal, you know, like a hail almost you've had got into the wrong place and caused something to then to go wrong in the turbo pump, [00:41:45] Mike Curtis-Rouse: And that's really interesting you say that, Jan, because as you said, it was a tiny piece of metal, but it was exactly the same with Virgin Orbit. The reason that their second stage failed was a filter, basically upstream of a pump, dislodged, and Dan Hart, their CEO, said it was about a $100 item, and it got swept downstream, and then it got jammed, and then not enough fuel could get in, the engine overheated, and the rocket, instead of going upwards as we were wanting it desperately to go upwards, started to go downwards, and at that point, it's game over. [00:42:12] Dallas Campbell: Can I just, I need to wrap up, but I just want to ask just on that, Jeff, how important is PR in your business? How important is selling your idea to the public in order to, for the politicians to then get on board and for the investors to get on board. [00:42:27] Jeff Feige: It's an interesting question because one thing I know that Jan and I have in common Is that I feel very strongly that the space industry particularly has a long history of companies announcing they're gonna do You know, big things and then never doing those things or not having the financing to do those things, making a big announcement. So Radian has intentionally kept a very low profile, and while we are out and we do a little bit of PR now we're still doing that in time, that will become a big, very important. But when you're still at the, you know, Radian has 30 million that we've taken in the last year, and we're still, you know, that's a drop in the bucket on the scale of the amount of money that you need to spend to make a project like this work. So as we mature, that will become a very important part of it. But when you're still in the, Building out the key elements, building the first version of many of our key pieces of technology. It's almost, not that I don't love you guys, but it's almost more of a distraction to be engaging a great deal with the outside world, because it's endless questions, oh exactly which week is it going to fly, you know, those sort of things. [00:43:44] Dallas Campbell: I understand that. It must be, you know, I can understand that balance you need very often. If you know, if you over promise, you're also going to over dissapoint. [00:43:52] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Radian kept that very stealth aspect and it's the same with Orbex. Orbex, I mean, trying to get Jan onto a podcast has been difficult, basically. Trying to get Orbex to talk about what they do is difficult because companies like this, which are in my view, going to be successful, keep a very low profile. They don't talk about what they do. They don't tell anyone what they do. do it progressively, slowly, and neither of these companies will tell you, you will not get a launch date out of either of them. [00:44:15] Dallas Campbell: Orbex have got a nice sexy video though. [00:44:18] Mike Curtis-Rouse: They've got a nice, video, but there's nothing in there which says, we're going to launch on this date, and the problem with having a launch date, and Virgin did this, Virgin originally wanted to launch on a specific date, and if you do that, the problem is the wider population holds you to it. So the best thing about launches, don't give a date. [00:44:33] Jan Skolmli: Both Jeff and Mike, they're absolutely right, and we haven't done anything of substance yet. We haven't launched anything. So, you know, how much do you brag? How much do you PR about so you talk about when you get some money coming in we had the prototype that we revealed was it? Yeah last year? [00:44:50] Mike Curtis-Rouse: Last year, in April I think, yep. [00:44:52] Jan Skolmli: Yeah. Yeah, and also the fact that we did a, we changed the setup at the spaceport, so Orbex will be responsible for, you know, putting the spaceport together, so it'll all be tailor made to us. That type, those things are worth saying, but other things are sometimes just worth keeping quiet about. [00:45:11] Dallas Campbell: That is good advice for life. I think. Don't overshare. Jan and Jeff, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your wit and your knowledge. It's been terrific listening to you. Mike, just a final word from you. Just give us a very brief, a couple of lines on the state of play at the moment. Are you excited? Are you without giving us a date about when the next launch is going to be, but are you optimistic about things in the UK? [00:45:36] Mike Curtis-Rouse: I am pragmatic as ever about launch because launch and space and a whole myriad of other sectors which lead us to achieving success are all difficult and all challenging, but challenging and ingenuity is what we do well, so I'm pragmatic that launch in the UK will manifest. I'm not going to agree to a date as anyone else basically says for the next launch from any company, but I think companies like Orbex and Radian, who hopefully will operate out the UK in due course, and many others will basically start laying the foundations for successful activities, including launch. [00:46:08] Dallas Campbell: Good stuff. Thank you very much for everyone for joining us in this chat. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening, thank you for your company to hear future episodes of in orbit Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and to find out more about how space is empowering Industries between episodes you can visit the Catapult website or join them on Twitter, linkedIn or Facebook.