Main Engine Cut Off - T+131: Andrew Rush, CEO of Made in Space

Episode Date: August 31, 2019

Andrew Rush, CEO of Made in Space, joins me to talk about their big new NASA contract for Archinaut One and the history, present, and future of in-space manufacturing. 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, 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 265 other supporters. Made In Space | Build Above NASA Funds Demo of 3D-Printed Parts Made, Assembled in Orbit | NASA Made In Space Awarded NASA Contract For Robotic Manufacturing And Assembly Flight Demo Mission | Made In Space Archinaut One Solar Array Deployment - YouTube Made In Space, Inc. Completes Successful Ground-Based Manufacturing & Assembly Testing For Archinaut Program | Made In Space Archinaut NASA seeks to break the “tyranny of launch” with in-space manufacturing | Ars Technica NASA Administrator and Made In Space CEO share vision for on-orbit manufacturing, assembly - SpaceNews.com 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 Main Engine Cutoff, I'm Anthony Colangelo and today we are talking about in-space manufacturing, a big topic for the future of space. If you want to do anything interesting in space, you're probably going to have to make some structures, some hardware in space whenever you get where you're going. And we've got a great guest to talk about it today. We've got Andrew Rush, the CEO of Made in Space, the company that you think of when you think of in-space manufacturing. They've been doing a lot of work on the ISS the past couple of years, and they just got a big NASA contract for an upcoming mission that's going to be really exciting to watch. So we're going to talk about the history of Made in Space, the current projects they're working on, Arcanaut 1, and the future

of Made in Space in general. It's going to be a great talk, so we'll call them in a second. But before we do that, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who makes this kind of show possible. Head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support if you want to help support the show. There are 305 of you supporting this show, including 40 executive producers of this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, TheEverDashNut, Frank, Rui, Julian, Lars, Tommy, Adam, Sam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support and for making this episode possible. Helps me do things like this interview and

continue to grow the show. So if you want to help support it, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. Thank you all so much. Now let's give Andrew a call. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I'm very excited to talk about Arcanaut, all the other things that you've been working on lately. How are you doing? Doing wonderful. It's a pleasure to be here. We were talking a little bit before I hit record about your recent visit. Jim Brinestein was, I guess he was at your facilities, is that correct? That's correct.

Yeah, that was pretty awesome to see. So I've got some links in the show notes to check out uh they were everybody was tweeting about it as well so uh what's that like to have the nasa administrator who's been at the center of a lot of media in the past year what's that like to have him on site at your facilities talking about your current work it was it's a real it's a real honor to have the administrator come visit us um he's a he's a really engaging gentleman. And I was, in particular, I was really impressed with how much he sought out essentially every member of our staff that was there and talked to them and engaged with them and wanted to know more about them and their backgrounds and what excited them about what we were in space, not one and all the other projects we have going on. So it was a real pleasure,

pleasure to host him and to talk about, you know, the history of main space, how we've worked really closely with NASA to get where we are today. And the, and the sort of the vision for the future for doing in space manufacturing and how that, you know,

how that, you know, really meshes with, with Artemis and the other goals that NASA has laid out for itself in the relatively near term. Boy, you are one for segues because that's exactly what I wanted to ask you about. So I guess you got some practice with a NASA administrator before coming on the hard-hitting podcast here. Oh, he's a master of segues.

So let's start with the history of Made in Space. I think a lot of people are familiar with Made in Space in terms of the work that's going on in the ISS, but I'd love to roll the clock back, you know, years before that even on how things got to where they are today with Made in Space. Yeah, absolutely. So Made in Space was founded in 2010, actually. So we're about a nine-year-old company, which makes us a relatively old dog in

commercial space nowadays. Totally. The founders of this company came together around the vision of how do we enable people to sustainably live and work in space and and that's evolved into you know what's focusing on how we can you know enable and incentivize uh you know the the kind of permanent settlement of space and very quickly what we what we came came upon is that manufacturing is this really key piece to to that puzzle that we need to develop new tools and technologies to enable satellites to function more effectively, be designed and optimized for their operational environments rather than just to survive launch and to be able to provide tools and fixes for humans

on spacecraft and orbit, as well as to utilize manufacturing in the microgravity environment to provide economic incentives for us to go and stay. Because really, that's the way that we've opened every frontier historically as humans, is that there was an economic motivator for us to go and branch out to these new locations. to go and branch out to these new locations. We went west to California, not because California is beautiful, even though it is,

but because there's gold. There was gold in the rivers that people could pick up and take back and trade for luxury and profit. And that's a really big motivator for a large portion of our business. It's focused on space-enabled manufacturing. you know, profit. And that's really, you know, that's really a big motivator for, you know, for a large portion of our business is focused on space enabled manufacturing is, is finding those, you know, you know, those metaphorical, you know, you know, rivers of, you know, rivers of gold. So we, you know, we started, you know,

we started off with the kind of foundational technology of just demonstrating any ability to do manufacturing of useful objects in space. And, you know, the founders of the company, you know, bootstrapped it, demonstrated on a flight opportunities, parabolic flight, the ability to just manufacture a little bit, do a little bit of 3D printing. And that was enough to get, you know,

to get the broader NASA community's attention. And through a series of SBIRs, we were able to design and build and ultimately launch the first 3D printer at the International Space Station in 2014 and manufacture the very first functional objects off the face of the planet. And that was actually less than five years ago, which for us as folks in the space community is like the blink of an eye, right? And so it's really wild to think about that's where we were, you know, four and a half, five years ago. And now that machine's like two or three generations old.

we have a 3D printer that we own and operate on the space station as a kind of machine shop in space that if NASA or university or another aerospace company or another space agency wants to manufacture something or needs a tool or fix on the ISS and they want it quickly, they can just call us up and we'll print it for them. Yeah, the tool thing was one of the first applications that made its way into headlines. There was a ratchet and some wrenches and things like that. What else is happening with that today on the ISS?

What is the typical demand like for things that need to be printed up there? Yeah, so we've printed almost 200 objects on the space station. And they really run the gamut in terms of what they are. You know, we've made covers and fixes for scientific equipment. We've made structural elements to hold and stabilize things. We've made medical,

we've made things for medical applications like finger splints. We've also made a lot of, you know, we've got a lot of STEM interests. So we've made tools and models that have been designed by students, you know, get them thinking about, you know, designing for microgravity, not just designing for, you know, for 1G. So really, it really runs the gamut. And we've been really impressed with the community's response to it.

Finger splints is pretty good. Is there a particular astronaut that is known to be clumsy that needed a finger splint? Or is that something we can't talk about? It's actually something that's a fairly common occurrence is that folks get up there and maybe push off a little bit too hard and jam their fingers by running into things. And so that was a really interesting project because we demonstrated the ability to kind of iterate a design very quickly. Like we made a first design and it was tried out and then

we made some tweaks to it to make it both more supportive and more comfortable for the subject. I think we actually have a pretty cool picture or two of it being modeled, you know, on the space station. Modeled in terms of wearing it or actually three models? I'm not sure even which one you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. So one of the, you said you have multiple generations of printers on the iss today uh and i think people have a general idea of 3d printing in 1g but maybe not so much

in 0g and that's obviously one of the biggest challenges uh with adapting 3d printing to the space environment so those different generations were the iterations more of refinement of technology did you have any complete you know let's throw out all the plans that we had before and redesign this entirely what has that transition been like through the generations and then maybe up through you know your next project of arcanaut yeah so we had we've been the approach that we've taken at Made Space to technology development is, you know, a very iterative approach, a very step-by-step approach.

So, and that's paid a lot of dividends that we haven't had to sort of throw the book out and redesign everything, you know, everything fundamentally. So the approaches that we took to traverse an extrusion all the way back to flat opportunities, you know, parallel flights that have been infused really throughout our technology development.

The main differences between the two printers on the space station, the first one was, you know, it's the size of kind of a bread box and lives inside of the microgravity science glove box on the space station, which is a nice enclosed contained environment that the astronauts use for a wide variety of scientific experiments. The second generation printer we made prints in a much wider variety of materials compared to that first printer. And it's a standalone device. It's got its own environmental control system in it. It's completely enclosed because, as I'm sure you know, any manufacturing process has a certain amount of off-gassing

or other materials that it is generating during that manufacturing process. And it's important for us to protect the crew and the spacecraft from that material. So we want to capture all that and not let that into the main cabin. And so that was a big, you know, that plus additional material was a big focus for the second device, our additive manufacturing facility. But the underpinning technology there, that ability to do 3D printing in microgravity, really, really remains the same foundation in all of those. And now, you know, we're moving into manufacturing

and assembling satellites on orbit. And that has a few key pieces. One of those key pieces is the ability to manufacture in microgravity. Another key piece is being able to manufacture in the vacuum of space. And then you need to be able to assemble not only what you've manufactured, but you want to integrate that in your spacecraft as well as integrate prefabricated components that are easier to launch than to manufacture on orbit in order to have a satellite that can, you know, manufacture and assemble itself on orbit in a space-optimized way rather than designing for that launch

environment. And that's really where we are today with our very first satellite mission that we're calling Arcanaut 1. Arcanaut is our manufacturing assembly technology that we've been working on for many years. And 1 is the very first mission. Maybe a precursor to that that I wanted to ask about. I got some questions for you from the supporters of the show. I always give them an opportunity to send me some questions if they've got any for our guests.

And some of them asked about the stash and deploy program that was talked about a couple years back, where the idea was there would be, you could probably explain this better than I could, but you would keep components up on the space station and then print to order, maybe a CubeSat or something like that for deployment at a later date. I'm wondering how much of that, if anything did come of that, that you could talk to, or if the direction you're heading with Arcanaut, where you would build the entire satellite, if that's indicative of maybe where that ended up. So Stash and Employ is a really interesting service. And you did a great job of highlighting how it kind of operates. There's two really cool benefits of stash and deploy.

One of those is being very, very responsive. That, you know, right now, if you came to me with a perfect CubeSat and a big pile of money, it would take at least a month for me to get that satellite on orbit just because of launch license. And that's kind of unfortunate when you're trying to be responsive. Like if you have a constellation that, you know, a portion of some satellite malfunction, you need to fix that.

You need to fill that hole. You want to do it as quickly as possible and not wait around for launch licenses or whatever. The other way that this is really interesting and provides this great benefit is, again, it's another way of cracking the making a spacecraft that didn't have to survive launch loads. So we devote more of the mass to our functional capability rather than simply structure. And we can also have a configure physical layout that is, again, more optimized for the mission rather than, you know, sitting and, you know,

fitting inside of like a containerized launcher or something like that. We've had, you know, we've done some good development with actually multiple partners on that capability. We have not yet fully demonstrated end-to-end the Stash and Deploy service, but we'd be very excited to. too. Yeah, and I think there's a significant overlap with what you're talking about with Sash and Deploy, because with Arcanaut 1, you are going to be building the structure of a large solar panel. But then Project Arcanaut down the line, you might be expanding to producing different pieces of the satellite. But until you are able to completely produce a satellite in space,

you're going to need some components that are either the smaller electrical components or things that, you know, the printer just doesn't do yet. So it's kind of a very logical progression where it's, what can we produce in space and bring the other pieces along with us to plug in where we can't yet? So to that end, I'd love to talk about Arcanaut 1 itself before the full project Arcanaut. You're going to be producing a fairly large solar array, or I guess the solar array themselves will be rolled up in the satellite, and you'll be producing the support structure there. Can you talk a bit about that being the first project that you're picking off for the Arcanaut

series? Why is that a good fit for right now? And how do you see that playing out beyond this particular project, maybe in the commercial market in the next couple of years? Yeah, absolutely. So Arcanaut 1 is fundamentally a definitive demonstration of the ability to manufacture and assemble in space. We chose the specific configuration of Arcanaut 1, you know, manufacturing and assembling, you know, 20 square meters of solar array on orbit because we felt it was really important to show something, to show a tangible, useful application of manufacturing and assembly technology in the space environment. of manufacturing assembly technology in the space environment. And one of the things that we're always looking for more of in space is more power.

More power and more surface area. And so that's why Archon 1 is focused on manufacturing assembly large solar arrays. But if we need to take the solar arrays away, we're going to be demonstrating the ability to do sampling on a very small satellite, probably the smallest, I think probably the smallest satellite that's ever had a robotic arm on it, as well as doing manufacturing of multiple

large spars. We're going to make two 10-meter-long spars with our extended structure-added manufacturing technology. So all of that in the package of ARCNOT1, the package itself is really important. The ability to provide five to eight kilowatts of power on a small satellite, and that's a significant bump over what's currently available in the marketplace. And small satellites can mount nowadays.

They can mount really power-hungry sensors that are relatively small, that are massive in the profile that we can fit on small satellites. But the small satellites today just simply can't provide enough power to run those. And this really breaks that paradigm. We're going to be able to provide the amount of power that large geotelecom satellites have been providing in geo for decades now on these small satellite buses and really making them less power constrained. So the one thing there that is a question I've had

is the difference in, I guess you're trading volume for mass at a certain extent. Is that accurate to say? Because you're producing a solar array that maybe couldn't fit in the volume area that you've had previously, but you do bring along extra mass of the thing that produces your structure, the raw material that you need to produce that.

So what does that trade off like in terms of this scale and even larger than that? Yeah, good question. So the structure itself that we're manufacturing is actually less massive than a traditional deployable structure, both because we're manufacturing to not have to survive launch loads, like the filament is a configuration that's very intensely packed at launch and doesn't really care how many Gs you're subjected to to. Once we get on orbit, we're going to manufacture almost gossamer-like structure that would not survive launch even if you folded it up.

But we do have the robotic assembly and manufacturing plant that's on there. And that plant was what really enabled us to make these really complex structures in a volumetrically efficient way and a mass efficient way and also in a cost effective way. If you wanted to deploy that kind of size of an object that would be prohibitively expensive on small satellites.

So even from a kind of state-of-the-art perspective and considering and saying, hey, you know, maybe looking at mass constraints here, we're still coming out, coming ahead for the customer from a capability and a cost perspective, which at the end of the day, that's really important. You know, the dollars per capability, you know, that's really important. The dollars for capability, for a unique capability that we get to space. Now extending this a little bit further,

when you get into bigger assets, obviously the more things that you're manufacturing and assembling, the more you're kind of amortizing the mass of the manufacturing system across the different subsystems that are being manufactured and assembled. So even in small sets, um, we, we,

we can be very, you know, almost mass neutral compared to, um, traditional ways, you know, traditional deployable ways that you might accomplish things, um,

because of how many hinges and everything that you need, um, you know, per need you know per you know per unit length but certainly unlike larger assets you know we see more and more mass mass and volume saving in addition to you know availability and costing yeah that makes sense you mentioned a little bit about the robotic arm that would be part of Arconaut one and Arconaut in general that's something that I feel like flies under the radar here because that's a project all on its own, the complexity of that robotic arm. And I've done shows. I went down to NASA Goddard last year and talked to them about the satellite servicing they're working on with these very complex, large robotic arms with several different tool types. And there's some other companies working on that as well.

Is there anything with the robotic arm that is involved here with manufacturing that you could talk about? Or is that kind of the secret sauce? So the robotic assembly is definitely, as I laid out earlier, is definitely one of the key pieces of Archonaut. And our emphasis has been on cost effective system, you know, that, that,

you know, that we can, we can deploy, um, on, on small satellites in a cost effective way, because, you know,

we're not, it's not realistic to, to build, you know, a $20 million arm and put that on an SBIC-class satellite. Yeah, it kind of defeats the purpose of this. Right, right.

That's the cost of a whole satellite, right? So we've been focusing on architectures and approaches that allow us to leverage um, to leverage a lot more, um, of sort of modern, you know, modern developments in robotics, uh, to provide reliable, very cost-effective systems. One other thing that I'm wondering about with Arcanaut 1 itself, and then I want to ask you some questions about Arcanaut in general. Um, I've got a 3D printer sitting next to my desk here, and I am not a professional by any means, so I tend to waste a lot of filament. I'm curious if you have a certain amount of material,

kind of as overrun material or extra material in case something goes wrong with manufacturing, and how you plan that out in case something unexpected happens in the environment of space and you need to reproduce um one of the pieces of the structure uh do you have enough to print extras and what do you do with the the excess at that point so this is actually one of the unsung heroic developments of the 3d printers that we have on the space station that 3d printer that you have you know you know in your 3D printer that you have, you know, in your home, you're right. We all waste a lot of filament. Me more than most.

Don't be too nice here. But you probably also have to do a certain amount of maintenance to it. You know, taking care of it. And if it was a little bit more of a larger professional unit, like we have some in our shop you might actually pay somebody to come by on like a yearly basis to you know make you know to to just just do maintenance on it replace things or get worn out um and just

keep the machine in really good working order um we don't have that luxury on the space station uh you know we asked nasa if they'd fly us up to the space station, let us maintain it once a year and they politely declined. Um, so we had to make, we had to make printers that you could run for, for years, um, without, without a, you know, without doing maintenance on them. That extremely high reliability that we have in those printers is also the kind of design paradigm and knowledge that we're infusing into the extended structure added manufacturing device

that's in Arcanaut. For that reason, we're pretty confident that we won't have misprints on orbit. Well, that rocks. I hope that that makes its way into my one that's sitting next to my desk at some point in the future. But all right, so that's Arcanaut 1. That's producing a piece of a satellite off of itself. The Project Arcanaut in general, you have a site that kind of lays out a bunch of different visions for this. And this is more of a free-flying spacecraft that is able to produce all sorts of different structures. I would love to hear where that kind of is.

Is that still in, you know, theoretical development phase? Or is that something that is kind of actively worked alongside Arcanaut 1? Where are things at with that today? Yeah, so Arcanaut, the way we conceive of it is it Arcanaut 1. Where are things at with that today? Yeah, so Arcanaut, the way we conceive of it is it's really a platform technology that can come in a wide variety of form factors. And there's maybe two branches. There's maybe two main branches of the tree.

One branch is a satellite that has a manufacturing plant built into it that uses that manufacturing plant once that satellite gets on orbit to build large extended structures or finish itself, finish deploying itself in a space optimized way. And that's in the future. In the future, those systems will be designed to not only manufacture themselves, that manufacture the initial configuration of the satellite, but to also, in response to customer need or some other external force, to reconfigure themselves or to repair themselves that there was some damage done

To to get us more to almost go from from expendable satellite to reusable satellite To go from kind of fire and forget we we said put the satellite up there unfurls itself And that's configuration did more to more of a paradigm where it's up there. It can reconfigure itself, it can augment itself, as long as you're providing it, obviously, the raw materials to do so, and to be more of an immortal satellite rather than something that's only up there for 10 or 15 years. The second branch of the Arcanot tree is that vision of a factory in space that perhaps lives in one orbit and manufactures two-order satellites on orbit that meet customers' needs. on orbit that meet customers' needs. And if you had a few of these factories in space, you could provide assets in a very timely fashion

to provide global coverage. That's one of the really fantastic features that we're diligently working on. We're very proud to have NASA's support via public-private partnerships and other mechanisms as well as other customer support. That one's still

a little bit far off, but that's definitely one of the areas that we're working toward. That seems like a really mindset-shifting project in its own right. I was joking with a friend before this that at a certain point when talking about in-space manufacturing, you get to the question that's similar to why not make the whole plane out of the black box? Like, why ever launch a satellite that doesn't make other satellites?

Is there that kind of inflection point in the future, or do you still think that's way far away at this point to consider never launching a spacecraft that was built on the ground? So Argonaut and a few of the other initiatives that we have here at Made in Space and what other folks are pushing on with regards to space manufacturing are all working toward putting more infrastructure in space uh so that we can you know so we're expanding our economic and you know economic influence expanding humanity's presence um beyond earth and and the more infrastructure you have you know it's it's almost like a you know it's almost it's

this very like uh positive you know positive feedback the's almost like a you know it's almost it's it's this very like uh positive you know positive feedback the more you have the more you want it just kind of keeps building so absolutely we will have i think we will we will it is in our future and our you know with you know within within decades that we will have you know this amazing amount of infrastructure in space that you won't be talking about building satellites and completing them on the ground and folding them up and putting them in a launcher and launching them into space. And then you'll send piece parts to space and do finishing there

and then release those assets. It's almost like going from the horse, the horse and buggy to the automobile. You know, you know, once eventually the automobile will completely, you know, completely supplanted the horse and buggy.

And I think that satellites that are doing, you know, that are manufactured on orbit or finished on orbit will eventually completely supplant, you know, the totally finished satellite that's launched from the ground. Yeah, and I think you've kind of shown us how, in some instances, it makes a lot of sense, even today, to do that, where you're talking about the fact that you can build structures that only exist in zero-g, that don't need to be able to withstand one-g or any other environments for, other than what they're

built for. And that kind of specialization is something that when you think about building out infrastructure in space seems so important because that's what we do here on Earth. You know, we specialize to the applications. We don't have to make this thing that survives every environment we could possibly think of. But to that end, I'm curious if you have, you know, I see a lot of the images on the site here are free-flying spacecraft in space, but I'm curious if you have any inklings towards manufacturing on other planetary surfaces and how what you're working on now might play into, you know, a future out there in different gravity environments, in different atmospheric

environments, and if that's something that is on the roadmap for maiden space. Yeah, we absolutely want to build, you know, roads and commodes on the moon for, you know, for human exploration and settlement of, you know, the moon, not only the moon, but then, you know then feeding forward to Mars and beyond. Remember, our vision is a very human settlement-focused vision. And our roadmaps and our objectives here are to develop as many manufacturing technologies as possible to enable that infrastructure that lets people sustainably living work

in space, including on other planets and other moons. So absolutely, our three friends on the space station work in 1G and 0G and fractional G. So taking those printers and putting them on the moon and using those to, to prepare, to prepare, um, the, the sites for human occupation, um, and, and also, you know, keep the habitats going and repaired in a good order is absolutely on the roadmap and, and, and, you know, part of our ambition. So that's obviously, you know, obviously kind of lays out a timeline of things

based on where the industry in general is at. But I'm curious in your own kind of personal vision for Maiden Space, Arcanaut 1 is due to launch in 2022, I believe. That's the current schedule. So that's three years out. I'm curious what you see Maiden Space working on five years from now

and 10 years from now and 10 years from now. 10 years from now, I hope that a significant fraction of satellites are designed around an in-space manufacturing assembly capability that's based on Arcanum. I think, you know, again, to use the kind of horse and buggy and car analogy, like this is the car, right? Its usefulness once it's going is obvious. And I think the industry is hungry for these sorts of innovations because there's so many missions that we have ambitions for that will just be prohibitively expensive and extraordinarily difficult and risky to do absent some in-space manufacturing assembly capability.

Ten years from now, I also firmly believe that we're going to see space-enabled manufacturing of multiple products be scaled to the point where you'll have commercial space stations, commercial space station modules that will be steadily manufacturing goods in space that will bring that down to Earth and sell into the commercial market. Really expanding the pie of launch,

expanding the pie of human utilization of space, and being those tenants in those commercial space stations alongside NASA, and really establishing a commercial low-earth orbit. And all of that really excites me because I firmly believe that we just don't know the impact of these new technologies, these new business models.

I really think we're going to see a wonderful and almost unbounded economic boom from these like the e-commerce revolution. Are there other trends in the industry, be it for launch or even production on the ground? Are there other trends in the industry that you see interacting with Made in Space? Things that you're excited about, things that you're worried about, anything there that you're looking outward and have some thoughts about that you would like to share? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think the launch industry right now is so vibrant and almost week to week we're seeing new approaches, new service offerings.

I really think the next 12 months for launch, for small launch, and for larger rockets is just going to be very, very exciting. And the net effect of all that, you know, from our perspective, is really positive, right? More launches and cheaper launches is great. We'd of course love to see more return vehicles to bring stuff back. That would be really nice. And one thing, a potential storm cloud on the horizon that I think

everyone's done a really good job of keeping in bay is staying, is whether or not we're going to stay committed to the amazing amount of space technology development, the pace of space technology development that's been occurring for really the last five or ten years um you know commercial cargo now commercial crew um the incredible investments that space technology that space tech mission director at nasa has made all of these things are really you, enabling this new renaissance in this beautiful community of ours in a way that, you know, I think lots of folks, lots of folks that were around for Apollo even say, hey, this is this is like as exciting for, you know, in this community as it was then.

And that's you just kind of have to pinch yourself and just feel so grateful to be a part of that, to be witnessing that or being a part of this right now. But we, of course, will face setbacks, right? You know, both as companies and as a broader community. And I hope that we can continue to have the courage of our convictions and say, hey, yeah, that's a part of the process. Instead of, you know, to borrow a line from, you know, Magic School Bus,

get messy, make mistakes. That's what we're doing. But it's yielding these amazing results, right? Like the Falcon 9 is a great example of that. They've had their own, you know had their own trials and tribulations, but look at the impact that it's had on the industry.

And we're in main space. Sometimes we miss schedule, but we ultimately overcome that and deliver great systems and show these new capabilities as do many, many people in the industry. And I'm really excited about the level of commitment

that we've seen within the community, you know, and even on Capitol Hill to these development of these new paradigms. You've appeared on Capitol Hill a couple of times. This was something that I was thinking about in the run-up to the interview. I'm curious if you have thoughts on what that process was like, preparing for an appearance there and actually being there to give your perspective. Is that terrifying?

Is it exhilarating? Where are you at on that? You know, it's really, I think that kind of ties back to what I was mentioning a little bit earlier, that it's really awesome that these folks that are senators and are members of Congress are so interested in innovation in the space industry that they invite you know that they invite somebody like myself from a really small company like made in space to to share our perspectives and to kind of tell the story and to highlight how the programs and processes that nasa and darpa

and the industry really as a whole have, have, you know, consciously unconsciously put together that we've been able to use those to, to, to accomplish real things, um, to show real progress and to do real technology demonstration development.

Um, it's, it's really, it's really exhilarating for, for, for those, you know, to have those folks be interested in what we're doing.

Uh, my second to last question here, I'm looking over my notes for things that I might have missed talking about. But this maybe does play into politics a little bit. It has come up a couple of times in the last few years, and certainly on the technology side, it has as well. In-space debris is something that many people are talking about these days. There's a bunch of different technology development in progress right now to capture debris. I'm curious if you've got any ideas in that direction of being able to reuse the material that's up there and maybe produce something out of it.

That seems like something that would be a pretty rad futuristic project, but I don't know if it's something that, you know, Made in Space has the time to focus on yet. Yeah, certainly reusing or repurposing assets on orbit is something that we like to think about. Sometimes those thoughts are over pizza and beer, but it's definitely an exciting area to consider going forward.

And I think it's just a question of when will we see real interest in that? Because there's, there's some, the technical challenges are like totally fascinating, right? It's not only, you know, identifying where the asset is, but there's the raw name of the product stops. And then there's the actually figuring out if the material is what you think it is.

And then you have the kind of verification back to the customer saying, hey, I said I was going to make this thing out of this alloy because I thought this alloy was on orbit and I found it or I didn't. Here's the proof. It's a really fascinating problem. I do think that again, as we build out this infrastructure, first in low-earth orbit and then further out, those sorts of futuristic applications will become realistic far quicker than I think we imagine. Is there anything else that I should have asked you about, either history, future, current status of maiden space that I didn't bring up here on the show? I don't think so.

I think you covered the one quite well. Nailed it. You're the first one that I nailed it on. I don't know. Everyone else is always like, I had this one thing that I really wanted to talk about. So I'm glad that we covered the gamut. I'm really excited to have had you on, Andrew.

I'm very excited by the projects that are happening on Made in Space, and I'm excited to follow the next few years as you get closer to launch with Arcanaut One. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you for having me. Huge thanks again to Andrew for coming on the show. It was a real treat to have him on here and talk about doing work in space. We have been on this tear recently of talking to people that are actually making use of all the cheap launch that we tend to talk about here on the show. So it's always good to have somebody on that's doing the work up there, making use of that cheap launch. So thank you all so much for your support. If you're out there supporting the show, you make this all possible. Thank you all so much for your support. If you

want to help support the show, mainenginecutoff.com slash support and do it there. If you've got any questions or thoughts, email them to me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. And until next week, thank you for listening. I'll talk to you soon.