Main Engine Cut Off - T+203: Starlab with Marshall Smith, SVP of Space Systems at Nanoracks

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Marshall Smith, Senior Vice President of Space Systems of Nanoracks, joins me to talk about Starlab, their commercial space station which recently won a contract award from NASA as part of their Commercial LEO 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 706 other supporters.TopicsNanoracks - Your Portal to SpaceNanoracks Appoints Marshall Smith as Senior Vice President of Space SystemsStarlab - The first ever free-flying commercial space station - NanoracksNanoracks Space Outpost ProgramT+200: Orbital Reef, Starlab, and the ISS Conundrum - Main Engine Cut OffNanoracks and Lockheed Martin partner on commercial space station project - SpaceNewsNASA awards funding to three commercial space station concepts - SpaceNewsThe 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 NASA

Hello and welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and I've got another special guest with us today. Today we have Marshall Smith who is the Senior Vice President of Space Systems at NanoRacks. We're going to be talking all about Starlab, which is their commercial space station that we've actually talked about on the show on episode 200. I did a little bit of coverage of that, Orbital Reef from Blue Origin.

But now we know that Starlab from Nanoracks is one of the winners of the initial commercial LEO Development Awards from NASA. So they are going to be getting some funding from NASA to develop Starlab further, eventually leading up to the second phase of commercial Leo development, which would be its launch and operation of these space stations. Bananarack says that Starlab will be ready by 2027. It will be launched in a single launch.

Their graphics show Falcon Heavy as the launch vehicle, but who knows? 2027 is a long way away. They're working with Voyager Space Holdings on this, with Lockheed Martin on this as well. So there's a lot at play here, and Marshall's going to help me sort through some thoughts on what's going on in Starlab, ask some questions from the technical side, from the operations side. It's going to be a pretty great time to talk to somebody so familiar with the system. And Marshall's really cool too. He spent a lot of time at NASA just before joining NanoRacks at the end of the summer. So great guest to talk about all things Star Labs. I'm very excited for that.

But before we get into that conversation, I want to say thank you to all of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainengincutoff.com support. There are 746 of you supporting the show every single month. I'm so thankful for all of your support. You help drive this forward. This is an entirely listener-funded show. So if you like what you're listening to, help support out over at managingcutoff.com slash support. This episode was produced by 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, TheEverDashnot, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, TheAstrogators at SCE, Chris, AegisTradeLol, Fred, HeyMonth, Dawn Aerospace,

and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. If you want to join that crew and get Miko headlines in your life, it's an entire podcast that I do for supporters. Head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support, and thank you so much. So now, without further ado, let's give Marshall a call. All right, Marshall Smith, welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. Hey, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Anthony. You've had an exciting past week or so, I'm sure.

You got a big announcement last week of the award for Starlab. I think that was last week. My timeline might be off, but how did that feel to see come through? Well, that was actually fantastic. We're very excited about the opportunity to get to go do this. In my mind, this is really a huge step toward real commercialization in space. In the past, NASA, which is where I used to work until a few months ago, in the past, you know, NASA has been doing commercialization in terms of we've been doing commercial cargo,

commercial crew, and other things like that. But, you know, we've been paying for the majority of it. I say we as in NASA because I used to be there and have a hard time printing that habit. But, you know, NASA has been paying for most of it. In this case, though, NASA is not the majority funder of these systems. This is really relying on commercial capability and, you know, payloads and crew astronaut time and those types of things to actually go fund it. So it's a huge step forward in the way we're doing space in the future for lower orbit. I'd actually love to touch on how you used to be at NASA part for a while,

because there's this proliferation of people that were in and around the ISS program for a while, now heading out into commercial space stations. I've had Mike Suffredini on, who's now at Axiom Space. He led the ISS program for a while. You're making this jump. I believe you started just a couple months ago in the end of summer or so. So I'd love to hear what it was for you personally that had this desire to make the jump to this side of the industry. Was it, you know, the commercial space stations in particular that you were fired up about or was there something else that caught your eye?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I've been working for NASA for I worked for NASA for quite a while, 37 years, actually, I worked for NASA. And, you know, I did aircraft, I did spacecraft, I did missions that go to Mars. But the last 10 or 15 years, I spent working on human spaceflight, and really working on, you know, large rockets, large vehicles, did Ares 1X, things like that. So I kind of got the bug for doing this. But, you know, one of the things I want to do is I want to go fast. I want to get things done. I want to get things accomplished. Not that NASA is not doing that, but I see a real potential in the commercial space side to move quickly to get things accomplished, because basically that's the commercial business can't tolerate long development times and they've got to move forward quickly. So that's one of the reasons, you know, when it came time,

obviously after 37 years, I started looking around and this potential opportunity came up with NanoRacks. And to actually step out and to work on doing commercial space stations is a huge opportunity. I think this will transform low Earth orbit economy, the commercial economy, which is one of NASA's goals too. So very much excited about being part of that. Development timelines is definitely a topic I want to talk about today

because when you look at Starlab that NanoRacks is developing, the competitors out there are these very expansive space stations. That's the visuals that they put out alongside their announcement. We see the future of Axiom Space's station that they have as a free flyer that has this huge power tower, several modules. Blue Origin and company is working on something that's pretty large scale.

The Starlab design here is, I think I called it like a hot rodding of a space station where it's really focused on this single launch architecture that it would launch all on, Falcon Heavy was in the video, but who knows where it will be in 2027, I suppose. That seems to me like the main design driver here behind Starlab, that you are focused on something that can be done in a single launch and is really focused on getting to that initial capacity. From your end, is that the main driver or one of the main drivers?

And if it's one of, what are the other ones that are into your decisions there? Yeah, so, you know, when you go look back at what we started to do with the International Space Station, you know, there was some goals that the government had in doing that. And that's bringing together a lot of different countries, working together to form a large space station. There was also the options of doing smaller space stations, to do a number of smaller space stations. But it kind of missed that goal of cohesiveness with the international community. You know, we're kind of at a different inflection point, I think. And, you know, we can continue building large space stations. There's a place for that, certainly. But there also is a very strong place for smaller stations. Not that they have to be small. The Starlab that we're launching initially is a third the size of the pressurized volume of the ISS. It has all of the payload capacity that the ISS has. So we can get the same amount of research done on one Starlab

as we can currently in the ISS. It's obviously newer and obviously has a lot of less opportunity. We don't have to do a lot of EVAs, for example, to maintain the vehicle so we can focus our time doing the work that needs to be done. Those are all great things. And we can actually expand the Starlab. we can double its size we can add modules to it so that's all still still very good and flexible and viable but you know whether you know you need a customer or have all your customers working together on one piece of system in one giant star space station may not make sense for everybody. You know, you might want to have a star lab that is focused on in-space manufacturing because it's messy and dirty and those types of things.

And you don't want that environment going over to contaminate some research program or project. Or you may want some that are just focused mostly on research or plant work or biology or entertainment. So, you know, there's a lot of opportunities to use these star labs in different ways. So I don't see it as one star lab. I see it as many star labs or maybe being able to connect these two together to do certain things that we need to do. So we're trying to be flexible, agile, respond to the commercial market because this, as I said, is majority paid for, vast majority paid for by commercial. So we want to look at what does the commercial market need?

And I can tell you one thing that I'll just add to that. One thing that I did like about when I came in to InterX, InterX has been doing commercial space for over a decade and they have put up over 1300 payloads. They have customers in over 30 different countries. They understand what has gone on and what the customers are looking for. And that's one of the reasons why I came here. What you're talking about there with multiple Star Labs in the future, I was curious if that's something that is actively being planned for and is in action, or is that more of a planned hold depending on how the market develops?

Obviously, there's a huge question mark about the market generally that many people are wondering about what the market is for commercial space in low Earth orbit. So would this be, you know, let's focus on this initial Starlab, get it up, get NASA and other customers in there, and then see where the market leads you? Or do you have others in mind already on what the second or third Starlab would be? Well, I'll answer the second part of that question first, which is about the market itself. So when I left NASA, I kind of had in my mind, oh, NASA is the anchor tenant. You know, we're always driving the train, et cetera, et cetera.

And I walked out, and when I started looking at the models for the demand models for the customer markets and seeing what was going on, I was frankly shocked. I was, you know, if you stop and think about it, you know, the ISS is the one destination that everybody has. And we all have to work through the systems that we have, which is which is fantastic. It's amazing, complex pieces of system. But there's a whole world out there that wants demand. They want to get involved. You know, countries that normally don't have the access to do that,

that don't normally have the access to put crew up because, you know, the ISS is pretty well booked up. And, you know, you're going to ask which country is going to take your crew off this year, this six months to let some other country in that's not a contributor to the ISS. So there's a giant demand out there, I believe, for commercial markets, for commercial astronauts. There's a giant demand out there for payloads. And when I looked at that and saw there really is a big market, there's actually a market for many stations, many commercial star labs, or even, you know, as the CDFF program or

CLD program has awarded three contracts, I think there's a market for, you know, a number of stations up there. But I believe Star Lab is not just one and done. It's going to be multiple Star Labs and they're going to be of different configurations for different markets. And I really do believe the market is there. I'd love to talk a little bit about the technical side of this initial architecture. We see the inflatable module. There seems to be some sort of adapter between that and the power and radiator area. Can you talk maybe about that propulsion bus first? What kind of propulsion is it? What's the power draw there? And how does that individual element kind of function?

Yeah, so we've got three main components on the Starlab. There's the inflatable habitat itself, and then next to it or connected to it is a metallic module that will have docking rings on it, docking system ports on it, as well as, you know, maintain a lot of the actual equipment that runs the Starlab day-to-day. The actual inflatable will have mostly research-type work and science payloads and where the crew will live and operate. It's capable of handling four crew continuously. And this is all capability that is on day one after we launch, by the way.

And then finally, we have a propulsion element, a power propulsion element. We have not finalized what that power propulsion element will be there. You know, obviously we proposed something, but we're actually looking at a number of options. So from a technical perspective, you know, we're going to be conducting some trades between now and early summer where we're going to finalize those systems and subsystems. We're looking for the power propulsion element to deliver at least 60 kilowatts of power, which is pretty large given the size of the system that we have, as well as provide the capability to keep it at the right orbit and right attitude. Now, the inflatable side of this all, where did that come from? Was that something that people have been particularly excited about? I know there's been various inflatable modules out there in the past, Transhab and even some of the Genesis modules that Bigelow put up, beams on the OSS. But what was the inspiration behind that piece? I've been a big inflatable proponent. When I worked at NASA, I was a deputy associate administrator for systems engineering integration.

Under me were all the architectural work, so all the Mars architecture and lunar architecture work. One of the biggest things that I've been looking at is how are we going to go to Mars? Mass is everything when you're going to Mars. It's a tremendous amount of mass required to push every gram that you're going to send to Mars or even to the moon or on the surface of the moon. So we want big volume with low mass. And inflatables do that. They give that to us. They give us huge volume with comparable mass as opposed to metallic structures. Also, they are a little bit better with respect to MMOD.

They act like, because they're multilayered, they act almost like a Kevlar vest if they're struck by an object, a small object like a bullet. Can you think of it that way? And as well as radiation, the data that we're getting off of the systems that have been in orbit for quite a while,

they actually perform a little bit better on radiation. So overall, it's a technology, I think, that we want to move to. So when I left NASA and I walked out, and this proposal was due within three weeks when I stepped into it, Lockheed Martin and NanoRex had been working on inflatables. Actually, I knew that Lockheed Martin was involved in inflatables before I left too because we'd been working in that area.

So I was pleasantly surprised. To me, it really helped set up some of the exploration goals that NASA wants to continue working in LEO. How do we go get ready for Mars? How do we test out the systems? I predict that it will be something like an inflatable or multiple inflatables that we use to go to Mars. So this has really kind of set up, you know, in my mind, the right kind of architecture to look at LEO as well. In terms of the outfitting of that, when it launches on day one, is there an outfitting phase that has to happen before it would be ready for its first crew? Or does this actually inflate and then is it fully set up because everything may be centralized or something like

that? We are planning to launch it with our payloads already installed and ready to go. So when we inflate it, we're going to send crew up and we can start operating immediately. We may add some components in the future because the size constraints, because we may add a Bishop airlock, which we currently have on the access.

I was wondering about that. Yeah, I noticed that was missing. Well, it's missing because we can't fit it in inside the volume of the launch vehicle itself. It won't fit on the side. So, you know, that's probably something we'll add, you know, probably in one of the next missions that we put up. But we are going to have science airlock capability as well as eventually crew airlock capability as well.

But the initial one won't have that, and it's not necessary. So when we launch, we'll have all the capabilities I told you before. We'll even have the payloads loaded. We'll inflate it, get it stabilized. Once it's stabilized, we'll send crew up, and we'll be off and running. From the space system side, this is probably something you're particularly keen on. I'm curious about the maintenance inside the lab. Is that something that, you know, obviously you would hope that there is less maintenance needed than something like the ISS today, but would the users that are going up to the station be on the hook for

carrying out those tasks? Are there occasional NanoRacks funded crews that would go up and do periodic maintenance? How do you foresee that? Yeah, I actually expect that there will be a little of both. The majority of the maintenance I can see happening with NanoRacks-trained crew as we're up there. I'm sure there will be somebody up there at all times that is capable of doing that. Excuse me. But overall, the maintenance will be done on the inside.

You know, the ISS was designed because of the size of the modules themselves requires a good bit of the components to be on the outside of the vehicle, which requires a lot of EVA time to do maintenance and activities. You know, that's not the way we wanted to do Gateway. That's around the moon. That's not the way we certainly would build a system to go to Mars. We don't want to, on our way to Mars, be doing a bunch of EVAs. That's actually a fairly dangerous activity to go do. So we want to design the system so that they can be all installed and maintained from the inside. That's the way this vehicle is going to be designed as well.

There'll be very, very little maintenance to be done outside. We will have external payloads, but they'll be maintained by the robotic arm that we have. The actual power and propulsion element, you know, there's really not a lot of maintenance you can go do to that anyway. They're based off commercial buses that, you know, are up there operating without maintenance for,, 20, 30 years at a time. So we don't expect to do any real maintenance on that system either. Most likely after 15 to 20 years, we may just replace the bus if the vehicle is not just going to be replaced in its entirety to begin with. So that's actually replaceable as well.

Is there a docking interface between the bus and that metallic node? That's a trade that we're going to be conducting in the first half of this when we talk about how the ppe is going to be uh actually uh materialized how we're going to do that that's awesome yeah it's like you know there's you mentioned gateway a couple minutes ago and there is a little bit of resemblance between this and and the initial uh halo habitation module that's heading out to Gateway and that it's, you know, backed off a commercial propulsion bus and then you've got a habitat in front of that.

So it definitely seems like the look of the 2020s, 2030s in terms of expeditions to space. Yeah. And you know, that's kind of a, wasn't me because like I said, I came in and they already were well formed on this. So it wasn't me that did that, But I did formulate Gateway and work that. So, you know, you need for any kind of station, though, you really need power, propulsion. You need habitation.

You need logistics. You need to get things back and forth. And you need an airlock if you're going to do any kind of contingency maintenance or anything like that. That's pretty much the makeup of a small station. And that's what Gateway was designed around. And that's what you see here as well. Now, in terms of the actual docking ports on this, I can't get a full look from these visuals.

You've got one on the forward side of the inflatable. And then you mentioned that the metallic node has maybe one or two in there. It actually has one in this picture, but we're doing a trade to look at two. I predict we'll probably have two on that. So there'll be two there. And then there's one at the rear of the power propulsion element.

So it has a tunnel going through it. So there'll be, most likely there'll be four ports on this vehicle. And that probably be the baseline when we get done. And would those be docking ports or there there be a berthing port or two? How do you foresee that playing out? Well, right now they're IDSS compatible, but we are doing the trade as well to look at a berthing port as that fourth port we put on.

Yeah, and then you would be able to handle multiple vehicles coming up at the same time, maybe like a crew vehicle and a cargo vehicle. Do you see the need for a cargo vehicle for expeditions of these scales, or do you think you can carry everything alongside your launch? It depends. It depends on the launch vehicle itself. For example, a Dragon can carry the trunk with it. It can carry payloads with it. But we're going to need to do resupply for the ECLA system,

or the life support system. We'll need probably some cargo flights as well. I expect we'll do both. Also, if you have a large cargo vehicle dock, you can use that space as well for other work too.

Yeah, or trash as we've seen. Or a customer might want to come up and do some work, and they have maybe a particularly messy thing that they want to go do. Well, they can do it in the module, and then we can get rid of the module when we're done. Yeah, I like that. All right, the stickiest question that I've got for you is we're in a politically fraught environment right now with commercial Leo in terms of the budget allocation that has happened the past couple years um we heard from the the press conference last week that a lot of this from the nasa side relies on getting full funding for the next several years from congress on your side of things how do you mention not all the funding here and a minority of the

funding is coming from nasa so how does that affect the plans for Starlab overall? Do you think it's something that if NASA needs to downscope or even just kind of slow roll the program a little bit because of funding that Starlab is similarly affected? Or do you think that Voyager, NanoRacks, Lockheed has what it takes to get this done on your own timeline? I think it's the second part there. Obviously, we want NASA to be part of our team and to be engaged as much as possible. I think, you know, the more they're able to contribute and engage, the better off we'll be with respect to what they need. But, you know, this is since we're providing most of the investment in here, you know, we are not going to really necessarily slow down because NASA slows down. We have to get a return on investment.

We have to keep going. So we plan to continue right on through and get the system launched. Now, in terms of customer management there, you did mention there's other countries out there that don't have access to a crude environment right now that would be interested. NASA foresees its own needs into the future. And you can have four people on this continuously crewed. But do you have any idea on,

you know, would you be buying three month trips to this? Would you be buying weeks at a time? Is it up to them entirely? Do you really have any limits there on how you'd like to see those expeditions? We don't. It's up to the users as they want to see it. You know, NASA's expressing interest to have two crew up for roughly six months out of the year, you know, and if they end up having multiple stations up, you know, it might be spread across those. Obviously, we're going to continue pursuing commercial astronaut markets as well and look at not only within the U.S., but other nations that are interested in doing that. So yeah, I think it's wide open. I'm curious, this might be my last

question that I've got on my list for you, in case I missed anything. You can think of something that you wanted to mention that I didn't ask about. But in NanoRack's case in particular, you have an interesting overlap with Axiom Space, who's one of the other, they didn't get a free flyer contract, but they are in are running through their station they're building out at ISS and eventually free flying. You two are going to have some overlap on ISS. NanoRacks does a lot of work on the station. You mentioned the airlock that you've got up there.

Axiom's looking to have their module up within the next couple of years. Are there things that you're learning from these other competitors? Are there interactions at all between the groups, things that you can share with each other, maybe even potential collaborations in the future that you could foresee? Well, I'm sure we're absolutely willing to talk. We want to work with other folks as we can. But NanoRox mostly is focused on ISS, on the internal payloads that are happening as well as external payloads. We're able to bring a lot of customers to bear in that market. And certainly we would be happy to work with anybody in those areas and we'll keep doing so. And we are learning quite a bit

from that activity. That's one of the reasons why I think the Starlab system will be designed around the things that we've learned over the past decade of how to do research in space and how to do it better as we move forward. And how can we redesign payload systems and systems that hold these payloads to work better and to allow us to reconfigure them quickly and those types of things. Those are the things that things that the animatronics can bring to the table with respect to starlight but of course you know the station is is planned to go through probably

2030 is what be my guess maybe maybe it'll go longer but someday the space this is probably in the extra question section someday the space station is is going to have to be decommissioned. It's been up there for quite a while. You know, it has had a few things happen to it recently. It's a fantastic system. It's a fantastically complicated system too. It's a very complex system, but, you know, NASA does a fantastic job keeping it running. And I predict that they could keep it running, but the question is how long do we do that? And what we don't want to do is have a gap. We don't want to be in the position where, like we were, you know, when we decommissioned the shuttle and we didn't have a way ourselves to get to the ISS.

We want to be in the same position here where we don't want to be in the same position here where we don't have capability in LEO. And so it's really critical that NASA sees this, that we move out and we get this done, you know, in a relatively quick timeframe so that NASA can make the changes that they want to make. And, you know, eventually really focus on deep space exploration, going to the moon and Mars and beyond. And just make sure you grab the Bishop Airlock before Axiom flies away. Just throw that on there before it flies away. You don't want that sinking as well. That thing's still got some life in it. That's exactly right.

Yeah, we're excited about the Bishop Airlock and all the work it's able to do. It really makes a huge difference on the ISS. Marshall, thank you so much for chatting with me. I've been very curious about Starlab. I didn't ask, I should have probably asked this, I didn't ask how this affects the future of NanoRack's outposts, if that's still a program that NanoRack's interested in the future, or if Starlab's the main focus for the next couple years. Maybe that's a going away question here for you. That's a great question, actually. I have a PDR on the Outpost system this afternoon. So we are absolutely proceeding with Outpost. Outpost is more about how do we operate and

use upper stages? Everybody puts upper stages up. How can we continue operating and using those even after their normal lifespan is over, if they're staying in orbit. We are highly involved with that as well as, you know, how do we get to the point where we can reuse upper stages in space to turn them into assets that we can use for habitation and other things like that. That still is a very important part of, you know, where we're going. It's not something that's going to happen in the next two to five years, but, you know, I think that is a very good goal for us to have. It's cool to hear that it's still kind of floating around there and being worked on and something that is in the future.

Maybe we'll see an outpost pull up on next to a Starlab someday. That's exactly what I would like to see. Well, same here. Thanks again for coming on. This has been awesome. And it's been a pleasure talking with you. You too. Thank you very much for having me.

Thanks again to Marshall for coming on the show. That was an amazing conversation. Very glad to have people like Marshall come on this podcast. And they do all because of you. You out there listening, you supporting, you make this kind of stuff possible. So if you want to hear more of this, head over to MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, Anthony at MainEngineCutoff.com or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. And until next time, thanks for listening. I will talk to you soon. Bye.