Main Engine Cut Off - T+123: The Noosphere of Influence

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

NASA made a series of announcements about their ISS commercialization effort and the first Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions, and Firefly unveiled their Orbital Transfer Vehicle. And there’s a really interesting connection between all three stories. 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. NASA Opens International Space Station to New Commercial Opportunities | NASA NASA Selects First Commercial Moon Landing Services for Artemis | NASA Firefly’s Orbital Transfer Vehicle Noosphere Ventures | Technology Knowledge Humanity 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 Like the show? Support the show! Music by Max Justus

🎵 Hello, hello, and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, and I've got a trio of stories this week to talk about that I'm kind of catching up on. These things happened the last week or two. And they're interesting stories in their own right. Some of them I don't have a lot to analyze, honestly. They're more of just news stories that I think we'll be tracking in the next couple of years as they make their way to space. So it's worth mentioning on the podcast. But there's also a really interesting connection between pieces of

these three stories that illuminates a little bit of what's going on right now. So let's start with this ISS commercialization announcement from NASA. This happened last week. They rolled out this big plan for commercializing the space station, low Earth orbit, everything around it. The main tentpoles of this are that they are opening the ISS, at least the US side of the ISS, to commercial projects. They don't have to be purely research focused anymore like they have in the past. So now companies that want to do commercial interest in space could use the space station. They still have to fit a certain criteria. So NASA isn't going to green light everything. You could think of some of the seedier things that NASA would not green light,

but they do have to approve these things. They have to fit certain criteria. But in general, it is open for commercial business right now. I saw a bunch of people talking about shooting commercials on the space station, which will certainly happen for a Super Bowl coming up or something like that. And there's also some pricing in there as well for resources on the space station. That piece is particularly relevant to the other part of the announcement that says that relevant to the other part of the announcement that says that NASA is now open to private astronauts or space tourists flying up to the ISS. There are particular rates for the services on the ISS. So they've given out prices for life support and crew time and just about every resource you

would want on the ISS. They put out this pricing plan to guide companies in their business plans. Alongside that, they said that they'll be open starting in 2020 as part of the commercial crew program for these private astronauts to fly aboard one of the commercial crew providers and pay directly to the launch provider and pay NASA for the services on the ISS. And they could fly up to two private astronaut missions per year, 30 days long each, so they would be a shorter duration mission. But nonetheless, that's something that hasn't happened on the U.S. side of the space station yet. That's happened on the Russian segment, not on the U.S. segment. So that's an important and

notable change in policy. Now, a lot of this is more of an indication of what NASA's thinking, more of guidelines for what to work towards. So this isn't them announcing that there already are private astronauts slated to fly to the space station, but this is giving out the pricing accommodations that would be necessary for these missions, the guidelines for flying to the station, what they can and can't do when they're on the station. So the idea here is that NASA supplied all this info to the industry, and now they can take that, work up their business plans, work up their business models, figure out what kind of package they could put together to offer out to the market. And then, you know, hopefully somebody signs on for one of these missions and everybody's able to do something interesting and make some money. The thing that they did

mention in the press conference was that all of this is the first draft, essentially. They're putting this out. They want feedback from the industry that they say that price seems a little high. This thing could be better. We need more of this. We need less of that. They want some feedback on this and they will adjust accordingly. I think they said they check in every six months or so and adjust things. Another important note while I'm on this roll of important notes is that NASA can't compete with the private market. They're not allowed to. So if somebody were to come along and offer some service that NASA has put out a price for now at a cheaper rate, then you have to buy it from that person or you could buy it from that person. NASA can't compete directly with the private market in that

way. So, you know, in terms of they've given out prices for what cargo costs to get up to the station, what it costs to get down to the station, whether that's disposed or back to Earth. If somebody says, I can do this cheaper and I will do it cheaper, then that's an option that NASA and the companies involved would have to take the offer on. So there's a lot of complexity in this and there's not a particular announcement out of it. But the one big piece that I haven't talked about yet, all that's kind of the future looking commercialization stuff. But there's a couple of things about the future of the ISS itself that are particularly interesting here. There was basically like, here's five points about the ISS, all somewhat related. But the most important one is something that we've heard about the last couple of years. There's a

docking port on the ISS that we've been hearing for two to three years that NASA would like to offer up to the commercial market for somebody to attach their own module to the space station. We haven't officially gotten the request for proposals for that port yet. There's been a bunch of studies as part of the Next Step program to develop future habitats for space. But now, as part of this announcement, they said that on June 14th, so just Friday of this week, the RFP for that, the request for proposal, will be put out to use that docking port and to attach something to the ISS. A couple of shows back, we've talked to Axiom Space, who's planning to attach something to the ISS.

This would be what they're responding to and what they hope to get selected by NASA for. So they would say, NASA, here's our proposal. Here's what we would do with it. Here's why you should pick us. And NASA would select one of the people that submitted a proposal to actually attach their module to the space station. So some of the other ones that you should keep in mind for this, NanoRacks has always been working on this kind of outpost idea. There's obviously Bigelow, who has their expandable storage thing attached to the ISS right now. Asterisk about Bigelow, who has their expandable storage thing attached to the ISS right now. Asterisk about

Bigelow. All I ever hear about Bigelow is that it's absolutely crazy internally, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of hope for whatever they're working on. They're very hard to really get a judgment on what's actually happening inside, but I don't hear very encouraging things about Bigelow. And there's a bunch of others that have participated in the Next Step research so far. Sierra Nevada, Blue Origin, there's a bunch of companies that have taken part in that program that would be candidates and would at least probably submit proposals. Axiom, obviously, we talked to them about their plans. They have very specific plans for what they would do to the ISS, what they would attach to the ISS, how they would use it to bolster their own station in the future. So they would kind of use it as a starting point and build out from there. So, you know, that's one that we now know quite a bit about, and that

would be interesting to see what they actually propose. But nonetheless, they are going to release that request on June 14th, and they expect to select a company by the end of the year for that docking port. So by the end of the year for that docking port. So by the end of the year, we'll know who's got that shot to attach something to the ISS, which would be a big moment for commercialization of the space station of low Earth orbit, and really just the next step of what we're doing in LEO today. The last note about RFPs is that they also said in July they will release another RFP of sorts for free-flying stations. So this isn't something that would attach to the ISS. They want to hear

proposals for what you could fly on your own. So if you're an Axiom or a Blue Origin or a NanoRacks or Sierra Nevada, what would you do on your own to set up a commercial space station that is not attached to the ISS and that would be kind of its fully owned entity up in space that could still offer services to NASA or other customers as they need it. And that will be interesting to see how that's worded, how that comes out. So, you know, that was a bunch of ISS stuff. But the basics are the ISS is open for commercial projects for private astronaut flights. There are prices for both of those things. And also, at the end of this week, NASA will be releasing an RFP for who can take part of that docking port, take ownership of that docking port, and attach their own module to the space station. All right, moving on to another commercialization effort by NASA.

This one is about the moon, though. So if you remember a couple months back, we heard about the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. This is a program to develop small cargo landers and send collections of payloads to the moon on these landers and hopefully be diversified enough, enough suppliers that you could fly many missions very cheaply or inexpensively. And as Thomas Zurbuchen of NASA put it, take shots on goal because not all of these landers are going to work. There are supposed to be commercial landers that are less pricey than a full NASA program to develop a cargo lander. So the idea is not all of them are going to work. But if you pepper the lunar surface with these landers, we can get a

lot of useful payload to the surface successfully. So previously, we heard a bunch of companies that were greenlit by NASA to actually bid on these launches. So they didn't actually win funding at that round, or maybe they did win a little. I forget what the deal was. But essentially, they submitted their proposal to NASA. NASA gave them the thumbs up and said, when we put out a task order for a launch,

you're able to bid on that particular launch and landing mission. So we're a couple of months down the line from that now, and NASA has officially announced the first three selected to fly missions to the lunar surface. So in the order listed by NASA here, we had Astrobotic. This is the company based out of Pittsburgh. They won $79.5 million. They would fly up to 14 payloads to the near side of the moon by July 2021, so just about two years from now. Astrobotic, you'll remember, we had members of Astrobotic at the time on MECO talking about Cube Rover, which is kind of a spinoff of Astrobotic. But they have been planning this lander, the Peregrine lander,

that could land, I think, around, it was right around 100 kilograms, might be 90 kilograms on the lunar surface. Originally, they were intending to fly on an Atlas V as a rideshare. Sounds like that's kind of up in the air right now. You know, considering the Atlas V's flight rate, that's probably a good idea to think about other options. But they've been working for a while now. They had previously said 2020 was their target date, slipped a little bit, but July 2021 is what they're targeting now. Second company selected was Intuitive Machines of Houston. They have been awarded $77 million. They are working on a lander called Nova C. They would also land on the moon by July 2021. So again, just about two years from now. And Intuitive Machines is one I'm particularly excited about for a couple of reasons. But number one was that they are a

team that kind of spun off from an old NASA project called Project Morpheus. This was the Morpheus lander, a methane-based lander that was going to be about this size and do landings on, I think the idea was moon and Mars. But they've taken a lot of the work from that. And that Morpheus lander, by the way, did a lot of free flights here on Earth. They did a lot of testing, a big test campaign for that. So they took what they were working on there, and they have rolled it out into this Nova Sea lander. So they do have some experience behind them, behind their actual design.

The people there are from that project, largely. So it's something that I've been particularly interested in, and I'm pretty excited to see what they can do. And their lander, I think that would also be about 100 kilograms to the lunar surface as envisioned right now. And the third company selected was Orbit Beyond. This was the company that was a little mysterious when we heard about them last time, but they've been awarded $97 million. They would fly up to four payloads, and they could land on the moon by September 2020, they say. So just over a year from now, they could be landing on the lunar surface. Now, Orbit Beyond, the last time we heard about it, we were trying to make sense of it because it was this kind of shell company, it sounded like, that was a wrapper around the Team

Indus team that was part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. So they were working on a lander. Honeybee Robotics was also in that as well. A couple other companies were kind of building this lander together. And now Orbit Beyond is essentially marketing that to NASA is what it sounded like last time. So I don't know a whole lot about Orbit Beyond, but I have heard a couple of things that give me some confidence in their technical approach and their schedule even. So that's encouraging. Their lander, the first version of it, would land about 50 kilograms on the moon, so a little bit smaller than the other two. But nonetheless, those are the three that are getting the first missions here. So we are between one and

a half and two years out from these missions happening if everything stays on schedule. The payloads haven't been assigned to each of these landers right now. They are still going to figure out what they need to, and they said that they will make the selections for what's flying on what lander at the end of the summer. So I guess they're still finishing up some homework there. The other two, so Astrobotic, I said they were originally going to fly on Atlas V, and now they're kind of thinking about options. The other two, I believe they said that they would fly on some sort of a Falcon 9 launch. So I don't know if there's a hard and fast rule yet on what they would fly on this far out, but I assume it's

going to be some sort of rideshare that they would tag along with another mission. So again, I don't really have a whole lot to analyze out of this story itself, but these are things that now we know which companies to pay particular attention to over the next couple of years when it comes to the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. There were some statements by the other companies out there. I think Mastin Space said that this first task order wasn't really applicable to our lander design. It was not, you know, we didn't fit what NASA was looking for for these, but we're

hopeful for the next round. So that's an important note, too. These aren't the only three missions that would fly out of the commercial lunar program. There's going to be other task orders in the future. Presumably every couple of months, they would announce some more opportunities, maybe every year, depending on the schedule here. So in the future, I'm sure we'll see other flights by other companies, maybe the ones that are right now a little farther from launching themselves, but these three seem to be fairly close to being able to launch and land on the moon. So that is an encouraging sign to know that we've got three picked out for going to the lunar surface.

All right, we've got one more story to talk about before I give you my grand theory behind these three. But before we do that, let's say a huge thank you to all of you out there who are supporting Main Engine Cutoff every single month. If you want to help support the show, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and kick in there. 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, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Heather, Tommy, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for supporting the show. This is an entirely

listener-supported show. This is an independent operation. So if you like what you're hearing, if you like what I'm doing, send a little support my way, mainenginecutoff.com support. All right, the last announcement that I want to talk about is from Firefly Aerospace. This is a company that is working on a smaller launch vehicle. They are working on Firefly Alpha right now. They've got some other ideas for the future, but Firefly Alpha is the one that is closest to launching as their first starter vehicle. And it's one that I think could make a pretty big impact on the launch environment. So as a quick refresher on Alpha, it launches about a thousand kilograms to low earth orbit. They currently have a launch site on both coasts. So they're taking over Space Launch Complex 2 West out at Vandenberg. So that

is what Delta 2 used to fly out of, out of Vandenberg. They got that first. And out on the East Coast, they have Space Launch Complex 20. So they are working on launch sites on both coasts, which is very important. I often talk about the lack of polar access that we have here in the US. There are very few number of polar launch sites that are left. Vandenberg is not that big. A lot of it is for the Air Force, a missile defense agency. And then the other half is kind of for space launches.

But there's not a lot of launch sites there. There are plenty of extra old launch sites that are out on the Cape that could be revitalized and used. And even the Cape itself could be expanded in certain directions. But out at Vandenberg, there are very, very tiny amount

of launch sites available there. Polar is very hard to get to from Wallops. You could do it, but it's a huge performance hit. And Alaska, the spaceport up there, is just hard to get to. So the lack of access to polar launch sites is something that I find concerning for the future, knowing that these polar orbits and sun-synchronous orbits are very popular for what's launching these days. So the fact that Firefly has a launch site on both coasts is a huge boost to what I think they can pull off here. There's someone that's very interesting because if you remember the story of Firefly, they kind of died out for a while. There was a whole bunch of lawsuits and there was funding issues. And then New Sphere Ventures swept in, bought up Firefly's assets and revitalized it to what it is today. The vehicle design changed.

It's much simpler. It doesn't rely on an aerospike engine anymore. It's very traditional rocket engines and traditional tankage. And it kind of brought the thing back to life. And since that, we've seen static fires of their upper stages. They're working on these two launch sites. So they have always been targeting the end of 2019. It sounds like that's slipping into 2020, as we assume now, but they're a year away from being an active launching company. And the payload range that they're targeting, I think, is very

interesting. Rocket Lab is a very useful payload range, but it does seem to be a little bit small to me. I'm much more interested in the couple of launch vehicles that are being developed in the 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit range. I think that gives you a lot of flexibility, and the flights could still be pretty inexpensive. And I think it's going to be really interesting for the future of space launch to see which size wins out. Is it the really small launch, the really small and dedicated launch like Rocket Lab, or is this slightly bigger size that gives you a little more room, a little more flexibility, and lets you kind of grow your satellites up from CubeSat size to a little bit larger?

Well, now Firefly announced their orbital transfer vehicle. This is a small upper stage that would fly on Firefly Alpha. It is powered by electric propulsion, a xenon-based engine, or two it looks like, a couple engines on there in one of these diagrams. So this greatly upgrades their payload capability to certain higher energy orbits. So they have released a user guide for this upper stage and you would essentially mount your payload onto this upper stage. It could mount one big primary payload and a couple of small secondary payloads and then this really improves the payload performance. So the the stats they give here in this

user guide are up to 600 kilograms to geostationary orbit and up to 500 kilograms to lunar orbit. So that is a huge, huge upgrade from what they were previously targeting, which was 1,000 kilograms to LEO, and that drops off pretty quick as you go higher up into the higher energy orbits. But with this very efficient electric propulsion, small upper stage, they can take payloads to these higher energy orbits very efficiently. You're obviously trading a little bit with time there, so it's going to take a little longer to get up to geostationary orbit with this kind of upper stage, but they can do it now.

So it takes their small payload size and it puts it into a pretty interesting class, especially when you consider things like this new company that is working on smaller satellite buses for geostationary orbit. So this one company is named Astranis, and they're working on geostationary satellite buses that are, I think, somewhere between 200 and 300 kilograms. So if you consider that with this new orbital transfer vehicle payload, Firefly could take one or two of those to geostationary orbit on its own. So when you consider, you know, the satellite sizes kind of dropping down to that range, and then the launch vehicle that is upgraded to get that range to geo, that's a really interesting

payload size. And it's quite interesting, because right now, Astranis customers tend to be, you know, maybe unsure of how they're going to get to geo, maybe they're going to hitch a ride with a bigger satellite that's going to geo. Well, now they might have an option to fly for just a couple of million dollars to GEO themselves with Firefly. And more interestingly than that is the 500 kilograms to lunar orbit. Firefly Aerospace was also part of that commercial lunar payload services program that I was talking about in the last segment there. We were all wondering what the deal was there. And I've picked up some tips that they were actually partnered with Intuitive Machines. So Intuitive Machines would build a lander and Firefly would launch them. And I was always wondering, you know, I guess the Intuitive

Machines lander could put themselves into lunar orbit or from Earth orbit into lunar orbit and then down to the surface. But now you consider this new orbital transfer vehicle, it sounds like they would be able to launch from Cape Canaveral, launch a lander like Intuitive Machines Nova Sea Lander, fly it to the moon and then drop it off in lunar orbit. And considering the payload size of a lot of these small landers, they could probably do that for most of the landers that are in that program. So that's a really interesting market for this, you know, especially when you consider that these lunar landers are supposed to be able to be for people that aren't NASA. So that if you were, you know, some sort of scientific institution, and you wanted to land a payload on the surface,

you could go contract directly with one of these lander companies and fly a private mission to the moon. And Firefly is right in that class that could do it if this orbital transfer vehicle works out as they are intending. So I always thought Firefly was really interesting because of their dual launch sites, because of their payload size to low Earth orbit and sun synchronous orbit. But now they're able to get 600 kilograms to geo and 500 to lunar orbit. That is a really attractive offering. I don't know what the price tag would be for this orbital transfer vehicle. Firefly Alpha itself was targeted, I think, $15 million per dedicated launch.

So you consider a couple of more million for a launch to a higher energy orbit with this upper stage. That is a quite interesting and attractive offer on the launch market. And one that seems to be about a year away from the launch pad. So at a time when Rocket Lab seems to be struggling to get up to their pace that they're intending, at a time when Virgin Orbit is struggling to even get to their first launch, Firefly is a really interesting company right now that I am particularly excited about. So to wrap this all up in the grand theory that I was talking about before, I mentioned in the Firefly Aerospace segment that they were bought by NuSphere Ventures.

It's a company that is founded by this Ukrainian who is some sort of entrepreneur, made a bunch of money, Max Polyakov. So he swooped in with his NuSphere Ventures company, picked up Firefly Aerospace, and kind of revitalized them in a lot of ways. Well, I heard recently an interesting tidbit that Firefly Aerospace is not the only space company that NuSphere is behind. They have also invested in Intuitive Machines and Axiom Space. So the three stories we talked about, NASA commercializing the ISS, Axiom Space is one of the front runners to get access to that docking port on the ISS. NASA looking for commercial lunar payloads to the surface. Intuitive Machines is one of those that are flying the first three missions.

And Firefly with this orbital transfer vehicle that would be launching one of those, also a new sphere venture. So all three of these really interesting stories have a new sphere connection. And these companies seem to be kind of on the interesting edge of space these days. And you got Firefly and Intuitive working together, and you got Axiom pushing the commercial Leo market. The new sphere of influence, as I'm calling it, that is a really interesting presence in space these days, and one that is growing in an interesting way. They haven't talked much about Axiom or Intuitive as part of the New Sphere Ventures collection, which I find interesting. So, you know, maybe the tip is not accurate,

but I trust it very, very heavily. So that is a really interesting turn of events, if that is the case. And I'm curious why they aren't mentioning it much at this point, because it seems like something they would want to tout pretty heavily. So there you go.

That is your hot tip of the day. New Sphere Ventures, Firefly, Intuitive Machines, and Axiom Space, all three doing really interesting work. So for now, that is all I've got for you on these three stories. Hope you've enjoyed the little grab bag of a breakdown of these stories that we're talking about here. Got any questions, send them over to me, Anthony at MainEngineCutoff.com or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. Don't forget, support the show, MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. Thank you all so much, and I'll talk to you soon.