Okay, today we are talking space planes. A very weird, sci-fi sort of idea. They are not quite planes,
they're not quite rockets, but hopefully they will
be a cheap and quick way to get things to space, and
the company we're gonna visit that's making one of these space planes is called Dawn Aerospace. They're based in New Zealand. One of the co-founders is
a guy named Stefan Powell. The company is pretty young, they've just built their first prototype. And so with that, let's head
way to the bottom of the world and Christchurch and talk to Stefan. We're at this interesting
time, and you're in an interesting place when
it comes to rocketry, there's a little bit of a race going on to make these small rockets that are cheap and that you could launch all the time. Rocket Lab, which has got its
main operations in Auckland, is the clear leader so far. They're the only ones
that have really launched. Then you guys have almost
like an even more radical take on getting rapid access to space. So I mean, give me the 10,000 foot view of what Dawn's trying to do. Yeah, so Dawn is a space
transportation company in a very general sense. You know, that's space launch
that's maneuvering things around in space, and eventually
that means getting stuff back down to Earth as well. And, okay, and then in terms of like, getting stuff to space,
I mean, you guys have this awesome space plane, and
give me like, sorta the specs, on like the first one
that you're building. Yeah, so the first plane
that we're building, the Mark-II Aurora, is about
280 kilograms takeoff weight, about 2.5 meter wingspan, and it flies out of regular airports, that's the point. Our space plane will be
certified under aircraft law, we'll fly it as an aircraft,
and so we will have a license to fly the vehicle as opposed
to a rocket launch license for that one flight. Yeah, well, and so for
people that, who like, know nothing about this, I mean before every rocket launch, it's like, you've gotta
apply for this license, which is this whole
timely and costly process, and then you've got to clear the airspace. You've got to clear the water. And I mean, it is kind of
reasonable because these rockets the way they are now,
they are pretty dangerous. Like a lot of them do fail. But aircraft are different,
just 'cause they have wings. You can completely lose
all your propulsion and you can generally still glide back. You know, it's not end of the mission. So with this first space
plane you guys are building, how much will you take to space? And then, and then what's kind of the goal as you make bigger and
bigger space places? Yeah, so, the Mark-II
Aurora will be able to take four kilograms on a suborbital flight. The Mark-III should be more
like a business jet size, that'll be able to get about
50 to 100 kilograms into orbit. It ascends just like a
really high powered aircraft, by the time it gets to
the edge of the atmosphere it's flying pretty much like a rocket. Once it gets to about
100-ish kilometers altitude it'll release a second stage,
just like a regular rocket. That second stage is
gonna fly off into orbit and deliver a satellite. And it can actually turn
around and glide back to the launch site and
land just like an aircraft. In sci-fi, we read about the idea of space plane all the time, but yeah, why hasn't somebody
built one of these so far and why are you guys,
why do you guys think you could actually do this? They actually did try to. The Air Force, in particular,
started on space planes. The X-15 roars free on a tongue of flame! That power is enough to shoot
nearly 59 miles into space! But it eventually all fell
over because we just had to go beat the Russians to space, you know, and the easiest way to
do that was rockets. We revisited that with the space shuttle, yeah, that's a huge space
plane, that thing is massive. But it actually had lost every element that would have made it an aircraft. In every other way it was a rocket, it's just that it had wings for landing. There were then a whole
bunch of other programs, but in the end they all fell
over because the government no longer wanted to back them. But the reason you can do
a space plane project now it because of the small satellite market. You know, we don't have
to build something capable of taking 20 tons to orbit, hell, 20 kilograms would be fine. And then the, just the
amount of venture capital going into space now has gone up hugely, and so there is actually
commercial appetite for this stuff. And it's this kind of confluence of things that makes space planes
actually make sense now. I think the big inflection point for us is being able to show that yeah, we've had properly reusable space launch technology. We can go fly a plane that is a plane in every single way, but it has
the performance of a rocket. And if we can do that
basically on fuel cost, plus a little bit of engineering time, that's the game changer. Because you're going to cut
your total flight costs by 96%. The price you guys are
talking about for a launch, I mean, say you've taken
it from millions of dollars to thousands of dollars to
get something into space. It sort of like opens up this new world to run all these experiments
that people have been clamoring to do. We found that molecules do weird things when there's no gravity, we found that the plants
grow in strange ways, DNA behaves differently and materials can be made to do different things. Absolutely, and that's
why we're working on such a far out technology. In-space manufacturing is
gonna be the next big thing. You know, multi-trillion dollar industries could spawn out of this. We need space planes, we need
proper frictionless access to space to actually make this happen. We want to be able to make
space more accessible. I mean, that's kind of our whole ethos, you know, space is kind of for everyone. And I saw, I think I saw that you guys do this kind
of cool thing where you, you put out is almost like a contest that people could do the design on the outside of the, of the space plane. Was that just for students? How did, how did that work? No, it was, it was open to everyone. We had students like, you
know, we had 10 year old kids put in designs as well as design studios and all kinds of people
from all over the world. Space is something the whole world should be participating in. And so why not open that
up to everyone else? And you had contest on
the payload too, right? Yeah, yeah, so the prize was actually that if you designed
the winning paint job, we would fly payload for you. But funnily enough,
the company that won it didn't have too much
interest in flying a payload. So we actually found another contestant that had the best payload, Centaurus School in Colorado, and they want to measure
pollutants in the high atmosphere. Were you like a space geek, growing up and you knew you always wanted to do this, like, what were you into as a kid? No, like I wasn't really a space geek. I actually went to the university thinking that I was going to get
into sustainable technology, wind turbines and whatever. But I actually got to the
university and realized that there's not much practical
stuff you can do with them. It's not particularly hands-on but there was this really
cool university group building rockets. I could get stuck in there and
actually start building stuff and putting solid rocket motors together. That was an epic experience, yeah. And one thing I wanted to talk about, too, is you guys, you want to
make basically simpler cheaper thrusters for satellites. Yeah, so scalable, high-performance, nontoxic chemical propulsion for cube sets and small satellites. We can mass produce these,
they're relatively simple. They're relatively easy to put together. They click onto this satellite and they can give mobility
to their constellation. That's a mature product, you know? You can go online and buy it. We actually have it in our webshop. You actually add to cart
and buy a rocket motor with a credit card, if you want. So you guys have a couple
of things going on, you're doing the business
around the thrusters. And then the biggest
milestone is the space plane to start running some
of these flight tests as soon as you can. Yeah, exactly. If we're successful that will
then be the first vehicle to ever be able to fly
to space twice in a day. We think that's kind of
the game-changing moment. That's the, like, okay, you know, we've actually got properly
reusable space systems.
