Discover Traveling Format Billing for Research and Development

Traveling format billing for Research and Development

[Music] suppose that your grandfather died several months ago and when they read his will you discovered that he'd left you two hundred and fifty thousand dollars what would you do if two hundred and fifty thousand dollars suddenly and unexpectedly fell into your lap well one thing you might do is buy that shiny silver Lamborghini that you've been dreaming about since you're twenty five and if you did that you might even have enough left over to make the first insurance payment another thing you might do is pay off your daughter's medical school debt well most of it anyway and yet another thing you might do would be to buy a ticket for a ride to suborbital space I'm going to try to make the case for you today as to why you should choose that third option now spaceport america is located in the southern part of New Mexico and it's a leading center for suborbital space activity it was developed by and is owned and operated by the state of New Mexico so that makes every one of you here today a part owner of that facility so let's talk a little bit about that space experience so there are three compelling elements of a suborbital space experience the first one is an opportunity to experience sustained microgravity microgravity is also sometimes called zero gravity or weightlessness and if you've seen videos of astronauts floating around the space station or sometimes researchers and the vomit comet aircraft doing somersaults that's they're experiencing microgravity so it's it's a more intense and a longer-lasting version of the experience you feel if you're in a very fast elevator as it begins to descend or sometimes even if you're in a car that goes over a rise in the road and then suddenly goes into a dip the second compelling element is the ability the opportunity to see things that can only be seen from space the blackness of the sky the curvature of the earth the thin blue band of the atmosphere and finally the third compelling element is the opportunity to see the magnificence and the enormity of the earth and to think about that and many of the people who've had that experience have actually described that experiences life-changing so to get to spaced to be a true space experience you need to reach the altitude of the Karman line the Karman line is a hundred kilometers above the surface of the earth or about 62 miles so why is space define to begin at 62 miles the reason for that could be the subject of a talk of itself but the short answer is that as airplanes fly higher and higher in the atmosphere the air becomes thinner and thinner and eventually they have to go so fast that that they're going at orbital speed which is 17,500 miles per hour and that happens in about 100 kilometers hence that's the threshold of space so if space is only 62 miles that way how do we get there well one way potentially would be to travel at say 10 miles per hour unlike orbit where you must reach a speed of 17,500 miles per hour there is no specific speed requirement to get to Silver orbital space so you only need to go up so you can go at 10 miles per hour it's going to take you about six minutes to or six hours to get there but you'd be burning lots and lots of fuel and that just isn't practical so the way we normally do it is we burn a really powerful rocket motor for 10 to 60 seconds and accelerate very quickly to several times the speed of sound say 3,500 miles per hour and then Coast the rest of the way all right so on the way up very interesting things happen you will want once you're outside the Earth's atmosphere and your rocket motors burned out and you're not feeling any drag from the atmosphere you will be experiencing the condition that physicists refer to as freefall and that's what causes microgravity and during that time you'll be able to do all those things that you've seen those videos of astronauts doing on the space station you'll be able to float around your cabin you'll be able to do those really interesting experiments where you lay out a line of mmm say and you lunge out and eat them one by one all those things will be possible but there's one big difference those astronauts on the space station have days weeks even to do that you're only going to have a few minutes so so you're going to need to take advantage of that time now on the good side since you're only going to be there for a few minutes you're not going to need to to wash your hair okay so while you're floating around your cabin I would hope that you would take a few minutes to look out the window and see those wonderful sights that black sky the curved earth and all those things and that you would take a little bit of time and contemplate your position on the earth and the Earth's position even though it's enormous in the much larger solar system in the solar system's position in the enormous ly larger galaxy and our galaxy's position is one of billions out there in the universe at large again many people have described that experience as life-changing in the history of humans in space there have been only about 600 people that have been there we think that space tourism has the potential to increase the number of people that have the space experience by orders of magnitude so why would that be well one reason is that the space vehicles that are being developed for for space tourism are reusable right now as you probably know we throw away the hardware after every launch of people to space so making it reusable is going to help a lot another reason is that these vehicles are only going to go to speeds of say a thirty-five hundred miles per hour and they're only going to go to altitudes of perhaps 60 miles or seventy miles so the design is simplified quite a bit and another reason is because these these missions are only going to last for a few minutes and so consequently you don't have to take along large supplies of life-support oxygen water or food from the passengers perspective not only that but but the rigors are being accelerated only 3,500 miles per hour meaning that a lot more people are going to be able to do this and secondly because you'll be able to train for the mission in just a short time maybe a few days or a week and do your mission you won't you'll be able to do this in sort of a vacation setting so the Dennis Tito who is widely regarded as the world's first space tourist he spent many months training with the Russians to fly to the space station and he also spent two million twenty million dollars of his own money to do that okay so if space is life changing we'd like to get more people there but space has a problem right now there's what I call the space conundrum space launches are very expensive because they because the annual number is very low but at the same time the annual number is very low because they're so expensive so how can we break that paradigm well perhaps we can take an example from the computer industry do some of you are old enough to remember when computers were very expensive because very few were sold and at the same time very few computers were sold because they were so expensive so the computer industry needed a killer app to break that paradigm and it turns out that in my view at least computer gaming was a significant factor in breaking that paradigm there were a few invent individuals who found computer gaming so compelling that they were willing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to buy a computer so that they could do that so if you think about it look around your house and how many computers to do you see and how expensive were they you can be thankful that in the 1980s there were people who were willing to spend many thousands and thousands of dollars for the for the ability to play Dungeons and Dragons and Tetris some of you remember those I'm sure okay so so this life-changing experience that you've had that you're going to have on your space ride will provide be a source of tremendous personal fulfillment and personal enjoyment but at the same time that space mission is going you're by doing that you're going to be helping to ensure our future as a species in space by helping to bring down the costs and make space much more accessible ok so you will be helping for example to make humans multi-planet species you'll be helping to make it possible in the future for four generations of people to come to generate much or most of their electrical power requirements by putting solar collectors in orbit around the earth you'll be making it possible for us to derive much or most of our metals requirements by mining asteroids rather than mining the earth you'll be making it possible to make better materials in space for example better crystalline materials that will lead to even better computers than we have today perhaps better pure pharmaceuticals grandpa would be proud [Applause]