Closing Bell - Manifest Space: The First-Ever Private Moon Landing with Astrobotic Technology CEO John Thornton 1/4/24

Episode Date: January 4, 2024

The upcoming liftoff of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket is historic for a number of reasons: the first flight of the megarocket will also carry a payload aiming for the first-ever private moon landing. The Peregrine lunar lander was manufactured by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based robotics company founded in 2007 by Carnegie Mellon scientists. Aiming to be the “Moon company and more,” Astrobotic’s first mission will carry 20 payloads, including 5 from NASA’S Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. On this episode, Morgan Brennan sits down with Astrobotic Technology CEO John Thornton ahead of the historic launch.

When United Launch Alliance's new rocket, the Vulcan Centaur, makes its maiden flight, it will mark a milestone not only for the launch industry, but for America's moon ambitions as well. The Vulcan will carry to space the Peregrine, a robotic lunar lander built, owned, and operated by Astrobotic, a space startup born out of Carnegie Mellon University. If all goes according to plan, Astrobotic could become the first company ever to successfully put a privately owned lander on the moon. Undertaking this has been 16 years in the making, says CEO John Thornton,

in a paradigm shift that's also economic. Our first mission will fly and land at the surface of the moon for on order of $100 million. We don't go to specifics on how much we've actually generated from the customers, but it gives you just a sense of scale. Typically, missions like this would be in the hundreds of millions, multi hundreds of millions. So we're really breaking the paradigm on that. That's affording much more affordable and routine access for our nation's scientists. So typically, if you're a scientist, maybe you get one shot in your long tenured career

to take a mission of science up to someplace in space. But with this approach, and if you're going to have two to maybe three landers landing every year on the surface of the moon, bringing these packages, you can go back to the moon again and again with your science and update it and go to different locations. And that's just game changing for how we've approached space for decades.

Liftoff is scheduled for as soon as Monday morning. Peregrine Mission 1 will carry payloads for seven countries and some commercial customers, including the cremains of a few Star Trek luminaries. The mission also represents a contract with NASA for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, CLPS, program, a public-private partnership to send cargo and conduct research in preparation for the return of Americans to the lunar surface later in the decade. Peregrine will spend weeks orbiting the moon before attempting to touch down on February 23rd in a carefully choreographed landing. Once on the surface, it will carry out the specific tasks of its various payloads, collecting and sending data back to Earth. On this episode, Thornton discusses the upcoming mission

and what's hinging on it for the quote-unquote Moon Company. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Well, John Thornton of Astrobotic, thank you so much for joining me. Glad to be here. You are on the cusp of a major milestone for Astrobotic. Walk me through, walk me through this first mission of a robotic lunar lander that the company's been working on for years now. Yes, 16 years in the making. We're finally here on the precipice of launch just a couple days away. It's going to be potentially the first commercial mission to go back to the surface of the moon. First mission from U.S. soil in nearly 50 years. Very, very

exciting. A new beginning of a new commercial era on the surface. This will be the beginnings of routine regular access. This mission is going to carry six new nations to the era on the surface. This will be the beginnings of routine regular access. This mission is going to carry six new nations to the surface of the moon. It's really going to open things up and make a whole new world possible for access and deliveries to the surface. And depending on the timing and if everything goes according to plan, your company will be the first commercial lunar lander ever on the surface of the moon. Is that right? It's quite possible. Depends on launches from our competitors and exactly how the timing is going to play out, but it's quite possible. We're neck and neck right now with one of our competitors. Yeah, that competitor being intuitive machines, and we've seen launch timing

shift here and there, or I guess they'll get delayed for both for a variety of reasons. So how is this going to play out? Assuming liftoff happens Monday morning as anticipated, everything goes the way it's planned to go, what are the next steps? That's right. We have a few-day launch window starting January 8th. If all goes well, we will be blasted towards the moon. The launch vehicle will deliver us to a trajectory called translunar injection,

which is basically being shot towards the moon, and then it's our lander's job the rest of the moon. The launch vehicle will deliver us to a trajectory called translunar injection, which is basically being shot towards the moon. And then it's our lander's job the rest of the way. So we're going to do trajectory correction maneuvers on the way out. We're going to take several days to get there and then a few weeks in lunar orbit itself. And the reason for the long lunar orbit is we're actually waiting for the local sunrise at our landing location. So we're actually going to wait there until February 23rd. And right then that day is local sunrise at the location we intend to operate at. And that's when we start our landing descent. It's about a one hour operation from sending the command to land to actual touchdown. That is going to be the ultimate nail biting, terror, thrill, excitement, all at once experience. We're going to be operating ultimate nail-biting, terror, thrill, excitement, all-at-once experience.

We're going to be operating that all from Pittsburgh in mission control at our headquarters. And then once we successfully soft touchdown and down on the surface of the moon, that is when our surface operations begin. We're going to establish communications, become a power and communication hub for our customers. We're going to have rovers dropping and driving off. We're going to have some payloads dropping down to the surface and lots of science instruments turning on. And everyone's going to be trying to scramble to get as much data as they can as quickly as they can before the sun sets in just 10 days.

Because at that time, we anticipate that we're going to have failures of the system because it just gets down to liquid nitrogen cold and stays there for two weeks. So that will be a flurry of activity, very different than a Mars mission for multi-years. This is going to be a flurry for 10 days and just to prove out as much as we possibly can and learn as much as we possibly can for the subsequent missions to come. You kind of already touched on it, but why is sunrise so important and what does that mean in terms of the sun cycles you see on this part of the moon? Yeah, the moon has 28 days to or 28 Earth days for every single lunar day.

So that means 14 days of light, 14 days of dark. When it's light, it's above boiling. It can get up to 120 degrees Celsius or about 250 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface. Once the sun sets, it gets down to liquid nitrogen, cold and stays that way. So it's down to minus 180 degrees C and it stays that way. And it's really, really challenging to survive that. Most battery chemistries will fail in that environment. And even just small things like a solder joint could break with that extreme temperature variation. So it's very difficult to survive the night with the architecture that we have today. We are working on technology to survive that into the future and there are other ways to do it. Typically you need government resources to get that done because they use radioisotope materials to survive the night. That's difficult for

commercial. So for now this first mission we're just focusing on landing, focusing on getting as many payloads operational and get as much data as we can back and we're gonna learn a lot from that. And subsequent missions will continue to amp up the capability and future set. So you have 10 days to do all of this with some of those payloads. Then is the is the window here 10 days or for some of these payloads? Is it going to be much longer than that? It's 10 days just for all of the payloads.

And the reason for that is all of the payloads rely on our power and communication to operate. The communication back to Earth is very difficult from the moon and you need a lot of power and a big antenna. And all of our payloads are too small to carry their own versions of that. So we're actually going to use a local Wi-Fi network to send all of our payload data through our systems back to Earth with our special space antenna that can do bandwidth connection back to Earth and get all of that data down. Which is fascinating in and of itself because it's such a different business model than anything we've seen lunar-wise ever before. And that sort of gets to what you're doing with Astrobotic. The fact that this is a commercially built and owned, right, lunar lander. And then you're basically renting out your services for your hardware and for your technology to the government.

That's exactly it. We are a cargo delivery service. We're a power station. We are a communication provider. That is the nuts and bolts and really the business model for what we do. We've got 20 customers on board the first mission. Some are just using delivery. They just want to get there.

Others are using the full suite of other services with communication and power services. But ultimately, this is the beginnings of routine regular access to the moon. And this is what our nations and world scientists and explorers will use to discover more about the moon and find ways to use it in ways we've never had possible before. And really open the future of our whole solar system, because the moon really truly is a gateway to the rest of the solar system. And it's part of the CLPS program at NASA, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, how instrumental is a program like that to a company like Astrobotic being able to realize this vision? NASA's CLPS program is really, really critical. And I can't thank enough the agency. And I'm very lucky just taking my company hat off and putting my U.S. citizen hat on. We're very lucky as a nation to have NASA be as forward thinking as they are and risk tolerant as they are to take on a program like

this, to bet on commercial, to bet on industry, to be able to break the cost paradigm, to get back to the moon at a regular cadence at price points that have never been possible before. They have manifested 10-ish missions to go back to the surface of the moon with this model. It really is the beginning of a flurry of activity on the moon. And it's a new paradigm in that if not every mission is successful, that's okay, because there's a whole bunch of other missions right behind it. This is much more similar to SpaceX and other commercial launch providers than it is a big multi-billion dollar planetary mission. And I think that affords a new opportunity and it actually positions us really well on

an international stage for competing and maintaining our leading edge in space, simply because if we're doing commercial deliveries at this price point, there's no one else in the world that can keep up with us. What is this price point and how much and how much less or I guess more affordable, I should say, is it than any kind of historical precedent? Our first mission will fly and land at the surface of the moon for on order of one hundred million dollars. We don't we don't go to specifics on how much we've actually generated from the customers, but it gives you just a sense of scale. Typically, missions like this would be in the hundreds of millions, multi-hundreds of millions. So we're really breaking the paradigm on that. That's affording much more affordable and routine access for our nation's scientists. So typically,

if you're a scientist, maybe you get one shot in your long tenured career to take a mission of science up to someplace in space. But with this approach, and if you're going to have two to maybe three landers landing every year on the surface of the moon, bringing these packages, you can go back to the moon again and again with your science and update it and go to different locations. And that's just game-changing for how we've approached space for decades. So it's very, very, very exciting for the future. And I think it will also open up the possibility of using resources and building infrastructure on the moon.

That's really going to be our next leapfrog moment, is if we are able to use resources from the moon for in-space activities, say, even taking some material and 3D printing new parts or taking materials and creating rocket fuel, like using the water at the poles of the moon, you start to learn to live off the land. And if we can live off the land in space, that totally changes how we think about going to Mars and going to the moon and other destinations. And we're going to learn to do all of that on the surface of the moon. It's our nearest neighbor.

It's the place to get started. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. So I just want to go back to CLPS for a second. 10-ish missions. How many are you contracted to do with NASA? So we are contracted for two CLPS missions right now. The first one's about to fly in just a couple days. Our next mission flies later this year.

And it's a very large, very important mission. It's a NASA Viper rover that's going to be flying on the vehicle with us. It is a 450 kilogram vehicle that NASA, it's a rover that's going to be sent to the surface of the moon aboard our vehicle called Griffin. And that system is going to land at the end of this year. It's going to land at the poles of the moon and deliver that 450 kilogram rover. And it will drop and drive off into the distance and it will drill for water. This could be the first time that robotic activity can produce and look at the waters at the poles of the moon and understand the composition, quantity, and

most importantly, exactly how to potentially extract it for future uses on the moon. And if you can get water, of course, you can drink it, you can split it, you've got oxygen to breathe. But most importantly, you can split it and condense it and make rocket fuel. So you could produce rocket fuel at the poles of the moon. The moon could become a gas station for delivering things back and forth to the moon, to refueling spacecraft there to go deeper into the solar system maybe one day we could use that moon fuel to mine the mine the moon and bring resources back to earth it's uh it's truly game changing again if we think about those space resources and how to use them and if we can bring that into our economy our thinking it really can can open up and change

the way we think about earth and provide provide massive quantities of resources that are really unfathomably large. What does that mean for total addressable market? Can you even wrap your arms around that? It depends on what kind of timescale you're willing to think on. For the near term, it's going to be a lot of science and exploration, but long-term, if the resources really do open up, I mean, you're talking potentially all of the large-scale high price point commodities could potentially be sourced in space. And we're talking a long time, you know, 50, 100 plus years, but we're building the foundation for that now. I mean, I think of this as the Wright brother moments for the moon. We're building the foundation of routine regular access and opening up the possibility of new resources. And I think this is a bet that is very worth taking for our species.

This is how we're going to create sustaining life on the Earth is we're going to stop mining and messing it up here. We're going to use the resources from space and create the blue planet that we can all sustain and survive on and thrive on using in-space resources. Which is an argument and a concept we've been hearing in a business model. We've been hearing more and more about. In terms of the breakdown, I guess, near term, medium term, longer term for Astrobotic between some of these government missions and commercial missions. I mean, what would commercial missions look like? Do you already have some signed up? We actually do have some commercial missions on board our first mission itself. You can kind of

get a little bit of a sample of that. We've got a company from Japan sending a time capsule to the surface of the moon. It's a drink called Pocari Sweat. And it's a super popular drink in Japan and Asia. And they're sending a time capsule with hundreds of thousands of dreams from the children from Asia. And they actually have a powdered form of their drink inside as well to one day be mixed with moon water. And every one of the cans that are being sold here on Earth actually is a key to that time capsule. So the next generation is getting a key to the time capsule on the surface of the moon to one day open that up. For that brand, that's a great inspiration message and a great way to connect with their fans and consumers of the business. So I think we'll see those kinds of fan engagement and people engagement activities in the moon in

the near future. Over time, I think the big businesses are going to be in an infrastructure that is communications from the surface and back and forth from the surface of the moon and power on the surface the moon that's one in particular that astrobotic has its eyes on we have a program and an architecture that we call lunagrid to build a sustaining power grid at the poles of the moon that can survive the night, that can survive multi-days or multi-years on the surface of the moon and can recharge astronauts, recharge the suits, recharge the tools, recharge whatever you need, rovers. We're going to need that kind of infrastructure for long-term operations on the moon. And I think that's the next big business opportunity for the moon. Is that something you're already developing in addition to Lunar Landers?

It is. It is. It only makes sense for us to be doing that because we're already in the cargo game. The next step is, okay, what do we do next? And that's the infrastructure. So we actually have two contracts right now to build up a full-scale version of the lunar grid architecture and test it here terrestrially. And we're pushing NASA and advocating to others as much as we can that we need to be setting up a demonstration of this at full scale on the surface of the moon. So we're working on it right now. That's very cool. Now, you mentioned the 16 years in the making. Astrobotic was essentially born out of what? The science labs of Carnegie Mellon? I guess, give me the origin story.

Yeah, 16 years ago, we were pursuing, we got started pursuing the Google Interact Prize. I was an undergrad coming out of school. I was supposed to go out into industry, actually to go work for Boeing, but I got an opportunity to meet a professor, Brad Whitaker, who was starting this thing up. And we got things going and had a few hot years. And then we crashed. And iterate that a few times, we almost went under multiple times through the course. About 10 years ago, I stepped into the helm to steer the ship. We were able to steady it and grow it on technology contracts. And then over time, make some of the first sales of commercial payloads to go back to the surface of the moon. And then over time, eventually, NASA and the US government got in the game with clips. And that was really our breakout point.

We went from 15 people in about early 2019 to now 250 people today in 2023. So just a meteoric rise of growth and activity. So it's been quite a ride. But truly the hardest part along the way has been convincing people that it's possible. The idea that a small startup in Pittsburgh, of all places in this country, can start a business to go back to the surface of the moon and actually make money doing it. That's a tough notion. And we got a lot of laughs along the way and people didn't believe in us. But there were a small group, just enough that believed in us along the way to get us to where we are today. Have you been raising capital from the VC community and others? I guess, what is your timeline for that? What's your timeline for going public? Would you want to go

public? We're keeping our options open on that. In our early days, we were seeking capital. Those were a lot of the conversations were the folks that were laughing at us. I remember going to some pitch fests and literally the judges were laughing at me. So it's taken a while. I think the investment community has now recognized that, yes, this really is an investable business and opportunity. At this point, we are we're open to conversations. We're not actively raising a round right now, but we're open to seeing where things go. We're right. We're 80 percent plus closely held owned. So people at the company own that. So we really are a product of our own sweat equity. And I think that's an unusual situation to be in. And we're very proud of that. So we're going to be careful about who we partner with into the future and what our next path is from here.

Okay. So you have this first launch, assuming all goes according to plan, you land your first lander on the surface of the moon. You've got another one in the works for later this year. And then behind that business, infrastructure, lunar infrastructure, longer term, what is the vision for this company? Where do you see this going? Or is it really, I don't know if this is a pun or not, but like sky's the limit because this is such a new economy or a new concept. Well, we think about ourselves as the moon company. We are delivering things to the surface of the moon. We've got rovers that can drive across it. We're building the infrastructure

for the moon. And if we can operate and build sustaining infrastructure on the moon, then why not the next planet in our solar system? Why not the next deep space destination? We could potentially start disrupting science missions that are done at a fairly high price point. Maybe commercial can take those opportunities on with this same approach. So I think there's a lot left for Astrobotic to continue to grow into. And we also want to grow our DOD portfolio and create a nice balanced approach for space and build on our space robotics talents and capabilities in the company and create a long, sustaining business for space and continue to grow aggressively. So we're just 250 space nerds and super fans excited to be a part of this big industry and doing something big like a moon landing. And we just want to keep doing that. We're having a blast and looking forward to the next opportunities. That's wonderful. Just real quickly, the DOD piece of this with

robotics, is that about the technologies or is there a lunar aspect, a national security aspect to the moon as well? I'll leave that to the DOD to address in terms of their interests there, but generally space robotics is a very interesting opportunity to apply for satellite to satellite operations. I think in general NASA is primarily interested from the U.S. government to go back to the moon. Okay, great. Well, we're looking forward to liftoff and congratulations on reaching this milestone 16 years in the making. Truly appreciate the time, John Thornton of Astrobotic. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. 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 Brecht.