Main Engine Cut Off - T+128: NASA Shuffles CLPS, Partners on Blue Moon and Starship

Episode Date: August 2, 2019

NASA terminated OrbitBeyond’s CLPS task order, opened CLPS up to more providers, and announced exciting partnerships with Blue Origin, SpaceX, and others. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 41 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, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous—and 253 other supporters. NASA Partners on Blue Moon and Starship, and Shuffles CLPS Providers - Main Engine Cut Off Commercial lunar lander company terminates NASA contract - SpaceNews.com NASA Announces Next Phase of Commercial Lunar Payload Services | NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) On-Ramping - Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities NASA Announces Industry Partnerships to Advance Moon, Mars Technology | NASA NASA agrees to work with SpaceX on orbital refueling technology | Ars Technica The Science of Plume Effects – Center for Lunar & Asteroid Surface Science 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 and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we've got a ton of lunar landing news to break down today. I'm not going to say that I must be able to tell the future, but last show, during the Starhopper segment, I was talking about the fact that at a certain point, we were either going to see NASA embrace new projects like Starship, like Blue Moon, when they start showing progress with hardware like Starhopper, like BE-7, or they were going to start getting questions asked of them as to why they're not. I don't want to say I predicted the future, but then all of a sudden this week, we got some indication that they're ready to embrace these kinds of projects. And that's really exciting. So I'm going to talk about that in a second, but let's start on the smaller end of the lunar landing scale. This week, we heard two bits of news about the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program. Quick refresher on what that is. Back in fall nasa uh verified or certified i don't know what word you want to use but they accepted nine different companies in to a group of providers

that could bid on task orders so when they have a flight ready to go to the moon these nine companies that they approved could bid on that task order and then they would award it from there and these are smaller flights these are scientific payloads heading to the lunar surface in preparation for human landings, is what they say. I think it's actually outside of that a little bit. It's a little bit independent of Artemis. I think this is something that has staying power, and you'll hear me talk more about that soon. Because, spoiler alert, on Monday, you're going to be hearing my conversation with a couple of folks from Intuitive Machines, who are one of the first three to fly to the moon under commercial lunar payload services. We'll talk about that more.

But this week, we heard the news that NASA and Orbit Beyond have terminated their task order. Orbit Beyond was this kind of weird shell corporation of sorts, where they were a U.S. counterpart to a team of people based around Team Indus. This is an Indian company that was working on flying to the moon as part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. So Orbit Beyond was going to be the NASA-facing side to market that lander. There started being a lot of questions asked about why this foreign company was part of this program that was supposed to be for American companies. There was a lot of questions being thrown about that and a lot of drama in that area. I think

politicians started to take note. And I've heard that that did have a lot to do with what happened here. I'm not sure exactly what happened behind the scenes, but I'll just say that I'm not surprised that Orbit Beyond kind of fell apart here. So that is a bummer. But, you know, this is the point of having a distributed program like this from NASA's perspective. They want to spread the risk around all these different flight providers, around many different flights, so that if one doesn't make it, it's okay because they have so many others lined up. Now, I think the thinking was there would be a technical issue during a launch or during a flight that we'd have to recover from, and not that it would happen this early, you know, two months after they announced the initial task orders to these

companies. But I think the same theory still applies. It's okay, they can survive orbit beyond bowing out of this competition, and they still have the other two task orders that were awarded back in May to Astrobotic and to, as I said, Intuitive Machines. Those are very promising so far, and I think you're going to really enjoy the conversation with Intuitive Machines. Funny enough, I stopped recording with them, and then this Orbit Beyond news broke. So in that interview, you'll hear us talk about Orbit Beyond as they're still a thing. But nonetheless, we are moving ahead. And NASA is too.

The other bit of news on this front was that NASA announced the opportunity to on-ramp new providers for commercial lunar payload services. So back in the original announcement, when they opened it up to different providers, there was a deadline. There was a minimum cargo payload, which was, I think, 10 kilograms or something. Very low. And then there was a deadline for when you could fly. So the cutoff was the end of December 2021. So you needed to be able to fly a flight by the end of 2021 in order to be approved as part of the Eclipse program. Now, as part of this new call to on-ramp new providers, and to be clear, this is to bring more providers in that could then bid on task orders.

They have now moved that deadline back to 2024. So obviously the date lines up with Artemis a little bit, but it's actually December. The end of December 2023 is now the target date. So they've given it an extra two year window for providers that could enter the CLPS program. And in the documents that where this was all announced, there's a Q&A document that NASA released, and there's an interesting quote from there. It says, the rationale for this change is that commercial entities seek to develop very capable lander systems that may be ready after 2021, and it may be preferable that such organizations be included now in the CLIPS catalog versus later after a future on-ramp process. Extending the landing ability date to 2024 is more in keeping with the IDIQ,

that's the Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity Procurement Strategy, and allows NASA to prepare for the mid to large payloads that will need not only more time for development, but more discussion on interfaces with providers. Now, there's a couple of interesting knock-on effects from that change and from the rationale that NASA provided. Number one is a lot of the companies that were already in this process have ideas for future bigger landers. So any of the companies that you've heard of that are in the CLPS program already, they were able to bid maybe their first lander, but might have plans for two or three sizes down the line. And I think that they could now bid those landers as part of

the CLPS catalog, as they say, not just their smallest land they could now bid those landers as part of the Eclipse catalog, as they say, not just their smallest lander, because the bigger landers are going to be follow-ons, so they would fly in 2023, 2024, whatever it may be. But also, it sounded a lot. They were talking about very capable lander systems and large payloads. That sounds an awful lot like the two big sleeping giants in terms of landing on planetary services, Blue Moon and Starship. So it sounded a lot to me like they were opening the door because there's a low end payload cap and there's a range, a suggested range of payloads, but there is no high end. It's not saying we can't land landers larger than a thousand kilograms.

It just says the payload range needs to fit this. So you could put a thousand kilograms of NASA cargo on a Blue Moon or on a Starship and they could fly other stuff as well. But why doesn't that fit in Eclipse? So this is a very open-ended procurement strategy here with a low end on the payload range and a suggested range, but no cap. And now they're talking about very capable lander systems with large payloads that are ready after 2021. And that sounds a hell of a lot like Starship and Blue Moon. And little do you know it, just a couple hours after, NASA announces a bunch of new partnerships on technology for the Moon and Mars. And that's what I want to get into as the main meat of this show. But before we do that, let's say a huge thank you to everyone who made this episode of Main Engine Cutoff possible.

This is entirely listener supported. So if you like what you're hearing, if you want to hear more of it, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and help support the show. There are 294 of you supporting the show every single month. We are so close to 300. So if 60 out there have not thrown a dollar my way, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and let's get over the 300 mark. But this episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 41 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, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support for making this show possible. All right, so back in October, NASA made an announcement of collaboration opportunity. That's what they call it. And this was an opportunity to get into a Space Act agreement with NASA. And they've now selected 13 companies for 19 partnerships in this vein.

Now, Space Act agreements are not contracts per se. It's not NASA paying these companies for work. It is a partnership between NASA and the company or the organization that says, we will share what we know and what we have if you share what you learn. So NASA gives them access to facilities or to hardware, to software that they have, to expertise that the people at NASA have at no cost. And the company provides back things that could benefit NASA in the future, be it knowledge, be it other hardware innovations, whatever comes out of it, NASA kind of gets to use

as well. So it's not a, you know, NASA paying these companies for work, and it's not the companies getting a contract from NASA. It is a partnership where you're sharing knowledge, you're sharing things you a, you know, NASA paying these companies for work, and it's not the companies getting a contract from NASA. It is a partnership where you're sharing knowledge, you're sharing things you learn, you're sharing maybe some things that you make. But it's, you know, something that we see kind of often, but it's important to note that that relationship is there because the companies themselves retain all the IP that they build. So if they're working towards their own ends, it's not like now every other company in the world is going to have access to whatever they develop. They might know about it, they might hear about it, but they're not going to get access to

any particular piece of IT that the company develops. Now, there's a lot of interesting companies in here. I'm going to talk a lot about Blue Origin and SpaceX and their partnerships here because I think those are the most interesting, but there's a couple other ones here that are worth mentioning. You should go read the list yourself. I have the link in the show notes. There's a lot of talk about the Deep Space Network and communications and things moving forward. And we know that the Deep Space Network is something that pretty soon is going to need some additional work. And maybe that's a thing for future conversation with advanced space of boulder colorado and vulcan wireless of carlsbad california they're going to be looking at some

communications and navigation uh work there's a couple of sierra nevada mentions in here which are pretty interesting uh they have one where they're going to be partnering with uh langley to capture infrared images of dream chaser as it re-enters Earth. So that's going to be kind of amazing to watch. If you remember back in the day, there was some imagery captured of a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster coming back in, and it was incredible to see this flying through the atmosphere and the different visualizations that NASA had. This was part of a CRS flight, and we're going to get a similar partnership here with Dream Chaser. So that'll be pretty awesome to watch whenever that does happen. And then the second collaboration that they have, Sierra Nevada will mature a method to recover the

upper stage of a rocket using a deployable decelerator. It's interesting that they're working on it. It's something that ULA has talked up a lot about and then never really went through with. I think they do have some sort of mission coming up soon, but upper stage use of deployable decelerator is kind of interesting. I'm curious who Sierra Nevada is working with on that or if they just have some ideas. We'll see where that goes. But the real things that I want to talk about here are three different partnerships with Blue Origin and two different partnerships with SpaceX. By name in this announcement,

Blue Moon and Starship are called out. And that is very important to note because it does show that NASA is addressing these things as real projects that could benefit them in the future, that both the companies could benefit from NASA helping them out with it, and NASA could benefit from the companies developing these systems.

And that seems like a small thing, but I think when you put it in context of everything that's going on, NASA acknowledging these two programs and starting to partner on them is a very big indication that they see a lot of hope in these ways and that they see this as a potential future for themselves. So in the Blue Origin case, there's three different partnerships. As I said, they're working on guidance navigation systems to do precise landing on the moon. They're going to be working with fuel cells for the Blue Moon lunar lander that will power it on the surface. And then they're working on high temperature materials

for liquid rocket engine nozzles. All of those primarily, presumably, for Blue Moon. So this is something that could be very important to NASA, not only in the CLPS program, as I just mentioned, but also for Artemis in the future. If Blue Moon is going to be a part of this program, these three things are going to be important for that program's precision landing, power on the surface, and the engine nozzles are obviously pretty important. But again, it's a good sign for Blue Origin that NASA and them are going to work together on this project. Blue Origin is developing it regardless of what happens with Artemis. And I think that's a real benefit for NASA. But to be able to share some knowledge of what Blue Moon can do and for NASA to share knowledge of what Blue Moon needs to do and what they need to know.

Those are really good signs for that project overall. And when we see BE-7, the engine for Blue Moon, has been making really good progress this summer, and then you see partnerships like this, it's something that gets me very excited about that program itself. But then the two most interesting announcements in this were the ones with SpaceX. They call out Starship by name, which is a big deal. We've been waiting to kind of hear an official acknowledgement of this program from NASA for a while. People have been asking about it at conferences and they never really take a stand on it.

But to see actual partnerships heading towards SpaceX for Starship work is awesome. And it's two very important areas of research. The first one was to advance their technology to vertically land large rockets on the moon and specifically to assess engine plume interaction with lunar regolith. This is a big area that SpaceX needs to start researching and needs to research if they want to get approval to land on the moon, if they want to do frequent landings on the lunar surface. There's been a lot of talk of late.

Dr. Phil Metzger has been talking this up. I'll put a link in the show notes to his research on this but uh effectively the lunar environment is very interesting when it comes to engine exhaust um even for small engines and it will be especially so for giant raptor engines but um because of the size of the moon the gravity the lack of atmosphere and the regolith itself when you land the moon, you're pretty much ejecting particles all around the lunar surface, like literally everywhere, into orbit, onto, you know, thousands of kilometers away. And that's something that is going to be important if we're going to continually land on the lunar surface. We're

eventually going to need landing pads to limit this. But this was really first noticed on Apollo 12. They landed next to a surveyor lander, and they found that it had been blasted by lunar regolith when they landed the LEM on the surface. So this is an area of research that I think is going to be increasingly important. And it's like I said, for the CLPS landers, it matters a little bit. They don't want to land too close to something. But those engines are tiny compared to Raptor. So if SpaceX wants to land on the moon, and this certainly applies to Mars, maybe not as bad because of the slight atmosphere at Mars. But if they want to do these kind of landings, they need this research.

And by showing that they have a program towards lunar landings, I think it's showing, it's indicating that they see Starship as something that will do the moon, that will do contracts to the moon, that will work with NASA on the moon if there is work to be had there. Now, four years ago, I could have seen this contract going to SpaceX and talking about Mars. Moon is in right now. But the indication from SpaceX that they're going to partner with NASA on research about the moon, I think that's important to note that they are open to flying Starship wherever there is work to be done. So that's a really interesting partnership to me. And I'm excited to see the research that comes out of that. I bet we'll see some really cool visualizations of what a Raptor would do to the lunar surface and what kind of crater it will put in there when it lands. So

that's one to watch. But the bigger one is the second partnership. This is the partnership to advance technology needed to transfer propellant in orbit. Now, this is huge for two reasons. The first is that in-orbit refueling is crucial for Starship as it's been defined to us so far. If without refueling, Starship is nowhere near as interesting as it could be. And that is an area that they really need to nail, right? They've got docking down, they got launching down, they've got landing boosters down. I'm sure they can do all

three of those things with a bigger vehicle like Starship. But propellant transfer in orbit, it's not something that's never been done. It's never been done this way with these kinds of propellants at these kinds of temperatures. So that is important to research. But this is kind of the crucial technology that they need to master for Starship to achieve its full potential. So that's really interesting that they're already working on that kind of stuff. Obviously they were, but to have an indication that they're at partnership status with propellant transfer is a really good note. And the second reason this is so big is that propellant transfer, propellant depots, refueling

has been forbidden at NASA for a very long time now because it threatens traditional programs like SLS. This is something that's been reported on a lot, specifically by Eric Berger. So there's an article over in Ars Technica that you should check out on why this has been a political hot button issue. Spoiler alert, Richard Shelby, everybody's favorite senator from the Gulf States. But for NASA to say this is something that we're going to actively research, we're going to enable a new type of activity in low Earth orbit that could lead to more exploration of space. That's a really big statement to make, even if it's by way of a small partnership. So even if this is a

way to announce that intent, a small way in the way of a partnership, reminds me of that Hemingway quote of, how did you go bankrupt? Two ways, gradually, then suddenly. These kind of things, these shifts in the stated NASA policy, they don't happen overnight because we've seen the attempts to change things overnight with Artemis, and it's a lot harder than that. But when you see something like this creep its way into partnerships, and then maybe down the line, there's another contract for it, and then all of a sudden an architecture is built on it. It's a slow creep at first, but it builds up, especially if they're able to achieve some quick results, some good success on this partnership. So this is very exciting, not only for NASA to show that they're ready to embrace projects like Blue Moon and like Starship, but the fact that

they're ready to embrace the pieces of those projects that are significantly different from what NASA has been working on by itself all these years. So that's really exciting to see that and to see that different kind of tact. And I think it shows that there's people within NASA that think like you and I do. NASA gets a lot of flack as kind of this big monolithic organization. We think, you know, we talk about it like everybody at NASA thinks the same, but man, there are so many people in NASA that think like everybody else in the industry and are frustrated by different parts of NASA and the bureaucratic structure there and the influences that they have. But it's times like these when you realize that there are people within NASA working

towards the future that we all want to see. And this is really encouraging in that way. So I wanted to cover it here on the show because I think it's a really important story to keep an eye on. We'll see a lot more coming from these partnerships, not only the SpaceX and Blue Origin ones, but all the other ones in that list. So go check it out there on nasa.gov. It's worth reading through all the different partnerships to see what we're going to see in the future. And as I said, on Monday, we'll be talking with Intuitive Machines about the commercial lunar payload services program. It's really fun to talk to people that are working on landing on the moon.

So there's a lot more clips talk coming up, but until then, thank you all for listening. And I'll talk to you next week. Bye.