Main Engine Cut Off - T+150: SpaceX Signs Crew Flight Agreements with Axiom, Space Adventures

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

SpaceX recently signed two agreements: one with Axiom Space to fly a private mission up to the ISS, and one with Space Adventures for a free-flying tourist flight up to 1,000 kilometers. I discuss these two missions and why agreements like this are key to SpaceX’s long-term strategy.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous—and 347 other supporters.TopicsAxiom Space plans first-ever fully private human spaceflight mission to International Space StationEpisode T+147: Mike Suffredini, President & CEO of Axiom - Main Engine Cut OffSpace Adventures Announces Agreement with SpaceX to Launch Private Citizens on the Crew Dragon Spacecraft - Space AdventuresNASA Awards Psyche Launch to SpaceX, Who Now Has Its First Mars Launch on the Books - Main Engine Cut OffFarewell, Red Dragon - Main Engine Cut OffThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and I want to break down some big news that we got in the last couple of weeks. There were two agreements that have been signed with SpaceX, one by Axiom Space and one by Space Adventures. Both of them are agreements for crewed flights on Dragon 2. They are a little bit different in their scopes overall, so I want to talk about each of those agreements, and then I really want to talk about the reason that SpaceX is in the commercial crew program at all, and where they're going with that kind of thing, what the payoff that they're hoping for out of commercial crew is, now that we see some of these plans starting to take shape here. So to start with the Axiom side of things, because

we did just have the CEO and the co-founder Michael Suffredini on the program a couple of weeks back. So go check that episode out if you want to hear a full discussion about Axiom Space's plans, and specifically some plans around this announcement, which is the announcement of their first precursor mission to the ISS. Axiom Space has been awarded one of the nodes on the ISS. They're going to build out their own space station, starting at ISS, adding a couple of modules to ISS, eventually becoming its own full-blown space station. But before they get there, they are going to do these precursor flights to the ISS, where they buy a full crew

flight up to the space station, they put all of their own people on board and they fly these missions to really test out some of the crew training that they need to do for the missions overall when they have their own space station or even just up to ISS they want to test out a lot of the different processes that they have in place and things that they'll need to get right to just really get experience with this kind of activity before they have their node up in 2024 and beyond. So again, if you want to listen to more about the thinking behind that, we talked about it with Safradini here on the show. So I've got a link in the show notes that it's episode 147. Go take a listen to that for the full discussion. But this is really big news for Axiom. You know,

it sounded like when we talked with him that they were getting close to this announcement. I didn't think it would happen as quickly as it did. I thought it would be a little later this year. But this flight is going to happen in the second half of 2021, which means a couple of things for Axiom and for the ISS and for Crew Dragon overall. That means that they are expecting to have Dragon 2 up and flying regularly by second half of 2021, so regularly that they are able to support a flight that is not for NASA's commercial crew program, but is actually for this dedicated flight for Axiom. On board the Axiom flight, there would be one Axiom-trained astronaut and three private astronauts that would go up to the ISS.

Now, this would be an eight-day mission to the ISS. So I saw a lot of bad headlines and bad takes that this is a tourism flight to the ISS. And it could turn out that some of the crew on this Axiom flight are tourists that just want to go to the ISS, like we've seen happen in the past with tourists flying on Soyuz. But really, if you remember from Soffredini, from what he was saying here, the market that they're trying to address is beyond tourism. There are national programs that don't currently have, you know, flight agreements in place to be able to fly astronauts up to the ISS that might want to, whether that be missions or nations that have not yet flown to space and

would like to get their first astronaut up, or nations that do regularly fly to the ISS but don't currently have any crew scheduled. ESA gets an opportunity every once in a while, but not as regularly as NASA or Roscosmos. So they might be interested in buying an extra seat on the space station to get some flight experience for somebody or to fly somebody up for a short duration mission. There are a lot of reasons that nations would want to buy these seats. And that's a big market that Axiom is trying to address. So I'm curious to see if this does get any of those nation states to buy a seat on this first Axiom flight. They've got three available, so we'll see what that gets filled with. But I'm pretty confident that they're going to be

able to sell this mission, considering the fact that Axiom has such big plans in place for crewed flights going into the near future. So that's a really big deal for Axiom, and it's a really big deal for ISS overall that we're going to be keeping our eye on over the next year as we get closer to that flight. Second half of 2021, so we're a year out from the run-up to that mission. And obviously there's a lot of stuff to go with Dragon 2 to begin flying humans up to the ISS. And we'll talk about that in the back half of the show. But the other agreement real quick that I want to touch on is with Space Adventures. Now Space Adventures is a tourism dedicated company. They have organized

flights up the ISS before. All of the tourists that you might have heard of that have flown up to the ISS have done so with Space Adventures. So they are a mission-based organization that is really targeting this kind of tourism opportunity. And they've signed an agreement with SpaceX to fly a tourist mission. But this one is not to the ISS. This will be a free-flying mission on Dragon. It would be about five days up to four individuals, and they will fly up to orbit, and they will actually go much higher than the ISS orbit. I heard Napa G around 1,000 kilometers. I don't know if that's totally accurate, but this would be more akin to a Gemini flight is how they're comparing it.

But this one is a tourist flight, right? There could be an opportunity here for some nation to put their astronaut on board if they wanted to say that they've got an astronaut now. But it seems much more targeted at the kind of high-end space tourism market than something that is really focused on going to the ISS and carrying out a pretty typical space mission at the ISS. Now, Space Adventures seems to always announce these opportunities for different spaceflight experiences, and every so often they get a taker. It seems not entirely consistent that every mission they announce, they actually fly. So I'm much more suspect of this mission happening than the Axiom mission, just because of the history with Space Adventures overall. Even in the announcement of this agreement, Space Adventures says if interested parties are secured. So they are putting this out there as kind of marketing

to get people to sign up for this mission. So I'm a little more suspect on this mission happening just compared to Axiom who has this, now they've got a commitment from NASA and the ISS program that they've got access to from NASA and the ISS program that they've got access to a node, they're building a space station to go put on the ISS. They have a lot more of a roadmap in place than these one-off space adventures missions. So that just is my general vibe on these two things. But both are really important, especially to SpaceX, and where

they're heading with Dragon 2 and the crewed missions that they have planned for Dragon 2, and really their motivation for getting into the commercial crew program at all. So I just wanted to kind of circle back on that now that we're getting pretty close to flying the first humans on Dragon 2, talk a little bit about where that program is at and what SpaceX is hoping to get out of that. But before we get into that, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 385 of you supporting this show and this blog that I write every single month. I could not be more thankful for your support. It really makes so much possible. I just did a bunch of audio hardware upgrades, so you'll be hearing a new road rig when I

go out, hopefully to some launches this year or maybe even a conference or two as well. So you'll be hearing a lot of upgraded audio hardware in action, which is all thanks to the support that we get over at mainenginecutoff.com. And this episode was produced by 38 executive producers. Brandon, Matthew, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this episode possible. I could not do it without your support and everyone else over at mainenginecutoff.com support. Thank you all so much. So on the topic of SpaceX and their interest in the commercial crew program overall, SpaceX is a mission driven organization. They only do things, take part in these kind of programs or accept contracts that have some sort of resonance with their own missions, that they're on this really long journey to really, you know, their focus is on Mars, but they've got a lot of these side quests that they

have to hit as well. So they really only take, you know, contracts or entrance into programs if it matches up with where they're heading overall. They're not going to take something that takes them too far away from their focus area. And we've seen that time and time again through different programs. In Commercial Cargo's case back in the day, that was a program that has really bootstrapped the Falcon 9 operational history. They developed Falcon 9 and Dragon as part of that program. Obviously, Falcon 9 has went on to become what is likely the most incredible launch vehicle operating today. It has just completed its 50th landing. They're reflying them constantly.

And they've taken over a substantial portion of not only the commercial market, but now they're also starting to win a lot of different science missions from NASA. Just in the last year, they've won four different missions. Most recently, they got selected to launch Psyche. Before that, they've won DART and PACE and IXPE. They've been winning a ton of NASA science missions. They've also been winning their fair share of the Department of Defense missions that are offered here in the U.S. US. They've obviously been winning some GPS flights, and they've started to win some Falcon Heavy flights for things going out to geostationary orbit. And they're likely going to be somebody that wins access to phase two of the National Security Space Launch Program upcoming this spring or summer. So Falcon 9 is just an incredible business that they have running now. And then the side benefit of having such a reliable launcher on the market

and making money from that is that they not only have money to invest in their own programs like Starlink, the communications constellation that they're working on, but they also have Falcon 9 to launch their own constellation, which has massive impacts for how much money it costs them to deploy a constellation the size of Starlink. So all of that was really bootstrapped from their work on commercial cargo in the early days, where they had to develop Falcon 9 to lift Dragon up to the ISS,

and then they made it a commercial launcher that has just become an incredible part of the space industry overall, and an incredible part of their own plans moving forward. Now, in the case of original Dragon, the cargo version of Dragon, that was really their entrant into flying spaceships operationally. It's obviously not something that humans fly on, but it is that first step towards crewed spaceflight. And it obviously gives them a ton of opportunity to work out orbital operations, on-orbit operations, both up in space, but also in their control center. It gives them a lot of operational history with rendezvous and docking with the ISS, and really just flying these regular flights up to the ISS every couple of months. That gives them a huge base of experience to work off of. And then they also had

all these other plans in the early days to fly things like Dragon Lab, which would be dedicated robotic flights on Dragon that maybe somebody would buy space to operate a mission in, you know, freefall for however many days and then return to Earth. That never panned out, but the idea was there to use Dragon for these other missions, not just missions up to the ISS. So when you look at the culmination of everything that went into the commercial cargo program for SpaceX and what they have turned it all into, a very reliable launch market, one of the most reliable vehicles that flies up and back from the ISS, vehicles that flies up and back from the ISS, this full operational engine that is SpaceX that flies so consistently these days, it's pretty obvious that they used commercial cargo and they were

successful in commercial cargo to turn it into a key part of their business. They used that program to fine-tune everything else that they were doing to turn themselves into the SpaceX of today. And you contrast that with their counterpart in that commercial cargo, the CRS-1 program. Now it's Northrop Grumman who flies Cygnus on top of Antares. That is kind of the opposite story. Antares only flies for Cygnus missions. And Northrop Grumman has said as much that the Antares flights are still profitable when they fly Cygnus because that was all baked into the program originally. So they were really never intending to fly Antares as a commercial vehicle. They've attempted, or they've

at least said that they've attempted to sell some missions on Antares, but the business case of being involved in the commercial cargo program was never contingent on becoming a commercial launch provider like SpaceX's was. And that's the difference. As I said up front, SpaceX is a mission-driven organization, not a contract-driven organization. I think that is the key difference right there. If you look at how SpaceX has went about this and how Northrop Grumman, what was Orbital Sciences, Orbital ATK, and now Northrop Grumman have went about the same program. SpaceX has used theirs to turn themselves into a global launch provider that is looked at as one of the premier launch providers, if not the premier launch provider in the industry today.

And Northrop Grumman is really just doing the same thing that they were doing all along, providing a valuable service to NASA, but not having these side benefits that SpaceX has with their same commercial cargo program. So if we now extend this same kind of thinking over to commercial crew, we have a lot of other things to unpack with Dragon 2 there, but it was following a similar kind of thought process. It was very tied up to SpaceX's own plans, and it still is today, tied up to SpaceX's own plans, and it still is today, to the plans that they have for the long-term mission of SpaceX. What can they do with Dragon 2 that gets them closer to that long-term goal? They didn't need to develop a Falcon 9 for Dragon 2. They already had Falcon 9. At this point,

they have Falcon Heavy as well. So they weren't looking at it as a launch vehicle development program or something that could subsidize their launch vehicle development. But they were looking at it as a way to get a really useful spacecraft that could do a lot of things in space that they were interested in in the future. for NASA. They have these kind of agreements that we're talking about here to fly dedicated crew flights for other private companies or other organizations that are working with NASA in some cases, or tourist flights overall. All of these things that require human spaceflight, SpaceX has made themselves the cheapest, the most inexpensive option. And now that we're seeing what's happening with Starliner, the most reliable option for these companies to fly with if they want to have crewed spaceflight as part of their program. So for Axiom Space, they're going to use Dragon 2 flights up to the ISS for precursor missions. I am sure they're going to continue to use them for flights to their own space station when that does come about. For

Space Adventures, they can sell these tourist flights on Dragon 2. And in SpaceX's case, they are going to build new Dragon 2s for NASA flights and then try to reuse them for these other revenue generating flights. So a big part of the viability of Dragon 2 is that they can resell them and make more money on that hardware they've already built. resell them and make more money on that hardware they've already built. They have a very cheap launch option in Falcon 9, and as long as they can fly multiple flights with Dragon 2, they can make a lot more money on it than they spent building that vehicle in the first place. But aside from that, they had all these other plans at the beginning. If you remember Red Dragon, Dragon 2 was supposed to be a vehicle that was capable of landing on Mars. They eventually

ditched the propulsive landing idea for a series of events that we don't really need to get into, but that idea went away. So Dragon 2 was no longer, you know, the thing that was kind of tied into their plans overall. So now, I guess there was also an idea that they could maybe attempt to convert it to being a moon lander of some sort. That doesn't seem to be panning out. So it doesn't look like Dragon 2 is going to be landing on other planetary bodies. So what they're left with is really making this the staple of their crewed flight experience at this point in their life cycle. They have long-term crew flight plans with Starship that are much bigger and much grander than Dragon 2. But Dragon 2 is here now. They're going to be flying multiple missions per year with Dragon 2 up to the ISS and maybe some like space

adventures to other destinations in low Earth orbit or even maybe up to medium Earth orbit or maybe potentially around the moon, though those plans seem to be dying out as well in terms of free return trajectory around the moon like we originally heard was in the plans that switched to Starship eventually. So here we are, Dragon 2 to low Earth orbit is the thing that Dragon 2 does. And in SpaceX's case, if they are looking at their roadmap overall, crude flight is a huge portion of that. So the more flights they can do with Dragon 2, the more that gives them experience, and it gives the team experience, and it gives their hardware experience for the crewed flight plans that they have in the future. And it does have a certain amount of prestige to it to be the most

reliable crew flight provider in the US. When you have such a big market here, and you have such big plans, that is a really good thing to be seen as a premier provider of crewed flight to space. So all of that is to say that agreements like this with Axiom and Space Adventures are really the key to paying off the inclusion of SpaceX in Commercial Crew. I'm sure Commercial Crew, at this point, knowing how late it is and how much has went into it that we didn't think would go into it up front. Even Gwen Shotwell has said that they wish they bid more money for commercial crew knowing now what they know. So I wonder if that indicates that it's technically not profitable to be flying these commercial crew flights as it stands now, but if they can sell a significant number of crewed flights that aren't for commercial crew, but do use the same hardware, that do use literally the same spacecraft that are flying those flights for NASA.

The more they can make it worth their money, worth their time. But above all, if it helps them on their mission, their long-term mission, then I think they will look back at Dragon 2 and the commercial crew program as something that was invaluable to their trajectory in space overall. So I hope to see more of these agreements in the future, and I really hope to see Dragon 2 start flying regularly. You know, all of this does hinge on the fact that Dragon 2 is getting close to flying its first crewed flight. Right now it's on the schedule for May 7th. We haven't heard any updates on the reviews that are going on for that first demo mission too. Hopefully that happens this spring or summer. And if so, I expect them to get into regular crewed flights to the ISS and beyond shortly thereafter. And really that is the key to what we're looking for for SpaceX crewed flight in the next couple of years, up until people are on top of Starship, whenever

that may happen. But for now, that is all I've got for you this week. If you've got any questions or thoughts, send them to me on Twitter at WeHaveMiko or in email, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com. And if you want to help support the show, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. And until

next time, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.