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00:00What do you wish people knew about space they don't ask you about?
00:04You know, as you said, a 23-year career, I've been, I think, asked just about every question,
00:09so it's hard to say. It's something I wish people would ask, because they ask all the questions,
00:13and I wish we could talk about some of those things, and you had a chance to ask all those
00:17questions as well. But I think the thing that amazed me the most about space and human space
00:21flight is the ability of humans to adapt to living in that environment so quickly.
00:27That was my experience. We were talking backstage about what your life was like coming back onto
00:32Earth. Can you, I've seen the video of when you first landed. What was that like, trying to walk
00:37on Earth for the first time again? That's always hard. It's challenging. Everybody manages that a
00:41little bit differently. For me, it was easier for short missions. You know, a couple of weeks in
00:46space, no problem. It's pretty easy to walk around your spaceship when you get home. But after six
00:51and a half months in space, I found it very difficult to do anything but lie on my back for at least
00:56four hours before, you know, my head stopped spinning. But I've also seen somebody do basically
01:02an obstacle course after a year in space. So everybody reacts differently to that recovery
01:06and coming back to gravity.
01:09And I wanted to ask about the International Space Station, the six-month mission you did.
01:13Well, missions 55 and 56. I'm curious because, you know, people who don't know what that actually
01:19is. It's a low-Earth orbit base station run by the U.S., Russia, Canada, Europe, Japan.
01:24It's been occupied continuously since 2000. It was a feat of human engineering and international
01:30cooperation. It was considered the most expensive object ever built with a $150 billion price tag
01:36just to build it and launch it. What has been the benefit of the ISS to taxpayers and to governments?
01:42That's probably not enough time for us to talk about those benefits. I think what's important
01:48to realize is that, in fact, yeah, as you mentioned, ISS was in space for the last 25 years with
01:54humans on board. And I was lucky enough to see the whole evolution of that from the very first
01:59module that was launched until the time now where we're talking about retiring the International
02:04Space Station and building a spacecraft to replace it to carry on those activities. In fact,
02:12there have been space stations before ISS. So to say, like, what has been the benefit? I mean,
02:18the cell phone that people are holding in their hands is one of the benefits of human spaceflight,
02:23but also spaceflight in general. So everything that we do, every asset we put in space,
02:28not only is a technological advancement, but also for us on the ISS and any human platform,
02:34it's a way for us to learn how humans live and work more efficiently and effectively off of the
02:40planet. I think the ultimate goal of mine, and I think of many astronauts, is that humans should
02:47not be a single planet species. We should be multi-planetary if we can, or at least start to
02:52understand what it takes to live in places away from our own surface right now. And we finally have
02:59the technology to be able to start to do that. I certainly will be asking you about that toward the end.
03:06I'm curious, so yes, the ISS will be decommissioned by 2030. If I'm being honest, from my vantage point,
03:12it feels like a very depressing state of the world that it's going to be decommissioned. What do you think
03:18is going to be lost without having the ISS?
03:20I'm not sure anything will be lost because we've really taken advantage and I think tried to squeeze
03:28every aspect out of it that we can to help us do the next thing. And the next thing for us as humans
03:35is to go back to the moon and explore to Mars. And that's been a challenge. You know, NASA has been
03:42the sort of the cornerstone of human exploration for the last several decades and will continue to do
03:48that. But NASA has never been great at doing more than one thing at once or at the same time. So
03:52NASA is working and has been trying to enable a low earth economy, which is what has motivated
03:59companies like mine and others to compete to replace the ISS. We want to become service providers for
04:05an anchor tenant like NASA and allow NASA then to do the next exploration phase, which is return to
04:13the moon with permanent human presence there and eventually onto Mars. So I'm not sure anything's
04:18lost. I think everything has been gained. And to be honest, I assess the fact that we're allowing it
04:24to continue to orbit till 2030 is a feat in of itself. It's past its design life. It's still working well,
04:32but some components of the space station have challenges and it's time to move on.
04:38I mean, the theme of this conference is European sovereignty. What do you think it means to have
04:44countries going it alone rather than cooperating together? And I mean, to your point, the ISS will
04:49replace with commercial space station. Are there benefits to having these private companies really
04:53step in and finance these solutions? Yeah, we see great benefit to it. If you look at the model that
04:58the International Space Station provided, it was primarily 16 nations that participated in that development
05:05of that asset. But it is primarily operated by the US and Russia along with Japan and the European Space
05:14Agency as well has a module there. But it really doesn't have a lot of, I mean, aside from those 16 nations,
05:21it's not like it covers the world in terms of participation. By having a commercial space station,
05:27what we believe we're creating is access to space by not only private individuals and institutions,
05:36but also sovereign nations. And I can say that in the work that we're doing building up to
05:41the launch of our spacecraft and the eventual follow on with the next phase of that, that we see great
05:47interest internationally, multiple sovereign nations, nations that weren't part of the International Space
05:53Station Consortium are now, now have access to a low Earth orbit platform. And that's what, you know,
06:01that's the service we want to provide that allows humans to start to explore off of the planet that
06:06didn't formally have that opportunity. I think for those of you who are not familiar with what VAST does,
06:12think of how SpaceX dramatically reduced the cost and the hurdles to launching rockets. VAST is trying
06:17to do that with space stations. There has never been a commercial space station yet. Why are you
06:23confident that VAST will be the first one? Well, again, a lot to unpack there. We are a company
06:33that came online just in the last few years. We have our design, engineering, and manufacturing
06:38facilities all under one roof in Long Beach, California. So we do have competitors. They've taken
06:43a different approach. Some of those are more traditional, similar to the way the ISS was built
06:48under government contracts. We have one founder and one person who is supporting the company to allow us
06:56to build and launch and send the first crew to our spacecraft that should be launched, that will be
07:03launched next year. So we're on track to do that. We think that, you know, having everything under one
07:09roof, we have control over our supply chain. We have control over our design, our engineering,
07:13our manufacturing, that allows us to pivot, to react quickly, and actually tailor our hardware
07:18to exactly what our needs are and what we want our capabilities to be. So we plan to be first to
07:23space, and it's hard to argue with being first to space and showing that you have capability to put
07:27humans in your spacecraft. Can you walk us through some of the concrete examples of how VAST has been
07:33able to reduce the cost and we speed up the production of space stations? Well, I'll just reflect on
07:39some of the things I just said. If you look at a model that we can compare to, if you look at the
07:44SpaceX model, right, that's a company that essentially put everything under one roof, did all their own
07:49design, manufacturing, engineering, and started building their products and operating them themselves.
07:55We're following the same model. We have everything under our own control, and that helps with efficiency.
08:01It provides an ability for us to make changes as needed, and we know everything that's going to
08:07space. So we have configuration control of every aspect of that vehicle, and we can actually,
08:15you know, mid-assembly or mid-development, make changes that otherwise might be locked up in a
08:21contract or a state or government contract that would not be possible in the past.
08:25And when you joined VAST, there was no actual product, right?
08:28So I joined VAST in December of 2023, so we are less than two years from that time. And when I joined the
08:34company, we were trying to, we were doing a design trade between using stainless steel and aluminum,
08:39and today I can walk into our facility and see our flight hardware, our flight capsule,
08:46our flight module in the facility fully assembled. The primary structure is complete, and we're working,
08:52we're now starting our secondary phase, secondary structures and integration. So we've come a long way
08:57in less than two years, and launch is slated for next year as well, that spacecraft.
09:03I know we've talked in the past too about how the design of Haven One is going to be quite
09:07different from what you're used to. To give the audience a bit of an example, I mean, the International
09:11Space Station is just one yard shy of being the size of a U.S. football field. There are six sleeping
09:17quarters, two bathrooms, a gym, a 360-degree view bay window. In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 orbits
09:23of the Earth traveling through 16 sunrises and sunsets. Am I missing any other fun facts that I
09:28should be including? Nope, those are all good fun facts. That's good. What does Vascoe to look like?
09:33Because from my vantage point, it looks like a really sleek hotel. Yeah, it does, and there's a reason
09:39for that. You know, we learned a lot from Space Station. What we learned is it's really important to
09:45integrate hardware and requirements early on, because otherwise, if you look at ISS, for any of you that have
09:52seen pictures of the inside of ISS, it looks like it's growing from the inside more to the inside.
09:57So it gets smaller and smaller internally every year because there's so much hardware, experiments,
10:03fluid connectors, cables, you know, you name it. It's built into the Space Station, and it gets smaller
10:09all the time, especially with the cargo that we send up. And NASA likes to hoard equipment, right?
10:15It's really expensive to launch things to space. So everything that goes to space pretty much stays in
10:19space. Whether it's working or broken, we like to keep spare parts. Our spacecraft is designed
10:26from the conception to basically have everything integrated behind the walls and the panels. So
10:31we've tried to make it more human-centric, more focused on creating an experience that is
10:38comfortable and familiar to astronauts so that they become more efficient and effective in their work,
10:45and actually feel a little bit more like they're connected to the planet. Because my own experience
10:50is being in space, and I think it's consistent with other astronauts, is that when you are one of six
10:57humans representing seven billion people and you're floating above the planet at 400 kilometers looking
11:04down, you can really feel disconnected from humanity. So we're trying to build in some more of that
11:11that familiarity with Earth. Like what? In what ways? I don't think we have any images of our spacecraft,
11:21but the tones we use, they're very sort of Earth-based tones, very warm tones, smooth surfaces,
11:30wood paneling features. So all the things that give us those connections to the planet, and the dirt,
11:40and the air, and the things that we experience as humans on Earth. The space station, on the other
11:44hand, is very utilitarian. Like it's just nothing but cables and wires and computers, and that's really
11:49not, it doesn't create a home-y feel. The only way we make it feel like home is by plaster and pictures
11:54of our loved ones around our sleeping quarters, and that's about it. That's all you can really do.
11:59Well, and you also helped inform the design of the sleeping quarters. Can you tell the audience a bit about
12:03what that was, how to make a, I feel like you're actually sleeping back on Earth?
12:08Yeah, so one of the things that I experienced in space was that it's very difficult to sleep,
12:12and other astronauts will express this as well. And typically what we do is we bungee cord ourselves,
12:18elastic bands, and sleeping bags, and we strap ourselves to the wall. And what you see is astronauts
12:24getting multiple straps and making those tighter and tighter to feel like they're being pressed against
12:28the bed. Because when you're in space, everything floats, like everything. So sleeping is no different
12:33than being awake. The difference is you turn the light off, but you don't really feel like you're
12:36in bed. So what we came up with was a way to have distributed force on the body that would sort of
12:42simulate the feel of gravity. In space, your muscles never really relax, and your limbs don't relax.
12:48So if you just float in the middle of the module, your legs are slightly bent, your arms are slightly
12:55bent. But if you think about when you lay in a bed, your muscles pretty much relax. Even though
12:59your arms aren't straight or they're not in any specific position, gravity forces you to relax
13:04your muscles. So we created a system with my inputs that is an adjustable bladder, air bladder,
13:13that you can inflate that will basically press you against the surface of the bed to emulate that
13:18feeling of gravity so that your limbs and your body can actually relax. And I hope that'll make a
13:24difference for people sleeping because it doesn't always work out well in space. You have good
13:29months and bad months of sleeping for sure. I highly recommend everyone go and look at the
13:33videos of the sleeping quarters too. Can you tell the audience a bit about some of the milestones that
13:38are to come? And the original intention was to launch this year, and it's been delayed a bit till next
13:43year. Can you walk us through a bit of also why that's been delayed a bit and how Vast is dealing with
13:49some of the most technical problems? Sure. I mean, I'll just start by saying flying in space is non-trivial.
13:55So it takes time. The fact that we've gotten as far as we have in less than two years,
13:59I think it's pretty incredible to be launching a spacecraft next year. What we are launching this
14:03year, in fact, in just under a couple of weeks, is our demonstration satellite. It's probably a meter
14:09on a side, plus the addition of a solar ray. And on that satellite, we're testing all of our primary
14:15and critical components for our spacecraft, our propulsion system, our guidance and navigation system,
14:20our home-built computers. So all of the key communication, power control for the solar ray.
14:28So all of the things that are important to work on our spacecraft that we're launching for humans
14:32next year is being launched into space on a satellite this year in just a few weeks. So we'll get a chance
14:37to test all that out. And then those components get transitioned over to our flight hardware for
14:42humans. And then we build upon that and mature that. So making great progress. That spacecraft
14:48that's launching is actually loaded on the SpaceX Falcon rocket right now down at the Cape.
14:54And we're just waiting for the team to send it up to orbit. And then we're all focusing on the
15:00outfitting the secondary structures within our module and putting that in space next.
15:04And Bass has talked about how its customers will be governments and private astronauts. What is a private astronaut?
15:12A private astronaut is what I understand to be a private astronaut is any individual who has decided
15:19they have enough discretionary income for themselves to go to space, but also to do meaningful work.
15:25So I've met and interviewed all of the astronauts that have flown private missions to date with NASA.
15:32And each of them has gone to space with the intent to do meaningful science and work. So don't just
15:38think of people wanting to go for a joyride to space. People that go to space, even for a short period of
15:43time, 10 days, they want to do something that makes sense for them and is meaningful to them.
15:48Many of them represent institutions, organizations, hospitals back on earth where they're doing
15:55research and experiments that will benefit those organizations or those people. So a private
16:00astronaut can be anybody. But we also, you know, the company is also intending to work very closely
16:06with sovereign nations to allow other, those, those groups to stand up their own human space flight
16:12programs as well.
16:13I'm running out of time, but I do want to ask, I mean,
16:15Vast has talked about, you know, putting people into space, permanently building human habitats on
16:20Mars. You mentioned this kind of multi-planetary existence. Can I be frank, why do we need that?
16:25Why don't we need that?
16:28Because single planet species don't last. The dinosaurs are a perfect example.
16:34We've never had this much investment and capability in the world than we have now to create access to
16:42space for humans. And I think it's really important that we take advantage of it. This is what we do as
16:46humans. We explore. We continue to explore our own planet and we will continue to explore off the planet.
16:53There are many resources in space for us. We know there are resources on the surface of the moon.
16:57There are resources in asteroids. It all seems a little like pie in the sky right now, but the reality is
17:02we will get there. Launch costs come down. Access to space comes down. Our ability to return those materials
17:07to Earth and also use those resources in space will just increase every minute that we spend in space.
17:14We learn more about how to do that efficiently and effectively. My very last question is,
17:18will you be on that first space station with Vast? Never say never. There's a non-zero chance that
17:24I'll get a chance to go to space again. But, you know, we need to protect that asset and make sure that
17:29what we have in space for returning customers is exactly the same thing that the first crew sees. So we'll see.
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