Main Engine Cut Off - T+200: Orbital Reef, Starlab, and the ISS Conundrum

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

Commercial space station mania! Blue Origin, Sierra Space, Boeing, and Redwire announced Orbital Reef, while Nanoracks and Lockheed Martin announced Starlab, all in the run up to the expected awards as part of NASA’s Commercial Low-Earth Orbit Destinations program.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Brandon, Simon, Lauren, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, 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, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous—and 702 other supporters.TopicsNanoracks and Lockheed Martin partner on commercial space station project - SpaceNewsBlue Origin and Sierra Space announce plans for commercial space station - SpaceNewsOrbital ReefAnnouncing Orbital Reef - Your Address in Orbit - YouTubeBlue Origin and Sierra Space Leading Team to Build “Orbital Reef” Business Park in Space – SpacePolicyOnline.comT+195: Blue Origin’s Project Jarvis, Suborbital Flights, and Nauka Fallout (with Eric Berger) - Main Engine Cut OffSenate Committee Told U.S. Space Leadership Requires Continued Presence in Low Earth Orbit – SpacePolicyOnline.comIndustry Input Sought on Commercial Destinations in LEO | NASAThe 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 SpaceX

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and the news has been hot this week with commercial space stations. So I want to dissect some of the announcements that we've seen, but also talk about the ISS conundrum that we have been in for a few years now. But I think the recent announcements, looking at the calendar a little bit, the political, budgetary drama that's going on in the US makes it a little more dire than it's been in the past. And I wanted to cover that a little bit, just to frame what we're seeing from the commercial space stations, because the announcements here are inseparable from the NASA program of record for the future, I guess it would be, the commercial low-Earth orbit destinations contracts, the CLD contracts.

You'll see them referred to that. So let's start with the news from last week before IAC, which did kick off this week in Dubai. The weekend before that, there was an announcement from Lockheed Martin, NanoRacks, and Voyager Space Holdings, who is the majority shareholder of NanoRacks, that they're going to be collaborating on a space station project called Starlab. Now this, in contrast to the other commercial space station renders that have been thrown around from Axiom, or as we'll talk about from Blue Origin and Friends, this is sort of like hot-rodding a space station. It doesn't have multiple modules, it doesn't have all this expansion built in, doesn't have these luxurious large windows.

This has essentially a satellite bus with some radiators and solar panels, a little robotic arm there as well for work on the station, and then an inflatable habitat with a docking port at the front. So it is really slimmed down to just sort of an expedition class space station, not something that is going to be this enormous complex in space, or at least what they're showing off here is not the enormous complex vision. I'm sure they have that somewhere. But what they're showing here is exactly what NASA is looking for in the future. Some place that can host, I think this, in this case, it was four astronauts. Do I have that right? Yeah, four astronauts at a time. And they've got plenty of habitation space. They've got some lab space. They've got the

robotic arm to do external experiments, things like that, can host, you know, whatever vehicle wants to fly up to this. So it's an announcement that I think is pretty straightforward on the technical side. When you start thinking about what this really means overall for what their future is here, it gets maybe a little bit more complicated, right? The collaboration here, of course, Nanoracks has been talking about commercial space stations for years. We've talked about it with Nanoracks on many occasions on the show. So it's not a surprise to see them playing in this space. They've talked about doing some sort of wet workshops idea with Centaur upper stages. They've shown some derivatives of that where it was a modified Centaur upper stage.

And now I think they're kind of getting to this new format where they have this inflatable habitat that would host all of the habitable volume on the station. Now on the funding side of things, Voyager owns NanoRacks, or the majority of NanoRacks, and a whole host of other companies as well. So Voyager seems to have no problems with the funding on their side. And, you know, the intention from Voyager at the start was to invest in companies that were a little bit more forward-looking, a little bit more long-term, maybe had some good profits running now, good revenues running now, but needed an investment because their business model was such a long-term view of the future of space. And, you know, that obviously holds with NanoRacks in this case, but

is it the kind of funding that they need to build out a full orbital space station without something like a NASA contract? I don't really think so. And nor do I think Lockheed Martin is invested in that way. So this one seems very dependent on being part of NASA's commercial low-Earth orbit destinations contract. And not that that's problematic. I think we're going to see that pop up around this contract, but I do think it helps just frame the way that you think about this. This is a thing that might happen if they get the funding and the anchor tenant that NASA would be to build this out into the future. You know,

there wasn't a ton of detail divulged about this. That makes you think that they are very far along in the design and development process of Starlab, which also the name is kind of annoying to me because Star something is a very loaded namespace. I think they probably could have done a little better there. So I'm kind of bummed by that. But you know, it is what it is. Now on the other side, we had the Orbital Reef rollout from Blue Origin. Now I say Blue Origin, but it is Blue Origin in partnership with Sierra Space, which is the space wing of Sierra Nevada Corporation. Those are the people behind Dream Chaser. You might know them.

They rolled out Sierra Space as its own thing. This time last year, maybe a little bit before that, just as a freestanding entity. So those are the two main partners on the station. Then they have some other team members that includes Boeing. And I'll get into what each of these members are going to be doing in a bit. Includes Boeing as a team member, and then Genesis, who's going to be making this awesome little EVA. You want to call it a suit, but it's his own little personal spacecraft with robot arms. It's kind of like an orbital mech, and it looks awesome, and I would like to drive

one at some point in my life. But the idea behind Orbital Reef is that it is an open-ended architecture that can be added on to by whoever is interested. So this isn't, you know, Axiom saying we're going to build all these little modules, we're going to put them all together, we're going to operate this whole complex, and then you can buy time on our station, you can fly to our station, you can be our customer. This is saying we have a couple of partners here that would like to kind of co-locate in Earth orbit. And if you want to contribute to the project, you can.

If you want to build your own module and add it on, you can. If you want to fly here and live here for a little bit, you can. It's open-ended in a way that could sometimes be seen as problematic because it is punting some important questions and answers down the line. It's pointing the business model question to the people that might actually fly to Orbital Reef because they're positioning it as an end-to-end service. So if you want to fly to the station, if you want to get cargo up at the space station, if you want to do research on the station, this is an end-to-end service for you. So you would interact with Orbital Reef as an entity,

and you would book time on it, you would book your flight through them. You wouldn't have to go to all these other destinations to book the flight entirely. So we'll dive more into that in a second, but let me tell you who and what Orbital Reef is. So Blue Origin is going to be building the core modules. They are the central modules. If you look at the visualization here, it is a large diameter module. So they're going to be taking advantage of that big fairing of New Glen to build that large diameter fairing. Sorry, the large diameter habitat. From that would be a, you know, solar panels, radiators that would all be built and deployed by Redwire, who is recently responsible for the rollout solar arrays on the space station. There's going to be the Sierra Spaces Life module, the large inflatable element.

I think I got that right. That's an inflatable habitat that would be on one side of the station. And then on the other side, Boeing would be developing some sort of science module that looks very reminiscent of some of the modules that we've seen on station thus far. Boeing is heavily involved in the ISS, which is a huge aspect of this that we'll break down, but a very ISS-inspired science module there. Sierra Space would also be contributing, they say cargo and crew flights with Dream Chaser. Crew flights with Dream Chaser is a thing to unpack as well. And then Boeing said that they would provide cargo and crew services with Starliner at some point in the future. Now all of those, and then the

Genesis little EVA suit thing that I talked about is also part of these original renders. All of that is in some sort of pecking order that is hard to discern. But Blue Origin and Sierra Space were classified as partners, whereas Boeing and Genesis and Redwire were team members. So when you're thinking about this kind of open-ended architecture, you have to be ready for companies to come and go, to interest levels to wane and wax. But I think what it comes down to is, you know, one thing that I was thinking about during this announcement is, which of these partners, if they packed up shop and left, who would be able to withstand the departure of someone else? And Blue Origin is obviously a huge one. If they pull out, then this whole thing seems to go away,

considering they are the core module. If Sierra Nevada did, maybe they are, from a funding perspective, going to be in a tough spot, but the habitation module seems, you know, replaceable by something else. Maybe not as good as Life if you like what Sierra Space is offering there, but like I just mentioned, there was the Nanoracks and Lockheed habitation module that is inflatable. Axiom is building a lot of hab modules. You could even host something like a Northrop Grumman Cygnus-derived habitation module like they are sending to the moon for NASA's Artemis program. So habitation is something that, you know, could be replaced. And then Boeing contributing a science module and flights, that is kind of in the same ballpark. That the flight's obviously

replaceable because i don't know if you've seen starliner flying up the station yet but that's a replaceable situation there so all this is to say that blue origin is really you know the keystone here uh and i think until we know more about the funding side of it, Sierra Space may be, but all the other ones do seem replaceable, which is important because the desire for Blue Origin to stick with this project is something that I have concerns about. I'm sure others do as well. That's a thing that is up in question right now

because of everything else that Blue Origin is involved in. Back in August, I had Eric Berger on the show. We talked a lot about Blue Origin during that podcast. We talked about Project Jarvis, the reusable upper stage that they're working on. We talked a lot about the human landing system contracts that they are protesting and now suing NASA over. And a big thing that we talked about was how developing commercial space stations and payloads for space, habitats for space, is something that we wish Blue Origin invested harder in and really drove forward with because it is so precisely in line with their vision of millions of people living and working in space, the thing that they say over and over again, and no one else is really doing it, and no one else, very few others I no one else very few others i should say have the

requisite funding to invest into something like this so it seems like something that is so down their center line of their vision it is something that is within their funding level grasp and it is something unique because there aren't a lot of companies that are bending metal in this department right now to make this kind of thing a reality. There are a ton of launch companies, a ton. There are too many launch companies, many people will say. They're not all the size of New Glenn, but do you need something that big when you're putting together a space station and not launching a gigantic single-shot habitat? So this is something that is unique, that is within Blue Origin's technological and funding wheelhouse, it's within their vision. I really wish that this was something that they would drive forward on and own in a very aggressive way, because we haven't seen that in a lot of other areas when they do kind of drift in the wind with what contracts are available, with what projects are available. wind with what contracts are available, with what projects are available. And it gives me major concerns that if they don't win a NASA contract that is coming up soon, will they be so invested

in this idea to continue to push it forward? Because we've seen this time and time again, not just with Blue Origin, but with other companies as well. And to that end, even Sierra Nevada, or now Sierra Space, with Dream Chaser. They had huge plans for crewed Dream Chaser missions, and they didn't win the commercial crew contract, and they did kind of put those plans on ice for a little bit. They developed a smaller cargo variant now, and hypothetically, they should be able to scale that back up into a crewed variant. And that's not to say that they haven't invested a ton of money into Dream Chaser, because they have and they clearly care about it because they've signed a ton of agreements with nations and with other space agencies and companies out there to provide Dream Chaser services to them. the crude one was put on ice totally. But it's something that they've continued to talk about.

And that's also another fact that we should lay out here is that Sierra Space does have quite a lot of resources. They are also owned by billionaires who own the company. And they're billionaires because the company is so valuable. But that's kind of how Elon's wealth is as well. And you see how much money SpaceX is investing, both personally from Elon, I'm sure, but also all that external funding they're taking. So it's not like they are on a shoestring budget. They've invested a lot in Dream Chaser already. But have they continued to push the crewed spacecraft forward as aggressively as some other companies would have if they really wanted to see that thing exist in the world? as aggressively as some other companies would have if they really wanted to see that thing exist in the world. No, they kind of were waiting for another business model to come along,

another big contract to come along, another big anchor tenant to come along, which I totally get, and they see this as the opportunity. But in the same way that we had thoughts at two IACs ago, when Blue Origin announced a big national team to develop a human lander for the moon, the question was, if they don't win that NASA contract, will the funding that Blue Origin has carry through this team to exist in the absence of that contract? And that hasn't been the case. So here you have the same question, right? If this contract does not come through in weeks or months, however far away it is, which of these team members are going to stay involved? For Blue Origin's case, I do think that they're going to stay involved in this one because

I think at some point they have to try something different. They have to try a different model. And this is, again, so directly down the center line of their vision that it would be, in my view, silly to bounce out of this one if they don't get picked by NASA first. For Sierra Space, they clearly see the space side of the industry being such a huge growth area that they rolled out their space company as its own entity that could bring with it the further investment in the space business. It could mean going public. It could mean a massive infusion of assets there. And they see that as a major growth area. So I would hope if the NASA contract does not come through, that they in some manner, whether it's solely providing the cargo flights that they're

already capable of doing because they have cargo dream chaser coming up pretty soon to start flying to the ISS, even if it's just that, and maybe developing the life module, that I would hope that that continues in the absence of the NASA contract. Boeing is the first one where the story changes quite a lot. And that has a lot to do with the weird spot that Boeing finds itself right now across the industry, really. Boeing is the prime contractor on ISS. That's something on the order of $200 or $300 million a year to run the ISS. They are obviously providing, or they're on the hook to provide crew flights to the ISS with Starliner. They are very heavily invested in the existence

of ISS. Now, that means two things, that they need to continue to lobby for the continued existence of the ISS. And we've started to hear people in Congress throwing out 2030, 2040 for the existence of ISS and not deorbiting it at 2028 or 2030 as the plan currently stands, but operating that until 2040. And you can be sure that there are people with relationships with Boeing that are in those conversations pushing for the maximum extension possible to the ISS because Boeing is very invested in that existing. They're also invested in that existing because, hypothetically, NASA would continue to buy Starliner flights all those years in addition to the prime contract. But at the same time, they need to be realistic that the ISS is not going to be around forever. So they need to start

putting some feelers out there to, you know, what projects can we be involved in in a post-ISS era if this ISS money goes away? We need to continue to have a foothold in this. We have all this experience. We have all this expertise. We have these people in-house. We have all these facilities. We need to put that to use somehow. We need to have a spot in that post-ISS future. we need to put that to use somehow we need to have a spot in that post-iss future so this is and then i should say furthermore boeing is also massively invested in sls existing and that's a budgetary constraint for nasa right now because there's a lot of problems that and we'll talk about this towards the end of the episode but nasa's having a ton of problems getting money for the commercial space station side of their plans.

And when you talk to people around the industry, a lot of people chalk that up to, yeah, there's so much money being taken up by SLS Orion right now that we can't actually take on these other important projects because there's just not enough funding available in NASA's portfolio. So Boeing's lobbying for that SLS funding to continue, the ISS funding to continue. If they continue to get both of those things, there's no money for the commercial space stations. And with no money means, you know, if contracts even are doled out for this program, they'll be very tiny. Would that keep Boeing's interest at that point? And I'm very unconvinced that it will. i also think that in the same way that some of the stuff that sierra space provides is uh interchangeable i think all of that what boeing would provide here

is interchangeable uh starliner was announced as as the crew transportation option for the space station and they talk about that in the in terms of the end-to-end services that they're going to have for the station so if you want to fly to orbital reef um you don't have to go to boeing individually and charter a flight there would be some sort of flight schedule um i was on the call about this orbital reef rollout and i asked does that mean that you have set schedules and sort of an expedition an iss expedition style uh flight plan where you know oh, you want to go up? Well, there's one flying next April, you can get on that one. And then there's going to be one in October. I asked if that's the case where you can buy on demand. And it seemed a little bit up in the air.

But the one thing that Brent Sherwood, who is really in charge of this program from the Blue Origin side, the one thing he said was that, well, he brought up New Glenn and its flight rate and its affordability as a point to that, that it wouldn't necessarily be on demand, but would flights be more affordable overall because of New Glenn? Yes. Which I thought at first, I was like, okay, that's kind of like a random tangent, but it's totally possible that New Glenn jumps in here and is providing the launch services for not only Dream Chaser, but for Starliner in the future as well. There's only a couple of Atlas rockets left. Starliner is going to have to figure out a new launch vehicle, whether that be Vulcan

from United Launch Alliance, or if they can figure out how to launch this thing with New Glenn. New Glenn's payload capacity is very high to low Earth orbit. So could there be something where you are co-manifesting cargo going to the space station, or even another module going to the space station along with a crewed flight? Blue Origins talked about this last mile space tug that they're going to build to help bring those modules and integrate them onto the orbital reef. So could they be using New Glenn in this way to co-manifest crew and cargo going up to the space station to help that cost? I kind of suspect that that would do a big number on the affordability of Starliner seats. If and when this future comes to pass,

that Starliner is flying in six or eight years. By the way, this orbital reef thing is going to fly in the later half of this decade, they say. So if by that point, Starliner is flying on New Glenn, they've flown it for a lot, they're reusing a lot of components, could the cost come down enough to make it very affordable? Very plausible, especially if they're going to co-manifest all that payload space to get more up into space in one shot. But I don't think that anyone on Orbital Reef is opposed to chartering a Dragonflight to the station or chartering whatever the cheapest crew vehicle is to get to the space station. Hell, Rocket Labs talked up making a human spaceflight vehicle of some sort and launching it on Neutron. So they are obviously, because of this open-ended architecture, open to that sort of thing if it comes to pass. they are obviously, because of this open-ended architecture, open to that sort of thing if it comes to pass. Now, one of the most interesting aspects to this whole announcement

is the idea that Blue Origin, Sierra Space, Boeing, whoever else is part of this program, would help build modules for people that are interested in adding on to the orbital reef, who might not have expertise in space at all. This is the second question I asked on that call was whether the expansion to Orbital Reef would be something that has to go through the partners on the team, or if it's something where you can bring your own tin can and attach it on board, because so much of the logistics and the life support, everything will be handled by those core modules from Blue Origin and the energy masts from Redwire Space. So you can kind of bring dumb tin cans and dock them on board.

And Brent also said that they're open to both of those things. If there's a company out there who has expertise in this area, has already developed their modules, if it's another country who is invested in building their own modules, you think in this case specifically, Thales Alenia builds a lot of pressure modules that they could make. They're building Axioms pressure modules, pressure vessels. I don't know what I'm saying, pressure modules. Modules is in my head today. They're building the pressure vessels for Axiom Space. They're building them for Northrop Grumman's Cygnus. So they tend to build a lot of these. And if some country wanted to build out a module

and attach it, they could build that and get it to the station on their own. But more interestingly than that, Brent said if somebody has no experience and they want to add on to this, that they would work with them. their orbital hotel and work directly with these partners to build out that module, design it with them, and eventually get it integrated on station, and then just participate in those end-to-end services for cargo and crew. That kind of thing, again, it does punt the question of business model down the line, but it definitely opens up a lot of possibilities that aren't necessarily there with Axiom. Maybe they could theoretically partner with somebody like Ritz-Carlton to build out their hotel habitat or something like that, but they seem much more invested in building out the complex on their own, operating it the way

that they say, whereas this seems a little bit more fast and loose, ready to kind of bend to the wishes of the market. And to me, that seems, in a market that has a lot of unknowns, that seems more ready for the future than either of the options. Now, I want to talk about the NASA of it all, and then I kind of want to give some more general thoughts about where this whole market is going. But before I do that, I need to say a huge thank you to all of you out there over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support who make this show happen every single month. There are 742 of you supporting the show every single month, and that includes 40 executive producers. Thanks to Brandon, Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel,

Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, the Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this episode possible. If you want to join the crew and get Miko headlines in your feed every single week, I do an entire other podcast where I talk about all the stories from the week, everything you need to stay up on and give you my short thoughts on whatever I have thoughts on. It's a great way to stay up on the news to support the show. So head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support to do that. And a quick editor's note about that. I'm actually heading out on vacation tomorrow as I record this. So there's going to be one more headlines

this week. And then next week, you're going to have a special episode in the headlines feed, a little sneak preview of something else out there in the wild that might be of interest to you. So if you want to get some headlines in your life and you want to get a sneak preview at something else that's happening out there in the podcasting world, then join up and you'll get a show this week and you'll get a special show next week. then join up and you'll get a show this week. You'll get a special show next week. And then I'll be back post vacation with headlines through the end of the observable universe, I guess, because I do that every single week and it's awesome. So thanks again for all the support and I appreciate it. All right. So the NASA question here is a real big one.

NASA is at a weird spot right now where they are, as I mentioned with the Boeing lobbying efforts, they're having a hard time getting funding for the ISS commercialization initiative. It's been something that they've been talking about since, you know, 20, even, I don't even want to name a date because it'll probably be out of sync with reality, but it's been many years where there's been people talking about what do we do after ISS? We want to avoid this gap of human spaceflight and LEO for whether that be geopolitical reasons or just pride. There's a lot of different reasons for avoiding the gap or just bad memories from having the gap after the space shuttle until commercial crew was flying. It's been a lot of people talking about that for years. So the idea starting around

2015, 16-ish, was to have this commercialization effort where NASA would fund a couple of different companies to begin developing the predecessor, or the, that's not the right word for it, the ancestor, the follow-on to the ISS, where then NASA could buy services on orbit. The way that they buy services for cargo and crew to the ISS today, they would buy that service of crew time on orbit in the future. Now, they've gotten very little money from Congress for this over the years. Every year, they seem to request something in the $100 to $150 million range. They tend to get something in the $15 million range, and even that is new, and that is the largest sum. They're to get something in the $15 million range. And even that is new. And that

is the largest sum. They're making like good influencer money on this Leo commercialization effort. And that's not going to work, right? We're looking at the calendar. We're sitting here. We are towards the back end of 2021. The ISS theoretically can make it to 2028. But I don't know if you've noticed, there's been a lot of ISS problems lately. The Russian segment has spun the ISS out twice in the last couple of months. There's been a couple of leaks.

There are things that are aging. There is a lot of problems with the ISS because it's just getting old and it needs some work. And something that Brent Sherwood of Blue Origin said in that call last week, or this week, my timeline's totally screwed up. He said that you do want to plan for the ISS to make it to the end date, but you don't want to bank on it because what if something else happens and you need an alternative plan sooner than that, right? So we can sit here and talk about 2028,

we can talk about 2030, we can talk about 2030 we can talk about 2040 but i i don't know anyone that would bet on the iss really being in a good shape beyond 2030 so you couple that with the fact that these commercial space stations are going to take half a decade or the better part of a decade to really develop build out and launch and even get operational and then you factor in typical aerospace delays. We're at crunch time here. You know, there's not a lot of time to lose. So NASA needs to either take this seriously and start getting funding for it or put better Congress has to take this seriously and start putting funding in the budget for it.

Or they're just going to rely on the hopeful existence of companies like Blue Origin, like Axiom, like SpaceX to just continue in the direction that is good for them. Jim Bridenstine was on Capitol Hill last week in a hearing, and he didn't say it out loud in the hearing, but in his written testimony that he submitted, he suggested $2 billion a year that NASA would be allocated for commercialization efforts. $2 billion a year. That's what they spend on SLS. It's what they spend on Orion alone. It's what they spend on the space station alone, almost. I think space station's at like $3 or $4 billion, but it's pretty close. And that's just to develop two or three options here in the leo space and have the

requisite funding to will this into existence so without that again we're left with that question of if nasa doesn't come through here for these companies who's going to be building out these space stations axiom seems to have a ton of funding a ton of momentum they're bending metal they are going to start sending private astronaut missions up to the ISS. They're looking to launch their first module in 2024. They're building out a huge new headquarters. They have like three or 400 people now, last I heard. So they seem to be very serious. SpaceX is doing a lot with Starship, and there's always the people out there, much to the chagrin of a lot of other people out there who would say,

just use a Starship and make it a space station. But it is a plausible thing. It's not something that you want to rely on in the same way of a permanent habitat in space, at least in its current iteration. But, you know, in a pinch, if NASA did need to send a bunch of people to do some experiments, get some flight time, it is a thing that could exist. I mean, Inspiration4 basically did that a couple weeks back with Dragon. So there's free flyer missions. And then there's this Orbital Reef idea that if Blue Origin, if CR Space are committed enough and NASA does not come through with the funding, could exist. But this is a case that we would like to see NASA do better, I think.

Because, and again, every time I say NASA here, I mean Congress and I mean the NASA Budget Department, but you have this industry going in this direction that is so clearly in NASA's best interest because of the state of the ISS, the state of the NASA budget, the future of what they want to do, and really the future development of space overall, because all of these companies that are building out these LEO habitats are invested in building out an ecosystem that would make a more healthy space environment overall. You know, if there's these space stations operating in low-Earth orbit, what is that going to do for the cost of everything else around it? It's going to have some downward pressure

on operations, on logistics, on transportation. The more customers there are, the more downward pressure there is. The more competitors there are, the more downward pressure there is, the more competitors there are, the more downward pressure this is. So you can get yourself into a good cycle, but it takes a ton of upfront investment. And right now, we're banking on a couple of companies continuing to be interested rather than actually getting the money from Congress to see that there is a successor to the ISS. That's the word I was looking for earlier, successor. A successor to the ISS that is able to do the things that NASA requires. So I'm kind of getting wandering now, but the commercial low Earth orbit destinations contracts that we've been talking about all along, and that existence of that program is why we're

seeing all these announcements right now, because earlier this year when that program was announced, they said that the awards were going to be in the first quarter of fiscal year 2022. You might be confused looking at the calendar, but we are in fiscal year 2022 because that started on October 1st. Now, it looks like in the congressional halls, we're seeing numbers around $ million a year for leo commercialization for nasa for fiscal year 2022 the budget process is already screwed and there's tons of other stuff going on this year that is going to make that even more screwy but um the the contract awards shouldn't be coming out within weeks if not months like We're getting very close to these announcements. So I think by the end of the year, by early next year, we'll probably have a re-sync on this topic

because we'll see who wins those contracts. NASA was talking up two to four. It's probably going to be closer to two because of that restricted funding. But they're going to get contracts that are $40, $50 million a piece to continue studying, or maybe to continue design concepts to start some early prototypes to start some testing. I don't know what they can do with that money, given how much it's going to cost. But certainly, there's companies like Axiom who are already pushing forward with hardware itself. So I would be shocked not to see Axiom picked. And then I think it's really a toss up to see between these two, Starlab and Orbital Reef, and then whoever else bid. I'm unclear on who's going to win that, but

it's going to be a really interesting time because, you know, we're getting to a real tough point here between schedule and budget. And this tends to be how we do things in this country in that we tend to wait a little too long before we start investing a lot of money. We even did it with Commercial Crew. We had the program established, we had it underfunded for the first couple of years, and then we put the money in and it finally worked out many years late. That's going to happen with the ISS and with the follow-on space stations. It's going to happen that there's going to be a gap of space stations. And the only way that isn't going to happen is if there are, you know, in some cases, individuals who are invested enough

in seeing a space station exist. In other cases, can companies continue to get the investment that they need to build it out? Otherwise, you know, I'm betting on there's going to be a gap in the space station market, because that's just kind of how we do it. And I hate to end on a down note, but I've just been kind of bummed looking at all these concepts, looking at the calendar, looking at what's coming through these budgets. So we'll see what happens. Like I said, we'll catch back up on this in a couple of weeks once we hear the announcement, once we see the budget get a little more finalized. But very cool concepts, very cool design comps, very cool ideas behind Orbital Reef, behind Starlab. I'm excited to see where it goes.

Hopefully, I get to talk to some people that are working on these projects in the near future. So we'll see what happens there. But if you would like any of that to happen, once again, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support to keep the show going. If you've got any questions or thoughts, email me, anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or hit me up on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon.