Main Engine Cut Off - T+106: Q&A

Episode Date: January 1, 2019

This month I tackle questions on future space architectures, companies working in space right now, and finish with a 2018 Top 10 ranking. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, and six anonymous—and 208 other supporters on Patreon. Episode T+82: Jon Goff, Altius Space Machines - Main Engine Cut Off Neumann Space - Connecting humanity to the stars Neumann Space Exec on a New Potential Use for Orbital Debris - Via Satellite Tethers Unlimited Home Page Vulcan-Centaur Performance Figures Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello, hello, happy new year from Philadelphia, where you can probably hear the faint sounds of helicopters as the mummers are outside mumming. If you're not from Philadelphia, maybe don't look it up. But this has been Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, and we've got a Q&A episode here today with some questions on future space architectures, some companies working in space right now, and a fun 2018 wrap-up. So let's dive in. We'll start here with a question from Stan. While there are multiple constellations proposed, one of SpaceX's Starlink proposals is for 4,400 satellites orbiting at altitudes of 1,100 to 1,300 kilometers. This appears safely away from space station altitude about 400 kilometers up during operation,

but ultimately each and every one of these satellites will need to navigate through the space station's vicinity on its way down. will need to navigate through the space station's vicinity on its way down. What are the risk mitigation strategies? What will be the overall space station risk growth due to adding hundreds, if not a thousand, of such encounters a year? Well, first up, the altitude that you're talking about there, once you get above a thousand kilometers, the natural orbital decay time is something on the order of like a century once you're up that high.

So that's the height at which something's just going to stay up there. And if you were to put something there today, it would be up there much longer than the ISS would. Uh, so that's one thing. Now we don't know exactly how quickly they're going to be turning over some of these satellites. So they could be de-orbiting and re-orbiting satellites. Um, you know, I had a good clip, but, um, re in reality, you know, it's these satellites are going to be launched up there and probably outlive the ISS. Where we're at now with the ISS is that we're funded through 2024, 2028, and Congress here in the U.S. is now talking up 2030. So we're probably here with the ISS for, you know, 15 to 20 years, which makes me a little sad as somebody who wants to see us

go out further than that. But that's kind of the reality right now is that we've probably got ISS around for a solid 20 years. So when you're thinking on that timeline, it's not as worrying. But when you do think about that, you know, far timeline, you also consider the fact that there probably will be other space stations. So it's not like once the ISS is away that this risk is gone. But in any event, these satellites, you know, like I said, they'll be up there a while if they're not deorbited specifically. And if they are deorbited specifically by a company, they're not going to linger very long in that ISS orbital range. So this would be something that goes into the calculation of when to do the deorbit burn, when to pull it down out of orbit to make sure you don't hit anything ISS or otherwise. There's a lot of other stuff, you know, in the 200 to 400 kilometer range that you don't want to

hit as well. But that kind of collision avoidance is something that goes into all of the navigation of a satellite like this as well. And when you're deorbiting, you're going to drop from the navigation of a satellite like this as well. And when you're deorbiting, you're going to drop from wherever you are to the atmosphere as quick as possible. So I don't think it's too much of a worry. There's obviously a worry when you put so much stuff up there, but I think we're a ways off from really having to be concerned of this. The bigger concern for me would be, instead of these satellites deorbiting and hitting the ISS is for debris. We really, at some point in the near future, need to start looking at debris removal and things like that. And we had John Goff from Altius Space Machines on the podcast earlier this year, and he had a lot

to say about debris removal. So go check that show out if you want to hear a little bit more about that. I think that will become a bigger issue than, you know, deorbiting constellations will in the meantime. Maybe a little bit of crossover there with when you have constellations of this size, it's going to generate more debris. But debris would be more of my concern than the specific placement of any given constellation. Question from Jason. With all the talk of Lunar Gateway and missions to Mars,

is anyone working on things to keep people in space long term, meaning artificial gravity, moon habitats, etc. So one of the most prominent programs for this right now is the NASA Next Step program that is currently in the works. NASA is working on some exploratory contracts with a whole host of companies from Bigelow, who's got the expandable habitats, to Sierra Nevada, who's going to use Dream Chaser and add a little bit onto it to make some sort of habitat. You've got a team of NanoRacks and SSL and Altius, as I just mentioned, working on a sort of wet workshop-ish inspired idea. So there's a whole bunch of different things that are going on within that program. They're looking more at habitats for something like the Lunar Gateway. On the artificial gravity front, there are a couple of very small centrifuges up on the

ISS right now to do research, but nobody's really, publicly anyway, doing research on habitat scale artificial gravity, which is one of the things that I would love to see come into fruition, especially when we're talking about missions to Mars. I feel like at some point, tethering and spinning up some artificial gravity will make sense, but nobody yet is working on something in that regard. But nobody yet is working on something in that regard. So right now where we're at is we've got a host of companies working on ideas for the in-space habitat portion of things. And then some of those concepts do have extensions down to some sort of surface, be it the moon or Mars.

Bigelow has always showed renderings of landing one of their habitats kind of on the side and standing that up, covering it with some lunar regolith, and then having that as your little habitat. Obviously, SpaceX has a bunch of these plans in the works for how their vehicles would play on the lunar surface and the Martian surface. So there's a bunch of disparate projects going on right now. But that's going to be only as far as we need it for any given program. You're not really going to push way ahead with any of these concepts before you have any idea that somebody would use these sort of habitats or have the funding to be able to develop these habitats, pay for them, etc. So right now we're still very exploratory. But over the next five years, if we are going to be heading to the moon, this is something that we're going to get very serious about.

On a similar thread, Daniel asks, We have a lot of grand concepts about what spaceflight should look like in 50 years and are developing the tools to achieve that right now, from lunar facilities to ISRU, wet workshops, reusability, etc. I'm worried NASA and Congress will be too reserved or cautious to make the leap to adopting these as the new normal. I'm worried NASA and Congress will be too reserved or cautious to make the leap to adopting these as a new normal. Do you see any of these technologies as being a hard sell for real use instead of just experimenting and building prototypes? All right. Well, there's a ton to that question there from Daniel. And this is a U.S.-focused kind of policy budget question.

But I think what I'll say here applies wider than that. So first up, I think a good example for this kind of question would be the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program that's just announced partnerships, and we should see them starting to build and fly hardware over the next handful of years. I think that's a good example to talk about with this, because it gets at two sides of the problem of developing space technology. One is the budgetary side of things, and then the other is the technological side of things. On the budget side of things, the U.S. specifically right now is in a really, really weird spot for budgets and not just space budgets, but budgets overall. Right now we're in this government shutdown where we're, you know, I'm not going to get

too deep into it, but we're in this weird government shutdown that is really a stalemate of all stalemates. And I think it points to some larger issues with the way that our government is funding things right now. And then creeping in the background is the fact, I think I brought this up on a recent show, that the debt maintenance payments on the US national debt is creeping up the list of the biggest budget line items in the country. So we're hitting a point when I think we're going to get into some really bad budget issues, budget troubles that will at some point affect space. And I don't think we can go

in expecting that space is going to get some windfall of funding in the next 10, 20 years when there's all these other issues that are getting more and more problematic. So I would be concerned if you're looking at like, oh, we need this huge piece of funding to do a Mars program and that's what we need to do right now, I don't have a lot of hope for that right now, given the way that the federal government funding seems to be headed. So in that environment, what you want to do, if you're interested in these kind of programs, is see if there can be smaller line items that still give you a good return. And I think commercial lunar payload services is probably the most promising of these right now because what it intends to do is, you know, the hot topic there is the public-private partnerships

where the government puts up some money, the private sector puts up some money, and they fly missions together. The idea there is that it requires less government money to actually incentivize these companies to do some work, and the companies can rely on the government as being an anchor tenant or an anchor client when they're in their early days. So it's a good partnership there. It keeps those budget line items down smaller to something that actually can get through a budget process, which is good. a budget process, which is good. But the other thing that it does is, since it's breaking things down into smaller flights, specifically with this commercial payload services program, there are going to be small landers that are flying more frequently. So you're breaking one single large

mission, like Resource Prospector, into these smaller missions and flying them more frequently to the moon. And that really helps the technology development cycle, both from the payload side, but also from the vehicle side. You know, the reason that SpaceX was able to start landing boosters so successfully so quickly was because they have a really high flight rate. So they get a lot of practice because they're flying so frequently. And, you know, when you fly only once in a while, you don't get as much experience and as many times to try and fail and fix things as you do when you have a high flight rate.

So I'm encouraged by the fact that we're, we're seeing this program come to fruition. That is a small budget line item that increases flight rate. And that should, you know, provide us ample opportunity to take different technologies to the lunar surface that could start looking at resource extraction and resource prospecting. And you start breaking up the things that you need to learn, the things that you need to develop into these smaller flights that are less budget intensive and give you a quicker return cycle than you would if you spent, you know, five, 10 years working on some major one grand project that, you know,

goes and maybe has some trouble and you don't achieve everything that you do. And then you're kind of, uh, you're kind of in a bad spot because that was the one, you know, you put all your eggs in one basket. Um, so I feel like this is a good example of a program that is the future of these types of missions. And back to your original question of, do you see, uh, any, any, uh, technologies that are being going to be a hard sell? I think given this kind of new way of working where you're breaking things down into smaller chunks, you do get more evolutionary progress rather than revolutionary progress. So you're going to make small changes over time.

And that's going to do, in the minds of people watching this space, you're going to chip away at these things so that once you finally have to sign off on something, it's not going to be a hard sell because you've grown increasingly comfortable with a different technology. Say something like resource prospecting, resource harvesting. Through the commercial lunar service, we should see a handful of missions that started working out each different component of what is needed there to actually fund a full mission to go do a huge demonstration of let's land, grab some resources, turn it into these resources, and kind of prove out that life cycle. You're going to chip away at that over time,

so it doesn't have to be one big hard sell. It can be this slow progress, which I think, given the land we're in with NASA, Congress, etc., that is the way that we're going to be needing to look in the next few years. Now, you can contrast that, as we're wont to do, with somebody like SpaceX or Blue Origin, who has a lot of funding and a very clear roadmap that can make huge leaps in a very short amount of times. But those are just different constraints that you're working in in these different environments.

So, you know, politically, we're in a weird spot, but I think the commercial lunar payload services program is a really good model, and I have a lot of hope for it. And I'm going to pin a lot of my hope over the next couple of years on that program. Ben from Canberra in Australia, the capital city down there, sent in a question. Hey, I wanted to know your thoughts on a company that claims to have built an ion thruster called the Newman Drive, which claims an ISP of 14,690 seconds.

I am a bit skeptical of their claims. As you can probably hear from my little chuckle, I am as well. I think extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is a good mantra that applies here. I've been looking into this company a little bit, and they have very sporadic updates. They are not very frequently updated, so it's kind of hard to tell what's going on behind the scenes there. I don't know enough about the science behind what they're working on. They seem to have an incredibly small team, which already gives me pause for something as big as this. There is an article in Satellite Today from August 2017

that says that they are working on some sort of thruster to fly to the ISS in February 2019, where it will conduct on-orbit testing atop an Airbus defense and space module. The team expects to bring the product to market between 2020 and 2022, initially offering propulsion

for small satellites in the 100- 250 kilogram range. So, you know, we'll see how that turns out. I don't know what mission that's slated for. I couldn't really find a whole lot on that. I'll be interested to see if that's still accurate, if this was ever accurate. I don't know. In terms of the ISP there, 14,000 seconds. Dawn's engine, the NSTAR engine, that had an ISP that was just about 3,000 seconds. The new generation of that engine, which is what would fly on the Caesar mission, go Team Dragonfly, although Caesar would use one of these engines, that would have an ISP of a little over 4,000 seconds. of a little over 4,000 seconds. The VASIMIR engine that's in development down in Houston that NASA's working with, see how that turns out. I think that's got an ISP that starts out around 5,000 seconds. They have concepts that go way higher than that. That's just to give you a little idea. This is like magnitude above what these others are working on. Now, whatever the

case, maybe this turns out as a really good technology. They fly something in the ISS and it actually, you know, the theory holds. I don't know what that changes for us right now. This is kind of my take on any like newfangled propulsion, even nuclear engines and things like that. I like to see these projects in development, but I don't get super worked up about them because I don't think where we're at now is contingent upon the development of a brand new, incredibly efficient in-space propulsion. I don't think any of the big problems that we're facing over the next handful of years in space are in-space propulsion. They are bigger things like actual definition of missions

and funding. The actual launch sector is something that I find very important, as you can tell the way I focus the podcast. I think the changes there with reusability are incredibly more impactful than a change in space propulsion would be, given where we're at now. Long term, you know, long term, yes, I think in space propulsion is something that is going to need work. But long term, I'm also, you know, I also think that something like a lunar gateway would be very useful. Right now might be the wrong choice for where to spend your time and money and energy. But in the long term, we're going to need it. So you always want to have people working on these kind of things. But I

don't get super into this stuff because I don't think it changes anything imminently in the industry right now. And I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that we need to tackle before we do something like this. I think refueling on orbit and using that as an architecture piece is going to drive a lot more change than this incredibly efficient in-space propulsion. I think a fully reusable vehicle would drive a lot more change than something more efficient in space propulsion. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that I think we should focus on first. Not to say don't work on advanced concepts. Just to say, if I had to put my money somewhere today, I would be working on some of these more fundamental problems first to get solved, because I think they change a lot more in the industry than the further out problems, at least given where we are now.

Andrew asks a short one, do you have any sense of what Tethers Unlimited has been up to recently? short one. Do you have any sense of what Tethers Unlimited has been up to recently? Tethers has seemed to have a very, very busy year, very productive year. NASA selected their Hydro-C thruster for a mission in early 2019. And they just flew the refabricator up to the ISS. This is the thing that's going to take plastics, turn them back into printable filament, and be able to 3D print new materials or new, you know, tools or whatever on the space station. I think that one is going to be a pretty fantastic mission to follow. I think that has big impacts in, you know, like I was just saying, where there's certain low-hanging fruit that are going to mean more to the short term.

And I think that's one that could really play a big part in any of the future architectures that we're looking at here. That seems like a very fundamental piece of technology that for human missions we're going to want on any given spacecraft that we're sending out to the solar system. the other programs they have. They just have an expansive body of work and they seem to be constantly winning different contracts to work on different technology development. And I will just ominously foreshadow that I do have some plans for the early part of the year here. So stay tuned on the Tethers Unlimited front. We've got a couple other launch vehicle questions and then our 2018 wrap up question coming up in a bit. But I first want to say a very special thank you to all of you who support Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash miko.

There are 242 of you over there supporting this show every single month throughout all of 2018 and going into 2019. I could not be more thankful for your support. And this episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 34 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim, Dodd, The Everyday

Astronaut, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for making this episode possible. Thank you for keeping this thing independent, live, with you every single week, mostly. And don't forget over at Patreon, if you are a $3 a month or more supporter over there, you get access to a little special RSS feed. And every single weekend, I do a headline show running through all the stories of the week. So if you're looking for my take on any of the small stories or big stories that you didn't quite get to on the main podcast, it's probably over in headlines because I talk about literally every space news story that's worth talking about every single week. So go check that out if you want to help support the show and keep this thing going strong through 2019. Thank you so much for your support.

Johnny asks, for launch vehicle contracting, assuming the same launch vehicle, do the prices change for payloads of different mass? In other words, do the launch companies charge more for heavier payloads, less for lighter payloads, all other things equal? Or is there just one price for the rocket and the payload can have any mass as long as it doesn't surpass the maximum limit? Does this vary for different companies, SpaceX, ULA? Thanks. Well, launch pricing is just about the most obscure part of the industry. Unless you're on one of the teams that does the pricing or a client who bought a launch, it is very, very hard to figure out exactly what's going on behind the scenes here. what type of payload processing you need, whether that be different mating structures or interfaces or different handling requirements or different payload servicing requirements or like a late load kind of situation,

or you're paying for different flight to a different type of orbit, you're paying for if you're doing a very fancy orbit, something like a direct to geo insertion, you're paying a little extra for that kind of support for a coast phase and then an injection into geostationary orbit. You could be paying differently depending on the type of vehicle that you actually need to fly on. So if it's something for SpaceX that this is a flight that they can get the booster back, you might be paying a different price than if it's one that they have to fly expendably. And then in SpaceX's case, again, you're paying a different price if the vehicle has flown once

or is the first launch that it's ever done. So there are about a thousand different variables in any of this. And I think there's even some that are probably specific to different payloads. In government flights, you're paying for mission assurance because government agencies in general can't buy anything akin to launch insurance. So they're paying you for mission assurance because government agencies in general can't buy anything akin to launch insurance. So they're paying you for mission assurance because they can't take out an insurance policy on a mission, whereas a commercial company, they can take out insurance policy for launch and they pay you less because they've already paid insurance otherwise. So there's different requirements for different types of customers. So I think launch pricing is probably all custom kind of one-off and isn't quite yet at like airplane seat buying territory

for dedicated launch, for shared launch, for a ride share kind of situation. That pricing is going to be entirely different and probably closer to that airline type pricing, then it would be for a dedicated launch. Sorry if that was vague or not very, you know, pointed at your question, but that's kind of my feelings on the launch pricing industry right now is that it's vague and not very pointed. And that's kind of where we're at with those things because I'm somebody who does a podcast and doesn't buy satellite launches. Richard asks, talk a little bit about SpaceX launch manifest for Falcon 9. Are they running out of launches in the near future? You hear about them winning launch contracts, but not at the rate that they're launching rockets. And Richard is kind of right on

that, that right now where we're at with SpaceX, and this probably goes for, you know, several other launch providers out there. The manifest is, you know, full up for 2019, 2020. And we're right now kind of in the sales cycle phase for the launches that are occurring in 2021, 2022. We're starting to see announcements of missions, not just on Falcon 9, but of New Glenn and Ariane 6 and, you know, different vehicles that are going to be flying in the early 2020s. We're starting to see those first launch contracts come through right now. So this year, SpaceX won a couple of launch contracts from the Air Force, one specifically for Falcon Heavy, and that flight is slated for late 2020.

So we're just about hitting the sales cycle for the part of SpaceX's manifest that does seem a lot emptier than their current one does. They had a lot of sales work in the early years because, you know, guess what? They were starting up, so they needed to sell a whole bunch of launches, and they filled up their manifest through 2019, 2020, and now they're hitting that new sales cycle again. So this year, we should start hearing a lot of other launches, and if we don't, then I think it's time to get concerned, but right now I'm not too concerned because they have plenty of work to do. And that's not even counting any launches that would happen for their own missions like

Starlink or whatever else they want to fly on their own. So this year will be pivotal for the 2021 time frame. So let's keep an eye out as we go through the year for contracts in that time frame. timeframe. Bastian from Germany sent me a little link to a Vulcan Centaur performance little spreadsheet and then asked, upon seeing these performance numbers for Vulcan, I wondered if ULA might be looking into offering dual launches to GTO on Vulcan Centaur. What is your take on this idea? Could ULA use this to be competitive in the current and future, parentheses, post-New Glenn launch market? And as a sort of follow-up question, do we know if Vulcan can fly with any number from

zero to six solid rocket boosters or only zero to four or six? To answer your last question first, I believe the plan is still to be able to fly with anything from zero to six. That was at least the plan in previous announcements. I haven't heard any updates on that. fly with anything from zero to six. That was at least the plan in previous announcements. I haven't heard any updates on that. Anytime you see performance numbers like this chart that he sent me, Vulcan Centaur performance is listed as the two solid rocket booster vehicle and the six solid rocket booster vehicle. But I believe they're able to use their old dial a rocket approach

and customize that amount. Now what he's asking about specifically for dual launch, their GTO numbers specifically for the six solid rocket booster variant of Vulcan Centaur do seem to indicate that that would work. So their GTO number is 13,300 kilograms to GTO with that six solid rocket booster version. The two solid has 7,400 kilograms, so that is not quite enough for a dual launch of two full-size satellites. It could do smaller satellites. So if satellite changes happen that drive the size of typical geostationary satellites down into the 2,000 or 3,000 kilogram range, or even lower than that, then they would be able to do dual launch with two solid booster variant. But the six solid booster variant is incredibly similar

GTO performance as New Glenn is. So just about everything that I've said in the past about New Glenn dual launch would apply here as well to Vulcan Centaur, except for the fairing size. The fairing is smaller on Vulcan Centaur, quite a bit smaller. This is a 5 meter fairing, not a 7 meter fairing. So you would be limited to a more traditional size here and like an Ariane 5 launch, to throw a couple of more launch vehicle names in here, the satellite that sits on the bottom would probably have to be a little smaller than that even to account for the dual launch adapter. But nonetheless, I think it is something that ULA would be looking towards. Pricing wise, that would probably land them around the $70 million range if their pricing, as stated so far, is accurate to $70 million per piece, you know, for a launch to GTO.

So it's competitive, but it's not, you know, drastically competitive in the way that a new Glenn launch would be based on, you know, my kind of predictions so far. It obviously brings them much closer to the SpaceX range. It brings them much closer to the Ariane 6 range. So it does put them in the ballpark. But as of yet, ULA has shown not a lot of good signs on the commercial market. They sold a launch to Viasat this past year, but Viasat also took the strategy to spread their launches around. So they have one on SpaceX, one on Arian, and one on ULA. So I don't know how much stock I put in that as, you know, the fact that an Atlas 5 is a good test for their commercial market. We'll see if Voltgen Centaur

does make it through to launch if they do find a better commercial market for it. But, you know, I don't know. I've been increasingly pessimistic about ULA as I've seen their development path go. I think dual launch would fit their kind of schedule because they don't fly a whole bunch. And I don't think they're expecting to up their launch cadence much with Vulcan Centaur. So maybe flying a commercial dual launch mission, you know, once, twice a year at max would fit. It would give them an extra launch, a little bit more income for the Vulcan line, and that would kind of fit their flight rate. Because the other thing is Vulcan Centaur is going to be a very heavily Defense Department vehicle, as it kind of is

intended to be. It's got that really long fairing so they can fly the biggest spy satellites the US has to fly. Right now, there's a Delta IV Heavy sitting out at Vandenberg with a new generation spy satellite on it, and that kind of thing would fly on Vulcan in the future. It wouldn't be able to fit in a Falcon Heavy fairing. It would be able to fit in Vulcan fairings or Omega fairings or New Glenn fairings. So whichever of the other, you know, if SpaceX makes it in on the next round of Air Force contracts, whatever other vehicle would have the leg up for those big spy satellites. And that's kind of a sweet spot that Vulcan would find for itself if it was in those races. So, yes, they're almost certainly going to try to sell them if they do come to fruition with Vulcan Centaur. I'm not incredibly hopeful that they will be super competitive on the market, especially in a new Glenn world.

All right, and the grand finale for this New Year's Day edition of Main Engine Cutoff. Question from Lars about 2018. What are the top 10 space companies who did something impactful? No points for having good ideas or getting funding, funding only for accomplishments that were a big deal. So this was a really hard question. He sent this in weeks ago, so I've been thinking about it a lot. And it's really hard this year to come up with 10 space companies. So I maybe have one or two things that break the rules as he's laid out here.

One for the funding purpose, one for the space company purpose, and one for the use of the word accomplishments. But we'll see if he allows some of these inclusions here. Because 2018 was filled with announcements and partnership signings and a lot of things for us to analyze. But first question, actual accomplishments. It was a tougher job than I thought originally. So here's the 10 things I thought of. These are in no particular order in a ranking. These are just 10 items loosely organized.

So don't think that I'm saying one is better than the other. I think this is a solid list, though. So let's start. It's impossible to start this without talking about SpaceX. They started the year off with Falcon Heavy demo. They launched a couple of Starlink prototypes. They got Falcon 9 Block 5 flying, and they flew one three times. They won the first Air Force launch for Falcon Heavy, the Air Force Space Command 52 satellite. That was a big deal. They won that away from Atlas V. They launched

the first GPS-3 satellite. They launched TESS, NASA's TESS, which is a telescope that got launched earlier this year. They flew 21 times, and they got Category 3 certification from NASA's Launch Services Program, which certifies them to fly the most important launches that NASA has. which certifies them to fly the most important launches that NASA has. So on a list of accomplishments, they really knocked it out of the park for 2018. They were definitely on a roll this year. Certain things didn't go their way. You know, they weren't all golden.

They had some issues with getting fairings back, and they had some unfortunate, you know, technical issues that were happening behind the scenes that sounded kind of scary from time to time. But you know, that that list of accomplishments is going to be hard to touch in terms of who did the best for 2018. So moving into my second item here, I have space flight industry industries down further sun synchronous orbit a launch the SSO a the sun sync express. This was a dedicated launch they flew with SpaceX. And I think this is a really good sign for them. You know, they've flown a lot of payloads otherwise, but this was a really, really big dedicated mission for spaceflight. It flew something like 64 satellites. They had multiple different deployment events and things like that.

So this is a really good mission that I think is going to lead to good things for spaceflight over the next couple of years and a really good indication of where they're currently at with their services, what they're offering. And I thought that was a really great accomplishment for spaceflight to be able to have under their belt. I have a couple more launch related items on the list. So number three, I have Rocket Lab. They flew three times to orbit this year, all successfully. They had a really great year. They had a launch earlier in the year, then they were going for their second launch of the year. And they had this really long technical delay where they went back and they worked out a bunch of issues. And they came back November,

December, back-to-back launches just a couple of weeks apart and have been nailing it. So I think, you know, they took a couple of months there to work through some technical issues, but they have shown at the end of the year that they're ready to step into a very regular cadence of launches and ready to start clearing all of the launches that they have signed up right now. So Rocket Lab was really impressive this year, aside from how many scrubs they had. But I do think, you know, it was interesting to see them take that tactic of, you know what, we're going to pause all of this, we're going to go work out this issue, and we're going to come back

so that we can hit our stride with launches. So I'm very curious to see if they can, you know, hit like 10 launches or something in 2019. But they were very encouraging to me this year. My fourth item on the list, much to everyone's surprise, will probably be virgin galactic uh they had this spaceship spaceship tube test right towards the end of the year that was able to get up to like 82 kilometers or whatever it was uh they had a really good test program this

year and i didn't think that they would be able to get that high that quick uh i'm convinced by jonathan mcdowell that space starts at 80, so they made it to space with people. That's impressive. They did great. I'm still incredibly skeptical of everything that they do over there, and I'm not very confident in their architecture. But it's hard to not put them on this list for something impactful, for flying a couple of people up above the McDowell line at 80 kilometers there. On a similar front, Blue Origin had a really good year. They had strong New Shepard tests this year, including an incredible in-flight abort that put the capsule up to 119 kilometers. They are just about ready to put a human aboard this thing.

I would be incredibly surprised if we're not talking very soon about the first human flight on New Shepard. They also had a great year with BE-4 hot firing. That got chosen for Vulcan. They won money from the Air Force for development of New Glenn. This might violate Lars' funding rule, but I think this is different than just taking an additional round of funding because this was a massive scale of project to get that sign-off from the Air Force. That was a big investment for Blue Origin to go through all the hoops they needed to to get that development money for New Glenn. And I think that leads to very big things in the future with New Glenn, like potentially a lot of the national security launches here in the U.S. So that is a huge moment and I think capped off a pretty big year for Blue Origin in addition to continuing to build out their factory down near Canaveral. So they are poised for a very strong couple of years here coming up.

Moving into some spaceflight, spacecraft kind of stuff. This one also might violate one of Lars' rules for the space company. But number six, I have JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Technically not the government, right? Sort of. They're like a federally funded research facility, so they're like technically different. But it's hard not to put them on this list

specifically for the Marco CubeSats that flew alongside InSight. These two little CubeSats flew all the way out to Mars and they relayed all this telemetry back during InSight's landing. And they were 100% successful. And I think that is huge and has major potential to change the industry of planetary missions in the future. And I think if we don't see Marco style CubeSats riding along, you know, every planetary mission from here and out, I would be very surprised because those things did so well and were so helpful in the InSight landing process. They really proved themselves there. And I think JPL should get a lot of credit for building those and flying them and being so successful with those. So I'm going to be pretty confident that that loophole will fit Lars' question here.

So Lars, let me know if that works or not. Number seven, I have Lockheed Martin Space. They had a really huge year, and I think it's worth giving them some credit here. They built InSight. They built OSIRIS-REx, two spacecraft that are well on their way to accomplishing their missions. InSight successfully had Mars, OSIRIS-REx in orbit around Bennu. Lockheed Martin got the first GPS-3 satellite launched. They won like $7 billion for another 22 satellites. They launched another space-based infrared system satellite early in the year,

another advanced extremely high frequency satellite early in the year, another GOES satellite early in the year. A slight ding on that one because they have some cooling issues, but three very high value assets for the United States government. And Lockheed Martin Space just really knocked it out of the park with all those missions this year. And I think their track record there is pretty incredible and we need to give them credit for that. Number eight I've got is Iridium. They have nearly deployed their full Iridium NEX constellation this year. They're turning over their entire constellation with these new next generation satellites.

They have one more launch coming up on SpaceX, but they've put up a ton of satellites this year, very high value satellites. And it's going to be fun to follow them as they go from deployment phase to actually operational. And they're already mostly there. A lot of their traffic already is, you know, going off these new satellites and they're well onto their way

of turning over the entire constellation in full. So they had an impressive year launching all of those, being able to manage that quick of a deployment process and managing that big of a constellation. It's a great year for Iridium, and I'm excited to see what they do with it heading into 2019. My number nine spot is actually a collection of four space companies. This is the C-Band Alliance, Intelsat, SES, Utelsat, and Telesat. These four companies are part of this

alliance, as they've called themselves, and they are responding to the... Here in the US, we're working on trying to figure out how cellular 5G is going to come together. satellite operators. And that's currently used for broadcast television and a whole bunch of other stuff. So these four companies came together with a proposal on how to manage this overlap. So they're willing to give up some of their spectrum and get some things in return. And I think that is going to be a really impactful thing moving forward as 5G rolls out, as this kind of C-band stuff turns over, because part of that is they're going to be needing to buy new geo-satellites in the next couple of years. And that's part of of that is they're going to be needing to buy new geo satellites in the next couple of years. And that's part of the deal that they're striking up. So we might see a big uptick in geostationary satellite production and launching here in

the US because of this, as well as seeing a quicker development of 5G as we kind of work out these technical details here. So I think this is a really big deal for the next couple of years of communications. And that's an impactful thing that I think happened here. Number 10 on my list may be controversial. But I think when we think about space companies who did something impactful, that particular piece of the sentence, I can't think of anyone else except for Swarm, who fits the 10th spot here. Swarm is the company that defied the FCC and launched satellites that they didn't have regulatory approval for. So they launched these little things they called SpaceBees, which is essentially like taking a CubeSat and

dividing it by four and having something that small be free flying. And their idea is to be able to make an even smaller satellite that's fully featured. But they did it without the regulatory approval that they needed. They did a whole bunch of other stuff without regulatory approval too. But these four satellites are up there and they're tiny. They're two centimeters on one side. And that led to a big hubbub about how that's too small to be tracked, too small to be tracked. Turns out a lot of people out there, companies and government agencies were tracking these things and still are today. So it kind of led to this collective discovery and discussion about how two centimeters could definitely be tracked in low Earth orbit. So between the licensing debate and this tracking tracking debate those two things i think were

impactful to the industry because i think they're going to lead to uh you know some changes on the regulatory side which might be good might be bad uh spaceflight itself who was the person the company that deployed swarm on orbit they've already changed some of their tactics and on the last launch they did uh one of their customers got locked inside the payload dispenser because they couldn't show proof of paperwork. So they've already changed some of their activities. The FCC side of things is probably going to change the way they handle some of this paperwork. And it might even lead to a rethink of just how small is okay to be approved by the FCC and other government agencies if we can track something as small as two centimeters and maybe even smaller than that. So I think, you know,

while probably not the best insight for Swarm to do this kind of thing, probably not the best future forward plan, I think it was hard to argue that those were impactful things to come out of their actions. So that's all I got here. You can let me know if you've got other things you would add to that list. You want to yell at me for including the wrong thing or something that didn't quite fit. You can do that on Twitter at WeHaveMiko or to the email anthonyatemanagingcutoff.com. For now, that is it. Thank you so much for sending all these questions in. Continue to send them in. I just have cleared off my Q&A sheet now with this show, so we're going to need a bunch of more questions for the end of January here. So send them in, email or Twitter, wherever you want, and you will be on the next show. So thank you again so much for

listening. Thanks for your support at patreon.com slash miko, and I will talk to you pretty soon.