For the second year in a row, a company that seeks to develop an air-launch system for small satellites has won a business plan [...]]]>

Members of the CubeCab team, including CEO Adrian Tymes (center), and prize sponsors pose with the $20,000 first-prize check at the Lightning Pitch awards ceremony Thursday evening. (credit: J. Foust)

For the second year in a row, a company that seeks to develop an air-launch system for small satellites has won a business plan competition organized by the Space Frontier Foundation.

CubeCab beat out six other companies in the competition held Thursday during the NewSpace 2014 conference in San Jose, California. The “Lightning Pitch” competition was a slimmed-down version of previous business plan competitions held by the organization, with companies required to give a four-minute pitch to judges, followed by a three-minute question-and-answer session.

CubeCab won the $20,000 first prize by pitching an air launch system that can place individual CubeSats into orbit. The system would be able to place individual CubeSats into orbit on dedicated launches at the same price as current rideshare arrangements, where CubeSats fly as secondary payloads on larger launch vehicles: $100,000 for a 1U cubeSat and $250,000 for a 3U CubeSat.

“The judges felt they were in line to solve one of the number one problems that we have in our industry,” said Thomas Olson, organizer of the competition, during a brief awards ceremony Thursday evening, alluding to the challenges CubeSat developers face in getting their spacecraft launched. “They had a management and technical team they thought was really unsurpassed among all the contestants today.”

CubeCab disclosed few specifics about their air-launch design. In his brief pitch, company CEO Adrian Tymes listed some technologies the system will incorporate, from room temperature self-pressurizing propellants to the use of 3-D printed components, but not a complete system architecture. “We’re still weighing the various options,” he said in a brief interview after winning the competition Thursday evening.

CubeCab believes it can develop this system quite inexpensively. Tymes said in his presentation that the company is seeking $500,000 in a seed round and $4–5 million in a Series A round. That would be sufficient, he said, to develop the system, although he said the company might need a couple million dollars more to give it “runway” before revenue from launch services kicked in. The presentation, though, didn’t given the company time to break down its costs.

Tymes, in the interview Thursday evening, said he planned to set aside half of the $20,000 prize to cover future expenses, and the rest to pay off some debts and provide bonuses to the team. “We have major credibility as this point,” he said exuberantly in the interview. “This is a victory for the democratization of space.”

CubeCab is the second air launch company in as many years to win first prize at a business competition run by the Foundation. Last year, when the organization ran a full-fledged business plan competition, Generation Orbit won first place.

In this year’s competition, RockZip, a maker of high-altitude balloons, won second place at $7,500. Elysium Space, a company that plans to launch cremains into space inside CubeSats, won the $2,500 third prize.

Ten years ago this morning, a small rocket-powered vehicle with a single test pilot aboard appeared to open a door into the future. SpaceShipOne, carried aloft by its carrier aircraft, White [...]]]>

Pilot Mike Melvill stands atop SpaceShipOne after flying the vehicle into space for the first time on June 21, 2004. (credit: J. Foust)

Ten years ago this morning, a small rocket-powered vehicle with a single test pilot aboard appeared to open a door into the future. SpaceShipOne, carried aloft by its carrier aircraft, White Knight, detached from the plane, fired its hybrid rocket motor and soared to an altitude just above the Kármán line, the 100-kilometer boundary widely adopted as the “beginning” of space. SpaceShipOne then glided back to a safe landing at the Mojave Air and Space Port, entering history as the first privately-developed and -funded crewed vehicle to go into space.

That flight, and the two that followed in September and October 2004 that won the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE, appeared to open a new era in commercial spaceflight. It was supposed to be one where people would fly on a regular, even frequent, basis for tourism, research, or other reasons. Yet, there hasn’t been a commercial suborbital human spaceflight since Brian Binnie piloted SpaceShipOne on its final, prize-winning flight on October 4, 2004. Had you told nearly any one of the thousands who traveled to Mojave to see SpaceShipOne’s flight ten years ago that there would be such a long gap in suborbital human spaceflight, you might have been laughed off the airport grounds.

People have written a lot about this long gap in suborbital spaceflight, and a thorough examination of the causes is beyond the scope of a single post. Virgin Galactic has gone through an extended technical development, including a recent switch in hybrid rocket motors; it now plans to begin flights late this year, about seven years later than its original plans announced in September 2004. XCOR Aerospace’s progress has been hindered at times by limited funding, as Forbes recently reported, although the company announced last month it raised more than $14 million in a Series B funding round that should allow it to bring the Lynx to market. Blue Origin, meanwhile, keeps its plans under tight wraps; it would seem that founder Jeff Bezos, who is also funding the 10,000-Year Clock, is not in a particular rush.

It’s a far cry from ten years ago, when it appeared that SpaceShipOne and other vehicles under development would soon usher in a new era of low-cost suborbital human spaceflight. For a more comprehensive review of the history of SpaceShipOne and its successors, I just published Waiting for Launch: A Decade of Suborbital Spaceflight Dreams as a Kindle ebook for just $2.99. The book is a collection of articles from The Space Review from early 2003, when SpaceShipOne was unveiled, to the present day, with updated introductions for each article as well as a new introduction and conclusion. It is not the definitive history of this industry, but it does offer a series of snapshots to show how it has developed—or not—over the last decade.

A continuing investigation into the failure of a [...]]]>

An Antares rocket lifts off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia, on January 9, 2014. The rocket placed a Cygnus cargo spacecraft into orbit on the first of eight such missions Orbital is under contract to perform for NASA. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

A continuing investigation into the failure of a first stage engine during a static fire test last month has delayed Orbital Sciences Corporation’s next cargo mission to the ISS until at least July 1. Orbital announced Monday that the launch, which previously was planned for no earlier than June 17, would now take place no earlier than July 1. “The new launch schedule reflects the timing of the investigation into the cause of an AJ26 engine failure that occurred in late May at NASA’s Stennis Space Center during customary acceptance testing,” the company said in an update on the website for the “Orb-2″ mission to the ISS, adding that there were no other issues with the upcoming cargo mission. Orb-2 is the second of eight cargo missions to the station under Orbital’s current contract with NASA.

The next launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, for ORBCOMM, is also being delayed. The mission, previously scheduled for Thursday night, is now planned for June 15, although ORBCOMM’s website about the mission has not been updated with the new launch time. The launch had been planned for mid-May but was postponed by what the company called a helium leak in the pressurization system of the rocket’s first stage.

At Friday’s press conference in Washington, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the effort to “soft land” the Falcon 9’s first [...]]]>

A screen grab from a repaired version of a video released by SpaceX on April 29 shows the Falcon 9 first stage rocket descending to the ocean, its landing legs extended. (credit: SpaceX)

At Friday’s press conference in Washington, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the effort to “soft land” the Falcon 9’s first stage in the ocean was a success, even though rough seas prevented them from recovering the stage. Musk at the time said SpaceX had video of the rocket’s descent taken from the stage itself, and would release after making efforts to clean it up.

Late yesterday, SpaceX did release the video, in both its original form as well as a “repaired” version, since the original footage is so garbled as to make it all but impossible to determine what is going on. (The company doesn’t explain why the video is in such poor condition; that is, whether it was a technical problem with the camera or poor transmission of the imagery.) The repaired version isn’t much better, but at 14 seconds into the video, there is a flash of clarity: the stages landing legs extended as the stage descends vertically to the choppy waters below.

SpaceX is providing the raw video files as well in the hopes that others can find better ways to clean up the imagery.

Musk said Friday that SpaceX would make another recovery attempt on its next Falcon 9 launch, of six ORBCOMM satellites. ORBCOMM announced this morning that this launch is scheduled for the morning of May 10 from Cape Canaveral.

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I write [...]]]>

The Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the next Dragon spacecraft late Sunday evening is shown in its hangar in a photo released by SpaceX earlier this month. This is the first Falcon 9 to feature landing legs on its first stage. (credit: SpaceX)

In this week’s issue of The Space Review, I write about SpaceX’s upcoming launch, including its plans to test the recovery of the Falcon 9’s first stage, as part of a broader look at some of the issues facing the launch industry in general today. The article includes some quotes from SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, who appeared Friday on David Livingston’s The Space Show program for an interview. Shotwell made some additional comments in the interview that didn’t make it into the article but are still worth noting.

In the interview, she said that the contamination detected in the trunk of the Dragon spacecraft was not the sole cause of the delay of the launch from March 16 to March 30. That contamination was just one of several factors, which she said included “struggling on some buffering with data transfer between here and Houston” and more time needed to work with the range regarding the recovery of the first stage. In addition to the contamination, she hinted that the Dragon team needed some time to catch their breaths. “So, it was really the combination of those four things where we said, ‘You know what, we need to step back'” and take more time to resolve all of those issues, she said.

Shotwell also discussed some of the changes SpaceX made since their previous attempt to try and recover the Falcon 9 first stage from September. She said engineers are “optimizing” the reentry burn by the first stage after separation and the landing burn before splashdown. “In addition, we have to get a little more stability on that stage as it comes in,” she said, which they’re doing with the optimized burns and an attitude control system.

Shotwell emphasized that these were test flights: “We’ll continue to make a little progress, probably take a step back, make some more progress, take another step back,” she said. “This is a really hard problem. I do believe we will solve it.” She did state that the company hopes to return a Falcon 9 stage to a landing site on land (rather than splashing down in the ocean, as this stage will do) later this year, and reuse a Falcon 9 first stage next year.

The reusable Falcon 9, she said, won’t have any affect on the payload capacity as published on its website. “Overall, this upgraded Falcon 9, which has flown three times, has about 30 percent more performance than what we put on the web, and that extra performance is reserved for us to do our reusability and recoverability demonstrations right now,” she said. That would explain why SpaceX has a contract to use a Falcon 9 to launch the SES-10 satellite in 2016, despite SES-10 weighing in at about 5,300 kilograms, above the published capacity of 4,850 kilograms.

Besides the Falcon 9 and its reusability, SpaceX is also hard at work on a crewed version of its Dragon spacecraft. Despite concerns about US access to the ISS given current tensions with Russia and NASA’s current reliance on Soyuz, Shotwell said she didn’t think it was feasible to greatly accelerate the development of a crewed Dragon. “We proposed a pretty forward-leaning program” for commercial crew, she said. “I don’t want to say that we couldn’t speed things up: we probably could, but it would have to be in lockstep with NASA.” She added that SpaceX current believes it can have a crewed Dragon ready “a little bit faster” than current NASA plans for flights in late 2016 or early 2017.

One decade ago, hopes were high for suborbital space tourism. Scaled Composites had performed the first powered test flight of SpaceShipOne in December of 2003, and other than a minor landing mishap, the company seemed to be on track for [...]]]>

SpaceShipTwo during its first powered test flight on April 29, 2013. (credit: Virgin Galactic/MarsScientific.com)

One decade ago, hopes were high for suborbital space tourism. Scaled Composites had performed the first powered test flight of SpaceShipOne in December of 2003, and other than a minor landing mishap, the company seemed to be on track for flying into space in the new year, putting it on the inside track to win the $10-million Ansari X PRIZE before it expired at the end of 2004. That, many believed, would usher in an era of suborbital space tourism by Scaled and other companies, including other X PRIZE competitors, in the following years.

The future, though, turned out a little differently. Scaled did win the X PRIZE with SpaceShipOne, performing suborbital flights in late September and early October of 2004 (as well as a test flight in June.) Scaled also announced a deal with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, establishing a venture called Virgin Galactic that planned to perform flights using a new vehicle, called SpaceShipTwo, as soon as late 2007.

But six years after that initial start date, SpaceShipTwo is still not yet in commercial service. Building a new, and bigger, vehicle, with a larger version of the hybrid rocket motor that powered SpaceShipOne has turned out to be a far greater challenge than expected in the heady days of 2004. And the other teams who were competing for the X PRIZE in the early 2000s have largely faded away—the da Vinci Project, anyone?

Still, there are signs of optimism for 2014. While development of SpaceShipTwo has been slow, Virgin Galactic did achieve some milestone in 2013, most notably the first powered flight of the vehicle in April. However, more than four months passed before SS2 made a second powered flight, in early September. A third powered flight was reportedly planned for mid-December but scrubbed by poor weather; it’s likely to be rescheduled for early January, after the holiday break ends for Scaled and Virgin.

Virgin did put the year’s developments in a positive perspective in a blog post by Branson on Monday, which included a 90-second video recap of highlights of the past year. It also included undated footage of a full-duration (approximately 55 seconds) burn of a hybrid rocket engine on a test stand; that engine has long been perceived as the limiting factor in SpaceShipTwo’s development.

“We are truly in the final phase of preparations for commercial service,” George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic, said in the video. When that commercial service will begin isn’t stated, but the company expects that to be some time in 2014; coverage of Virgin’s deal with NBC Universal to broadcast the first commercial SpaceShipTwo flight mentioned a date of August 2014. That, though, is contingent on Virgin making sufficient progress on the test program, which appears to be going slowly so far.

Virgin isn’t the only company in the suborbital spaceflight market. Just down the flightline at Mojave Air and Space Port from Scaled and The Spaceship Company (the Virgin-owned entity that will manufacture SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo vehicles), XCOR Aerospace has been working on its Lynx vehicle. Its development has also been slow going, although the company has in recent months been actively blogging work on the Lynx and associated activities, like engine tests. In the company’s most recent release, about a payload integrator agreement with the Czech Space Office, XCOR said flights of the Lynx Mark I prototype will begin in 2014.

XCOR is selling seats on the Lynx through another company, Space Expedition Corporation, or SXC. It’s best known for the contest it held in 2013 with Unilever, whose products include Axe deodorants and related products. That worldwide contest culminated earlier this month with Axe Apollo Space Academy, which awarded 23 trips on Lynx flights earlier this month to contestants after a week of testing and training in Florida.

Blue Origin is also working, slowly, on a suborbital vehicle. In early December, it issued a press release and held a media teleconference—both rare events for the publicity-averse company—to discuss a test of its BE-3 rocket engine, which flew a simulated suborbital flight profile. Company president Rob Meyerson said suborbital flights of its New Shepard vehicle should begin “in the next several years,” without being more specific.

While Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace all plan to continue development of their suborbital vehicles for space tourism and research activities in 2014, a fourth company is unlikely to follow. In August, Armadillo Aerospace founder John Carmack said in a speech that his company was out of funds and in “hibernation mode” because of a lack progress after a suborbital test flight in January that suffered a parachute failure. Carmack said the company would remain in hibernation until he found an outside investor or “there’s another liquidity event where I’m comfortable throwing another million dollars a year into things,” as he had previously supported the company with his “crazy money” that he has since exhausted.

Masten Space Systems is not in the suborbital space tourism business—its focus is on flying experiments and technology demonstrations—but it has been quietly working on some vehicles. At the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) in Colorado in June, Masten chief operating officer Sean Mahoney called 2013 “a critical year” for the company as it decides whether to continue work on low-level technology demonstrators or pursue a suborbital vehicle that can fly to 100 kilometers. If the company has made a decision on its direction for 2014, it’s kept that quiet so far.

The article linked to in the preceding paragraph also shows how the schedule slips for other companies continue: at NSRC less than seven months ago, Virgin Galactic was predicting test flights of SpaceShipTwo to space by the end of the year, while XCOR said Lynx text flights would begin by late in the year. Neither, though, happened. As 2014 begins, companies continue to promise major developments, but the slow progress and delayed schedules of the past suggest that people should continue to be patient.

One of the more than 30 satellites launched on a Dnepr rocket from Russia last week was SkySat-1, the first satellite for Skybox Imaging, the Silicon Valley startup that plans a constellation [...]]]>

An image of the Crown Perth entertainment complex in Perth, Australia, taken by the SkySat-1 spacecraft earlier this month. (credit: Skybox Imaging)

One of the more than 30 satellites launched on a Dnepr rocket from Russia last week was SkySat-1, the first satellite for Skybox Imaging, the Silicon Valley startup that plans a constellation of satellites to provide relatively high-resolution images for commercial users. “To our knowledge, SkySat-1 is the smallest satellite ever flown that is capable of capturing imagery at better than 1 meter resolution,” the company stated in a blog post earlier this week. (On the same launch, incidentally, were two smaller satellites for another Earth imagery startup, Planet Labs.)

The blog post was linked to the release of the first imagery from the satellite. The company initially released images taken of Perth, Australia, on December 4; since then, they’ve added a couple more images to their online gallery, of a university in Abu Dhabi and of the coastline of Somalia. “As you can see below, features are clearly discernible that validate our goal to provide high-quality, sub-meter imagery: car windshields, varying car colors, road markings, etc,” the company stated. “These images exceed our early expectations for quality.”

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who gained fame earlier this year for his social media outreach while serving on the International Space Station, is doing some interviews [...]]]>

Chris Hadfield on the ISS in early 2013. In an interview, he wonders if some Virgin Galactic customers know about the limited spaceflight experience they’ll get. (credit: NASA)

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who gained fame earlier this year for his social media outreach while serving on the International Space Station, is doing some interviews with more mainstream media in advance of the publication of his book, An Astronaut’s Guide To Life On Earth. In an interview with UK newspaper The Guardian, he’s asked what he thinks about suborbital space tourism ventures such as Virgin Galactic. He offers a qualified endorsement of such flights.

“I’m all for the idea. I commend him for it. But it’s not much of a space flight,” he said, referring to Sir Richard Branson. He believes that some celebrity customers (the example given by The Guardian of Paris Hilton) might be disappointed about the relatively brief flight. “I’m not sure she knows what she’s paying for. She may think she’s going to … see the universe and stars whipping by. None of that’s happening. They’re just going to go up and fall back down again… They’ll get a few minutes of weightlessness, and they’ll see the black of the universe. And they’ll see the curve of the Earth and the horizon, because they’ll be above the air. But whether that’ll be enough for the quarter-million-dollar price tag? I don’t know.”

He also note the risks inherent in spaceflight. “Eventually they’ll crash one. Because it’s hard. They’re discovering how hard,” he said, noting the years of delays Virgin Galactic, which originally proposed, nine years ago, to begin commercial flights in late 2007. However, he’s not rooting against Virgin. “I hope he succeeds. The more people who can see the world this way, the better off we are.”

The next powered test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle is coming up “very soon,” a top company executive said at a conference Thursday, as some observers continue to speculate about the reasons for the extended [...]]]>

SpaceShipTwo flies on its second powered test flight on September 5. (credit: MarsScientific.com and Clay Center Observatory)

The next powered test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle is coming up “very soon,” a top company executive said at a conference Thursday, as some observers continue to speculate about the reasons for the extended test program.

Virgin Galactic president Steve Isakowitz discussed the company’s test plans in response to a question during a panel session at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) in Las Cruces, New Mexico, on Thursday. (Disclosure: I moderated the panel; the question came from the audience.) “We have a series of them coming up very shortly,” he said of upcoming test flights. “We don’t normally announce our dates ahead of time, but I can tell you we have one that’s very soon that will also, again, incrementally build us up” to the point where SpaceShipTwo can fly into space.

SpaceShipTwo has performed two powered test flights to date. The first powered SS2 flight took place on April 29, when the vehicle fired its hybrid rocket engine for 16 seconds, achieving a top speed of Mach 1.3 and peak altitude of 16,800 meters (55,000 feet). SS2 made its second powered flight on September 5, firing the engine for 20 seconds, going to Mach 1.43 and 21,000 meters (69,000 feet) while also testing the vehicle’s feathering system needed for suborbital reentries. The long gap between those flights (and the lack of powered flights since then) has fueled in the space industry an undercurrent of rumors of issues with the vehicle’s engine.

Isakowitz, speaking at ISPCS, gave no hint of any issues with the engine, and noted that company’s customer base, now at 650 people, have been patient with the vehicle’s development delays. “We’ve generally found with our customers that they’re a heck of a lot more patient than the media or those in the industry,” he said. “From our customers, we really haven’t had anybody who’s said, ‘Forget it, you guys are taking too long.’ In fact, I don’t think we’ve lost a single person who’s said, ‘You’re simply taking too long.'”

Blue Origin has developed a reputation over the years as a notoriously secretive company, only grudgingly releasing information about the company and its plans. While other companies hold high-profile events [...]]]>

Blue Origin’s PM2 suborbital experimental vehicle, shown here on a flight before being lost during a test flight in August 2011. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin has developed a reputation over the years as a notoriously secretive company, only grudgingly releasing information about the company and its plans. While other companies hold high-profile events for media and customers (hi, Virgin Galactic!) or issue press releases about their ongoing efforts, Blue Origin only rarely issues releases or discloses information, which means those interested in the company hang on, and often try to parse, any words said by company leadership, including founder Jeff Bezos.

On Friday, Bezos did discuss Blue Origin in an on-stage interview Friday that was part of the grand opening of the Bezos Center of Innovation at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. As reported by Seattle technology publication GeekWire, Bezos said that the company was now up to 300 employees, the first time in recent memory the company has disclosed a headcount. That makes it small compared to SpaceX, which now has over 3,000 employees, but likely on a par with the Virgin Galactic/The Spaceship Company team developing SpaceShipTwo, and much larger than other suborbital companies like XCOR Aerospace and Masten Space Systems.

“The project is going extremely well,” Bezos said of the company’s efforts to develop suborbital and orbital reusable spacecraft, according to the GeekWire report. He said the company is working on its third iteration of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle, adding that he hopes this is the final iteration before beginning commercial service, although he didn’t offer a timetable for that.

Bezos regularly devotes time to Blue Origin, according to an excerpt of a new book about Bezos and his more famous company, Amazon.com, published in the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. Author Brad Stone writes that Bezos “moonlights” a day a week at the company. (According to the book itself, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, just published today, Bezos spends each Wednesday at Blue Origin.)

Blue Origin has also been working on an orbital vehicle concept that would launch initially on top of an existing rocket like an Atlas V, but eventually on the company’s own reusable boosters. The company got some funding and technical support from NASA under the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, and although Blue Origin elected not to continue under the next funded phase of the program, Commercial Crew Integrated Capability, it has extended the Space Act Agreement it had under its CCDev-2 award to permit additional, unfunded cooperation with NASA. Bezos said that the company’s orbital vehicle would be ready for flights in 2018, according to the GeekWire report, but didn’t mention how it would be paid for given the lack of NASA funding.

Those orbital flights, though, would likely come well after the suborbital vehicle begins service. “We will be able to have tens, if not low hundreds of flights [suborbitally] to prove out that flight heritage before putting people in orbit,” Brett Alexander, director of business development and strategy, said at a conference on human spaceflight organized by the US Naval Institute and held at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, earlier this month.

Blue Origin, of course, has also been locked in a controversy with SpaceX over their competing bids to lease Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A; Blue Origin has proposed a multi-user commercial facility on the former shuttle launch pad while SpaceX originally sought an exclusive use agreement. SpaceX’s Elon Musk was openly skeptical of Blue Origin’s ability to use the launch pad any time in the next five years, telling Space News that “we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct” of the pad than Blue Origin showing up with an orbital spacecraft to launch in the next five years.

However, Blue Origin has famously also taken the long view, not surprising for a company with the motto “Gradatim Ferociter” (roughly translated as “step by step, with ferocity”). Other than the $25.7 million it received from NASA, Alexander said the rest of the company’s funding has come from Bezos, accounting for “well more than 90 percent” of the company’s total investment so far (suggesting a total investment of well more than $250 million), and that this would continue for the foreseeable future.

“Fundamentally, we are on a journey that is about changing spaceflight from being dangerous and expensive into something that’s accessible to a broader sector of humanity,” Alexander said. “We view it as a long-term endeavor, something that’s 20, 30, 40 years in the making.”

And for the secrecy? “I think the reality is that we’re just very quiet,” Alexander said. “We like to talk about things after we’ve done them, and not before that, and hopefully you’ll be hearing a lot from us in the future.”