Main Engine Cut Off - T+191: Phil Bracken, VP of Engineering at Spaceflight

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Phil Bracken, Vice President of Engineering at Spaceflight, joins me to talk about their past, current, and upcoming missions, the Sherpa program, and to dive into the technical details of it all.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 41 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, and seven anonymous—and 595 other supporters.TopicsPhilip Bracken - SpaceflightSpaceflight - Launch Services, Dedicated and RideshareSpaceflight - Sherpa ProgramSSO-A - SpaceflightIntegration Wrap Up for SXRS-5 - SpaceflightInside look: Spaceflight ships out Sherpa orbital tugsT+162: Grant Bonin, SVP of Business Development at Spaceflight - 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 JustusArtwork photo by United Launch Alliance

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we've got yet another guest with us today. News has been a little slow lately, so I thought it was a good time of the year to reach out and do some guest interviews with people that are in the industry working on very interesting things. So as you've heard in the last couple shows, and you'll hear again here, we've got somebody like that today. Today we've got Phil Bracken, who is the VP of Engineering at Spaceflight. They are the rideshare company that you may be familiar with. About a year ago, almost exactly a year ago actually, we had Grant Bonin, who is the Senior Vice President of Business Development at SpaceFlights. We were talking a lot more about the business angle. This one, per Phil's title, we'll be talking a lot more about the engineering and specifically about their Sherpa program. They have been working very hard on a couple of Sherpa vehicles that are headed up to space pretty soon on the next SpaceX rideshare mission coming up later this month or later, depending on launch schedules, I guess.

We're going to talk a lot about the work that's gone into that, some of the thinking behind those Sherpa vehicles, the way that it impacts space flights, mission management, and the kind of customers that they go for and the services they can provide to those customers. So I'm really excited to dive in to some of that. But before we get there, let me say thank you to everyone out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com support. There are 41 executive producers of this episode of the show. Thanks to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Ian, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel,

Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. As always, you make this show possible. You make it possible to get people like Phil on the show. So thank you all so much for that. If you want to help join the crew, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support, and you can get access to Headlines, which is the whole other show that I do for the supporters of the show every single week, running through all the space news stories that are interesting to you.

So head over there, check that out, and help support the show. So now with that, let's give Phil a call here. Phil, welcome to Managing Cutoff. It's good to have you here. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. You've got a pretty exciting launch coming up that we want to dive into a variety of topics related to.

I thought maybe, though, we could start with some context around the history of the Sherpa program generally. You mentioned before we started here that that was part of why you joined Spaceflight. So I'd love to hear a little bit of the story, you know, from where Sherpa started out to where it's going, where it is today. Just the general storyline there. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to provide that. Yeah, Sherpa was was was in place, um, well before I started at space flight, uh, it was originally envisioned as a, as an ESPA class or

like, uh, uh, more like for five meter launch vehicles. Um, but, but a larger vehicle that, that could take, um, larger number of payloads to, um, to kind of geo and beyond a couple thousand meters per second of delta velocity increment. And so, you know, when I started, we kind of, we started looking at how we might reform Sherpa following our SSOA mission in 2019 to consider the new needs for the small sat community. And what we centered on as we went was that the Sherpa vehicle should really be like an ESPA port class. So something in the, it's got a 24 inch interface that can handle a number of payloads from one to let's say 16, you know, small spacecraft.

And so over the last few years, and as you mentioned, it is part of the reason I joined spaceflight was to come in and, and look at these, these type of systems and bring them to the small set community. But over the last few years, we've really centered on this, this port expander option that can be modular and built into, you know, simple free flyers quickly changed to become attitude control vehicles or full-fledged orbital transfer vehicles with different propulsion systems. So it's now a very compact and modular system that we can use coming up in the future for all sorts of different orbital needs. There were some, at least in my understanding of the old school Sherpa program, there was

wasn't there supposed to be one that flew on a mission that SpaceX ended up flying alone for it was like foremost sat or something that was almost like no kilograms flying on Falcon nine and it was so there was that whole, you know, I don't know exactly know how all that broke down. But then SSO A was that dedicated ride share. There was, if my memory serves 64 satellites that were being deployed. And I remember seeing the photos of that. It was a bunch of various adapter rings, kind of like, you know, the way that I would stack satellites, I'd be like i don't know this one fits over here that one fits over there it felt pretty haphazard in that um and i wonder about how that which pieces of those things were sherpa at the time um and and kind of like

what is the lineage from that era you know you said you're downsizing the the actual size of the thing named sherpa to fit the offerings of the current market better. And, and maybe, you know, some things where their lessons learned, I guess is what I'm getting at from SSA that you kind of redirected efforts because of those lessons. Yeah.

Yeah. So you do bring up correctly. The form of sat, I believe was the first, the incarnation of Sherpa we were planning. And, and that, that era, I think, at Spaceflight and in general for small sat launches was an interesting transitional time. I think economies of scale

have changed a lot since then. Back then, companies were looking at how can we use the entire ESPA ring? How can we put a single ESPA below larger payloads and make use of this capacity that was available? Certainly a more fledgling take on how to get small satellites to orbit. And SSOA came out of that as a pretty unique use of, as you mentioned, structures and avionics solutions to get customers to space. So Spaceflight pioneered that, and I think it was pretty groundbreaking at the time. Certainly something that was a complex mission to pull off. And one of the things that Spaceflight learned was how to put lots of different types of spacecraft together on one system. So you're absolutely right.

When you look at the stack from SSOA, it looks very interesting because of all the different types of payloads. You've got microsats that are relatively big and boxy to cubesats to everything in between, all sorts of different separation systems, all sorts of different masses. And so Spaceflight learned a great deal from that. It's a lot of what we take forward into the Sherpa program or the next-gen program we call it today, where we went from, you know, how do you mount all these things? How do you maintain the center of gravity? How do you do things where you separate multiple things on orbit just to be able to get all these customers packed into a five-meter fairing? And so it started, I guess, as Formasat 5.

It turned into this SSOA where the Sherpa program, the Sherpa system ultimately kind of was put to the side for a little bit just to make sure we got our customers to orbit on this much larger mission. And from that came a great wealth of internal knowledge on what we needed to do better, what we did well. And that became the basis for the trades that we did for this new Sherpa program. So a lot of what we are doing on these new Sherpa vehicles that you'll see in pictures are actually similar to SSOA in the sense that we use adaptable and simple mechanical structures and systems. A lot of what we learned from our sequencing and the avionics that we used on SSOA, we have built into our newly tested and flown R2A sequencer, what we call R2A core. And so all of that has come together into this much more economically packaged system that we're flying now. And you mentioned how originally it was like a five meter class vehicle, essentially.

I think it makes sense if you're looking at these, you know, more flexible sizes, you can fit a bunch of them under a five meter fairing or you can fly on an Electron and do just the same thing so you know it seems maybe not a total coincidence that that was the direction that we see this huge industry trend to like you're going to have all these new 1 ton class launchers in the next year or two you've got you know the small competitors to Rocket Lab

are flying now with Virgin Orbit is finally flying you've got Astra up there so there's a bigger range of vehicles now than when Sherpa was probably first envisioned. And from an engineering perspective, are there things about those different classes that you have to take into consideration? Or do you feel like this iteration of the Sherpa program

is kind of that common denominator between, you know, well, we're big enough to fill a small electron fairing as a primary payload, but we're just a little thing attached to something else on a SpaceX Falcon 9 fairing. How does that trade space play for you? Yeah, that was the trade space when we started looking at the next gen program for Sherpa. The size class that you need now with new launch vehicles coming on the market is very different than before. Certainly orbital transfer vehicles fit a niche that is kind of focused and targeted. Certainly launch vehicle customers can go and buy launch vehicles directly if they want to get to some specific orbit, as you mentioned, on an electron or

a vehicle like that. And orbital transfer vehicles have to be sized such that they can be used on a wide breadth of launch vehicles. That was one thing that we centered on really, really early on. So we did a bunch of trades. It took us about a year of using our internal lessons learned from SSOA and in the years of rideshare that we've provided to our customers to kind of center on this size. And that was specifically focused on how many

different launch vehicles can we put Sherpa on? Because at Spaceflight, we really do believe in launch vehicle agnosticism. We believe that taking our satellite customers to orbit, regardless of the vehicle that they're on, is the most important thing. We need to get them there on time and on performance. And so that was what became the main focus for Sherpa NG, was to make sure that we could easily move a Sherpa from vehicle to vehicle, from mission to mission, and move customers from Sherpa to Sherpa, or Sherpa to launch vehicle, because that's our focus of spaceflight is launch flexibility. So we have been really careful in how we've designed the system. Each launch vehicle has its own unique interfaces, its own unique environments. And that is something that we continue to actively study as we move forward with the program.

And what we're looking at is kind of incremental and iterative development where we slowly build from launch to launch with the same system using it over and over again so that our payload user's guide and our environments for our customers just become more and more robust as we go. Yeah, it feels like you're playing into spaceflight superpower, you know, because you seex flying transporter missions now and that's kind of what ssoa was but that's their superpower is to do those bulk launches but space flights is to be a spot where if i have something to get space you know the the ropes of the whole industry you're staying up on the trends of like who's flying where and when and i don't have to

do that work as a customer so it feels like it's a better fit for the goals overall. Yeah, I agree with you. That's exactly what we see with this program. And it was immediately apparent with our first Sherpa FX launch, which is the free flyer variant in January of this year. We consistently see customer changes. I think one of the only constants in the launch industry are delays, whether it's the launch vehicle delaying or the customer delaying. So we sit in the middle of that and we're proud to. We're happy to do this.

We're happy to be champions for our customers to provide the best possible customer service we can, the best launch service. And we say service really because that's what we look at this as, is being a service provider, not just a vehicle provider. And so the Sherpa program is an arrow in our quiver, if you want to call it that, where it's not the only thing, it's not the end all. It is a great extension to what we do as a service in general. But that's exactly right. I think it plays to our strengths in terms of providing ultimate flexibility to our customers. I want to talk about the different variants of this next generation Sherpa. You've got FX and then LTC and LTE, not the cell phone technology, different thing, or I guess

Litecoin and the other variety. sherpa fx has flown already and that that seems like the the base model doesn't have uh propulsion it might have i think it's got attitude control but not necessarily uh propulsion itself is that correct yeah it's actually got uh so it's got a sequencer system it doesn't have attitude control in the baseline um so the variants work in a uh really in like space Legos, if you want to call it that, space blocks. We designed the system so that you can very quickly, like within days, go from a Sherpa FX to a Sherpa LTC, which is the chemical version of the full orbital transfer vehicle. So FX, which flew in January of this year, was the base design that is effectively included on any vehicle, any Sherpa that flies.

So it's got the same exact modular structure. It's got the R2A core sequencer package. And each port, of which we have many, the mechanical team at Spaceflight has done an incredible job just honing in on using our years of experience to come up with all sorts of different modular interface designs where you can kind of stack up different structures to interface to any type of spacecraft that wants to fly in a Sherpa. And so that whole system as the base package, which we call SHRPFX or FLEX, flies on every mission. Then what we do is we kit it out with either a chemical or electric propulsion system and an avionics package that provides attitude control with highly robust flight proven avionics and really large reaction wheels and things that provide just great fine control over our orbital insertion. And so we can go from that Sherpa FX to a Sherpa LTE in just a few days, which we

actually just proved last week in our final integration for the LTE-1 vehicle. It was great to watch the team go from a Sherpa FX sitting on our integration card to a Sherpa LTE in about 24 hours. So that's going to be, so you've got one of each flying on the next mission here. I would love to hear about what the plan is for the LTE that's flying. And it was unclear in the press release if there's payloads hosted on that or if this is more of you working out, you know, everything you need to, to get that thing operational fully. It was hard to tell, but I'd love to hear about the mission profile for that. Yeah. So, so you're right. We do have, um, we have our Sherpa FX, uh, two flying on this mission, which is a similar variant to what we flew in June or in January. Sorry. And then, uh, the Sherpa LTE one mission is a demonstration mission that we have payloads on the vehicle.

They will separate off early. And then we will continue our mission with an Apollo Fusion electric propulsion system that we've worked into the system. And that will really be a demonstration of all of the different capabilities of the orbital transfer vehicle prior to having paying customers on board. So we'll complete a primary mission, separating all our customers off successfully. And then we'll continue on to this secondary mission where we commission the vehicle, fly that on orbit, check it out, run it through its paces, and then use it to do orbital transfers in lower altitude. To do two things. One is to prove out the performance and capabilities of the electric propulsion solution we've integrated, but also to bring SHRPA's orbit down in altitude and just reduce its time on orbit.

So there should be about a six-month mission where we spend just a good amount of time learning everything we can about the system before we embark six-month mission where we spend just a good amount of time learning everything we can about the system before we embark on our next mission where we fly a chemical variant. So what's great about it is that nothing really changes between the electric and chemical variant other than the propulsion system itself. And because it's modular, we prove out and bring everything to a high readiness level prior to flying a more energetic system with higher thrust, um, later this year. So the, the two variants there, uh, well, I guess to start, you've got, um, so you have payloads that can be mounted around the, um, hexagon if will.

And then you have a port on top that you could stack a primary, or I suppose other Sherpas as well. You could have a whole, a whole stack of them um so it's it's interesting in that it's it could be both like you know ride sharing many payloads or you could have one primary um and and that seems like you know some of these uh things on the site you mentioned being focused at geostationary orbit or cislunar space um what kind of payload classes could you support from something like a rideshare mission, maybe not one going to SSO, but one going to a mid-inclination orbit, getting out towards geo or out towards cislunar space?

What size should we be thinking as that primary spot on Sherpa? Yeah, so that's a great question. The way that Sherpa ended up being architected is that that that forward port, which is a 24 inch interface. And you're right, Sherpa is a is kind of symmetric. So the the system that we use to separate it from the launch vehicle, which is a 24 inch separation system, is exactly the same as the forward port, which is a 24 inch separation system. We modify that and can adapt it to all sorts of different things. And that's really space flight's historical bread and butter is these mission specific and really quickly developed structures and flight support equipment systems. So SHERPA is set up to support a bunch of different payloads on the front. And you can imagine if you take a chemical SHERPA, which has, you know, not a huge amount of delta V for like a fully burdened system with a couple hundred

kilograms of payload. But if you put just a 12U on that, you can take it really far. I mean, that delta V is high enough to go somewhere pretty far a 12U on that, you can take it really far. I mean, that delta V is high enough to go somewhere pretty far away. And you mentioned, you know, geo and cislunar space. That's kind of our view is that, you know, put a small payload on there, you can take it really, really far. And future upgrades will help build out the Sherpa system using very similar structures to what we have now to further extend the delta v and capabilities for that if you mount it on a radial port you're constrained more volumetrically than you are mass-wise so there's some cg things in there where you you can't put payloads out too far but really

putting it on the side of an esparing on a spacex transporter mission means that you're kind of constrained to an espPA class payload. We did that on purpose. If you look at the pictures of Sherpa, it's pretty short and squat. It's meant to be as thin as possible. And that allows us to mount the largest payloads we can in a radial port. But, you know, volume and mass are pretty constrained there. You're overhanging on the side of a port.

So if you take Sherpa and you mount it vertically in a launch vehicle, more axially, I guess you'd call it, you put that on one of the new thousand kilogram launchers, you put it on a cake topper on a rideshare mission. Well, now you've expanded and you can do a much larger payload, a much higher mass payload. You can't do as much Delta V, of course, because it's at least with the fixed propellant we have on these early systems. But for a larger vehicle that, say, wants a fine orbit tuning before separation, you know, just wants to make sure that they're within a few kilometers of their intended state vector, or they want to do some orbit raise,

we can do that from those forward ports. So that's the beauty of Sherpa being on a 24-inch interface is it really fits just about anywhere. And depending on how you mount it, you can expand the payload carrying capabilities quite substantially. I should mention the structure is designed to be able to support all sorts of different masses. So we really don't have to do, we don't have to requalify the system to fly heavier versions of payloads. Yeah, just more running the math to see,

to see what makes sense to do, where you need to go and what we've got working with here. So that's right. I do want to talk a little bit about the difference in, or not the difference between, but how you would choose between flying an LTC or an LTE with chemical or electric propulsion for the mission. There's inherent differences with how fast you're going to get to where you're going versus how efficiently you're going to get there. It's complicated further by the fact that you might be carrying many different types of payloads.

So what would that process look like to decide what variant flies? Is it trying to find the right grouping of customers that are sort of going in the same direction or have timelines that work with each other? What's the primary driver to deciding what variant you're going to fly on any given mission? Yeah, so we believe strongly in this approach of having opportunities to fly either electric, high efficiency or chemical high thrust systems. What it affords us is the ability to choose carefully for a given mission based on time or based on performance.

And so the way that we look at it is if a customer is willing to wait, and there are customers that are willing to wait to go somewhere really far away or have a much higher delta V in the same packaging, we can modularly add this electric propulsion system and go far. You can pack a great deal of delta V on a system of this size with 20 or 30 kilograms of xenon as you can compare to a 88 newton chemical system. So the first thing we'll look at when we're talking to customers is say, how far do you want to go? How important is that to your mission? And interestingly enough, this is exactly the conversation we have, whether we're flying an OTV or whether we're flying customers on a rideshare mission

dedicated on a launch vehicle. We always have a discussion with our customers about how varied their orbit requirements are, how wide can they be. The wider they are, the more options they have. The harder you focus on getting to some very specific unicorn orbit, well, the less options you have. And that goes the same for OTVs. Um, so, so we look at that first and we talk to them about whether, um, whether they have time constraints and in general, we, we trend towards wanting to get customers on orbit quicker. So that's where the high thrust chemical propulsion system comes in. It's good at doing,

um, relatively moderate, uh, orbit transfers and altitude, very, very small inclination changes, but it does it fast. And so my belief, I think our belief internally at Spaceflight is that our customers want to be on orbit fast. If you've got your satellite built, you probably don't want to be sitting around waiting for six months to deploy that on orbit. I think that's six months of opportunity cost that you're losing. And so we are actively talking to customers specifically about that. So the higher thrust solution tends to be, as I mentioned, more moderate in performance. And I think most customers just want to get to that more moderate orbit and separate and be off on their mission. It's pretty even right now, though, between LTE and LTC. I think there are active discussions going on with the business development group about different customers that want both of those capabilities.

So it really depends specifically on what each customer wants. I want to talk a little bit about the R2A system you were mentioning before. So it really depends specifically on what each customer wants. I want to talk a little bit about the R2A system you were mentioning before. I'd love to hear a deep dive on what that is and what other kind of year and a half to enable much more flexible sequence options right up until the moment before launch. And so one of the things that we've learned at Spaceflight is that you have to be flexible all the way until the end. It's not that you get 12 months in this industry to lock things down. I mean, I would love to have things locked down at 12 months, but it never happens. If anything, I would argue that the launch schedules are compressed with every single launch.

I mean, they get shorter and shorter how late we manifest customers in the launch. And I think that's great. That's what our customers want. That's what we want. We want to enable a customer who's come off a mission somewhere else or who needs to make a change to not have it be a dire situation for their technical or budgetary processes. We want them to be able to quickly re-manifest, much like you and I would if we were getting on an airplane or wanted to change a shipment on a commercial shipment. So when we started looking at that, we said, well, one of our long poles in this whole process is having a sequencer that can handle rapid changes from

one type of separation system to the next. You can imagine a 12U deployer or a small microset falling off a mission, and then you want to replace that with something completely different. How do you do that without having to completely upend your architecture, re-qualify software, spend all this time doing that. In addition, we believe strongly in getting additional telemetry down and having that be consistent with whatever vehicle you fly on. So if you're going to fly a Sherpa on vehicle X and then move it to Y, well, those electrical interfaces might change. You might separate Sherpa off or you may want to fly a sequencer direct on the launch vehicle. So we enabled space-to-space telemetry on the system to allow us to get our data down no matter what in a more consistent manner.

So we did a big industry study. We really couldn't find anything that fit what we needed with the number of signals we wanted to provide, the redundancy we wanted to provide, and the flight flexibility. So the internal team at Spaceflight rapidly developed this system called R2A and flew that in less than a year on the first mission in January. And so we see it as a pretty big enabler for sure, but it allows us to, in January. And so, um, we see it as a pretty big enabler for, for sure, but it allows us to, um, I mean, we, we can release our flight software a few weeks before launch and, um, and it's already fully qualified. It's just very simple, um, simple setup to actually get, get our systems, um, planned and verified and vetted and off to launch.

One of the things that you mentioned was, um, telemetrymetry i i'm not sure if you meant like post separation for these satellites these payloads um because there was a lot of talk in the last last couple years generally not even around any particular launch about some of these deployments being really tough to figure out which satellite is where whose is which satellite i got to get access to mine i got to make sure it's checked out there there seems to be stuff going on in that area in the industry about people being concerned about it maybe it's a little overblown because we tend to like to overblow issues that happen maybe it's legitimate concerns um yeah but i would love to hear about that end of things like you know what what is space flight's responsibility in in that in terms of like giving people access to the data that they

need to know which is their satellite uh is that something that space flight does feel responsibility for is it something that feels a little bit tangential to the the mission that you're working on or is that something that Sherpa is targeted for yeah it is very important to us at space flight I think the sustainability of space and the, I guess, in sustaining space, that means you need to know where all the customers are, all the satellites are, including our own triplets, as quickly as possible. And so we feel very strongly about that and are working with industry experts, with launch vehicles, and internally to figure out the best methods to do that. Whether it's augmenting tracking after launch with companies like Leo Labs

or working with 18 Space Ops to make sure that our customers are identified as quickly as possible. We're certainly very, very focused on that. R2A and the sequencer that we use does provide Sherpa locations. We get GPS data down that allows us to pinpoint our orbit. And as we enable future orbital transfer vehicles, it gets a lot more accurate in our state vectors that we provide. Just because we are flying a full-fledged satellite avionics solution. It's interesting, the Sherpa vehicles end up a mix of a launch vehicle upper stage, in that we want to deploy payloads on orbit successfully as quickly as possible, but also

a satellite, because we're operating for much longer durations than any upper stage would want to. So the orbital transfer vehicles provide even greater data in addition to the data we get from our, our sequencer. But what's great about our sequencer is on our free flyers, we still get that data down and we plan to use that to, to better understand our orbit and identify our spacecraft and our own Sherpas faster on orbit. But we, we do work with our customers to, to make sure that as they commission their spacecraft and they get their initial data down from their own passes, that they can get that in

and we get them tracked right away. It's certainly very important, especially on these larger rideshare missions. It's always funny, though, that some of the stuff that's written about this, and you hear the same about Starlink, you know, like, oh my my gosh this is going to lead to the most orbital debris ever it's like well the person that's most interested in not destroying their own orbit is the person who put the thing in the orbit so a lot of times it feels like it's it's written about in a very scary way but you just think about it for five minutes and it's like well these these people doing this stuff don't want that to happen because they're trying to do things up there.

And it feels like one of those situations, you know, in this instance as well. Yeah, we're at an interesting crossroads in the industry. Never before have we been putting this consistency of smallsats into orbit. And I think partly it's just us all catching up on how to do this the right way, on how to have a airspace-like system that we have in the world for aviation in space so that it is more, not so much controlled as it is just well understood how we're doing this. The real risks, the actual education on those risks, whether they're real or whether they're anecdotal at best. And you're right. Some of it is a bit of hype.

I mean, space is big and these small sets are small, but partly they're small, so they're hard to track. And space may be big, but it's also perpetual. Things don't come down that easy. So we've got a lot of work to do there. Spaceflight is super interested in what we can do to be a part of So we've got a lot of work to do there. Spaceflight is super interested in what we can do to be a part of that, to be a part of the discussion, but also to be actors in how we do it better. I mean, one of the things that we and the launch vehicle providers directly need to do is work more on this because we're the ones providing

the launch service. We're the ones that provide that provide the, um, and, and work with customers to get them to their initial orbit. So, um, it's kind of a, it's kind of a joint, you know, task that we all have to work on together. Looking around the industry, there's, um, a lot of different orbital transfer vehicles in works. Some talked about some actually flying and it's a lot in the middle. Um, you know, Rocket Lab is the one flying, kickstages very frequently right now. They're also working on Photon, which is the satellite version of that. Firefly has been talking up their orbital transfer vehicle once Alpha starts launching.

Are there particular things that others are doing in the industry that you go, I wish we did that thing? I wish I could steal that thing from that other product over there. What piques your interest around the industry? We obviously do keep close watch on the industry. From a technical standpoint, I'm consistently looking at whatever information comes out just to keep my eyes open. We've tried to be really, really careful and targeted at what we do with Sherpa. And so we really drive from our internal lessons learned and our depth of customers in this

industry to drive how Sherpa is developed. And so we watch and we keep track of it, but we really feel that the Sherpa system that we've developed is unique. And, you know, we hope to be industry leading. I think what we're putting in place, certainly I haven't seen other companies kind of doing it the way we're doing it. philosophies here on how we build in our propulsion systems, on how we select high efficiency, low thrust versus moderate efficiency, high thrust. There are other variants out there. We kind of believe that we're on the right track there with our system. So yeah, so we watch. It's super exciting right now. I think it only further justifies the work that we've put in to build this system up for our customers that there are others doing similar things. And so a lot remains to be seen what systems actually make sense. We know our systems make sense in the way that we are a

ride share provider and have been doing that for years. We can't architect a system that doesn't meet our internal customer needs and budgets and launch costs. Like we kind of had that background. So we know that what we're architecting has to fit. And so the decisions we make are very targeted on that. And it will be interesting over the next few years as new systems become operational and they actually get vetted out, especially for mixes of microsats and cubesats. That's where it becomes a really, really challenging technical problem, manifesting problem.

That's something that we're really strongly historically focused on is ride sharing multiple disparate payloads, as you mentioned early on with SSOA. So I think as we as we look to commoditize those things with these new technical systems, things will shake out over the next few years. I also think sometimes people look at spaceflight in the wrong way. And that when there's announcements like SpaceX small sat ride share program, or rocket lab announcing a new program that's cheaper than the other guy like people go oh this is going this is the thing that will kill spaceflight there's no like and that's just the wrong way to think about it and i've always been a little annoyed at that because it's like oh no but they get to take advantage of all that stuff so

the more offerings there are you know because not every mission that spaceflight flies is going to be a sherpa mission there's a lot of missions that they fly where you're manifesting on another vehicle going somewhere else. And all of those advantages that come are prime for spaceflight to take advantage of. And Sherpa is another, you know, I think you said another arrow in the quiver. Did I get that phrase right? I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

I just stroked out there for a second. No, that's good. But it's just, it's like an interesting way to look at the industry where it's all of these offerings are out there to take advantage of in ways that meet our customer demands. And the fact that you have the flexibility to go from, we'll put your one satellite on that other vehicle and get you where you're going, or we can fly Sherpa with all this flexibility. You know, I think the next step that I would ask about is I see some talk about hosted payloads on Sherpa. Or is that going to be extended to something like Photon,

where it's like, well, now you can buy the whole platform because you're doing so much work, like you mentioned, with avionics, with propulsion. There's a lot of pieces there that make up a satellite. Is that something that Spaceflight is interested in, or does that feel slightly outside of the mission? it's tough to also tell like when is it stopping hosted payload and when does it start being a satellite so it might be a weird i that that is the uh that is the kind of will be the long-term question for orbital transfer vehicles you go and enable

these things to become like satellites. When are they satellites? And I think it would be wrong to not entertain the idea of hosted payloads and long duration uses. We spend so much energy getting these vehicles to orbit. I mean, we spend so much money, so much literal physical energy, actually throwing these things into orbit that for me, it's, it's a kind of deeply saddening when we have to fly a mass model, or as we look at orbital transfer vehicles, we say, okay, we're going to get our customer there and then we're going to turn it around and drop it into the atmosphere and we're done. To me, it's like, well, we spent

all this energy, spent all this money, a system that can last on orbit for five years because it has to have satellite components to do what it needs to do. We should use that for more. So we are looking at that and we're interested in it. I would expect long term that Sherpas are used for orbital, for hosted payloads, for other extensible mission opportunities. for other extensible mission opportunities. And yeah, that is an interesting trade we continue to look at because you also have to add more, well, more TT&C,

more communications capabilities, your electric power systems change. And so it's definitely different to host payloads than it is to simply do an orbit transfer. But again, you've got the system fully commoditized, fully paid for and on orbit. It would be cool to keep using it. And I do agree with you back to your original point

that when I came to spaceflight from the launch vehicle side, my background is in launch vehicle design. It was an interesting transition because spaceflight's looked at maybe as an underdog or this like weird off to the side. Um, you know, why wouldn't you just go direct to the launch vehicle? Why wouldn't you go, um, you know, do something different? What, what is going, as you said, going to kill space flight. But what I've found, um, that I love so much about the company in this role is that it is quite the opposite, that customers

continue to come back because we continue to re-manifest them. We continue to provide better customer service in a lot of ways where we can be a champion for the customer. To the customer, we look like the launch vehicle, but maybe with more background across multiple vehicles, instead of just talking to one vehicle and what they know about themselves, which is my background of working on one vehicle, knowing everything about my vehicle, not caring about other vehicles because, you know, it's my vehicle.

I love this thing. Spaceflight provides this different view because we work with a bunch of vehicles. And then to the launch vehicles, we are more like one big, weird, disparate satellite when we put all these things together. And we have all this experience with all these different customers. So especially as new launch vehicles come on,

we can work with them closely to tailor what they're providing or have those discussions to help our customers further. So, yeah, there's a strong place, I think, in the industry for spaceflight, for rideshare providers, especially as we add orbital transfer vehicles into the mix and it, it only strengthens as we get more launch vehicle options and more and more launch options for sure. Yeah. That's the key thing that people need to keep in mind. So, well I'm at the end of my list of questions here.

Was there a thing that I should have asked that you're dying to talk about or did we give a good overview of Sherpa? Yeah, I, I, I think we covered a lot of the different aspects of it. I would say my closing thoughts are that we're looking to fly these systems frequently, very, very frequently. A number of launch vehicles have proven that the way you learn is to keep flying, number of launch vehicles have proven that the way you learn is to keep flying, fly frequently, fly often, iteratively develop, incrementally develop. And that's what we're trying to do with the system. So our roadmap is very consistent, very swift. I know the engineering team at

Spaceflight is tired from the swift nature of this development set. But what's great about it is over the next six months, we're going to go from having had nothing in December of last year for orbital transfer vehicles to having three variants that can do all sorts of different things. And that's just the start for what we're going to do with the Sherpa program in the future. We call it the next gen family of vehicles because there's a whole lot more coming as we increase their efficiency and capabilities as we go farther into Cislunar space. This mission coming up in just a month or so now really is the start of our long duration capabilities with the system. 36 customer payloads are on there. We're excited to take them, take them up.

That's, uh, um, we're going to consistently see larger numbers of sat of these Sherpas on missions as we go. And we're looking to, um, to support that on,

on future, uh, rideshare missions. Um, so it's, it's an exciting time. It's a cool, cool thing to be a part of.

Space flight guests always know how to leave like a little cliffhanger because I think when Grant was on last time, I nudged him about last mile propulsion on Sherpas. And he was like, well, I don't know. We'll see, I guess. So now I feel like you're doing a little bit of the same here. So we'll see whoever the next space flight guest is on whatever. That's right.

The new extension will be fun to have. Yeah, we certainly operate in like sort of six-month windows. So every six months, it's new here at this company. And maybe that's the new space industry in general, but it keeps it interesting and exciting. So I appreciate you having me today. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for talking with us. And good luck with everything that's going to happen in the next couple of weeks here.

Yeah, thanks very much. It's going to be an interesting time. Thanks again to Phil for coming on the show. That was an awesome conversation. I learned a lot. I hope you did too. And I'm excited to watch these missions fly. The next one coming up and then the others in the future as Phil was talking about there. So once again, thank you all so much for your support. This is a 100% listener supported show. I don't take advertising. I don't get money any other way. If you like what you're hearing, help support the show over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. It helps me put more time and energy into the show to make it better and better. And I thank you all so much for that. For now, that's all I've got this week. I'm on vacation as you hear this for a little bit

here, taking some time off. So I will be back with you again in a couple of weeks, I'm sure, depending on how all the news goes. So until thank you so much I'll talk to you soon