Main Engine Cut Off - T+20: Mike Johnson, Chief Designer at NanoRacks on NanoRacks’ History, NextSTEP, and Wet Workshops

Episode Date: September 7, 2016

Mike Johnson, Chief Designer at NanoRacks, joined me this week to talk about his incredibly interesting career in spaceflight, the past and future of NanoRacks, their NextSTEP proposal, and a handful of other topics. Mike Johnson | NanoRacks' Chief Technology Officer To boost commercial activity, NASA may add private airlock to ISS | Ars Technica NanoRacks To Catalyze Concepts for Deep Space Habitats NextSTEP Partners Develop Ground Prototypes to Expand our Knowledge of Deep Space Habitats T+17: NextSTEP Habitat Prototypes, and the Zombie Centaur - Main Engine Cut Off NextSTEP Pushes Forward to Ground Prototypes - Main Engine Cut Off Some More Details on NanoRacks’ Centaur Wet Workshop Concept - Main Engine Cut Off NASA Funds Plan to Turn Used Rocket Fuel Tanks Into Space Habitats - IEEE Spectrum Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we have a very special guest this week with us. We have Mike Johnson, the chief designer at NanoRacks. We're going to be talking a lot about their next step to proposal to turn a Centaur upper stage into a wet workshop and all sorts of technical details like that. But before we do all that, I just wanted to mention that if you wanted to help support Main Engine Cutoff, you can head over to Patreon at patreon.com slash Miko and give as little as $1 a month to help support the show. And I very much thank all of those out there that are already supporting on Patreon. So with that, let's get into the interview. Thank you very much, Mike, for coming on the show. We are very happy to have you and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. Thank you, Anthony.

So before we get into the technical details of the NanoRacks proposal as part of Next Step and all of that, I want to start off just a little bit about your background, because you've got what seems like a very interesting history with a lot of different programs. So, you know, if you could just talk a little bit about what you've worked on to kind of and how you got to NanoRacks today. Well, the start of my career in the aerospace business was in 1989, soon after I graduated from the University of Minnesota, I went to work for then, it was Rockwell Space Operations Company in Houston, Texas. And my job was, I was a crew activity scheduler.

So it was kind of an interesting job. Something kind of weird for an engineer to do, but all of us were engineers. They wanted the technical expertise in this particular job, but our job was to schedule what the astronauts did on the space shuttle missions. So I worked in, then it was called Mission Operations Directorate. And I worked there for about two years as a correctivity planner. And I dabbled into writing crew procedures, which was also important. And also part of our group was the attitude and pointing group of the space shuttle,

so I got to see a lot of propulsion and orbital mechanics situations. So it's all kind of important because as a crew activity scheduler all these things sort of melt together and you got to see payload operations you got to see operations of the spacecraft we went through a very comprehensive in those days we went through a very comprehensive training program that was um started by gene kranz, of course, the famous flight director. And I remember at our graduation, Gene Kranz came in to speak, and Mr. Kranz was very clear to us. He said, the most important thing that you can really do in this particular job, especially when you're working on console, is if someone asks you a question

and you don't know the answer, be honest and just say, look, I don't know the answer to this question. I'll go back and I'll find out and I'll get back to you as quickly as I can. And I use that advice a lot. Never guess. Always verify. Always verify. So it's very important. A little bit of advice for maybe some of the younger engineers out there. Um, anyhow, so, uh, spent a couple of years in MOD work, uh, I think about five or six shuttle flights after that was, uh, well, that period was coming to an end when, uh, uh, I decided to take a job in Huntsville, Alabama with this crazy little company called Spacehab. And actually it was McDonnell Douglas acting as a primary contractor for Spacehab Incorporated. And of course, Spacehab was the commercial module, human module,

a commercial module, human module, that flew in the payload bay of the space shuttle. So I call it like a space camper. And eventually, the Spacehab program, we flew something like 15 modules on the space shuttle. And so I worked at McDonnell Douglas Space Hab that's kind of interesting when I worked in Huntsville I didn't work at the Marshall Space Flight Center everybody thinks if you're working in Huntsville you're going to be working at Marshall

that's not the case I worked off site at McDonnell Douglas and we had this special program called Space Hab it was a commercial space program very different from anything I'd ever done before. And actually everybody there in the room was, I should say everybody in the building, this was totally different than what they had previously done. Most of these people had done Space Lab, which is a similar system.

Most of these people had done Space Lab, which is a similar system. The Space Lab module is a little bit bigger than the Space Lab module, but it was quite a bit older. It was done under a government program, ESA and NASA. So the Space Lab module, what I did there at the beginning was crew operations and mission operations. But also they needed extra help because we had about 134 people to do this job. So I started in 1991. It was April of 91. We had about 134 people to do the job of getting the space hub module on orbit.

Now we had very few design drawings at that point. We needed to build a couple of buildings. And of course we needed to build the module and completely outfit the module and also bring in payloads. We had a NASA contract that had begun at that time to fly the module. And so all of it was just totally brand new. We only had, I think at that time, about three civil servants and a balance of 134 people. Maybe about 35 were in Florida and then the rest were in Huntsville, Alabama. And that was the whole program. It's interesting because the structure of it sounds a lot like something

you would see today in the industry. So it's pretty cool to find out the inner workings of that are very similar, kind of a precursor to what we're seeing today in the industry. Yes, it was started in, I think officially Spacehab Inc. was started in 1984. And it took a long time to really get it jumpstarted. It really wasn't until like 89 where things really started kicking off. And then by 1991, NASA contract was in place and we were established and we could get going. And it was crazy because I started in April of 91 and we flew a module, our first module.

I think it was in july of 1993 so um the program was just you know operating at light speed it was incredible and really fun really fun we were all working crazy hours i mean i remember working 100 hour weeks it was it was insane but But a lot of good came out of that program. Like I said, eventually, we flew something like 15 times. We also had an external platform that came out of that program, the ICC, and variants of the ICC, where we flew cargo out in the vacuum area of the payload bay. cargo out in the vacuum area of the payload bay. And the Space Hab modules were also instrumental in providing services to the Mir space station program the time said, look, you know, we need a space station. Great. Let's just buy a space station from Russia. It's called Mir. And we set up all the equipment to do it. The first flight to the International Space Station, I'm sorry, to Mir, used a space lab

module, but every flight thereafter was a space lab module. And we flew tons of cargo. I remember flying up all sorts of Russian stuff, experiments, long-duration experiments to Mir, and then also returning this hardware from Mir. And we flew tons of stuff. I mean, it's kind of funny because you know a new space everybody gets excited about flying you know a metric ton something like that we would fly you know easily two or three metric tons of stuff up and down and it was no problem the shuttle was huge

and uh we could handle this kind of mass so So it was a very fun time. I think all of us who were doing the program at the time didn't really realize what was going on. I mean, it was really kind of earth-shattering because it was becoming rote. You know, flying to space and

returning was just becoming a normal thing. So anyhow, somewhere in the midst of that, I started a small company, a MEMS company, Microelectromechanical Systems Company. And it was for a couple of years. Kind of blew up in the telecom bust. So I came back to Houston to work for SpaceHab Incorporated properly at that time. It was late 99. And I operated a few, I think we had about six human factors labs that I was working on there at Johnson Space Center, being back in the man space program, human space program.

I'd say around 2004, I had the opportunity to go work in the advanced programs group at Spacehab. And I went over there, and somewhere around the 2000 and, I want to say around 2006 timeframe, we started working on a proposal to develop a COTS spacecraft. develop a COTS spacecraft. So we were one of the finalists in the first round of COTS, which has now become like SpaceX and the Orbital Signets Program, CRS. We were finalists in that proposal round. We didn't win the first round. And then there was a second opportunity to bid on COTS, and we bid on that.

That particular bid, we changed our vehicle design a little bit to basically utilize Centaur upper stage components to build a spacecraft out of it. So our proposal basically was an Atlas V rocket, which the second stage of that is a Centaur. And then you add on top of that an empty Centaur filled up with cargo, if you will. And that Centaur on top would be the payload that the rocket is flying up? Yes, the Centaur on top would be the payload that would fly eventually to the space station in birth, using the robotic arm and the CBM birth on the space station. And it would have cargo inside of it. And then, of course, it would operate just like the Cygnus vehicle does today.

We would exchange the cargo for trash. And then the vehicle would depart from the space station and reenter the atmosphere and burn up and dispose of the trash. So sort of a dry workshop version of what we'll talk about in a little bit. Yes. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And the beauty of it is, I mean, the centaur components are mass-produced right now, right? They're made, I don't know the exact frequency, but they make a lot of centaurs annually. And all tooling is in place. It's a rather simple job to shorten the length of the Centaur or extend the length if you want. In our case, it was just shortening

the length of the central tank, the hydrogen tank, and making a spacecraft out of that. It was repurposing. I got the idea after we had completed the very first COTS proposal. I started looking at a lot of the parts that were available on the Atlas, including the first stage and second stage. I started asking questions of the people who make the Centaur. they're like yeah we buy this stuff every day we make this stuff every day it's available so it wasn't like reinventing the wheel but uh so i put that after we lost that proposal put that on the shelf just kind of kept thinking about it so is that something that you retained you retained the intellectual property rights to, or it was a commercial off-the-shelf idea anyway,

so it's something that you could resurrect when the time was right? Yeah, actually a little bit of both. A little bit of both. At about that time, we lost that second COTS proposal, and a couple of the founders of Nanoracks had given me a call and I actually knew them through the COTS effort. They had their own COTS proposal that they were working on and I got a call and said, hey, we want to do this.

We want to fly CubeSats on the inside of the space station. So it's like, oh, really? Well, okay. Sure, I'll help you out. And we started coming up with ideas on how to do this because of my past experience with inside of the space station, inside of the mirror, inside of a space shuttle. I kind of knew how to get things on orbit quickly and through the safety process or verification. What astronauts could use, you know, couldn't use, what was safe, etc.

So with that knowledge, we kind of started Nanoracks on a bit of a shoestring. The original intent was to fly payloads on the inside of the space station. Anthony, you still there? Yeah, I'm still here. I'm just enjoying the story time here. This is great. I was going to ask a lot about how this idea came about, and it's crazy to hear how long of a lifeline this has. It's a convergence of a couple of paths. paths here. So at this point, we began, we actually were contacted by NASA because they

were interested in flying payloads on this brand new thing called the international, I'm sorry, the US National Laboratory. Congress had declared the US portion of the ISS, the US National Laboratory, and they were looking for different payloads. We had submitted an unsolicited proposal a little bit earlier, and it got rejected. But in July of 2009, we got a call from NASA that said, hey, are you guys ready to fly? And Jeff Manber had kind of taken over the entity that we had. And it's hard for Jeff to say no. Actually, Jeff said, yeah, sure. They said, can you fly in January?

And Jeff's like, yeah, sure, that'd be great. And so he calls me back and he's like, hey, Mike, we can fly in January, right? You're all set. I got PowerPoints, man. And so I tell this story a lot. I say, there were two things I could have said at that moment. I could have said, well, I could have said no. And I knew that, you know, nothing probably would have happened. And, you know, it's not going to get there. Or I could say yes. Now, worst case, we might not make it.

I'd get embarrassed. Well, I get embarrassed every day, so that's okay. In best case, we might make it. Yeah, at least you're giving yourself a shot if you say yes. Yeah, what the heck? We'll try it. We'll do it. So I said yes, and just cringing because I knew there was going to be some hard work ahead. Sure enough, we got the first set of hardware built and flown.

It was built and delivered in December of 2009. It was flown, I think, in March of 2010. And then the second set of hardware was finished in January of 10 and flew in April of 10. So we got our internal business started, and it was going okay. Not a huge amount of work at the beginning, but steadily building up the business. And then somewhere around the 2010 timeframe, I started talking to NASA about the possibility of flying an external platform with maybe a CubeSat deployer on it, like a little 3U CubeSat deployer. And at first, it wasn't looked upon too favorably. People were kind of like, eh, I don't think so. It's a lot of work here, a lot of danger. Well, okay. We're going to put that on the

shelf. Before I knew it, the Japanese had come up with a set of two 3U P-Pod-like employers that they were putting out of the Japanese equipment airlock. And NASA, Japan had gone to NASA, JAXA had gone to NASA and said, well, we can't get enough CubeSats to fly in this thing. Do you have any CubeSats you'd like to fly? And so I got a call from Al Holt at NASA JSC. And Al says, hey, I'm working this program. It's like advanced projects program. You guys think you could get a CubeSat? And I said, well, I'm working this program. It's like advanced projects program. You guys think you could get a CubeSat?

And I said, well, let me see. And in fact, Jeff Mamber, our CEO, was over at an ISU conference, and he was approached by a very young Vietnamese professor who said, hey, can you guys fly CubeSats? Of course, Jeff doesn't say no. And he calls me up, hey, Mike, we can fly a CubeSat, right? And I'm like, well, you're really lucky today because yes, we can. So we elected to go ahead and fly that first CubeSat. And it was tough because it was, you know, even though that JAXA was doing it,

we still had to go through NASA safety. It was tough. I mean, even though that JAXA was doing it, we still had to go through NASA safety. It was tough. I mean, they had a tough time with the idea of deploying something out to space station like this. Even though it's just a small CubeSat, problem isn't with orbital mechanics. You can get recontact like an orbit later of a small device know device but it's traveling at four or five thousand miles an hour you know changing velocities is possible or even even at a hundred miles an hour a one kilogram mass is kind of a kind of a bad day yeah i would say yeah so we you know we took a lot of measures to make sure that we deployed the and the astronauts took a picture of it, of these CubeSats being deployed through the cupola window.

We didn't ask for that picture, but they took it because they were very excited about this new capability that was brought to the ISS. We got a copy of the picture and just kind of posted it, you know. Pretty soon I started getting phone calls. Hey, is that a Photoshop picture? No, no, no. That's a real picture. The crew took it.

And they're like, really? Could you deploy some of our CubeSats? Oh, sure. Love to. And I'm thinking. The best marketing, right? Show them, don't tell them? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

No, there's no question. I mean, you know, there's nothing that beats performance, right? And so I was like, yeah, we'd love to fly your CubeSats. How many do you want to fly? And I'm thinking, you know, maybe we'll see five a year or something like that. You know, five 1U CubeSats. And I had like three phone calls, I remember distinct distinctly and all three of them were about the same they're like well we like to fly 100 cubesats i was like whoa well how when when would you like to fly these hundred well we want

to fly a hundred a year oh and oh by the way we don't want to just fly 100 a year we want to fly 103 you not 101 you but you know three cubesat satellites i was like oh my gosh you know the phone is dropping at that point i'm gonna have to call you guys back so we got together in the company and made a decision we've got to build our own deployers now because the Japanese deployers can't handle that load. So we started looking at how many of these deployers could we squeeze into the Japanese airlock. The Japanese airlock is about a meter long by half a meter square. So it's not super huge huge but we certainly can get quite a few cubesats in there and so we figured out a way with some help from a contractor of ours

to design and squeeze in as many as we possibly could deployers into into the japanese airlock. And we also utilize a piece of Japanese hardware called the MPEP. It's like a platform that interfaces with the Japanese robotic arm. And so it interfaces with the Japanese airlock slide table. So we put our deployers on this little platform that sits on the slide table. The crew sticks that in the airlock closes the inside door and then the japanese ground crew opens the outer airlock door the table slides

out the japanese robotic arm comes down and grabs their table with our deployers on the table take some points in the right orientation which is is retrograde and kind of, it's 45 degrees below the velocity vector retrograde and it's 45 degrees above the nadir vector. And we tick out our cubesats every, like every six hours we'll do a deploy or two just to give them some spacing. So is that the same orientation every time? Or does it change, you know, are there some that people can choose from?

Or is it one orientation that is, you know, allowed? Right now, it's just one that's allowed. That's the safest, most conservative orientation for the deployment of the CubeSats. And what happens is the CubeSats are deployed, they're shot out of the tubes with somewhere around a half a meter per second delta V, maybe a little bit north of that, and they go down and in front of the space station. And the other thing about the CubeSats, the drag on the CubeSats is a little bit higher than the drag on the space station. So it's always guaranteed that no matter what, these CubeSats are dropping in altitude so they can't recontact the space station later on. So that's our current launch plan for the CubeSats. And then from there, we started getting a lot of requests to build or

to deploy larger satellites. So that's when we came up with the CABR deployer. And the CABR deployer can pretty much maximize the use of the entire airlock. So we can fly like close to 100 kilogram, about a meter by half a meter by half a meter small satellite. And we have one of those on orbit right now. It's kind of waiting for its radio license. But the CABR's on orbit and it's ready to go. And that's kind of our current lineup. But we also have hit a small road bump. We've overloaded the Japanese airlock. It's too much traffic going through there and it's difficult for the existing infrastructure of JAXA to handle the traffic.

So we came up with a proposal for NASA to fly our own airlock. Our design is pretty simple. It's about, it uses a CBM, common birthing mechanism, passive common birthing mechanism with basically a bell jar behind it and a robotic grapple fixture on the back end of it. And this airlock has five times the volume of the Japanese airlock. And we were bringing it up in the trunk of a dragon. And once a dragon is birthed, the main arm of the station will go over and grab this airlock and birth it on the side of the port CBM of node three. And then from then on, we'll just use that CBM as an interface for our airlock. But how the airlock works is it goes up unpressurized.

It's just like a bucket. You attach it to the CBM of the station, and the crew vents air into the airlock, pressurizes it, and they open the hatch on the space station side. They load in whatever we want to put in the airlock. In most cases, it'll be deployable, some kind of satellite. What's cool about it is we can put in like literally hundreds of CubeSats in slightly different deployers. Or we could put in larger satellites, even up to a metric ton in size of a satellite. So, for example, a crew, we could send up a satellite in pieces on the visiting vehicles.

A crew can assemble it in the airlock, and the assembled pieces could add up to, say, a ton. And then the crew would close the door. We have a vacuum pump that will draw a vacuum on the airlock. And then we'll do a final bleed down, maybe 5% of the air will be lost, but just a small amount just to get a hard vacuum in the airlock. And then the airlock is grappled by the space station robotic arm. The CBM is released. We pull the airlock back, put it in the deploy attitude, and start deploying the satellites that are inside the airlock

in a similar fashion to our current deployers. Then we'll go back and reconnect the airlock to the space station, repressurize it, and do it all over again. We can also use that airlock to move cargo to and fro from the outside to the inside or vice versa on the ISS. So kind of an exciting project. We expect that to be completed and flown by mid-2018. So is that approved and will be flying, or are you still working through some of the logistics on that?

It's approved and will be flying. I mean, we're in the build phase right now. We've just ordered all the long lead parts, and it's being constructed as we speak. So we're getting a couple. We're getting the grapple fixtures from NASA, and they're basically refurbing some previously used grapple fixtures. But done deal. We're very excited about this.

Do you have a Dragon flight booked for that? Not yet, but that's actually the very next thing we have to do, and we're thinking it's probably going to be around 18 or 19. So that'll be a pretty big change for your operations for the you know the deployment side of of the business. Yes yes it'll it'll be uh you know we still may use the Japanese airlock in some cases of course we have all the hardware to do that but with the advent of the large airlock we can just put everything in there and It takes a lot less crew time. You can imagine in one airlock opening, we're doing the equivalent of five openings on the Japanese airlock.

So it helps a lot with the crew time, the crew activity. And it gives you a lot more capability to do different types of mission profiles, And then it gives you a lot more capability to do different types of mission profiles, you know, bigger things or, you know, just more in general or the, you know, coming in from the outside. There's so many more things that are opened up to you to be able to do with that. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's really cool. to mine is I'd like to see like a beam builder put in the airlock so we could build some really long structures maybe something on the order of 20 meters long popping out of this airlock clip it off stow it outside and bring the airlock back in and we could start building rather large satellites for very low cost right off the space station. So you've got that whole end of NanoRacks up and running and clearly making really good progress.

But now there seems to be this whole other side that's opening up with the Next Step 2 program. Exactly. So this was a thing that was announced by NASA in April, I want to say. That was the initial release? Yes. There was a request for proposal that went out and we responded to that

with the idea of repurposing Centaur. So was this a thing that you saw the proposal or the request that went out and then you said, hey, I've got this thing that I put on the shelf a decade ago. I can pull this out and apply

it here? Pretty much. What happened was we got some requests from SSL, formerly Loral, MDA. And Mike Gold was over there at SSL. He just moved over. And he was thinking, you know, I've known Mike for quite a few years. He's like, have you got any good ideas for a space station module on orbit? I'm like, yeah, I might have something. There's this old idea, which that original idea was called Arctis back at Spacehab. I thought, maybe I, maybe I could do something with this. And so I called up

some friends of mine at ULA and started talking about it. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I knew it was possible to use the Centaur components, the birth of the space station. One of the questions was, was it possible to say, take the spent second stage, the spent centaur, and make it a habitable volume on orbit? And the quick consensus was yes. I mean, it's actually not that difficult. Some scarring will have to be done on the ground. We'll have to rig up certain valving and whatnot, maybe carry up some air tanks and things. But then I started looking at the proposal too for next steps and I realized, oh, well, just having the spent second stage isn't quite enough to do the job. We would need additional parts because NASA was asking for like airlock connectivity, extra docking ports, things like this.

So in fact, we had made a mock-up of the Arctis. ULA had made a mock-up of the Arctis and shipped it out to Houston years ago. And those days, the Centaur was manufactured in San Diego. So we made this mock-up in like three weeks. It was incredible. And this is a testament to the existing assembly line. These guys had some spare, they were actually scrapped hydrogen tank domes. There were two of them. They made just a short barrel section and welded it together to create a

mock-up of the Arctis pressurized volume in the main body of the spacecraft. We shipped it all by flatbed to Houston and we had it at Spacehab and showed it to the, it was kind of the centerpiece of the COTS, the second COTS proposal. It was really fun. People were shocked. So it was almost like somewhere between

a structural test article and an actually, you know, an actual piece of hardware because you had a little bit of leftover parts from other places. In fact, if we'd wanted to, we probably could have used it as an STA. Based on that, the next step to release from NASA was talking about most of the things included ground prototypes that were going to be built out. Is this the plan? This is exactly where it's going, right?

Okay, great. So this mock-up still exists. And it's like, I think it's over at JSC right now, Johnson Space Center. And so we're like, gosh, you know, let's look at just the dimensions of that body. And so I took a look at that, started doing some CAD, and I realized, yeah, we can meet the intent of the next step's proposal by simply putting this second pressurized volume, it's kind of a dry lab on top of the wet lab. The dry lab would have things like a suit lock interface, so like this new spacesuit they're working on, we're inclined to the back of it, but

the spacesuit is actually attached outside of the spacecraft. So we could put a couple suit locks on this little antechamber, if you will, this upper module. We could put an equipment airlock on this, and we could also put an extra docking port on this, and we can satisfy all the requirements of the next steps proposal in addition to flying the wet lab behind this antechamber and then we started looking at it and i'm like well you know so far we've flown two atlases to the space station uh and both of those carried cygnus vehicle and so the thought was well would it be possible to use a cygnus vehicle. So the thought was, well, would it be possible to use a Cygnus vehicle? Although,

I'll be honest, at this point, we haven't really worked at all with orbital sciences on this. I was going to ask if they knew about that, because the IEEE interview that you did, I guess a couple weeks ago at this point, has some great illustrations in there of how this would fly in this configuration. Yes. We really haven't done any work on it because, to be honest, the next steps really hasn't even started. We're still in contract negotiations with NASA. So it's still a little bit early, but our intent is to go talk with Orbital. And we know the Orbital vehicle pretty well too because we have an external

CubeSat deployer that we fly on the outside of the orbital vehicle. So we do know the orbital folks fairly well and just need to spend a few minutes and get with them to see if this concept is even feasible. But I'm pretty sure it is. I mean, it's not that difficult. And actually, a lot of the work, what we can do is modify the Centaur a little bit to provide, say, a parasitic attitude control and maneuvering control that would function off of the Cygnus spacecraft at a certain point in the flight. After you achieve orbit, we'd switch over control to Cygnus, and then Cygnus could essentially tug this whole assembly to the space station. I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself because now what we have here is we've got the Centaur, which will function as a wet lab, a little bit of scarring, put some air bottles on it

and whatnot. And we have this antechamber that's above it, the old Arctis body. On top of that, we have the Cygnus spacecraft. Now, the beauty of all this is it all fits under an existing Atlas V five-meter fairing. And we can lift all of this mass to orbit using one of the bigger Atlas Vs with some solids on the bottom of it. So this is all totally practical. It can be done today, you know, with a little bit of work and investment. It can happen fairly easily. So anyways, getting back to the story of how you get to the space station,

once this whole complex gets in the vicinity of the space station, we rendezvous and the main arm of the station grapples either Cygnus or the Ixion complex, births the Cygnus to its CBM port, and then we take the arm and connect it to the whole wet lab area and disconnect that from the Cygnus and then birth that on its selected CBM. At which point, the crew can go into this antechamber in the front, slowly pressurized, ready for crew. It's got all the outfitting hardware in it. They continue to climb through and through manipulation of a couple of vents and whatnot, make sure that all the hydrogen was vented from the Centaur before it got to the space station. So tanks would be clean and we'd vent air back into the tanks to pressurize

them. And then the crew can remove, it's basically a manhole cover on the top of the centaur already. So it wouldn't even really be changing much of the structure of the centaur. And they'd unbolt that manhole cover, which opens up, they gain access to the tank, the hydrogen tank. So is that cover something that's used when they're processing centaurs on the ground that's already in place for usage, you know to gain access to that tank anyway yes it's already there because guys have to climb inside that tank when they're building up and cleaning and assembling the tank so there's there's actually a couple of manhole covers that already exist on the centaur in this particular one is right at the top of the hydrogen tank, so you can get into

it. Most second stages have this situation. I mean, this could be done with other second stages, too. I have to add that it's not exclusive to the Centaur, but the Centaur is very easy to do it with. Once the crew has established that SSL, their intent was to supply robotics that could outfit the inside of the Centaur. Instead of using crew time, we just use their robotics, which are actually very sophisticated now. And we at least teleoperate or, you know, semi-automate these robots to outfit the inside of the Centaur. And this is like demonstrating how we could use it for, you know, say, cislunar or, you know, pre-staging of habitats for crew, you know, going beyond Earth, low Earth orbit or, you know, going to Mars. Anything that helps with crew time right now is pretty important. So in addition to this, we're also looking at flying a small electric thruster test bed,

which would give some erosion data. This is one thing that's kind of mysterious. A lot of electric thrusters are flown or have flown or are working right now in space. We don't have a really good idea of thruster erosion information because no one's ever brought back like test coupons from exposure to ion or Hall effect thrusters. So our thought was we would bring back a test coupon set and probably the engine too from the outside of

the whole wet lab structure. We can bring that in through the Manorax airlock. Yeah, I was going to say, you've got a great little one-two punch here. Yeah, exactly. The space station, my goal is to just maximize the heck out of the space station.

We've got this wonderful asset up there. Let's use it. You know, let's really do something with it. So the whole program is kind of centered around what can we do with what we have. And, you know, to me, it's a shame. I mean, like I said, two of these second stages have already been in the vicinity of the space station. But they'd get thrown away. So that's how rockets work. So it definitely feels like a good fit for, you know, what you just said there is kind of the telling statement behind where this proposal came from and how it kind of fits in overall. You were mentioning that this is something that you would envision being used with something other than Centaur.

Centaur at this point has a decade-ish left because right now the current plans are ULA is flying Atlas V until the early 2020s when they're switching over to Vulcan, which would eventually switch over to ACES, which is kind of a derived from centaur. So at some point, centaur may be phased out. And the episode I did about Next Step originally, I called it the zombie centaur because it's been around for so long at this point. But if and when that is phased out and switched over to something else, the work that you're doing now is something that would still apply. You might have to rework a couple of things, but the intent is that you're doing research and work to make this applicable to other upper stages, things that might fly in SLS or

future ACES or anything like that. Right, exactly. So what is it that when you're working with NASA through this, you're going to do the ground prototype based on the article you already have. What kind of i don't know if you can talk about this too much um but you know in that vein what are the things that nasa is looking for uh for you to do the research on to show how this could be applied to other upper stages well a lot of that activity will happen in the groundwork, or in the ground mock-ups that we create. And as I said, it's kind of universally applicable to any upper stage. It has kind of this combination of liquid hydrogen tank at the top,

liquid oxygen tank at the bottom. For a cryogenic upper stage, it's pretty much a standard configuration. But for a cryogenic upper stage, it's pretty much a standard configuration. So, for example, in the new Vulcan rocket, same thing could be done. And any of the forward, you know, beyond LEO boosters, too, that NASA's working on, there's a variety of programs right now. This would work with any of them. So the main thing is you're going to figure out what do you have to do to scar these second stages to utilize them as habitable volumes. That's the main thrust. And it's kind of neat because it's a lot of valuable information and it's applicable to anything in the future that we're doing. I mean, unless we start using hypergols for upper stages, but I don't see that happening.

I don't think that's in the cards. Yeah. That seems to be getting less and less likely. Yeah. So is there any data that you, uh, you could mine from the Skylab days? Uh, anything that, whether it's design specs or anything like that, that you can pull and draw on? I already have done that, right? That's awesome. Yeah. Wet lab, you know, the That's awesome. Yeah, wet lab. The original concept for Skylab was wet lab.

But what happened, Skylab was originally going to be, well, the wet lab version is going to be launched using a Saturn 1B, eventually a Saturn 1B. But what happened was they didn't have enough Saturn 1Bs left over at the end of Apollo. They had more Saturn 5s. So they elected around 1969 or so to just go to a dry lab concept and go forward from that. So that's why Skylab was launched as a dry lab. Otherwise, it would have been a wet lab. And there's a lot of really cool pictures, a lot of work that was going on at marshall in relation to um to that activity so a lot of thought was put into it and pretty much know how to do this already it's just you know let's look at the modern situation and future um upper stages that are coming out and let's make

sure that we can do this job correctly i will also mention that uh if anyone's ever in washington dc they should definitely go to the air and space Museum and go into the other Skylab that is there because you can actually get in this. Yeah, because you walk into this thing and you go, my God, this thing is huge. And you get instantly jealous of the astronauts that got to run around the outside of it. You know, that famous video of them taking a jog around the outside of Skylab. Oh, yeah. And you have to remember, too, that some of these things are in solar orbit. Some are crashed on the moon, you know, the F4B.

Some of these are burnt up or pieces of it are in the ocean. But we were lobbing these things in the Apollo days out of Earth orbit easily. And you could even, technically, if you could find these things on the moon, you could use the aluminum to rebuild structure. And there's a few on the moon. That's pretty cool. That's pretty crazy to think about. I didn't really consider the fact that they're out there still.

You could hypothetically catch one. For example, there are centaurs in geostationary orbit. Some of the atlases will take... Oh, right, direct insertion. Direct insertion. So there are whole centaurs in geostationary orbit. I mean, these things are big. And you're like, wow, how can we use that?

So I've got one other quick topic or question for you. So I've got one other quick topic or question for you. A little bit about how you see the NanoRacks and SSL and ULA proposal fitting in the Next Step program. this, they could probably name four of them off the top of their head because it's the typical people we would expect to see that, you know, Boeing, Lockheed, people like that, that we already see their hardware in orbit on the station, things like that. Now, NanoRacks fits in that group, certainly, that there's hardware on the station, but you wouldn't expect to see that name in this type of habitat proposal. And a lot of the other proposals, the competing proposals, I don't know exactly what Next step two's plan is long-term, uh, what they're going to get out of these, where they're going to go beyond there. But in the case of Boeing and Lockheed and orbital, certainly, uh, their proposals are based on their modules that are part of the station today or

flying to the station. Uh, and, and they're very focused, you know, even the Bigelow one is, they've sort of already built a lot of these ground prototypes. So they seem very focused on one singular piece of hardware. And yours is very much open-ended, more forward-looking almost, in that this is something that we could apply throughout an exploration system. And is that something that concerns you, excites you? How do you see those two kind of ideologies competing in this type of proposal? Well, it kind of excites me because, I mean, one thing that I, I'm an engineer, so I'm going to be critical of engineers, okay? Engineers tend to focus on single point designs. And I'm like, you know, actually kind of, it's sort of a mantra of mine in the company here, and I've used this for years. It's like, if your solution doesn't have like two or three applications, it's probably, or, you know, two or three other things it's fixing, it's probably not a good solution.

Your solution is only fixing one thing. It's probably not the right thing. And, you know, in this case, like I said, we're using space junk, literally. We are using existing hardware. We're not reinventing the wheel. It's not a thing I hate to do. I hate reinventing the wheel. A lot of proposals, people are like, oh, yeah, give me a billion dollars, I'll build you a space station.

Well, you can build a space station with what you have, actually. And, you know, it's possible to save some money doing that. So I'm excited about it. And you're right. It's like everybody else has kind of point design solutions. I'm not saying that they're not good solutions. It's just, you know, get a rocket, launch something, it's up there. Honestly, this is the part of the, you know, this is the unique thing that a company like

NanoRacks can bring to this type of proposal because you're not tied into an existing module or something that you're flying like Cygnus or any of the MPLMs that have been flown. You're not tied down to one particular type of thing. So you were able to take an approach to say, what's out there? What can I use? And how can I put them together in interesting ways? Now, granted, you did that a decade ago, but that shows that the idea is timeless. This is something we flew at one of these kind of workshops in the 60s or in the 70s, I guess. And it's something that still lives on today as something that is very much underutilized. So I'm really excited about the NanoRacks proposal. Oh, thank you. I guess, you know, good ideas

always work, right? If they were. Two weeks ago on the show, I had Robert Zubrin talking about Mars Direct. And then this week, I've got you talking about an idea that's been around for so many years. So it's kind of interesting. Two interviews in a row, I've had people that have been interested in a particular idea for so many years now, in an era when we think all new ideas are fresh or something like that. It's just cool to see some of these really do last. Yeah, you're exactly right. So I'm excited for the

future i mean at nanoracks are you know everybody asks well what are you going to do with your company when the space station ends like well we'll be on another space station you know or your own at this point you've got a pretty good string of uh projects going here. Well, it may be the case, but we'll definitely be on some space station. So, yeah, it's definitely exciting. Definitely. You know, in the future, as the project comes along,

maybe we can have you back on and talk more about what's going on once you're done the prototype or have flown something, you know. Hopefully we can come back and talk about it again. That'd be wonderful. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you very much, Mike, for coming on the show and taking time out of your day to talk to us here. So thank you very, very much. That'll be it for us today. So thank you very much for listening. And I hope you enjoyed

the conversation here with Mike. If you want to help support Main Engine Cutoff, if you want to help contribute to some of these interviews and get access to them a little bit early, head over to Patreon at patreon.com slash Miko. If you have any feedback on the show today, any thoughts on what we talked about here, email me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. Thank you very much for listening, and I will talk to you next week. week