Jim Cantrell, CEO and co-founder, Phantom Space joins Cheddar News. 

SpaceX and NASA Launch Crew-5 Mission 

and joining us now to discuss this is Jim Cantrell Ceo and co founder at phantom space. Jim thanks so much for joining us this morning and welcome. This is such a historic moment. What was your reaction to this? Yeah, it's always a great thing to see our astronauts launching. That's sort of the lifeblood of our human exploration program and I in particular take great pleasure seeing it launch on a SpaceX rocket. That's something that was all with 20 years ago. So to see this first all woman crew launching is something that's really, really special. This is yet another milestone that shows that space is becoming commonplace. Now this mission is set to last six months. Can you walk us through what they'll be looking to accomplish at the International Space Station? So the space station has become a research vessel in space if you will. And each one of these astronauts will have their own particular research to conduct and they'll be doing that. Uh, you know, on a fairly busy schedule. So one of the things the astronauts complain about is not having a lot of time when they're up there to uh, you know, gaze at the stars are back at the earth mostly. So, so, you know, the Nasa and their various space agencies have assigned them a lot of duties. Now, Crew five marked the first time a Russian cosmonaut did fly in an american made vehicle since the space shuttle program. Given everything that's happening in Ukraine as well as a looming deadline uh, that will cancel the joint member management of the international space station. What does this tell us about Nasa and the Russian relationship here? Well, as you may recall after Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a different head of Roskosmos which is the Russian space agency where goes in and he made a lot of inflammatory comments about, you know, americans not being able to launch their their stuff and we'd have to write our broomsticks into space. He's since been replaced very quietly and the new leader has been very quiet himself since then. So I think this shows that there's a sense of normalcy that's going on behind the scenes and that gives me a little bit of hope that maybe uh this whole thing with Ukraine will be over sooner rather than later when you start to see scientific cooperation continuing like this. Now later on today, Space X teams are preparing for the third launch of the week with Falcon nine. Can you give us a preview of what this mission is all about? Yeah, Falcon Nine's the heaviest vehicle the SpaceX is currently flying. They have Starship which is bigger that they have not yet flown to space and Falcon Nine will be launching from from from the Cape Kennedy and it will have a intel set spacecraft on it, which is basically commercial communication. So a lot of, a lot of telephone service and other data relays happened through that. So this is something that is really what this vehicle is designed for now, since 2020 SpaceX has launched six crews under a multibillion dollar contract with Nasa. What does that contract include? And why was it so sought after by both parties? Well, it's, it's an older contract back when Mike Griffin was the administrator. Gosh, it's got to be well over 15 years ago. Uh, you know, we had a Nasa program to do essentially the same thing as what the Falcon nine and Dragon capsule is doing. And the commercial guys actually got it done faster and cheaper and so it's been going on uh, you know, for quite some time and only recently been launching the astronauts. But you know, it's, it's the amount of money that it took to develop. This is about 50 times less than what the government spent. So it's been a great deal for the taxpayer. Absolutely. Jim, thank you so much for joining us this morning and for your insight there. That's Jim Cantrell Ceo and co founder at phantom Space