Main Engine Cut Off - T+120: Dr. Mike Baine, Axiom Space

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

Dr. Mike Baine, Chief Engineer of Axiom Space, joins us to talk through Axiom’s plans for commercial low Earth orbit space stations. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 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, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Heather, Tommy, and six anonymous—and 243 other supporters on Patreon. Downlink Axiom Space Axiom Space | About Axiom Space Project Morpheus : Home Project Morpheus : Video Archive Intuitive Machines Email your thoughts, comments, and questions 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 Music by Max Justus

Welcome to Managing Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo, and we've got a great show today with Axiom Space, which we will get to in one second. But I wanted to start off up front to tell you about an app that I have built, and I've released it today. It is called Downlink. It is a Mac app. It is a small menu bar app that kind of runs in the background, and what it does is it pulls high-resolution images off of Go's East, Go's West, and Himawari 8. These are the geostationary weather satellites that are out there, and it updates your desktop every 20 minutes, so you've got this real-time view of Earth on your desktop. It is quite a joy. It is free on the Mac App Store, or you can check it out at downlinkapp.com. I wanted to tell you

about it because I built it as a space nerd I am, and if you're listening to this, you're probably going to love it. So go check it out, downlinkapp.com. So now let's get into the interview. First, a little bit of a preface to this. A couple of weeks back on the show, I talked about Axiom Space. I think it was part of a Q&A show or something like that. And I mentioned that there wasn't a lot of publicly available info about them. And the stuff that I have heard in the past from them wasn't all that exciting to me. To their credit, Beau from Axiom Space reached out to me about my comments. And we started talking about this as something that they would like to address. And I think that says a lot about Axiom. That says a lot about the company they are, the people they are, because there's a lot of companies out there that would hear something

like that and let it roll off their backs and not really address it at all. But to their credit, they want to come on and talk about this. So I am very excited to talk to Axiom Space today. We're going to be talking to Dr. Mike Baines, the chief engineer at Axiom Space. We're going to talk all about their plans for low Earth orbit and some of the plans around the ISS, but also their own plans as well. So I think it's going to be a lot of fun. So let's get into the interview. All right, Dr. Baines, thank you so much for joining me on the show. Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I'm excited to talk with you today. Well, thanks for having me.

talk with you today. Well, thanks for having me. Before we get into Axiom details, you've got a very interesting backstory, and I would love to hear about how you ended up at Axiom. You can take that as far back as you want. I don't know if we need to hear about your third grade teacher, but your space career so far has been pretty interesting, to say the least. So could you give us a little background on how you ended up at Axiom today? Well, it's been a little bit of a random walk. By training, I'm a physicist. I got my PhD in plasma physics from the University of California, San Diego. And I was doing research in laser synchrotron sources. And after I graduated, I did an NRC postdoc at the Johnson Space Center to do some plasma propulsion. And I did that for about a year. And then NASA decided to hire and I was lucky enough to be selected. And I spent the better part of my career at the NASA Johnson Space Center doing mostly propulsion work.

But then I was the system manager for Orion for about five years, doing propulsion elements associated with Orion. And then test and verification. And then I was the chief engineer for a project called Morpheus. It was a little lunar lander that we flew around Kennedy Space Center. After that, that project sort of ruined me from a desk perspective. I really got a taste for development and wanted to keep doing that. So I left NASA for a little startup called Intuitive Machines with a bunch of other NASA engineering, JSC engineering folks, and did that for about five years. And then Axiom was coming along and

seemed like the right thing to do. And I have enjoyed it ever since. Intuitive Machines is a pretty interesting place. We talked about them a couple of weeks or months ago at this point. They're included in the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, and I believe that's extended from what you worked on at Morpheus. Is that correct? That's exactly right. That was a very high-performance team that did some great engineering. Morpheus was really done pretty much all in-house at the Johnson Space Center,

from the engine to the tanks to the avionics to all of the software. So it was a very, very good team to work with. And based on that experience, how quickly we could actually accomplish things and get things flying. It was about six months from napkin to our first hot fire. It was incredibly fast. And then we were flying and tweaking and doing a lot of performance improvements along the way. We went through four iterations or four generations of main engine during that time. And right as we kind of cleared the decks to go to free flight, we did a lot of tether testing and hot fire testing. a lot of tether testing and hot fire testing.

We had an unfortunate incident at KSC where we lost an IMU ride on takeoff and crashed the lander. But it took us about nine months or so to recover from that and build a completely new vehicle and get up and fly. And then it was incredibly successful um over 15 free flights um and the videos are all online yeah there's a whole page that that shows like all of the flights i think completely through the program and i've always been amazed by that but we don't have to get too far down the morpheus thing i just it's one of those programs that i think about sometimes as such a cool interesting part of the recent history of

space that could have some pretty big implications into the future. So I'm excited to see what Intuitive does with it from there. How long have you been at Axiom since those days? Because that was not too long ago at this point. So have you been at Axiom since pretty much wrapping up there, or is it a longer-term thing than that? So I've been officially almost a year now as a permanent employee of Axiom. Before that, I was kind of a matrix support for about two years from Intuitive Machines to Axiom. So the relationship is that Intuitive Machines is a sister company to Axiom. They have a common investor between them.

And so there's a lot of sharing of resources between the two companies. Then that's cool to know. Also, SGT, which is now part of KBR Wiley, was also part of that same investor. So could you give us a little up to speed on where Axiom is today? I think most people think of them as one of the companies that's involved in this ISS commercialization pitch, but I would love to hear how you describe it to somebody who's either, you know, cursory,

I don't even know what word I'm trying to say there, slightly aware of Axiom, but doesn't know all the ins and outs, how you would describe it to that person? It's hard for an elevator speech to really cover all the pieces. I kind of think of it as, first and foremost, it's a commercial space station. It's really 2.0, if you consider ISS the 1.0. So it builds on top of what we've done in low-Earth orbit to date, and it increases the capabilities in other areas. So it is that commercialization of low-Earth orbit that we're all working towards.

So the idea is, I guess, you know, that's kind of separate from the ISS program, the explicit program that's going on to figure out what the future of ISS is. Axiom is related to that being one of the people that are involved in that program, but the idea is Axiom is a space station on its own, and if ISS is where it gets its foothold first,

then so be it. Is that kind of the way to think about it, or are those two different projects, really? Well, I think they're interrelated because there needs to be a continuity between ISS and whatever comes afterwards. Using ISS as a stepping stone, I think, is a very ISS is a stepping stone I think is is a very smart way to proceed it reduces the the risk to the commercial entity that is is building up the capability and it provides a gradual transition for NASA from its owned and operated space station to a commercial platform so I think that's a very key piece of it. From a long-term perspective,

the government gets out of having to be in the business of owning and operating a facility like this, and they can just buy services to support its internal needs. Okay, so there's really two things that I kind of want to ask you about directionally, I guess, with the thinking about starting at the ISS and then transitioning off of that. But taking into consideration what you're saying about ISS 2.0, that kind of idea, there's

like the crew and research and science side of ISS, which I think we'll get to in a second. But the other side of it is the infrastructure side and the upkeep side of things. And one of the questions I've always had about Axiom, and really this goes for anyone that's interested in the ISS program itself, is ISS is very resource intensive today to maintain and keep running. It takes a lot of crew time on station. So I'm curious, you know, how Axiom is approaching that to try to limit that? Or do you are you kind of seating the ground and saying, well, that's what it takes to keep in to do upkeep of a spacecraft in the same way that, you know, Navy ships take upkeep? That's just kind of part of

the deal. Or is there things within the ISS infrastructure that you're saying we can limit this and we can do this better you know building on the 20 years of heritage that we've got now how do you approach that well i i think um to start with is that iss has been a learning uh process right and there's a decades of experience of what has worked and what has not worked well. And a lot of the hardware is really 1.0 hardware that is slow to upgrade over time. But there's a lot that's been learned. It's that corporate knowledge that is so valuable that when you want to go and go to minimize lifecycle cost of a station, of a platform like this, you really need to understand what is driving that lifecycle cost. I mean, and there's two principal things that drive it, and that is the resupply cost,

basically the launch cost to keep keep it functionally functioning sorry and the the crew time needed to do uh to to affect the the maintenance and there's different types of maintenance right there's planned and unplanned maintenance um and it turns out that ironically that the launch cost per kilogram and the crew time per hour is about the same dollars. When you plug that into your lifecycle cost, it drives you in certain directions. The first it's going to do is really from the design onset of your subsystems. It's going to really focus your attention on those consumable items. Can you minimize their number? Can you minimize

the mass? Can you increase their life? And then secondarily, can I make it easier to affect that maintenance item? And really, we're attacking all of that in our design effort. So for instance, So, for instance, the consumable mass that we're currently baselined for our system is about 30% better than what ISS does today. So we found a 30% improvement just on how we did our consumable management. The other thing that we're doing to affect crew time is that we're using a lot of the things that were being developed under ISS, like smart inventory control, automated procedures, and the ability to kit and make accessible those items that you need to get to. And so there, I think the biggest gains are going to be probably an order of magnitude reduction in crew time, just from that, that all of the

things are ready to go. The crew doesn't have to search all over the station to get those particular pieces needed to affect that repair or maintenance item. And then the procedures can just be run real time and they're automated if there is commanding that needs to be done as part of that. And so I think there's a lot of that that come together to bring that to the lifecycle cost of those planned maintenance items. When you get to unplanned,

well, there's a lot more variability in it, but one of the biggest drivers there is, can I get to it? There's a lot of things on the ISS that require EVA, and that's an ungodly number of hours of crew time to prepare and execute EVAs. Yeah, and ground time as well to plan those. days. Yeah. And ground time as well to plan those. Exactly. So keeping those things inside the pressure vessel is going to help that tremendously. The other part of that is sparing, having the spares on orbit and being able to accept failures and keep on operating is an important part of that. Being able to bring your sparing posture to the point where you don't need as many spares,

that you have operational flexibility in how you deploy them. So those are the things that you look at to gain some of that unplanned maintenance that crops up time to time. So when you're looking at the ISS today, are there, you know, based on what you're saying here, are there pieces that you look at and say, if I were doing that for the first time today, I would still do it the way that we did it on ISS? And are there areas that you say, well,

that's not at all how I would do this anymore? Or is it more an evolution of the things the ISS are doing, if that makes any sense? Are there revolutionary areas of the approach, or is it a massive evolution of ISS? I think it's more on the evolutionary side of things. There are things that work incredibly well, and you wouldn't be spending your money wisely by trying to do them differently. And then there's other things that technology has come so far, and there's obvious improvements that you can make to certain systems and subsystems. So, I mean, when you look at ISS today, there's some things that you have to meet. For instance, the interface standards. You're going to have a common birthing mechanism, either active or passive. You're going to have a common birthing mechanism,

either active or passive. You're going to have the docking system. You're going to have to interface with networks and power and thermal. So those are going to be very similar, right? I mean, you have some flexibility in how the details of how they get implemented, but you're going to meet those interface standards. Probably the most obvious one to you and others is that it looks, you know, superficially like every other module on ISS.

And that was something that we started. We looked at a wide range of different structures that we could deploy. of different structures that we could deploy. And when we went through the trade, the traditional aluminum pressure vessel kept coming out on top. Part of that is that although volume is really nice, being able to carry all of your systems and integrated systems on that launch

actually reduces lifecycle costs significantly. So there's a serious cost savings there. When we look at the manufacturing base to produce those pressure vessels, I mean, all of that is in current operation today. So when you look at the welding machines and the ground support fixtures, the tooling, the dyes, the forgings, all of that infrastructure exists and has a very well-known schedule associated with that fabrication.

So there's a much better, from a schedule certainty perspective, you know that you're going to meet some milestones with that. Then really the ones that are important to your customers and particularly to NASA, and that is your ability to design the pressure vessel for minimum risk. and because there is so much known and comfort level with this these types of structures the workmanship the non-destructive evaluation methods the mmod protection all of this has a significant amount of data behind that you don't have to recreate so when you look at it at it from from the cost and speed of execution and to be able to accommodate all of your customers and their needs, the metallic or the aluminum module or pressure vessel came out on top. And I think that's going to be true for a while to come.

So that's the most obvious. But underlying that, the systems are all new. We took the best knowledge and data that we had from the operation of ISS and those subsystems and figured out ways where we can improve it or wholesale replace it if we had to. can improve it or wholesale replace it if we had to. And there's areas where we, especially in avionics, where we want to kind of migrate our parts to more commercially available, especially in the industrial and automotive. There's a huge production capability of those parts that are, in most cases, the same reliability as the S-parts that NASA uses. And as long as you know what you can mix and what you can't mix in terms of radiation protection and critical separation, then you can get away with a lower cost avionics system.

So being able to control that in-house is really important to the overall lifecycle cost of that hardware. So when you're talking about this first module, when you go to the Axiom Space website, you kind of see the rendering of Axiom Station. There's a version that's a couple of modules attached to ISS. Are those modules themselves, that's kind of the idea to start with,

is start with one of those modules and attach that to the front of the ISS, essentially, and then keep moving on from there and adding more and more? Or is there differences between each of these modules? There are. Each has a particular reason for being. But it's a way to bootstrap. Launching all of the hardware that we need to

meet our demand case is not feasible with a single launch. It's just you have to throw a lot in order to build up that infrastructure, an industrial grade infrastructure needed to support all the different customers that you have. The first one is a node. So it looks very similar to the other nodes on ISS. It's actually bigger than the other nodes. It's a little longer, it looks like, right?

That's correct. And that allows us to give us the ability to add more to that element. The next module that goes up is the habitat habitat which is basically where the crew quarters are and this has a lot of the crew interfaces and systems and it can house eight crew members at a time what i forgot to mention is that in the on the node there's actually a very large what we call earth Observatory. It's similar to the cupola, but much, much larger. But it's way more epic.

That's right. So it's part of the crew experience. So part of our market that we're going after is that crew experience. And so in the Habitat module, we actually enlisted Philip Stark, who is a famous French designer. He has a lot of—he's famous for yacht design in industrial restaurants. And so he's prolific in his design approach. And so he's provided a little of his aesthetic to the crew quarters to make them feel very inviting and warm and give a mental space to the crew quarters that is just not there with today's crew quarters on orbit. there with today's crew quarters on orbit. And the Earth Observatory is also part of that equation where if you ask any of the crew members today on ISS, they say one of their favorite parts of the station is the

cupola, where you can have a few people stick their head in and kind of admire the Earth kind of horizon to horizon. For the Earth Observatory, this is a much bigger, it's almost module size. So it's about four meters long and almost three meters wide. And it can accommodate up to eight people at a time to basically admire Earth orbit, horizon to horizon. And, you know, that was kind of part of that experience, crew experience that we wanted as a selling point.

It turns out it actually helps in other ways, too. The idea is that it also becomes a meeting place, a communal place, probably an area where the crew will take meals together, kind of a restaurant in the sky, so to speak. And so there's a lot of that wrapped into that thinking of how do we support that customer base. So to start, though, let's talk a little bit about the roadmap to get there. Starting with one module on the ISS I think is the first pathway to launching something into space is there anything particular about that

additional module added on to ISS that is important to note because NASA has been looking for somebody to add a module to the ISS for a couple of years so what is it about that first node of Axiom Station at ISS that you think makes the difference for NASA to go with Axiom Station at ISS that you think makes the difference for NASA to go with Axiom Space in that case?

Well, it's the total package. It's not just any particular element. It's how the system or the segment works together. Beyond the crew habitat is the third element, which is a manufacturing research module. And really, it's an industrial-scale facility that supports in-space manufacturing as well as research, including exploration research. research. And so that's a very important piece that when we add those three elements together, we're approaching the same type of utilization that ISS has today. And so it's very capable in terms of that piece of the revenue stream. The fourth element that goes on top of that is our power and thermal module. And that would come probably right before ISS retirement when we are planning to leave

so that we can basically take over and be completely self-sufficient on our own. And at that point, we would be able to have a very comparable capability from an ISS perspective, but new capabilities that were never envisioned for ISS. Okay, so I think that roadmap is really helpful to think about. It seems like the idea is NASA needs some people to expand the ISS itself. So you see an opportunity to build out at ISS and offer some of that back to NASA. And then as you know, between now and whenever we decide the ISS will be no more, the idea is to have added on the self-sufficient modules at that point in time. That does make a lot of sense to me. I'm curious, though, how you see the interaction with NASA and the other partners of the ISS going when you have your own node up there.

They're going to want some things out of your services while you have your own roadmap, really, to work through. So how do you see that interaction going with a private company offering services to NASA while building out their own infrastructure at the same location? Well, NASA already does this. There's at least 10 companies that I'm aware of that sell services to NASA. And these are typically facilities that are housed on ISS today. So it's not too much different than what they're already doing.

I think the trend will be that they'll be doing more and more of this in order to basically create the demand that will make a Leo platform sustainable. So it's not just the government users, but all the other users get brought along with that. So I think from a sustainability standpoint, it's important to help establish demand for low Earth orbit. NASA has got the lion's share of the market today. If you look at what is being spent on low Earth orbit, if you look at NASA, the international partners, and others, it's about $4 billion a year that is being used towards the utilization of ISS. I think as ISS winds down, I think more and more of that will start to be going to other

platforms um i don't see all of it ever going to other platforms i think nasa is going to find ways to use that money in other other ways but i think it does help um from a investment standpoint to know that there is demand at the end and that no one's undermining that demand. Yeah, so that's one of the big questions when I told the Patreon members that you'd be coming on the show. There was a lot of questions about the business case in the long run of your self-sustaining station.

And they were wondering if the business case at that point closes without a NASA or a big government anchor tenant, or are you really banking on 10 years down the line or whatever, launch costs being significantly lower and there being a lot more activity up there? How does that work out? Well, I think you have to look at it by market segment. And we have six segments that we're looking at. The first is the professional or astronaut, and these are typically sovereign astronauts. They could be international partners. They could be non-partner countries. So I think if you look at that market, those countries that want to establish a human spaceflight program, I think you have to look at that as a revenue source.

Of course, there's private astronauts. These are high net worth individuals or potentially sponsored individuals that would come up either on a short or or long term rotation. There's the research. And again, I think the research is is going to be at least government research. Research dollars will will stay on the ISIS side until it gets nearing retirement, and then it'll start to shift towards a commercial platform. In-space manufacturing is nascent right now, but it is probably going to be the highest growth area. The things that are produced in low-Earth orbit

that are either used in space or back on the ground, and I think that's a huge, potentially huge market, but it doesn't exist today. And then there's going to be a need for exploration system demonstration and maturation. So these are the things that you have to do to really validate your systems for deep space exploration in Mars. There's really no better place to get time on a system to know that it's going to work well than being in space. Yeah, and this is similar to today. We fly Orion life support systems up on ISS, I believe, right?

That's right. That's exactly right. And there's a bunch, there's a lot of, as I said, there's a lot of competing life support systems that are being brought up to do that kind of maturation research and development. Multiple companies are putting up their version of a carbon dioxide scrubber up there to see if they can mature it to a point where people would want to use their system. So I think that's going to be a pretty solid demand case for a while, and especially when there's no other option than to do it on a commercial platform. Sending it out into cislunar space is just adding cost that I don't know if there's any real benefit to. I mean, it dramatically increases the

cost if you want to do that demonstration beyond low Earth orbit. Yeah, and the only thing you're really gaining is the radiation environment, but when you're in low Earth orbit, you've got everything except that. So in many cases, it's good enough that's true but that that's true um the that that can be well characterized on the ground though uh with uh beans uh high energy beans so you can really get an understanding of of the reliability of your system from ground testing in that case unless you're in unless you're in an environment that you did not know. And then I don't know if that helps much. Yeah, you're on your own if you've gotten yourself into a weird

situation. That's right. And the last one that we see as a market segment is the kind of the advertising brand placement. And I think that there is some cachet associated with space and advertising has been, you know, foreboding on ISS to a large extent. And so the ability to do that kind of product placement or advertising, I think, is a revenue source that you can't ignore. So I think when you take all those together, you do close the business case for that platform. Even if research and NASA dollars are slow to come, it's still, by our analysis, closes. And how does that play out in the near term? We've been following this story of there being $150 million in the budget for NASA to explore commercialization options. That's sort of gone back and forth over the couple of years that

we've been seeing budgets. Who knows what's going to happen this year? So if that does not materialize, is your roadmap significantly altered, or is that kind of a nice-to-have in the case of that political funding? So our position, and we've given this feedback to NASA also, is that we don't want money. So, for instance, like the commercial crew program, NASA heavily invested in the development of those platforms, of those vehicles, and then those companies basically sell those services back to NASA. We don't think that's a good model. We think that if NASA provides demand or helps establish demand for those capabilities, that's far better in the long term from a sustainability standpoint, and that they should take that money and put it to man instead of into developing systems,

what's called supply side. So that's kind of our position is that, you know, and we think that if you offer money, you're going to just attract folks that are maybe not going to put their skin really in the game. They'll take the money, but at the end of the day, they're not going to risk everything to make it to work. And I think you really need to have that sense of failure in order to keep things going. Wow. That's fantastically put. And I think that applies to a lot of areas in space. We don't have to get into all of the details of that, but yeah, that's a really, you know, especially where we're at with commercial cargo and crew, we do have some learning to do from the programs that happen. So I really appreciate that outlook on it. I'm sure NASA does as well. They're like, okay, we can, we don't have to give you the money, we can keep it. They probably enjoy that a little bit.

we can keep it. They probably enjoy that a little bit. I do have another couple of infrastructure questions before we get you out of here. I don't want to keep you too long today. So when you're based at ISS, there are going to be some resupply constraints on, well, maybe not constraints isn't the right word, but you're going to have some need for resupply, both cargo and crew. You're going to have some need for crew time of the Axiom modules. How does that get handled at ISS, but also when you're on your own? So I'm taking these in steps here. So crew transportation, we will basically buy the services of a provider. The two providers today, obviously, are SpaceX and Boeing.

As more providers come online, we are going to buy the entire vehicle, and we are going to fly our crews and also borrow our consumables. So our position is that we're not going to – it's some net zero impact on ISS so we will do all our own resupply will provide all our own consumables and so we're really not leaning on ISS from from that standpoint either transporting crew or cargo and so we'll do that we'll handle that all ourselves we'll also train our own crews um uh for for that uh uh for their mission so was that does that mean that nasa astronauts and others that are up there right now would they interact with the axiom modules at all or would that be almost like a third segment to the iss in the way that we have the Russian, the U.S. segment, and then the Axiom segment? So it kind of depends. So from a maintenance perspective, no, NASA won't be doing any of the maintenance of our system. Now, if there's a contingency thing that comes up,

they will have the training necessary to go deal with that, but that really is a contingency operation. There could be a NASA-sponsored research that we're hosting. And so in that case, they may come over to carry out whatever research objectives that is. So they may decide to spend their own crew time for a particular thing. and their own crew time for a particular thing. But really, the operating goal here is that we will do the caring for our own station. Yeah, and you're obviously not going to be able to keep the ISS astronauts out of that Earth observatory. That's a non-starter if you're going to keep them out of there.

Yeah. And I think that the hatches are open, right? So it's a shared volume. And so we would fully expect folks to want to wander around. Now, how about life support in that case? Is this something that is going to be handling its own life support? Is it something that is a high efficiency system? Are you going to be frequently resupplying it? How do you approach life support of Axiom Station, again, on ISS and on its own? Yeah, we're completely self-sustaining. We have our own life support system. So we will generate our own oxygen. We will scrub our own CO2. We will provide any makeup

gases like nitrogen. We will remove humidity from the air. We will recycle water from the atmosphere and from urine. So we will do all the same things. And in a lot of cases, we're going to probably do them at a higher efficiency than what NASA does because the systems have matured quite a bit since they were first implemented on ISS. So we have a very, very good closure of our water and air loops. And so, you know, we're going to be completely self-sufficient. But is that going to be from day one? Or is that, you know, as you build out the station, are you going to add some of those components? You know what I mean? Like the first node that

goes up, is that, that's like table stakes? That's from day one. We are designing a redundant system. So one of our guiding principles is that we have a fail operational, fail safe approach, regardless of criticality. And so that allows us to continue operating even if we take a failure. And that's important from revenue. You don't want to have to stop operations in order to go deal with something. You want to basically keep powering

through it. So we've designed our system and our whole segment, how it works together. It's kind of a smart grid in terms of power, thermal, and life support in order to handle those types of failures and give us a long time to affect to the next failure. But we are completely able to handle the crew complement that we envision at ISS. So how do these modules get to whichever station they're heading to? We just see the visualization of them all there. Obviously, the ISS had shuttle to take everything up.

How do you navigate through space once you're launched by... Maybe you can touch on launch vehicles as well. So launch vehicles, right now, our design is flexible enough to be launched on several different launch vehicles. It's kind of interesting. Everybody is basically building brand new launch vehicles. And when we're ready to launch, all the vehicles will be basically new. So which one do you want to trust is going to be there when you need it? We need to wait a little bit before we can make a down select. But we've kept it flexible so that we have at least three different launch vehicles

that we can go on, hoping they'll all be there when we're ready to go. In principle, these are all visiting vehicles. So even though they are modules, they have a full complement of propulsion, guidance navigation control, the communications, the relative navigation sensors. So just like HTV, ATV, or Dragon or Cygnus would come up and today be grappled by the station arm, the Axiom modules do the very same thing. Wow. And we have a lot of experience in that area. So that's one of the reasons we decided that we would do that in-house also.

That's crazy. I would not have guessed that. They all have their own propulsion and everything. That's interesting. Does that allow you to reconfigure things in orbit if you felt like remodeling? Exactly right. So we could, in principle, separate a module off and have it go to an adjacent orbit and wait, and then come back and be birthed or docked to a different port. And also, it's very important from an end-of-mission standpoint, is when you have reached the useful life of an element, that you'd be able to have a disposal plan for it. And so having the propulsion capabilities in each of the elements allows us to deorbit them individually as opposed to a station. So it gives

us a lot more flexibility in how we build things out and how we build things out, and how we configure things, and eventually how we dispose of them. I only have one question left for you. And this is, I'm going to tell you that, okay, imagine a world where there is no ISS. Imagine the world where there is no other space station. What is, if Axiom Station is going to be launched today as the first space station, what orbital altitude and inclination do you foresee being the right fit for a LEO station? Well, there's a lot of thoughts on this. We actually think that the higher inclination orbit is better from a ability to view the Earth. from a ability to view the Earth. So the 51-6 inclination, I think, suits itself well.

And so if we were to choose, it wouldn't be much different than that because it does give you a lot of North America and Europe, which I think is important, especially for those countries, to be able to view both in both directions. For sure. That's definitely a big thing that people are worried about, ISS going away and missing the sightings. Right. And so the small cost of that higher inclination, I think, is worth it.

And so I don't think we would do anything different. From a configuration standpoint of the station, I'm sure, I mean, we would probably have to think about how we would reorder some of the element launch in order to provide the early capability that we would need as a single free flyer. free flyer. So I think there would be some, not significant, but there would be some architectural changes that we would probably consider if we weren't going to ISS. But I think there's so much benefit both for the commercial element as well as the government to establish that linkage that it would be kind of a missed opportunity if it didn't happen. And you would do a similar altitude as well in that couple hundred kilometers? Yeah. So, I mean, you're kind of balancing your drag. And so you kind of want to keep

six months to a year of a steady altitude if you don't do any reviews. So I think it's a pretty good altitude. And we have plenty of propulsive capability to manage the stack. So it's not an issue. I think it's a good altitude. Good to know. Well, Dr. Bain, do you have anything else that you wanted to mention about Axiom Station or space in general or anything else that was on your mind? I think we covered a lot of ground.

I'm happy to follow up with any other questions. Yeah, that would be great. I'm sure people out there will be thinking of things as we're talking. So I'm sure I'll get a couple and I'll send them your way if I do. But for now, thank you so much for coming on the show. I look forward to seeing Axiom Station, and I look forward to being the first space podcaster in space. If and when you're looking for guinea pigs, I would love to be on the list, so just keep me in mind. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much, Dr. Bain. Before we get out of here for the day, I want to say a special thank you to all of you who make Main Engine Cutoff possible. There are 283 of you supporting the show every single month over at patreon.com slash Miko. And this episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 40 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren,

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got any questions or thoughts, email them to me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. Once again, don't forget to check out Downlink over on the Mac App Store or at downlinkapp.com. Thank you all so much for listening and I will talk to you next week.