This Week in Space 117 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space. We're talking about building homes on the moon. Stay with us. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TORQed. This is this Week in Space, episode number 117, recorded on June 28th 2024. A home on the moon. Hello everyone, and welcome once again to this Week in Space, the Home on the Moon edition. I'm Rod Pyle, Editor-in-Chief of AdAstra Magazine for the National Space Society, and I'm here with our honored guest co-host, Isaac Arthur, who happens to be the President of the National Space Society but, more importantly, the creator of Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur. Isaac, since this is your first time co-hosting, tell us all a little bit about your channel, if you would. This is on YouTube.

00:50 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
Well, I'm looking forward to filling in for a while while Tarek's out, and I've been hosting Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur for maybe 10 years this September, 10 years and it's been an amazing time. We do a weekly episode and some others too. We're up to almost 700 total episodes and we probably have our biggest focus on space. But we also just look at everything from transhumanism to aliens and Fermi paradox theories, to what sort of technologies are right over the road in the next few years even, and while we do tend to have a bit of more distant focus in the future, we do try to keep everything very grounded in science. We love to talk sci-fi. We like to use that as an example, as opposed to you know the main point how can we make these things from from our favorite so it was from star trek, from star wars actually be effective, useful, make them become real or something close enough to them? And so that's been our focus for again going on 10 years and seven or some episodes. So it's been a great time.

01:51
Also became the president of the National Space Society last year and I've been loving it. It's such a great fit. The National Space Society is just. I used to think it was an organization just for astronauts, and I found out it was for everyday science geeks too. I love the group.

02:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But we do have both. And I'll just add about your channel, which I don't think mentioned, you're coming up on 800,000 subscribers, is that right, 800,000?

02:17 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
subscribers on YouTube and some more on some other platforms. We got the podcast version. It's got a couple of thousand too, and it's just amazing. When I started the show I didn't think we'd ever find even a thousand people who were interested in the topics.

02:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And, you know, turns out there's a lot more of them out there, so it's been a wild run and I just want to say, as a guy who worked on star trek in the 90s, where we had to sort of meter out visual effects and little tiny bits because they were so damned expensive and hard to do, which resulted in a lot of time watching the captain or in this case it was d space nine, so avery brooks bouncing in his chair as they're firing photon torpedoes at things, your show has eye candy from beginning to end and it's great stuff and it really it makes it so much more fun to watch that would be otherwise. Not that I wouldn't watch you talk, but having that kind of coverage.

03:10 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
It is amazing to have access to those kind of graphics these days. And, for the record, I thought Captain Sisko was probably my favorite captain in general and just by freakish coincidence, I was talking to Morkin Gendel the other day. He was the writer of a bunch of episodes back then, including one of my favorites, the, the inner light. So, uh, you know, that era is still the most groundbreaking and fundamentally inspiring era of sci-fi to me. So we get to talk about an awful lot on the show and it is I like that. All special effects are about as good as they are with a tenth of the budget more like 1 100th.

03:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Did you ever see trials? See Trials and Tribulations? Oh, yes, so for that episode. I've told this story before, but we actually had to go down to the salt mines in Utah to retrieve the original negative from the first series and that was, I think, the first time there was a digital transfer of that material, which was incredible. I mean, I'd grown up seeing it on bad three quarter inch tape dubs on local TV stations and seeing, you know, the coffee stains and Spock's tunic and this kind of stuff was just completely amazing.

04:13
However, the downside, since I was a lowly visual effects assistant, was for positioning purposes. They kept asking me to put on one of those Well, it's actually a red shirt. To put on one of those well, it was actually a red shirt. I was a red shirt, put on one of the red tunics and stand here and there so that they could figure out where they were going to place the stuff in the shot when they were compositing it later and I look like 20 pounds of sausage in a 10-pound sleeve. You know, it just was not an attractive look and thank God I was cut out of all those shots. They later realized because this was basically cut and cover, putting the new people over the old people standing in the shot, that because my midsection was wider than the people on the original show, they had a probably had to enlarge them a little bit to cover. Anyway, that's stuff you don't need to know before I forget.

04:57
Our guest today is evan jensen from icon build, which is a brand new company making incredible progress in 3D printing of buildings on Earth and planning to do so on the moon and, ultimately, mars. So this is a young company that only started in 2018. And I think you're really going to enjoy this one because he's an incredibly smart guy and it's a small company but filled with smart people and just doing incredible work. Before we get rolling here completely, don't forget to do us a solid and make sure to like, subscribe and all that other podcast stuff. We are counting on you. And now Fake drum roll. The weekly space joke. This comes from Zimmer for MP on the discord channel, which you can access If you join club twit.

05:45
The other day, I was interviewing an off planet visitor. We don't call them aliens anymore. Turns out they eat radioactive materials. I asked what its favorite meal was and it told me that he loves the fish and chips at isotope stadium in Albuquerque. That was a sympathy laugh because Isaac's sitting there looking at me like what the hell are you talking about? So there actually is a stadium in Isotopes Park in Albuquerque which I assume dates back to the development of the atomic bomb, and apparently they do serve fish and chips or fish and chips, as the case may be. Now he gets it. It's like what are you talking about?

06:26 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
It's an Adam joke. Sometimes those are the best kind.

06:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Maybe not this case. Well, please, everyone, save the cosmos and us from our own humor, although I thought that was a pretty good one. So so thank you to Zimmer for MP. In any case, send us your best, worst or most indifferent space joke to twis at twittv. That's twits at twittv. And now to some headlines. Are you ready, sir isaac? I am all right. First one is bringing iss home one way or another.

06:59
Nasa has selected spacex to-orbit, the International Space Station for them at the end of the decade, around 2030. The contract is for $843 million, which is pretty cheap by these standards for SpaceX to engineer a custom vehicle that will operate as a one-shot deal. All it's got to do is nudge the space station down out of orbit and have it re-enter. And the trick of this is, of course, you want it to re-enter so that it ends up in Point Nemo, which is this area in the center of the vast Pacific Ocean where you want this thing to come down, so it doesn't come down on us, because some pieces of it are surely going to survive re-entry. Have you been keeping up with this?

07:42 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
A little bit. I remember from when we had Nero come down. Oh God, how long ago was that? At least a couple of decades when that came down, and usually we try to de-orbit things go to that area. There's always that big question of is there some way? We can not lose this valuable piece of our history, and it's a tricky question. It's like, well, we're going to spend almost a billion dollars to blow up a piece of our history, basically, and it feels wrong, but there are so many limitations. What we do about debris these days which, uh, you know, has been a serious so just of late, I think um with uh space to be informing that. What was that russian satellite that uh?

08:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
yeah, that's the next story, yeah yeah, um, and so it's.

08:26 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
It's a hard one. I know people don't really like the idea of losing the space station that way, but it has lived far longer than we were really expecting. It's done good like voyage or pioneer. It's still getting used to out of it. But that time window is coming to a close and at a certain point it'll be hazardous to even keep people on board.

08:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That, as we count on the shuttle well and you bring up a certain point. It will be hazardous to even keep people on board that as we count on to the shuttle. Well, and you bring up a good point. I got a fair amount of email over the last couple of weeks about this and of course there's all kinds of conversations online about save the space station and can't reuse it for a spacecraft to go to Mars and that kind of thing, remember. And there's a white paper that nasa put out recently that really talked about in some depth all the options I looked at, including reuse, bringing pieces home to put in the smithsonian and so forth, which still isn't entirely off the table, but I think it will be shortly. Um, but you know it's important to remember, by the time this thing is brought down, it's going to be 30 years old, more than that. However, the technology was baselined at the latest in the early 90s and a lot of it was from the 80s, so this is old tech. It's been up there a long time.

09:31
Space is a harsh environment.

09:33
At this point, the astronauts are spending half their time, and an hour in the space station for one person is really expensive doing maintenance and repair and although they've replaced a lot of stuff thing.

09:44
This this paper noted was what you can't replace is primary structure and truss work and, although it hasn't been as big an impact as they thought it might be, the repeated dockings and undockings and repositionings of the space station when there's, you know, the potential for an impact of what, for orbiting debris stresses that structure a lot because of course it had to be built. You know they had this complex calculus of it's got to be as light as possible so we can launch a lot of it with the shuttle, which had a pretty limited cargo capacity, but at the same time it's got to be strong enough to stand up to repeated impacts. So it's sort of like an airliner with a cycle of takeoff and landings. It weakens the structure after a while and this is another factor in the space station and there's there's a lot more to this conversation, but the bottom line is it's served as well and 30 years old isn't old for people but it's old for space stations yeah, it rubs the wrong way.

10:40 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
It's like with the rocket boosters you get those all the way up into space and then you put an effort to knock them back down. We're always looking for ways to try to make those work again and use them as space stations. We look like can we use one of the boosters and turn it into space stations or link them together on a ring, and I love the idea. Everyone loves the idea if you can find a way to do it. But people tend not to think about how much structural damage something like that takes while it's blowing through the air. Um, they are often in pretty bad shape.

11:06
Reusing them was hard and, uh, same situation goes to the space station. It's been sitting up there soaking up radiation, uh, getting docked with, getting whacked around, not getting much external maintenance for so long now, and, um, there's a point at which it gets easier to bring something else up there, and we have a lot of equipment up there you really could not replace anywhere with newer stuff without it being a very, very difficult process. So it's got its life cycle and now just the question is should we keep it around as a potential hazard, so we could maybe have a museum of it one day and I have to admit I'm on the fence about that but it's served its usefulness as an actual resource facility at this point. The question now is just do we get it out of there so it's not a hazard, or do we try to preserve it, to make it a historical relic? And I think that we've made that decision at this point.

11:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So yeah, I think so too. I guess the other thing I'd mention is you know it's expensive to launch mass into space. That cost is coming down if it could be put in a large high altitude graveyard orbit and maintained as just a source of raw materials for that eventuality when we can actually snip pieces off it and smelt them into new pieces of rockets and whatever else you want to build. That would be great because it's a big source of stuff. But of course you'd have to take it apart and take out all the wiring and the instrumentation and it's just not something nasa's looking at.

12:26 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
So I don't feel like cannibalizing our relic at that point in time too. It's like let's see if we can take the uh, take the frame off the motor lease and reuse that oh, you said a medalist. A little bit, yeah, yeah I wouldn't want to cannibalize the apollo land yeah, there's hardly anything there anyway.

12:44 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All All right, next up. Breaking up is hard to do. The ISS astronauts took shelter after a satellite exploded. This was an old Russian satellite that we think may have had a battery that went kabang, but whatever is the case, it exploded. It was no longer functioning. It had just been sitting there for a long time, but it went kaboom created well over 100 pieces, fairly large pieces of shrapnel.

13:07
So, as his protocol, the astronauts on the space station took shelter in their individual spacecraft in case they had to take off, which in this case was for Starliner, the Dragon and a Soyuz, to make sure that, a they were protected and, b if they had to depart in a hurry, they could. Just as a note, an hour later the all clear was sounded, but there are currently over 7,600 operational satellites in the Earth orbit, many more dead ones and all kinds of spent rocket stages, chunks of ice from fuel venting, so on and so on, and, at least according to what I read, the ISS's safety zone is about 30 by 30 miles, so it doesn't take much to trigger an alert and say okay, guys, you got to go into safekeeping and and sometimes they move it. In this case, they just went into the capsules. But this is, there's a little bit of a I don't know kind of a star trek vibe to this, or maybe battle star galactica, where it's like you've got to protect yourself from incoming you know.

14:08 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
One thing Battlestar Galactica especially the remake, always did better was showing the sheer amount of damage that debris can deal with. Star Trek A lot of times you're kind of limited because you don't want to mess up that one actual physical model of the ship you have. Space debris is dangerous. We were just talking about that when we were going to the ISS. One tiny little piece of shrapnel that fast hitting you at what? The equivalent of 14,000 kilometers per second, potentially, if it's the wrong angle, that's going to wreck something really bad. And you know, again, that's part of why we're retiring the space station. This is a growing problem, but just so much more junky up there and you don't really want to take chances on that one. But uh, because if one of them does hit the space station they could take the thing out that fast. Uh, and before we wanted to, um, but it was. There's somebody coming up on this show in a couple weeks. Who? Who's going to talk about it? Wasn't there.

14:58 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I saw that on the schedule yeah, yeah, because we're we're sort of overdue. We had one, I think one, in the past, but it was back in the beta period, so it's been a couple of years, so it's time for us to do that again. Finally, sigh Starliner weekly update. It's still docked to the space station, so it was supposed to be back by now.

15:19
This is Boeing Starliner capsule on its first crewed test flight and, as everyone knows who listens to this, they've had some helium leaks back in the trunk. Helium is used to pressurize propellants and they had some thrusters fail. So they've done either five or six resets of the return date so far, and the last one and this is something we hear with Starliner quite a bit over the years the last one is, quote an indefinite delay, unquote, so sometime after July 4th, possibly, well, after. You know, the problem here is you don't want to keep it there too long because you've got leaking helium, although there's plenty of it, and you don't want it to age out, although it's designed to be there for months. On the other hand, uh, these people have to come home at some point.

16:07
The space station is plenty well equipped to support the extra astronauts and they've got lots to do, because there's always a backlog of projects, but you know this is a test flight and, uh, the test hasn't gone as well as we liked. Uh, I foolishly posted a picture of starliner with vines growing all over it, uh, attached to the space station on facebook, and, boy oh boy, did that generate some controversy. I was just putting up a little visual joke but, uh, a lot of people got to snipe it at each other and I almost had to uh delete the the post because it was getting a little too hot in there. It was a memorable image though. Yeah, I appreciate, even though it was backwards, right, I mean that's you know, thanks, mid journey.

16:50
That's the best you can do. But you know, on the one hand people are saying, look, new spacecraft take time to work out the bugs and all that. But starliners really had a troubled birth. They got more money by almost double than SpaceX did to deliver this vehicle to be able to take people up the ISS. It's been pointed out that SpaceX had the advantage of having used the Dragon crew capsule for years before Crew Dragon was built, so they didn't need as much money. On the other hand, good old Boeing has been part of the US space program since it started. They worked on Apollo, they worked on the shuttle, they built the SLS. You just wouldn't think this would be that big of a pull. It really has me scratching my head.

17:41 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
It reminds me of Star Trek episodes from that picture where they had some kind of space mortal fungus catch on the ship. And there's been a lot of ones like that in various episodes. But one thing I always remind myself of to me every time a rocket managed to get off the pad without exploding, I consider that to be at least a partial success, and so we've got to give them that. They got up in space, they did dock and I think they obviously had to save it down. There was definitely room for criticism because they have had a lot of resources and a lot of challenges. But I say what I always say about this stuff rocket science is still hard. Any time you can actually get one of the things to fly at all, it's impressive.

18:18
I had some friends who were working on the Peregrine Landor. Obviously that didn't work out quite as well as planned, but still that was their first flight. You take it as a success just by the fact they managed to get up there at all. I don't want to say we just keep throwing things at it recklessly, no matter how many challenges we face. But there's a certain part of that Still rooting for Starliner to get a little bit more successful on future flights. Obviously, this one leaves a little bit of room for growth, but not of the spacefights.

18:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Very diplomatically said All right, let me dip into the mailbag here for just a moment and then we'll move on. Tim Lazaroff, listener, wrote in about two more space songs he wanted to add to our collection from the other week. These are by a group I've never heard of but my knowledge of pop music is about zero called Lord of the Lost. One was leaving planet Earth and there was one other, and the singer looks like a goth ghost. But whatever, if it's your taste of music, check him out. Once again, the group is Lord of the Lost. Ever heard of these guys? Yeah, probably not. Good, not just me.

19:31
Finally, I got multiple. Why do you orbit the ISS inquiries, as I mentioned. One thing I forgot to add to that conversation is NASA is currently spending about $3 billion per year out of their $24h billion budget uh, keeping that thing going, and they'd really like to spend that on going back to the moon and other outside of earth orbit things. So let's just say it's time. All right, stay with us and we'll be right back with evan jensen of icon build go nowhere, all right, we are joined today by Evan Jensen, vice President of Strategic Research and Development at Icon. How are you, evan?

20:11 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
I'm well. Thanks for having me.

20:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Thanks for joining us. We met when I came to tour your incredible facility, when I was out in Austin, texas, to see the eclipse Well, to see the bottoms of clouds during the eclipse recently, texas to see the eclipse Well, to see the bottoms of clouds during the eclipse recently. And it was a real treat. I mean, the trip would have been fine without that tour, but that was just such a capstone. It was put together by the International Association of Astronomical Artists and we'll put up their website in the show notes, and it was, besides being a pleasure meeting you, I was really impressed with the maturity of your company after what? Six years?

20:48 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
only yeah. Six or seven, yeah yeah.

20:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So what was the idea If you could first tell us what IconBuild does and the idea that really got all this started, because it's a pretty unique and progressive vision you guys have.

21:06 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, sure.

21:08
So our founders, Alex LaRue and Jason Ballard, evan Loomis, sort of got together in a coffee shop somewhere At least that's how I picture it.

21:18
Alex specifically had been running a 3D printing service, sort of back out of his dorm room and onward into his post-college days, and I think, the way he tells the story, he was just sort of tired of, you know, making little knickknacks and parts and things like that. You know, additive manufacturing has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few decades and he wanted to do something bigger. You know, he said what is the limit of this capability? And that became what we now call additive construction capability, and that became what we now call additive construction. And so, essentially, that team got together and built the first 3D printer to print a house and printed what is now the world's first permitted 3D printed structure in North America what we call the Chaconne house. So that was back in about 2018. And then the rest is sort of history. We took that idea and ran with it and we're working to automate construction to solve the global home building crisis and the global housing crisis.

22:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So across the street from the office where he visited, you have a massive 3D printed structure, but you also have constructed some neighborhoods in Texas already, correct?

22:31 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, that's correct. So we started with proof of concept way back when and really just stretched the design aspects of our prints. We made our printers more capable, more reliable and a lot larger. So the structure you saw was called House of Phoenix. It's sort of a sculpture to showcase our new printer called Phoenix. It's 26 feet tall, it's a couple thousand square feet and was done in a single setup with our new 3 called Phoenix. It's 26 feet tall, it's a couple thousand square feet and was done in a single setup with our new 3D printer. So we're pretty proud of that work. It is pushing the limits of what we're capable of and we hope that trickles back into our main projects, such as the one in Wolf Ranch. It's Wolf Ranch up in Georgetown, texas, where we printed 100 3D printed homes available on the open market. And we're working on some other projects, for instance Marfa El Cosmico out in West Texas. So sort of rethinking what the cultural center that is Marfa, Texas could be when you apply 3D printing to that problem.

23:31 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
So you've been working on some moon demolished based stuff with project olympus. Could you tell us a little bit about that real quick?

23:37 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
yeah, of course. So, um, I guess I'll go quick into the the brief history of why a construction 3d printing company, uh, has aspirations to work on the moon and eventually mars. Um, I was not a, a space nerd as I call it. Uh, these days, as I've come to find out, that's a reasonably well-accepted term in the community and basically the 5 or 6 engineers at the company at the time back in I think 2019, were working way hard on a bunch of 3D printed concrete type problems, and our CEO, who had just finished his master's degree in space resources, sort of busted in and said, hey, we're going to do what we've done now on the moon. And of course, I told him he was insane and that it was 100 times harder than anything we had been through.

24:29
And then I said, okay, well, how are we going to really approach this problem? And I got excited and I wanted to be involved because I didn't know a whole lot about the space environment. It always felt like something other people did and that it wasn't tangible for somebody like me, and so I started just basically offered my nights and weekends, and a few other folks at the company sort of did the same my nights and weekends and a few other folks at the company sort of did the same. We found a lot of interest with NASA, who had actually been trying to 3D print with concrete for Mars specifically, or aimed at Mars and a bit in the lunar world as well, and that sort of became Project Olympus and I've been working on it for about 4 years and just having an absolute blast. We were fortunate enough to get some funding from NASA to work on it and to build a relatively small but highly capable team and we are trying to essentially build humanity's first home in another world.

25:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So, just to sort of cue this up, I think I told you when I saw you I had gone to a demonstration at Jet Propulsion Laboratory right about the time you guys started I think it was 2017 of an attempt they were doing at 3D printing off-world and I don't think they had done any particularly sophisticated testing yet with different substrates and so forth. But they were using the athlete robot, which looks like a giant 20-foot-high spider with a nozzle on the end of the arm, to try and print and the placement was fairly accurate, although not as accurate as I think is what you're using now, because it's just a big arm. But uh, you know they're still experimenting with the consistency of the, of the, the mix and so forth and it. You know not to be unkind because this was early on, but it was really kind of a disaster because the walls were leaning over and the stuff was extruding at different rates and you had blobs and it kind of looked like a bad frosting experiment of an eighth grader trying to do something.

26:24
But that's, of course, where you start in seeing both the construction across the street from your offices and what you're doing in the lab. It's really astonishing to me, especially now that you say it was sort of an overtime effort, how far you've come. So I think one of the questions that's going to occur to our listeners and viewers pretty early on is how the heck do you do this off-world? So I assume on Earth you're mixing that slurry with water. Is that right? Yes, correct, on earth. So what do you do on the moon, where I mean, there's water there, but it's kind of problematical using it for extruding, isn't it?

27:07 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
sure, sure, if you don't mind, I'll show a prop, because I get this question quite often. So, um, essentially, this is this is what we use on earth. This is called lava crete. Um, it's a cementitious mortar. Um, essentially, the difference between a concrete and the mortar is the size of the aggregate. Uh, probably, certainly somebody would disagree with me on that simplified definition.

27:25
But, um, this is is what solidifies into what becomes the walls of our homes, uh, and so this material we stack up, and you're talking about controlling the viscosity, uh, especially as you extrude it. So, we've gotten pretty darn good at this, uh, and making sure, because it's affected by temperature, it's affected by things like water to cement ratio, uh, all of those different things. So, though there are ways to do winter concrete, if you think about, uh, the cement hydration process, it does require water, uh, so when you put water in there and you're in the vacuum of space or the vacuum of the surface of the moon essentially the same thing uh, that's going to just sublimate off and give you all sorts of problems. So, even though there are lunar derived concretes, they really require an overpressure situation that we just don't currently have. So I think lunar concretes are going to be incredible in the future, uh, but right now, when we don't have these pressurized structures to build bricks in and things like that yet, I think we started looking at other options.

28:19
So, early on, we sort of did a large literature review and found out, kind of, what ideas had been studied, what levels of success that they had. We looked across cementitious microwave, processing through thermal energy, laser-directed deposition and molten extrusion as well, so, essentially, what we're trying to do to be clear, though, is to live off the land. So, for instance, this piece I showed this is approximately five pounds, which would take something like a quarter just call it a quarter million to get to the lunar surface, so we're clearly not building human scale construction with something quite that large. So what we do is we attempt to live off the land. We call it in situ resource utilization or, in this case, construction based in situ resource utilization, and so this is raw lunar regolith, right? I sort of joke that it's like crushed up coffee cups.

29:12
So it's a bunch of ceramic material that's been bombarded by micrometeorites for billions of years, and what we do is we try to turn this into something that's structurally sound to build with. So we're not necessarily building sandcastles, but it's not that far off, and so what we've been able to do is to develop what we call Laser VMX, which is essentially a laser-directed energy deposition system, allows us to bring this material through a full melt cycle and re-solidify it into something a lot like a concrete. It's not quite the same, but what we can do is turn the solar energy directly collected on the surface of the moon, put it through our system and use it to convert the raw amorphous powder here it's not really structurally sound into something that's actually quite an interesting building material. So it's a little hard to work with at times, but it is 100% ISRU, which is something that we're very interested in for the future.

30:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you wouldn't have to take up a binder or anything with that. It's simply done with heat.

30:13 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
So you wouldn't have to take up a binder or anything with that. It's simply done with heat. Yeah, correct, so it's entirely thermal energy. And really the hard part about that other than all the challenges of space robotics and the longevity on the lunar surface, with all the challenges there is actually controlling that material and making sure you get favorable properties out of it.

30:34 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
So that's something that we spent the last few years trying to perfect. All right, you mentioned there's some challenges on just trying to print the materials up there. What other issues you're having there? Is there any advantages in terms of size there or lower gravity causing problems with print deposition, or is it fairly standard? Do you think?

30:49 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
So the gravity situation we don't build quite as free form as we would here, and that has to do with the process and the material. So we're a lot more similar to if you're familiar with the additive manufacturing world selective laser centering or selective laser melt. So we're really building up substrates slowly on top of each other with supporting material on the sides, and so the things like gravity are going to affect, of course, your robotics and the size of those robotics and the payloads they can carry. But more specifically, for us it actually affects the melt pool viscosity as well as our ability to manipulate that lunar regolith. So you get a lot more lofting, for instance, and your angle of repose could be different, the way it stacks up essentially way it stacks up essentially. So we're working on experimentation and working on better lunar stimulants as well to better understand what it's going to be like when we actually have our robotic systems operating on the surface guys are really a full service shop.

31:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, we will be right back with our next question after this short break. Hold on. So you kind of touched on this, but do you have a sense, you know, 10, 10 years down downstream, say, when this is actually happening on the moon and I suppose it's a gravity dependent, but what kind of size limits are there for this kind of construction?

32:04 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, so 10 years from now we hope to have a commercially capable system, essentially. So you're pretty well unbounded by the size of the structure you can make. So far we've demonstrated that you can continue on a structure that's already been built. So essentially we can continue extrusion or various joinery processes our laser VMX process, for instance almost indefinitely. So you're really limited by the amount of energy that's available to you, as well as the longevity of your robotic systems and how robust those things are. Otherwise it's relatively limitless. If you want to build a skyscraper, we're going to need a pretty big robot or a robot that can climb the side of the skyscraper. But it's really a matter of what you want to accomplish.

32:55 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
You mentioned skyscrapers. There's a lot of glass and steel in those. There was some amazing imagery on your website, iconbuildcom. One of those shows a little greenhouse off the side of the main bays and I found myself thinking do you see much possibility for printing transparent buildings or translucent ones on the moon?

33:14 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
So there's some yeah, absolutely A few notes on that.

33:18
One of the things we can do is build what I would call a hybrid structure where, essentially, you're bringing a decent amount of the materials things like an airlock, for instance, which, at least in the early days, is not going to be something that you would want to trust to fully ISRU-based construction. It's just simply better, more cost-effective, safer to bring something like that and then integrate it into your ISRU-based structure. So something like that greenhouse. You probably very much care about how much light is going through those window panes, and so we would just need to develop the method of joinery such that we could incorporate them in our habitat or greenhouse in this case. That said, there is ongoing research and we have successfully produced some semi-transparent materials. So it really depends on how you filter out the materials from lunar regolith and what you're after. So we don't have an immediate need in the short term for uh printing translucent glass, but, uh, there might be a world uh in the future where we do, and uh, we can develop that tech as well.

34:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Awesome, well, and you talk about the future. So, growing up, when I did, I was a kid in the 1960s, uh, and you know, of course, read a lot of science fiction and some of that science fiction is back the 30s and 40s, and really from the 1930s up until well yesterday you see a lot of imagery, off-world imagery, of these big transparent domes on the moon and Mars that would just, you know, let the radiation come banging in willy-nilly and, you know, are kind of unnecessary when you get right down to it, except for, maybe, a place for people to spend time occasionally while they're soaking up rads. Um, when you're talking about the working with lunar regolith, what kind of thickness of that would you need, with that composition, to block a sufficient amount of radiation for it to be livable?

35:13 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
right, right, so it really depends on the mission parameters and how long the humans are going to be there. I assume you're talking about a human habitation. Yes, and so generally, the way that you handle that is by putting as much mass as you can between the thing you want to protect from radiation and the radiation itself. So it's essentially coming from all directions. There's no hide behind itself. So it's essentially coming from all directions. There's no, you know, hide behind a rock, uh, because it's only coming from the sun. That's not, that's not the way it works, uh, but we did some interesting uh work early on where we tried to understand the entire lunar environment and essentially what we call architecting from the right. So, starting kind of with the end in mind, and we looked at all these parameters, both the thermal cycling, the horrible relatively horrible from a human perspective thermal environment on the moon, and the radiation environment, micrometeorites, et cetera. And I think maybe you showed some of our habitat designs, which are early concepts, but they're actually informed by a lot of that type of question, right? So when you need a meter of uh regolith between you and this like sort of ubiquitous uh radiation coming at you, uh, the best thing to do is is to put mass between you and uh and that that dangerous radiation. So, if you don't mind, I'll show um, this sort of 3d printed habitat that we came up with.

36:32
So this is printed out of FDM material you know, regular plastic here on Earth, but this is, you know, intended to be a human sized airlock here, so you can kind of get a picture of the scale of what we're talking about. And so essentially, we'll be able to print this with the technology that we're starting to build. For instance, our 3D printer here on Earth could print this at this size. For instance, our 3D printer here on Earth could print this at this size, which will be an interesting time when we finally get a chance to do an Earth analog of something like of this size and shape.

37:00
But the idea behind here is it's actually sort of topology optimized. So I turn it like this. You'll see a lot of the printed material are actually these buckets, and so we're minimizing the amount of printed material that we need, essentially lowering the energy input to the system, getting more out of our robotic systems in terms of longevity and lowering the time, which essentially, you know, the energy and the time equates to to dollars in some sort of fashion. So we designed it like this specifically so that in the render you're showing you can see that a robotic system can actually fill those buckets with raw lunar regolith and potentially compacted lunar regolith, and so you end up with that meter or so that you really want for a kind of a medium term duration human mission and you get it for a lot less embodied energy. So that's what we're sort of after there.

37:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, and just for people listening to the audio stream, what he held up for us looked kind of like a flat bottom donut with a bunch of corrugation in it. So these little pockets are something you could fill with regolith, which is a pretty brilliant use of the material Because, as you say, it sort of minimizes the mass input but maximizes the protection that people would get.

38:14 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
So that's pretty cool so it reminded me a little bit of one of those uh bundt cake. Um, yes, there we go. It's a jello mold, so exactly like that. But uh, in terms of what that's made out of, since we're not gonna be baking it out of flour anyway, we're talking about using luna regolith that's got to get scooped up through ISRU processes. Can you tell us a little bit about what the acquisition and processing is like that? What's the ideal particle size? Are we crushing? Are we sieving? What's the process that you envision in?

38:43 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, sure. So throughout this project essentially this NASA-funded project called IMPACT stands for Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technology we've been developing this robotic capability, everything from the robot itself down to the tool head, and the tool head has a few different features on it, one of which is what we call local excavation and size sorting, and to do that we use what we call the scoop tamp filter, pretty creatively named there. It scoops, it tamps and it filters, but essentially the particle distribution isn't super critical to us. However, large rocks will affect our process and things like that. So generally we'll filter out anything greater than, say, a millimeter or two, and then any of the finer powders are generally fine for us.

39:27
But we put a substantial amount of work in to actually get that system working, especially in terms of filtering, because, as a lot of folks know from the Apollo days and the lunar regolith sticking to the astronaut suits, things like that it has a substantial amount of cohesion and really sharp grain sizes that really just clog up everything and it's just really a pain to deal with.

39:50
So, yeah, we've essentially developed a system to have self cleaning systems, uh, to clean out the filters and to vibrate in just the right way to sort those materials. But relatively speaking, um, the top few meters of of soil are are decently uh, are expected to be decently uh, homogenous with a decent amount of uh. You know, understood particle distribution at least from the Apollo days. But as we continue to learn more, we'll continue to adapt and so essentially we just take the material in the local region. If we're building something horizontal like a road or a landing pad, and generally we have enough material in that first few, maybe the first half meter or so, to be able to build a pretty thick substrate there like a foundation or a road or a landing pad. When we start talking human scale habitats, we're going to need a less local excavation capability. So there's a lot of folks working on excavation at scale, including NASA, of course.

40:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But given what we learned during the Apollo program and what we continue to learn from these robotic probes, I gather there won't be any shortage of building material near most of your work sites.

41:06 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
No, I mean our houses these days are built out of sand, aggregate, cement, which is made all just of materials that are brought up. So a lot of terrestrial analogs to construction.

41:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, We'll be right back after a short break. Stay with us. So you touched on the simulants you work with. How do you design a simulant? I mean, you've got chemical properties, you've got mineral properties, as you mentioned, because there's no weathering on the moon, there's just this constant rain of micrometeorite impacts. These things are churned up and banged around, but they're still very sharp. I mean, is that actually part of the simulant you use? The sharpness of the grains?

41:47 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
actually part of the, of the signal that you use the, the sharpness, the grains, somewhat. Um, I say that because, as you mentioned, the weathering is completely different there. So we have processes, uh, here on earth, like rain and wind, that that makes sand hit just the right particle distribution, that that you see, uh, desert sands, riverbed sands completely different. So, from the terrestrial standpoint, our, in our primary business, particle size, particle distribution, grain size and shape is a substantial driver of, like we talked about earlier, our ability to handle the viscosity of the material, things like that. So the cohesion is very of interest to us. So, to answer your question, though, how do you design a simulant? There's been a longstanding, very robust community at NASA specifically, and in the academic community as well, with a few private companies as well taking part in trying to design better simulants. So, essentially, we're taking the data that we've learned from Apollo and trying to make simulants that replicate those behaviors. So we now have pretty good, we've identified relatively good places on Earth to get this bulk rock, and essentially, we crush it into the right particle size distribution and we try to get as close as we can to the chemical makeup, and essentially we, the community, I should say, uh, or maybe at 99%.

43:06
Chemically accurate? Um, you have to be very careful about moisture contamination. There's bakeout processes, things like that, to to make sure you remove all the organic materials that aren't supposed to be there. You would never find them on the moon, uh, but once you do that, we have a pretty good idea of what these things look like in terms of their glass content, um, their mineral content, and so on, so we're able to find materials on Earth that are very similar to what you'd find on the moon, and we just mix them at the appropriate ratios.

43:37
The nuance there, though, is that a chemically accurate simulant is not the same as a mechanically accurate simulant, and so we're actually working with Colorado School of Mines, for instance, on a project funded by NASA Flight Opportunities called Dune Flow that's hopefully going to launch here in the next somewhere between three and six months on a lunar gravity flight, where we're going to study the geotechnical properties or the mechanical properties of the cohesion and the angle of repose things like that for both the control and multiple simulants that we're working on, as well as we actually are fortunate enough to, I hope, be able to fly an Apollo Regulus simulant. So some non-destructive testing. It's a little easier to get a hold of Apollo simulant, and so that apparatus has been through flight qualification and we're looking forward to using it to learn more Simultaneously. Everybody who lands on the moon is landing somewhere that nobody has ever been, so far at least, and so we're looking forward to all the data that's coming out of all the missions sample return or otherwise so that we can make better geotechnical simulants.

44:39 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
It seems like a lot of Project Olympus would work not just on the moon but Mars. What sort of have you looked into doing Mars much and what sort of challenges do you think you'd have switching from a lunar environment to a Martian environment?

44:54 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, sure. So there's some favorable things about Mars. For instance, the robotics are easier to keep cool stuff like that Completely different material science, though. So actually I'm pretty happy because we have a lot of experience working with, uh, cementitious materials, concretes and things like that, and I think those are going to be a lot more relevant on Mars than what we use now, which is the laser directed energy.

45:17
So, really taking the pros and cons of those environments things like, um, really good, uh, thermal flux from the sun, or or uh, uh, heat flux from the sun that we're able to turn into energy on the moon that may not be the case on Mars. So, essentially, we're going to take an entirely different approach on Mars than we would likely take on the moon. However, when we say something like moon to Mars, which is something that NASA says quite a bit, it's actually in the project that is our kind of anchor project. That we're working on Moon to Mars really essentially means that the technologies that we practice on the moon and we learn about on the moon robotics, for instance, extreme environments, dust mitigation, autonomy all of those things actually apply almost directly to Mars. So when we're building with robots, the material is going to change, but the software should be very similar and many of the problems that we face with the vacuum environment of space and so on, in transit, of course, to Mars, we're going to have to have solved already to construct things on the moon.

46:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So once you get to Mars, which does have an atmosphere, although it's in name only does the water sublimate slower that you could use that in your mix, or do you still have to use the thermal method instead?

46:40 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
I'm not yet sure. I do think that concrete on Mars or cementitious type materials is going to be a lot more viable. So, that said, for the initial pressure vessels, things like that, pressurized habitats, for instance, I think a thermal energy deposition method would be viable as it is here terrestrially on Earth, but it's a lot slower and it's a lot more power hungry. So I really think the idea of things like laser welded bricks and things like that, cementitious or otherwise. I think maybe we're going to have to look back into humanity's history and see what was working for us when we had less technology available and see if we can build the way that we used to build.

47:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But with robotics, and cementitious just means cement-like right. Cement-like, yes, okay.

47:32 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
So you mentioned the long trip You've got to go from just a few days to get to the moon, but it takes months to get to Mars and you're doing that in zero gravity. Have you guys done much looking at printing space stations or printing modules in a zero gravity environment like for an asteroid mine?

47:49 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
So we're just getting started.

47:51
One of the sort of realizations that we had we have a relatively small team, so we can't open up our aperture too wide and still be performant, and so what we've realized, though, is that we are making large scale lunar robotics, and in order to get a lunar robotic, it has to also be capable of at least existing in the zero gravity, in the flight, like environment, and the launch environment as well, for that matter, that we basically have a space robot, and so we need to start looking at things like on-orbit assembly, on-orbit manufacturing, things like that, Because, again, the software, the robotics, very similar, however the process is slightly different, so you don't get the benefit of gravity holding your materials together, so you're looking at things like, for instance, laser or sorry, wire.

48:44
Additive manufacturing may be more reasonable, but we do uh think a lot about using lunar derived materials in orbit to construct things, for instance, large glass trusses, uh, that sort of thing, which I think is very viable, because that mass is so much cheaper to get into space uh than when you bring it out of earth's gravity. Well, so we do think a lot about it, but it's sort of future looking for us.

49:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So there's a lot of discussion in the space settlement community anyway, about working in lava tubes on the moon and possibly lava pits on Mars. One of the downsides is that they're apparently at least on the moon fairly brittle because we see a lot of collapsed. You know how the rills are formed and so forth, um, and I I'm sure that's something that would be, you know, seismically checked before construction. But if, if you're talking about working inside a lava tube, let's say, because there's some very large ones apparently, um, I I'm assuming that this, that your technologies wouldn't really be, wouldn't lend themselves to sealing the lava tube against its interior. But if not, you could certainly build large shelters inside that would arch over and then protect whatever sealed habitats were below. Have you looked at that at all?

50:02 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, of course, um, and I think we we can can, uh, potentially seal a lava tube with our technology. Uh, we haven't run through the mission con ops of doing that exactly. Some of that is because, uh, a lava tube is a great place for, uh, for protection, assuming that we can find the ones that that we expect to be there when we show up, uh, but they generally are not, to my knowledge, expected to be in, for instance, the south pole of the moon, which is where we find water, uh, at a higher concentration at least. So, um, it's sort of a geographic issue, uh, in some ways. And so, sure, if we want to do lava tubes in the future, uh, the robotics, they don't care, other than maybe the thermal environment's different at the equatorial regions on the moon, but, um, there, but there's a lot of things.

50:46
Say, you wanted to build a data center inside of a lava tube. Where are you going to get the material to build that? Are you going to bring server racks or are you going to build them? So that's sort of our approach is to really think through what needs to happen inside there, furniture other stuff like that. Sure, why not build it out of what's there?

51:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I don't know how comfortable a brittle ceramic chair would be, but maybe we should start working on that. Clearly, a bunch of smart people working, which I admire no end. Okay, we will be right back, stand by.

51:20 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
So you were talking about different locations on the moon We'd like to look at doing. Obviously there's a lot of desire to go on to Shackleton Crater or the equator or other locations that might be better. How mobile do you think the equipment would be? Are we talking stationary equipment that has to get moved by other equipment, or would it be movable platforms?

51:41 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, so generally, we expect some reasonable amount of mobility, and it really depends on how we design the mission what are the requirements, and we'll design to those requirements.

51:52
We do expect to have this sort of Swiss Army knife approach, though, so that if we do have an asset that can last 10 years on the lunar surface and it's only got two years worth of work, of course you want to use it for the rest of the eight years because you've already invested in that mass getting to the surface. So mobility is something that we're interested in. That said, this is not like an exploration class rover, so we're expecting for it to build its own infrastructure, and I really like the thought experiment of the rover or our printer in this case only ever driving on a road that it's printed. So, for instance, all the problems with dust and kicking up plumes and the levitation of dust and all of that that's expected on the lunar surface, we can mitigate that and start working on infrastructure and building out where we want to go next. That said, there's still plenty of room for LTV type exploration rovers, but generally we'll get planted in one spot and try to stay within a, you know, five kilometer radius, for instance.

52:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I noticed as I was plowing through your website you're doing a fair amount of work on robotics. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and how much? You know what you're waiting on, that is.

53:04 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, sure, so we have a relatively small team. But a little while back, when we started looking at how to do this, what we're aiming for by the end of this year, which is a TRL six level demonstration that's technology readiness level. When we start looking at how a system like that comes together, it's got to operate in hard vacuum, it's got to operate in a cryo and a thermal environment and and of course, some dust involved there as well, we start looking at the market to see what's out there that can handle those requirements in terms of robotics. And, long story short, as we're going into covet at the time, um, you start looking at the offerings that are out there. There's.

53:42
There's really nothing on the market that could hit our schedule or our budget, much less both of them. So essentially we just went back down to the actuator level and started designing robotics. So we essentially have made a cryovac capable robotic system and we intend to offer that to the market in the near term, uh, if anybody's interested, but mostly it's. It's a matter of vertical integration because we need to uh in order to hit our goals. Um, eventually we want to have a full commercial capability down to you know, on surface mobility, uh, which includes robotics certainly. So we do a lot of our own software, a lot of our own mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, et cetera, in-house.

54:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And just so it's said for those who haven't visited the facility, which is probably just about everybody, the robotics are impressive. I mean, when I went in, I expected something the size of Pathfinder, maybe a microwave or something, but you guys have these huge robotic arms that are kind of nudging up to the class of what the shuttle had on it and, again, just really, really impressive stuff I think, uh, I obviously it's your very right to want to focus your actual down on commercial production of buildings on the moon, but, uh, have you looked at any other types of printing there?

55:01 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
like I think rod had mentioned chairs you are you considering printing from ISRU plastic materials or just focused on building buildings at the moment?

55:12 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
So it's sort of the order of focus that we're looking at. We prioritize horizontal structures first, so that's things like landing pads, roads, and then we're going to work our way towards protective structures and habitats. And essentially we're going to work our way towards protective structures and habitats. And essentially we're doing that because you don't necessarily need chairs until you have people, for instance, and you don't really need roads until they have somewhere that they need to go, and so we're really kind of focusing a lot on landing pads.

55:42
It's an interesting part of the community and the road mapping and our current state of understanding of what the plume surface interaction looks like when you land a lander. So we really want to start at first things first mentality, and we're going to get to the rest of the parts later. Now, something like printing with the fidelity that you would need for wheels or gears or something to that effect. I think we can get there. It's probably just that the robot looks a little bit different, but we can cross those bridges when we get to them. I think 80, 90% of the technology, the process, parameters and such look pretty similar.

56:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, and it's interesting. The conversation around rocket plumes is really blossomed in the last few years. It was something that I'm sure people were. I know that Phil Metzger and others in Florida were working on it big an issue it was going to become and the problem for anybody who hasn't been following that. And we have a, an article coming up in the next issue of that astro magazine that our resident deep diver, john cross, has done. That's, I think, probably 4 000 words. So it's, it's a. It's a read.

56:58
Um, when a rocket plume comes down the surface of the moon, or mars for that matter, but more so on the moon, because the lower gravity, these particles go streaming out really fast. Some of them, I guess, can actually reach escape velocity. And this was seen on apollo 12 when the astronauts walked over to the nearby surveyor robotic lander that landed there two years earlier in 1967, and upon examination, once they brought some of the pieces of Surveyor home, they saw that it had actually been scoured by dust particles just from this little 16,000 pound thrust engine on the lunar lander, on the lunar module. So when you start getting larger spacecraft coming down, larger landers, it becomes a real problem and I know there's tons of work being done on landing pads. Some of them they're even thinking maybe they can deposit by the lander as it's coming down. But clearly having something robotically built ahead of time by folks like you, before we get there, would be a real plus. Um, can you tell us about the moon box?

58:04 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Sure, sure. What's a moon box? Yeah, so essentially, we are looking to do the best we can do on Earth. I mentioned the Project Duneflow, which is really working on lunar simulants, and so once you have a simulant, you need somewhere to put it, somewhere to interact with it, and so the moon box is essentially part of our laboratory space that we are converting into a big simulant bed, and so that's going to allow us to do things like 3D print in there. With it would be atmospheric conditions, but we can really start to go to human scale without having to be in a large vacuum chamber. So controlled lighting, uh, dust control, things like that. So it's really just a capability that we have here in Austin, texas, to uh to help us get better at working with dirty robots, um and so, uh, essentially it's a room with glass, glass windows, but it also has blast doors so that we can close it all down, uh, and work on remote operation autonomy of our robotic systems. It's a big sandbox we get to play in.

59:11 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
Basically, we were talking about the Lunar Regolith again getting blown up all over the place and I've done an episode recently where we talk about trying to grow plants in the Lunar Regolith and one of the problems they have is compaction and it's always hard to get a good simulant.

59:27 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Your company also does make Lunar Simulants, do you not sell to others? Correct? And we just started that, and we've worked with Kevin Cannon at Colorado School of Mines, who's been incredibly helpful, as well as the simulant group out of NASA, to be able to build essentially a cost-effective lunar simulant that we can get in bulk. So feel free to reach out if you have needs there.

59:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So we can actually buy this in the future.

59:51 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
You can buy it right now. We prefer not to sell it as a novelty. It's really for the scientific community and folks that are really driving us forward, because there are limited resources available. In terms of mining, in terms of our ability to produce, it is at a quality standard that's high. But, yeah, you can buy it now.

01:00:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So another fascinating part of your website which I found absolutely amazing and I assume it isn't extended off world yet, but can you tell us a little bit about I hope I pronounced this correctly Vitruvius, your AI architecture model?

01:00:31 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yes, sure. So Vitruvius essentially is a way to go from the intent for somebody who wants to build a home through the design to build a home through the design. So it's aware of things like a family size and what your budget is and where you want to build the home, as well as architectural styles that you may want to employ. Maybe you like the brutalist style, or you want a gothic cathedral themed home, and essentially, you can go in and talk to it, as AI allows us to do in this modern world, and it'll design a home for you. And so we're working currently on taking it beyond design architecture into the full on build instructions, so that we can go from a design to a full-priced home, with all the way down to printer instructions. So then we can drive the budget, the schedule and actually hook you up with a builder that will be able to help you make it real.

01:01:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So this means I can finally buy. So I live in Southern California, where water is a novelty we have to bring it here and I can finally build that house up in the mountains where it hasn't burned for 110 years. I can build my fireproof house up there and be the only one left standing on the block when the flames roar through. Does that sound about right? That's the idea.

01:01:58 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, absolutely. And we have a home design I guess you call it a design language or specification specifically for areas where wildfires are more problematic than others. So, yeah, absolutely, look for a firehouse and storm house on our codex, which is our catalog of homes. So again, gulf Coast regions if you have flooding, for instance, we are far more resilient to things like flooding, whereas drywall you have to rip it all out, things like that With our homes. We are far more resilient to things like flooding, whereas drywall you have to rip it all out things like that With our homes. We're in a lot better shape there. So, yeah, we're especially good in locations where you value resiliency of the home.

01:02:38 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
So we have to look that up. I just had some flooding on the lower level, which is a big storm go through Ohio. But speaking about water, I saw the Moon Water Ranch concept. Is that a test theater for you guys have in Texas, or can you tell us more about that?

01:02:54 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Sure, we have a good presence out in West Texas, generally speaking, and we anticipate doing a lot more printing out there. It's just sort of a cultural favorite of ours. Of course, we're in Central Texas, here in Austin, and going out west of the desert is just a fun thing our CEO likes to do, and so, yeah, we have a ranch out there that's available for remote autonomy testing and we hope to actually build an analog moon base out there at some point from the local materials there. So we'll see how that goes. Maybe it's closer to a Martian habitat based on topology and the weather and the soil. But yeah, it's just a capability that we have to go out and test.

01:03:40 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So here's the big wrap-up question that I always like to ask and it can be either from your perspective or the company's perspective, or maybe both what's your big vision here? You know, what do you foresee in terms of how you're going to, either on earth or off Of course we're a space show, but either is welcome on how this is going to play out in the future for you guys.

01:04:02 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yes, good question. So, terrestrially, we have a global housing crisis, so that's really the mission of the company is to use robotics, automation and AI to solve that. We have a big, big problem where the demand is not met by supply and we're lacking skilled labor. Lacking skilled labor, um, and there there's more people who want homes than have them, and that's that's pretty sad for for uh, uh, humanity, that that is space faring at this point, and so, um, what we hope to do in space is really just, you know the way I, the way I think about it, I was, I was flying, uh across the Atlantic ocean, uh, just yesterday actually, and it was air conditioned and I was listening to a podcast, and I'm flying through the sky. So that's like that sci-fi future that somebody in the 1800s or early 1900s maybe thought about. So, offworld, what we hope is that we can make that real for somebody in the 2100s. What is the sci-fi future that we want? Let's go ahead and start enabling that now with AI and robotics. We want, let's go ahead and start enabling that now with ai and robotics.

01:05:08
Um, and the good news is, uh, icon, as a company, we, our space team, is about six, maybe seven percent of the human energy that we put into our day-to-day work, but it actually uh helps us substantially with uh, with our robots and the way we think about autonomous systems, because there's sort of no way around it in space, and so that actually helps us out quite a bit on earth, um, and it helps us to to really work on just really hard problems and, um, and we have a great team that's able to to take our learnings that we work on space robots, apply them terrestrially, um, and we take our terrestrial robotics knowledge and we apply it, for instance, making lunar simulant. We have a batch plant that makes concrete. It's not that dissimilar, so we sort of have a cross pollination of those things and hopefully we're just moving the ball forward a little bit every day and I hope I live to see the moon base.

01:06:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Me too, brother, but it's more likely you're going to make it than me. Well, I want to thank you and everyone for joining us for episode 117 of this week in space, a home on the moon. Uh, please don't forget to check out isaac's youtube channel, science and futurism with isaac arthur, where you can watch over 700 hard science videos. That's 700. This man's been busy. And, of course, you can always check out the National Space Society at nssorg, for which Isaac is our president. By the way, just recently installed Evan. Where's the best place for us to follow your progress and the progress of the company?

01:06:38 - Evan Jensen (Guest)
Yeah, just check us out on iconbuildcom and look us up when you're in Austin and come see what we're up to.

01:06:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's a very nice invitation, isaac. You got to check it out. It's fascinating. And, isaac, what are some of your upcoming episodes of the show?

01:06:52 - Isaac Arthur (Co-host)
Oh, we just had one about building artificial planets, that came out yesterday, so, and then that's scaling up a bit, isn't it? We're looking at the hollow earth idea, though mostly from the idea of printing a shellboard. We're looking at the hollow earth idea, though mostly from the idea of printing a shellboard, and then this weekend we'll be having one coming out discussing Roger Penrose's orchestrated objective reduction, the concept of quantum mechanics and free will. So going to a very tiny scale, a planet scale, then subatomic.

01:07:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You know I had to write about quantum stuff when I was working at Caltech for a very challenging year of news writing, and I still didn't understand it. So I'll have to watch your episode. I understand the basics of it, much less what you'll be talking about. And, of course, you can always find me at pilebookscom or at astromagazinecom. And please remember to drop us a line at twisttv. That's T-W-I-S.

01:07:43
At twittv, we always welcome your comments, suggestions and ideas. Even if they're not altogether friendly, we don't mind. And of course, space jokes, because we we need those. We're always running thin, we love getting them. Uh, new episodes of this podcast publish every friday and your favorite pod catcher. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends and give us reviews and five thumbs up or whatever, whatever icons they use. You can always also head to our website.

01:08:09
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