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.