Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Lunar Rovers with Astrolab CEO Jaret Matthews 6/6/24

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

As SpaceX’s Starship continues its development, some companies are preparing for the radical change it will bring to the space economy. Astrolab, a startup focused on building lunar rovers, was founded by former SpaceX employee Jaret Matthews to meet that need. The company was recently selected by NASA to design lunar terrain vehicles with the hopes of making the rovers Artemis astronauts will use to drive around the moon as soon as 2030. Morgan Brennan sits down with Astrolab CEO Jaret Matthews to discuss the contracts, a Starship economy, and the startup’s plans for its first mission that will launch as soon as 2026.

As development of SpaceX's mega rocket system Starship progresses, some companies are preparing for the future it will bring. I think our rover will be the first large-scale one on the surface, and it's the scale of an SUV. The whole starting premise of the company was to build the biggest thing we could pass through the Starship door to really maximize the capability that you can get out of these systems. Jarrett Matthews started Astrolab in 2020 after working at SpaceX on the Dragon

program and then Starship. Venturi Astrolab, as it's formally called, is building rovers for the moon. So Flex is really designed to handle the first problem first, which is the last mile problem. So if you have, you know, one of these landers like Starship landing on the moon with 100 tons of cargo, Flex is designed to take that cargo out of the lander, get it delivered the last mile, get it connected, set up, maintained, etc. But it's also designed to, and we're working on, the infrastructure to ultimately power the lunar economy. The startup was recently selected by NASA, one of three companies tasked with designing the lunar terrain vehicle. The LTV competition will result in a single company making the rover Artemis astronauts will use to drive around the moon's southern polar region, starting as soon as 2030. But Astrolab has plans to go sooner.

Its first mission, a fully robotic one, is targeting 2026. And its flexible logistics and exploration rover, Flex, and its commercial payloads will travel there via Starship. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Jared Matthews, Astrolab founder and CEO. Jared, it's so good to have you on Manifest Space. Joining me now, Jared Matthews, Astrolab founder and CEO. Jared, it's so good to have you on Manifest Space. Welcome. Thank you.

I'm really excited to talk to you. I just want to start at the beginning, maybe just a little bit on what Astrolab is and how you're thinking about the space economy. Sure, yeah. Astrolab is a startup. We're based in Hawthorne, California. And we were founded in early 2020. Basically inspired by the kind of

coming era of large lunar access. And so, you know, you have companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin working on really big landers to go to the moon, and they're being supported by NASA in those efforts. And we're building a platform, a rover, that is going to be a part of that future to unload the tens or hundreds of tons of cargo that these landers are going to bring to the surface. And our rover, we hope, will be ultimately the catalyst for the lunar economy. I want to get into the rover piece of this too, especially since recently you awarded a contract to work on that rover for NASA or with NASA. But first, just because you have quite the background, you were at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, you were at SpaceX. Speaking of landing systems, you worked on Starship, I believe, as well. So I guess just walk me through your experience and the moment that got you to, okay, it's time to start this

company. Sure. So when I was just graduating high school, that summer NASA landed the very first rover on Mars, the little Sojourner, you know, it was the size of a shoebox. And that was really the inspiration for my career. And so I ended up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ended up working on several of the Mars rover programs myself, like Spirit and Opportunity and Curiosity, and then transitioned over to SpaceX to work on the Dragon program, building all the spacecraft mechanisms for that program. And I was personally responsible for the docking system that it uses to dock to ISS.

And once that started flying, I did start working on Starship. And I quickly realized that if Starship ultimately is operational, it's really going to change the whole approach to planetary exploration and the scale at which you can do things. You know, Starship is able to put 100 tons on the moon and establishing industry on the moon, and decided to head out and start Astrolab to build what I think is the kind of next logical piece of equipment in that future, which is our Flex rover, the flexible logistics and exploration rover, which is designed to be the largest, most capable, most versatile rover that the world's ever seen. Do you think we'd be having this conversation? Do you think you would have gone out and started this company at this point in time if it wasn't for what SpaceX has enabled with Starship and

even just the access to space prior to that? No, this is definitely a unique time in history where, you know, you not only have SpaceX working on a huge lander, you also have Blue Origin. And you have essentially some of the richest individuals on earth, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, backing these efforts with billions of dollars on their side, matched by billions of dollars of NASA funding to develop these capabilities. And it's really like we're gaining access to a new continent here with these capabilities. The moon has a surface area slightly larger than Africa. So that's the way I like to think about it

is that we're standing on the shore, the ships are getting built in the harbor here and we can see this kind of new land on the horizon that we're soon to have access to at scale. And so I see that the opportunity is truly continental in size, and the timing is now. I like that analogy. I haven't heard that, but I'm going to use that. I'm going to borrow it. So let's talk a little bit about FlexRover. What makes it different than the rovers we've seen traverse the lunar surface in the past, which I realize it's been a while now? Sure. So if you think about, well, there's kind of two examples that the public's probably familiar with. The Apollo lunar rover that the Apollo

astronauts used in the 70s. It was kind of like a golf cart. It didn't have a computer. It didn't even have a rechargeable battery. So it was designed to last three days on the surface or so and serve the needs of the astronauts. More modern rovers like the Mars rovers, Curiosity, Perseverance, et cetera, that I worked on. Those rovers are, you know, very capable, semi-autonomous, last for years. And we're building a platform that really kind of does both of those things, supports both human exploration on the moon, but also can be used, you know, robotically from Earth as well. And the key difference with Flex is it has a modular payload concept. So unlike the Mars rovers, which, you know, landed on Mars with all the equipment they're ever going to have, all the cameras and drills and instruments, Flex has a number of modular

interfaces that allows us to ultimately have dynamic utility. So the rover can be supporting, you know, one activity one day with a swap of equipment. It can do a totally different thing the next day and essentially evolve over time to support a wide array of customers and use cases. When does the first one reach the lunar surface? So we have signed a launch service agreement with SpaceX to go to the moon on Starship. Our launch window opens at the end of 2026. And so as soon as the end of 2026, we'll have our first commercial platform on the moon. That is a strictly robotic version of Flex.

So it will be operated from Earth. It will take with it up to one and a half tons of customer cargo. And that's our business model is to essentially provide last mile you know services to other companies on the lunar surface so that that rover is going to take a number of customers we've already announced several of them last year and serve their needs on that mission if we successfully continue

through the NASA program we'll send a second rover that's human certified, able to carry Artemis astronauts around. That one will land on in late 2028. Got it. What are some examples of customers and payloads that would require going to the surface of the moon? Well, what's really interesting is the diversity of customers we've already signed up and their business interests. So there's a couple of them or several of them in the resource utilization space. So people who are looking at the resources available on the moon, like helium-3, like in the lunar soil, you have a multitude of valuable things, titanium, aluminum. You can extract oxygen from the lunar soil. There's big deposits of water at the lunar south pole, which is really exciting.

There's another set of customers that are kind of in the construction space, companies looking at taking lunar dirt and making useful things out of it, like landing pads, habitation. There's some pure science companies, including one that's sending a greenhouse with us. And then there's some data services companies as well who want to do things like edge computing on the moon. It's really fascinating to me because what you're talking about is a first launch that, as you mentioned, is going to be commercial. It's going to be revenue generating. You've already got customers signing on. And I just

wonder how that speaks to sort of this new space era we're in and what that means in terms of a startup such as yours intersecting with the government intersecting with private sector. Yeah, so it's a continuation of what I think has been a great trend over the last 10 years. And credit to NASA for leaning into this, where they've structured these programs as public-private partnerships that allow companies to provide commercial services to customers. And also, NASA supports the development and then ultimately becomes a customer, kind of the anchor customer for some of these services. That's successfully worked on a number of programs now, you know, notably, the program I worked on most at SpaceX was commercial crew, where you have, you know, the now the crew dragon spacecraft, which ferries astronauts,

you know, NASA astronauts to the space station regularly. But that same, you know, that same platform, SpaceX can sell seats to any and anyone. And you've seen, you know, private individuals like Jared Isaacman go to space on Dragon now. And the benefit to NASA is that you have, you know, a higher flight cadence. So the team is sharper. the production line stays open, and NASA's not carrying the full financial burden of keeping a vehicle like that operational. And so credit to them that they recognized about 10 years ago

that they wanted to create a future in which they become one of many customers for these services, and they've structured their programs to encourage that future. And I think it's great because you have, you know, that sets up a scenario where you can, you know, bring in private capital to support these programs, and ultimately save the taxpayers money and provide them with a better service. Are you bringing in private capital? Yes. So most of our progress to date has been with venture funding. And we just won this big NASA contract.

So that's bringing in a good amount of revenue over the next 12 months as well. Got it. What do you what is your what is your vision here in terms of the fleet of rovers that we see? I mean, you and I met. I actually had to spend time with one of your prototypes. But how quickly can you build them? How many do you foresee being needed on the lunar surface?

And perhaps just as importantly, at what point do we start to see some of these experiments and these payloads make their way back to Earth? Yeah, so FLEX is really the first step on a bigger, a grander vision for us. You know, we ultimately, like I said, want to be a catalyst for the lunar economy. And I think what is going to make that future possible is actually the establishment of the core infrastructure at the lunar South Pole to support industry. So things like power and communications are going to be kind of the first necessary pieces of infrastructure to ultimately enable energy intensive things like resource extraction and processing. So FLEX is really designed to handle the first problem first, which is the last mile problem.

So if you have, you know, one of these landers like Starship landing on the moon with 100 tons of cargo, Flex is designed to take that cargo out of the lander, get it delivered the last mile, get it connected, set up, maintained, etc. But it's also designed to, and we're working on the infrastructure to ultimately power the lunar economy. So deriving that technology from subsystems we're already making on the rover, like battery packs, power conditioning, compute, you know, solar cells, etc., we'll establish essentially a power grid, you know. so the idea is to, to really go from essentially being the UPS or FedEx of the moon, to transition to, you know, use the rover to set up this infrastructure to be the, you know, PG&E or AT&T of the lunar South Pole and provide the foundational infrastructure required to support the lunar economy.

Yeah, so you're, so you're really in the business of lunar infrastructure. I want to go back to, because you just mentioned it, with battery packs. We saw it with intuitive machines when that lander reached the surface of the moon earlier this year. It's the fact that it can be very difficult conditions, very, very cold temperatures. You don't have sun for a period of days. How do you keep your rovers? And then I guess longer term, when we do talk about some of this infrastructure, some of this power grid, how are you thinking about what's going to enable that? Is it going to require nuclear? Is it something else?

No, we think it can all be done with battery and solar. So we, on our Rover, we have a tremendous amount of energy storage, you know, approaching the same amount that you would have in a Model 3 Tesla. And so it's lithium ion battery packs. You need a lot of them to survive the lunar night, as you alluded to. The moon, you know, goes through periods of prolonged darkness where you're not collecting

solar energy. So during those times, the systems have to hibernate, essentially, you know, hunker down to survive the night, use the onboard energy to keep things above their survival temperature, and then carry on with operating once the sun's back up. So it's our position that you don't necessarily need a lot of new technology. It's more of an engineering problem to piece it all together, you know, make it reliable, and ultimately, you know, enable this future. So how long does it take for this future, for this full future to be fleshed out? I have so many conversations about this lunar economy, how crucial government involvement and

spending is to the realization of it right now. But at what point do we see that, I guess, truly realized and also become self-sustaining? That's a great question. You know, I think we're working on the right things right now, right? You first have to establish the long haul transportation network. So, you know, the Starship flight cadence is picking up and, you know, I'm hopeful they're going to start landing on the moon in the next couple of years. And, you know, the I think it'll be very quickly where the kind of the cadence ramps up, as we've seen with the Falcon program. You know, they're going to do 150 or so launches this year, which is incredible. And Starship should ultimately achieve an even faster turnaround. So once that long haul transportation network is set up, you know,

that's going to drive prices down in terms of access and the scale of equipment you can bring. And that is ultimately going to support the development of industry. So I think in that, you know, certainly by the end of this decade, early part of the next decade, you'll see, you know, real industry happening on the lunar surface. And then it'll, I think it'll grow exponentially from there. What are you most excited about in the near term with Astrolab? What should we be watching for in terms of next milestones? So we're very excited to have been selected for this, this NASA program. We're humbled. You know, we're now officially a part of the Artemis program, campaign. And, you know, it's an honor to have that responsibility to ultimately carry NASA astronauts around.

We have a lot of work ahead of us, of course. So we're in the first phase of that program, which is actually still a competition because there's two other companies in this phase. And NASA will down select next year. So we're going to work hard on that. We have a lot of exciting hardware milestones coming up this year. A lot of us came from SpaceX, and we have a hardware-rich,

fast iteration kind of ethos that we operate to. And so we like to build things, take them out to the real world, and test them out and then iterate quickly. So we'll have a lot of that going on this year, both with our batteries, our tires, the rover. We're going to go out to the desert a number of times over the next 12 months. So there's all kinds of exciting activities over this period. And yeah, like I said, we're just really honored and excited to be working with NASA. Okay, final question for you then.

If you end up with your first rover prototype on the surface of the moon as soon as the end of next year, would that make this the first one, the first of these commercial rovers? There will be the first one of this scale. So there are a number of companies working on smaller rovers? There are, there'll be the first one of this scale. So there are a number of companies working on smaller rovers. So you're going to see some of those likely land on the smaller Eclipse landers missions coming up over the next 24 months or so. But yes, I think our rover will be the first large scale one on the surface. And it's the scale of an SUV. The whole starting premise of the company was to build the biggest thing we could pass through the Starship door to really maximize the capability that you can get out of these systems. So it will certainly be the largest

and most capable to have ever gone to the moon. And it'll be the first. Yeah. Jarrett Matthews of Astrolab, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.