Martian Helicopters: Giuseppe Santangelo on Skypersonic, space hardware, and flying on other planets

[Music] ciao regatsi happy tuesday and welcome back to another episode of pathfinder today's guest is giuseppe santangelo and he is italian as you can tell as you can tell by the name so it was a good opportunity for me to use a little bit of my my very rusty italian but giuseppe has worked on a range of pretty exciting space programs and actually started and sold a drone company um to to another german company called redcat holdings and this this drone technology which we'll get into has a lot of applications um in gps denied areas of earth and and then as you might imagine all these areas offered where there aren't a gps broadcast so we talk about mars helicopters not gonna bury the lead anymore but before we get into mars helicopters i want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsor our reliance on satellites for navigation communications commerce and intelligence has grown exponentially in the new space economy unfortunately the risks have grown as well and the need to prioritize 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educational and professional background and experience leading up to skype sonic sure no i i'm italian as you can see my english is good with a strong italian accent which is which is something that i am i'm proud of i would say um but i i i'm u.s person i live here i'm a citizen and i live in united states from about 11 years okay i came here for my job before skype sonic i was um ceo of a engineering company ready me decides about a thousand of employees working for aerospace and automotive i am a mechanical engineer i studied astronautical engineering enrollment and i i work at pretty much most of my experience in aerospace i teach at the wayne state university at lawrence tech university here in michigan aerospace propulsion space system engineering and artificial intelligence dedicated to bronze and aerospace so my background is a full technical video awesome great i think that's a really helpful starting point when did you start getting interested in space does that go back all the way to you know your formal education and training yes i believe as a many of us or many of people that are interested in space my patients started when i was a kid five six seven years old you know i grew up with the star trek words and all these stuff dreaming when i was a kid about my future the space the future of the humanity you know other people other culture and so forth so i grew up and i still have the same patient even i i'm a little bit older so i get to the space from the beginning for really to the beginning uh and now i am i'm happy the emma proud to be part of some important projects of nasa and and in my company too if you had to pick one between star wars and star trek i'm gonna i'm gonna put you on the spot here which one would you choose definitely star trail okay okay star trek i'm a star trek guy i i know all the the seasons and all the kind of movement uh are you a fan of software too or not yeah i am but i'm gonna out myself here i'm probably more of a fan of star star wars i just grew up on it and yeah i don't know i i don't for being the managing editor of a space media startup i definitely should be more well read up or more well watched i don't know how you would say that but on star trek so oops just just out of my just out of myself here but so you worked for tails elenia i think i'm probably mispronouncing that but why don't you tell us a little bit about what you were doing there and i also want to open the aperture a bit just hear your perspective and your take on the italian space sector and how that's developed in recent years or maybe over the last decade okay thank you for this question i i joined dallas allen space in 1999 okay tell us talents or tales depends if if you're pronouncing the french way or the italian way you know there is a little battle between french and italy so sometimes we we fight for the wine we fight for the for everything also maybe for the name but good uh we're still a good friend so uh dallas or teleselenia it's the main industry in italy that produce space equipment that works in the space i joined them in 1999 when i and i was a thermofluid dynamics engineer i worked a lot on an international space station for the fire suppression system for their conditioning system for the as a computational flight dynamics engineer and then i moved on a special studies to work on scientific satellites a scientific mission i used to work in a very cool project like lisa which is a live interferometer space antenna it's a great product still going on to be launched from nasa and this project is going to capture gravitational waves by using three satellites of 60 millionths distance between each other in uh in a triangle and they have to be able to capture the the the relative distance of about one nanometer over 60 millions of kilometers that is the kind of amplitude of a gravitational wave you can capture i worked also on ongalaya galia is is a satellite for a search of extra terrestrial lights and other stars this satellite was launched two years ago and now this satellite is working i was in charge of the main telescope on board the development that and the and and the and some studies to demonstrate the validation this telescope is uh 76 meters of focal length and is able to to understand some potential extraterrestrial planets by using the parallax methodology with two telescope on board we'll will calculate the list the difference between the same view from the two perspective the two telescopes let's say and i used to work on the control system that system a lot i worked also for thrusters microtransfer systems to to the micro pollution propulsions to to keep the satellite super stable you can imagine when you look to the sky you want to have the satellites super stable without any disturbance even the solar flare can disturb the satellites so i used to work so many projects also another cool project i worked on was the reentry system a kind of intelligent rental system you know in the corridor uh i was from a computational from florida's point of view and i hotel mouse looks so i had the chance to work in many projects and which is a blessing for me because i grew up on there yeah yeah you've been all over the ecosystem and tala selenia is a it's a joint venture between thomas and leonardo i should i should know this is that do i have that right yeah more or less tell us a quick bit a quick story of tales before was the part of the national um you know uh ire group which is a government industry in aerospace at the beginning when i joined them aeronautical part and a space partner with the same company separating aeronautic division and space division i was working for the space division then after that the two companies separated leonardo now leonardo itself is more aeronautical defense intellectually which is a partisan leonardo also is with thales as you can imagine the ownership on board the salenia is maybe not everybody knows italy italian industry built up almost 40 percent of international space station we didn't know note 3 note 2 cupola atv so many spaces mtlm multi-purpose logistic models on the space station automatic transfer vehicles so we did many many things on the space station so tele selenium is a great experience in the integration and development of a space company for human uh and for many fields yeah that is a very fun fact actually i do want to switch gears to skypersonic and the work you're doing there and eventually of course will touch on the exciting tests that you recently completed let's start really simple how did you come up with the name what's the story behind the name skypersonic yeah it thanks for this question because when you think about the skyper sonic and think about drones you don't see a connection or relationship why skyper sonic and and drones uh and this is a very final reason when i when i founded the company in 2013 i quit for my previous job i was considering boring is i i don't want to say to offend anybody doing my job but as a ceo of a engineering company doing engineering from any other company i would like to get in more on a space i don't know my patients say if i have to fund a company to create a company better to do on what i love instead of doing what i don't know right and i was loving the aerospace so i had the idea and at the very beginning the company was founded with another friend which was uh a mission manager of a spacex uh another italian guy marco villa and and we decided why we don't do something really extremely interesting and by the same time challenging from a space point of view so why we don't do a transoceanic commercial suborbital flight so i want to go to take a coffee in rome and be back the same day so let's do a a hyper solid slide on the sky so sky hyper sonic so that's is the the reason that the beginning of the sky personally so they was working on the suborbital transcontinental flight and then that was the the starting point we started to work on that but i realized that maybe the the subject was too complex for us and i saw uh my little son at that time that was playing with a ball anything i can put a drone inside the ball i can roll and fly and so i got with the idea with the sky skycocker that was in 2014. as i like to say in the startup world you pivoted from supersonic suborbital flight to drones and intelligent autonomous drone software that sort of thing so after that pivot what problem specifically when within the drone world and i assume the then nascent drone world what problem were you setting out to accomplish yes i think the most important we want to distinguish ourselves to make a differentiation and the differentiation was the flying inside so from the beginning as you see my logo there is the the cage around we we we go instead to fly outside let's fly where we we don't want to have any person going there any people have to go to make an inspection because the environment could be very dangerous or complex so we invented this idea to have a a full caged drone able to fly indoor and when i'm when when i say indoor i don't mean just the uh generally in the sewage in a nuclear plant in areas that are really difficult to reach so the biggest challenge we have to we face it from the beginning how to keep the transmission and the connection with the drone without any problem even the drone is 150 meters underground or how we can navigate the drone without any gps how we can use how we can manage the camera with such as smaller illumination to emphasize the effects of the system so we worked on that and thanks to our customers they supported us to solve all these problems and the issues and so now the problem the project the the product or sky doctor was from the beginning decided to fly indoor inside and this gets into part of your tagline and a perennial problem i guess i would say with drones and other connected devices mobility devices that rely on navigation or typically needed to rely on navigation gps deny can you explain what that means and maybe how it relates to indoor flight and then other situations where the gps signals might be intentionally getting blocked or jammed right yes also i think first of all let's say a postulate all the the commercial drones we use outside 99 percent the relay on gps because it's the only way to have this kind of easy way to fly pros from the dji to any other they have a gps system on board so once they lock into the gps obviously they have other system they have accelerometer imu barrels and other things obviously not only that sensor cameras optical flow sensors so forth but the the most important i would say outdoor is the gps because if you lose the connection gps will bring the drone back to the home or can keep flying it can have orbiting and you can set away points and do everything so when we say the drone is autonomous because a good portion of this autonomy comes from the gps is the gps for us gps denied means there is no gps signal or the gps signal is so degraded that you don't have any way to rely on that so you have to use other systems to keep a sort of uh easy way to pilot the draw and obviously you can use time-of-flight sensors optical flow sensor technology on the cameras artificial intelligence many of these but even these systems in in our scenarios they lack a little bit because let's say there is no illumination enhancer dust magnetic interference so you cannot use the compass you cannot use because of so many metals so at the end of the day we discovered that we got also a good personal world from the pile so the pile is important for our job in the gps denial so i i don't mean that the drone is full manual there is many systems that support the drone to be a little bit stable in a very complex scenario in a pipe but having the cage you can bump around they can keep the drone safe but you still need a pilot from the other side yeah so yeah so so very much still a human in the loop with this type of product how do you maintain the connectivity though is it cellular networks is it wi-fi like what are you using because i know that part of the uniqueness of of your stack or your solution is that people these remote pilots can fly from you know a thousand two thousand miles away across the world so obviously they need some sort of like proverbial fat pipe to connect to the drone yes okay and this is gonna become something hopefully i can explain in a simple way even it's super complex first of all there is a connection between the draw and let's call the ground station because as you can imagine inside a pipe under 100 meters underground there is no internet and no gps no satellite links there is nothing there the only link you can provide to the drone you have to provide from your ground station and then we have a stable link between the drone and the ground station what we call ground station that link is is a radio frequency link to the frequency the lowest frequency possible to penetrate the wall we go obviously in africa you can transmit video and telemetry and the controls uh in a way we already established from years then from the ground station you may have the pilot not locally there but located elsewhere so the best way to connect the ground station to the pilot is internet or cellular phone so when the pandemic happened we had that problem we had customers around the world in the middle east or another place and and they need to send pilot there to perform the inspection or to support the training and we couldn't because pandemic so and uh to avoid to die because revenue was lowering was going really low thanks to this uh we needed to invent a system that could support the inspection or whatever from anywhere the main problem of this is the latency because we're talking together me and you in this moment and i believe we have a latest about the 300 400 millisecond i believe in this moment so many more that will be totally fine for us human brain is able to to to cover that gap in somehow but when you come to fly to pilot a drone you need to be really a real time to have a very fire so we needed to invent a software platform able to lower down the latency the lag at the lowest possible and so the latency we achieved now is about i would say uh transatlantically or transoceanic uh connection about the 100 millisecond less than 100 milliseconds in the same continent about 50 40 milliseconds which is really all really low when you have a latency in less than 50 milliseconds it's like a real-time part a portion of this latency is by the infrastructure i would say by the physics because every 100 kilometers or 300 kilometers lights needs one millisecond to cover because the speed of light is limited so we start from a point that just for infrastructure if you have a flight between one place in united states one place in europe which is average five thousand seven thousand kilometers you have already 20 30 milliseconds by the infrastructure you cannot go lower than that the rest it's what we do with our sisters so uh i'm very proud about the work my team and and skype personally did because we were able to lower the latency to this very small number considering that we are flying through a generic internet connection sometimes with lte cellular fall 4g yeah this is really fascinating i want to continue on the technology but we are going to take a very quick break time for a short break to hear about our sponsors again space is the new frontier for cyber security spy road mission systems build space cyber security solutions for civilian military and commercial space operations their orbit secure protocol delivers zero trust security to zero gravity environments protecting space communication command control data transmission storage and integrity of the data level learn more about how zero trust architectures will revolutionize security in new space download the new 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remember or check out their website at spiderope.ms.com and tell them pathfinder some chat so on the topic continuing on the topic of technology i think it's interesting it's kind of ironic for the purposes of this discussion because you know gps supports a lot of drones but not yours when evaluating the technology stack that comprises skype sonic's drones are there any other sorts of technologies that were initially developed for space uh at some point you know over the last 20 to 30 years that have either reached you know reached a point of affordability that they can be integrated into an industrial drone or have reached economies of scale in like other industries and the reason i ask is because nasa talks a lot about spillovers and like commercialization opportunities of technologies that a long time ago were initially developed for space but this is a very crucial question and i believe we have to put on the discussion uh another term space economy so in other sense the the the people thinks that the space exploration space technology yes there is some spin-off some connection to the real world but in the reality maybe we don't have to spend all this money for this exploration and at this point i would like to say there are two two elements that demonstrate completely the opposite the first one is the the the level of the access to the eiger education studies when we are in a phase as a worldwide going towards our limited over the sky there are studies that demonstrated that during the 60s through the apollo missions in nasa going to the moon we have a boom of people who are studying a phd engineering there's physics and so forth because they were where appassionated they were inspirated by these so this is a very important piece if we feel every day on our newspaper discussion about words problems difficulties the people get depressed and they don't believe they can go over if you see that we're trying to uh go over our limits as a human being and try to colonize another planet or to discover this life and from other place and not only on the earth that's going to create the this inspirational thoughts of the people that they're going to grow that's number one which is might be the most important we're here and we are not with the with the stones writing on the song because we have these inspirational things everybody the second element is technology-wise people don't think how much from the space development and technology we are using in our technology in our face sometimes the people are small things like some material stuff or some things but not let's start from the main one gnss which is the connection between all the gps system us and other other governments thanks to that all of us our life is different right because all the geolocation for many things logistics and and so hot is a very important genesis um technology related to the observation of the earth the gelatin weather and so forth this is something that is in our uh hands in this moment the internet connection is booming the satellite the uh large bandwidth connection like starling from spacex just to to say one um so the low orbit satellites about 300 kilometers of of the altitude they can create a a more stable connection than 5g i would say so i will see the future uh reduction of investment of infrastructure and in increasing our investment in satellites technology it's true robotic things you have to go to mars you gotta have autonomous systems they can manage by themselves with this mars the herd is a link between a between eight and 20 minutes of latency there is no way to do any real cast up there so you gotta have better having an autonomous system so the the pyrotechnic system the thruster system the um the islam technology have the rules on on on this i would go even earlier i was able and supported to to stay with a person um that was one of the of the apollo mission uh project manager he was one of the founder of matt works and he told me matlab started on the lunar lunar module because we need to create something for the astronauts to have a scientific coding but not could not be a guide graphic unit interfaces so have to be something with not really a fortran or c plus plus development but more more sophisticated from a mathematics point of view they can calculate quaternion matrix and stuff like that so that was the the beginning of of so i do believe that maybe 60 percent of our technology comes from the space that means yeah yeah that's it's fascinating you know we harp on that a little bit at payload just the notion that people tend to draw associations between like human space flight or like the sexiest or just like most attention grabbing aspects of the space economy even if they're you know still pretty nascent small and and folks outside of sort of the space what i'll say in group don't make the connections between you know connectivity broadband remote sensing earth observation navigation et cetera et cetera so in keeping with this conversation going kind of on either side of the karman line we we talked about how these technologies you know how there's the downstream effects excuse me for us on earth but i want to switch over now to talk about how your drone technology could be useful for space and why don't we start with the the test the recent test at mount can you walk us through what that was and what you're hoping to achieve and if you achieved it yes the test was pretty important because we we we achieved this important contract with nasa to support them in analog missions on mars which is right the testing all the technology for a future magnet mission on mars uh supporting the astronauts in you know playing with these new technologies one of these is a drone technology because we can fly on mars so we can fly many other planets that have a little bit of atmospheres uh like titan and so forth there is other missions from nasa like dragonfly and so forth above the drones on different plates so to achieve this capability nasa asked us to provide them hardware and software in particular for remote pilot in real time because doesn't need gps and whatever um to to give to the astronauts to the crew uh a tool to fly and to test drone even they will be confined in houston space center and they can fly everywhere in the world in location there are similar to mars like mondetna because montagna over a certain altitude i would say over 9000 feet there is no vegetation everything is a lava-based so there is lava tubes there are there are there are you know areas that you don't see anything around just a kind of martian morphology like uh scenarios so but testing over there was important to first of all establish that the internet connection was sufficient to let the people on houston or united states piloting the drones and and the rover secondly power side field testing technology and so forth so we were able to demonstrate and validate that our technology can work anywhere really anywhere in the world even in the most uh difficult scenarios like an inhospitable yes an hospitable place yeah almost in-house exactly internet was the most important so we were able to use different technology we tested different provider of internet um bridget to a place rather than satellite connection we discovered the satellites is the best we can use satellite connection to low orbit satellites internet connection that works perfectly oh interesting can you say what leo constellation you are using yeah for sure sterling okay add that to add that add that as another use case for for startling piloting piling drones around volcanoes that's fascinating so on mars in practice what would this look like would you need you know would you need like a local internet network on mars and then i assume you know in a future crude mission that the astronauts on the red planet would be piloting this like not not johnson space center here in houston i'm actually in houston right now so johnson's across town but so how would that what would that look like yes sure not from uh from here on mars that would be awesome if we do that we will discover a new way to pass through the tie right and go over the speed of lights which is not possible physically for now but from mars to mars from a habitat habitat on mars they could cover all the surface flying and acting piloting even rovers from there the technology i would say it's simpler than uh technology here because here the terror is crowded uh you there you can just obviously have a bridge with satellites or winds with other way to manage that i don't believe that transmitting con control yeah common in video it's a problem there it's already technology is already there the biggest the biggest issue is the aerodynamics for the drones in this moment there is we demonstrated nasa demonstrated that in generatives uh completely completed all the missions and it was a very uh very important achievements for us able to demonstrate that drones can fly in another atmosphere in another place in another planet but that means from a technical point of view it's a big difficulty because you have to fly where there is the very thin atmosphere i know in mars so you have the same at 12 sphere in terms of density that you have on 30 kilometers of altitude on the hair one percent more or less of atmosphere so how to fly over there yes it's possible as long as you can spin the propellers more so the motor have to speed at a speed they have to rotate faster obviously the air or death was feeling less dense so you have less drag which helps from the kv of the motors so the number of the speed that can models can do per each volt provided to the model uh and we are actually working on on a stratocopter which mean uh a drone can fly over 30 kilometers of altitude we are in a good direction we did a preliminar feasibility we were able to fly over a demo straight fly over 12 kilometers to altitude with a commercial drone not a very sophisticated drone that's another important thing so we don't have to have a super complex technology in this moment on mars uh ingenuity is very complex because they created such a very complex propeller with a carbon and with a kind of a sponge inside of carbon to make sure they're robust enough elastic enough to resist so that we we believe that we could use commercial material to fly on mars yeah off the shelf off the shelf often to some extent yeah yeah yeah to some extent we are doing that we demonstrate that we can do theoretically we demonstrate we can do we can do because our best let's say is demonstrating this visible this is our next achievement be able to to fly over you know over a certain altitude and we can achieve two return returns one is flying on mars on other planets so our technology is not yet not that rich at that level but we i believe we can and the second we can use drones on a certain altitude to to supply low orbit satellites and would be cheaper super cheap instead to have low satellites to cover that kind of applications we could use drones all that what would the propulsion be for these systems on mars and would there be any way to refuel them or no that's a very good question i know the propulsion is still considered the electrical propulsion which is the the the simplest in this moment and that will will help because you can recharge the battery um over the day the problem we have there the electrical problem is that you you have a very low temperature overnight you gotta keep the battery warm and having this this heat to give to the battery you are spending a lot of energy of the battery itself so that's why uh ingenuity can fly over 90 seconds every day because you need all the rest of the time to charge the batteries so we have to come to some solutions to we cannot it's not uh unlimitable to have 90 second fly every day we should go like a few hours and then maybe thinking about a different kind of combined propulsion or flying in a kind of a gliding system over mark which is super difficult because the the air is so thin but to we have to find a solution technology solution in this moment there is no clear technology solution uh to uh to increase the the flight time yeah i mean flying drones on mars could be the subject of its own hour-long conversation easily but i do want to keep us moving here and so my last question i suppose would be are you you know ingenuity has been this remarkable success story and it's been awesome to to cheer the helicopter on from earth are you just closely watching everything that ingenuity does and diligently like taking notes and everything and are you like even working with the jpl or any or are you in contact with any of the you know program manager engineers who are working on the ingenuity program our contract is based to another department which is man admission and we and so we are we don't have any formal connection right now even i'm studying what they're doing because their nasa is super friendly they release all the videos all the stuff so you can study that so and my next step to to to try to figure out how we can do a synergy with them and with other teams they are working now is not only nasa working on that ideas there are many other teams over in the world they're working on on this technology over different planets so moving on got to put my analyst hat on and also i i yeah i should mention i am i'm an amateur drone pilot and photographer myself i have the faa part 107 license so i'm pretty familiar i'd like to think with this space but your parent company red cat holdings can you tell me a little bit about that i think and there are parallels here to the space world too you know i've seen in recent years everyone's seen the industry there's a lot of you know sort of deep tech holding companies that are starting to arise and and this sounds like sounds like there's some parallels here with with your parent company but walk us through the decision to sell to to redcat and and also walk us through you know where you sit within the wider portfolio of capabilities that the company has yes we we joined redcap a couple years ago because the the project the dream day uh jeff which is the ceo provided me a very interesting picture said instead to be separated we can connect all our capabilities and our talents in different uh in different aspects of the drone's world and that we can be united we can do we can make the difference this is the the the situation the red card works in different areas works in the military area with the teals drawn we provide a super elaborated i would say intelligent small drones it's called golden eagle and already we have agreement with with the dod and with the with the defense uh around the world i would say to provide these in a huge numbers to all the people this is a very cool stuff then we have skype sonic that provide drones for for industrial inspections and obviously software for piloting from anywhere to anywhere in the world then we have fat shark which is a a super famous company able to provide goggles and systems for drones i would say nerds and then freestyle stuff and not only to that i discovered when i went to the montana the there was there another space project from dlr the the german space um agency and they were testing some drones for lunar application and rovers for lunar applications not bronze just rovers they were using drones also and they were using photoshop technology so our technology and then we have also educational um and uh you know companies a reseller company like roderick which is a pilot super smart pilot they are pushing to the limits the drones doing things that it's really something very complex to do um so this is a comprehensive uh team uh with many areas and we are thinking to enlarge ourselves to cover uh to cover the most we can from all the drones were yeah so i should also mention that redcat is publicly traded you ipo'd i'm i'm not sure when but they're in keeping with the theme that i just mentioned you know they're being similarities with the drone and space world i would say in addition to that that red card is now the public company so uh is in nasdaq which means that we are able to provide the the need the the financial needs to support all these technologies which is important for us and for this world besides that we're still organized in companies uh together growing in a sort of uh of uh organization that can handle everything and all this the the the structure there are in common were were joining together and by the speciality so which companies is still still there okay we are back after a brief technical snag on a technical hiccup on my end but i caught the end of the last answer and then i think i cut out when i wanted to ask my next question but the question was there are a lot of space companies that have been public that went through public through a different financial vehicle this back and you know a lot of these it's been a bumpy ride so a lot of these founders startup founders turned public company ceos find themselves you know in a somewhat difficult position and in a lot of cases the the path to profitability is still very long so was curious to get your thoughts you know on the leadership team of a more mature business and still very much deep tech business if you had any advice for them for management at these companies in terms of toughing it out in the public markets i i think that since i i had this experience right i started the company they were a company that the focus on the technology that is emerging is growing drones technology is not yet major at all in my opinion so we have to to start from there we think the drones technology is major enough to be and that is the reason why this market didn't pick up very well so all of us see this k this number of the market the total available market is huge in everywhere but at the end of the day we're still seeing uh not big results and the profitability is still difficult why because the the drones technology is not mature not mature to a level that we could could be considered standard besides the the toys the or the drone they can do aerophotogrammetry which is pretty mature already so that is already covered i suggest to all the the people that they are starting to work on this technology or they have a dream on this technology to be prepared uh be a an entrepreneur on this world when you work in something that the people don't know even it's cool stuff you gotta educate your market you gotta educate the people and you have to spend a lot of energy uh who is gonna cover this energy is not the technical only the money yes i know if you have the capital you can do that it's not only that that is super important it's important how much energy you have inside to keep going through this path even when you see there is a lot of failures in front of you and and when i say failures not mean only technical failure could be also business side failures so you're thinking that that customer is going to buy and then the customer changed mine because it's too skeptical or things that i can still use my old way to do this so you have to be prepared as a as a founder investor your return of investment will be the the patient the energy and then knowing that you are creating something new for the for the world i would say for the worldwide but this is super important to i remember phrases from i think elon musk say do we doing a entrepreneurship means chewing glass looking to the abyss that means so you are chewing glass and you look on the black hole in front of you and you still have to go forward if you believe you can resist on that go for there you go there you go words of wisdom so to close us out here i have some more rapid fire questions and the first is actually not something that i came prepared with but you had mentioned working in a past life on a program you know searching for extraterrestrial life so i'd like to pose the asian question to you do you think are we alone no at all and i i is not just only a thinking is a reality because recently a japanese discovered the presence of amino acids which means that the the basic element of the protein are present besides her obviously we can answer to the to the answer that the contact movie said right is a is a waste of space if we are just us uh we cannot be so aggressive and so um so rude to think that we are alone it's not possible there it's not possible at all there is the distance that yeah i believe i would like to add another small elements besides that when i get to the space the first time i was hired by the salinas space i was super excited i was 28 years old and then and after a year was super uh deluded by this because i discovered how big is the gap technological gap we have to travel in the space that's the problems not the presence of life elsewhere but we are it's impossible to reach that unless we don't find a way to go over the space time in this moment there is no technology at all to can put us in even in contact because the radio frequency transmission takes thousands of years to reach maybe the closest the closest part where there is another civilized at the planet so that's the problem not the life but the technology yeah seems like a few points in this conversation we've talked about kind of brushing up with the laws or boundaries of physics second question is what's your hottest take or most contrarian view on the future of space we are leaving and again a revival of the space because you know this i maybe i'm wrong but i'm feeling that the same moment in the past like this was at the beginning of the apollo program in the 60s because i think you know the 28 is scheduled the launch of sls the first again moon mission from nasa where we have the we will have human on on the moon the 25th to 26th of this decade right and then we are gonna have people maybe on mars so the exploration is taking a revival so i believe the space is gonna grow um which is a great great news so it's a good news for the people the new the new age or the new you know uh the the younger generation they and then when i was young i didn't have google internet that saw that amazing technology available and cheap now you have a lot of technology available and super cheap uh compared to the past so there is there is no excuse for the people that want to get to the space to start and try out that last question a little bit out of left field and maybe even a bit selfish but i want to ask you as an italian what's the best under the radar off the beaten path town or city in your opinion to visit in italy for visiting from you know we think there are so many that is difficult to know you can go to rome beside me there is a stamp of piazza navona rome is a one of the greatest venice florence from technological point of view i would say that a good comparison between the two is the artistic point of view historical and technology point of view is torino torino is a great town was a kingdom uh was the king was there so so you have a lot of historical residencies uh you can visit at the same time there is a a nice business cultures on the space on the railway and the automotive side is the house of fiat that the town so i would suggest for anybody want to visit italy to start from torino and then go from there southwest or or or side on west side too and it was fun thank you very much i hope it was interesting my thoughts and our things for the people that can see that and i thank you very much again for this opportunity yeah yeah fascinating conversation and plenty more but for now that's a wrap part one that's a wrap thank you very much oh i wanna last things to say on the seventh of september we're gonna have uh one important aerospace meeting in detroit uh would be the presence of an astronaut roberto victori which we participate for mission on the space station and also the former uh head of the outer space of a united nation simonetti people we have a panel there and whoever would like to be interested to see that i can provide the the link will be streamed and will be also present in metaverse so the people can connect on metaverse amazing amazing well well uh yeah definitely follow up with the the link and we'll we'll include that when we publish the episode okay great thank you very much orion aldora ragazzi that will do it for pathfinder 0013 thank you to giuseppe for coming on and going pretty rapid fire across the karman line a bunch of times with us pathfinder is powered by payload modern space media brand and while we have designs on kogi kobe kobe mines on becoming the largest space content company in the galaxy for now we publish an industry leading newsletter this podcast and a few other weekly and monthly newsletters shout out uh parallax eyeball eyeball emoji but stay tuned for more on that soon anyways if you like what you heard subscribe whether you are watching or listening to us and leave us a five star rating if you're so inclined it really helps and as always you can reach out to me directly at ryan to payloadspace.com with feedback constructive criticism uh amateur drone photos i'd love to see any any of y'all's amateur drone photos or if you just want to say hi but i will shut up and that'll do it for this week i'm ryan duffy signing off and i'll see you back here next week [Music] you

2022-08-29 12:08

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