Main Engine Cut Off - T+215: CAPSTONE, with Brad Cheetham, CEO of Advanced Space

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Brad Cheetham, co-founder, CEO, and President of Advanced Space joins me to talk about their upcoming CAPSTONE mission. We talk about how the mission came to be, what it’s been like working with NASA and the other partners on the mission, and then dive into the nerdy details of the trajectory it’s flying to the moon, the orbits it will operate in, how its autonomous positioning system works, and how it might be used in the future.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—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, Andrew, and seven anonymous—and 783 other supporters.TopicsAdvanced Space | Delivering Innovation to Orbit.CAPSTONE | Advanced SpaceCAPSTONE lunar cubesat mission to launch this spring - SpaceNewsCAPSTONE cubesat ready for cislunar mission - 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/Ben Smegelsky

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo and we've got a great conversation today with Brad Cheatham, who is the co-founder, CEO, and president of Advanced Space. They are best known for their upcoming Capstone mission that they will be flying to lunar orbit. They're going to be flying to the near rectilinear halo orbit that you might know from the Gateway that NASA and its international partners are working on. It's a very, very elliptical orbit that'll be going over the poles of the moon, very close to the moon in one side of its orbit and very, very far away. It's about a seven day orbit overall. So it's extremely elliptical. But they'll be flying a small satellite to that orbit to test out some positioning systems that they've developed based on ranging the lunar reconnaissance orbiter that's in low orbit around the moon.

They're also going to be testing out that orbit for NASA because NASA has an interest in figuring out some of the operational constraints of that orbit before they get there with humans in the later part of the 2020s at the Gateway. So we talk a lot about how the mission came to be. It's interesting because it is their own mission. It's not something that NASA contracted out to them because NASA wanted to fly this mission. Advanced Space pitched this mission to NASA because it was relevant to all interests, right? Capstone is testing technology out that Advanced Space wants to fly, but they're doing it in a way that is very relevant to programs that NASA is working on. So it was a very interesting way that this small satellite mission came to be. They're going to be flying on Rocket Lab's Electron, so a small launch vehicle, sending a pretty important mission to lunar orbit. Very, very cool mission overall.

So it was a fantastic conversation with Brad. And without further ado, let's get into it. All right, we are here with Brad Cheatham, your CEO, I suppose, correct, is the right title. Yeah, CEO is the right title, absolutely. Yep, founder, co-founder. All the good titles of Advanced Space based out in Colorado. And most famous right now in these circles for leading the Capstone mission, which is coming up, the first mission going to the near rectilinear halo orbit, which is everyone's favorite, everyone's favorite orbit name.

So I'm very excited to talk about it. It gets said a lot. Yeah, not always correctly, but you know, that's, that's the right terminology. Typically, do you go NRHO a lot? Do you have a cooler name? We do. Yeah. I mean, NRHO is the name, you know, near rectilinear halo orbit,

but, but a lot of people get that confused as a little bit of a tongue twister. So it's, it's that, you know, former NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, I think enjoyed saying it. And so he just said it over and over and over again. He kind of, you know, gave it its brand. He nerds out on that. Exactly. Current NASA is probably like the mega moon orbit would probably be a thing that they're going to start branding it as. So I want to talk a little bit about the background on not only the company, but the mission itself, because I feel like there's some interesting stuff to dive into that I haven't seen a ton of content on. So maybe we can spend a couple minutes. Let's do the let's do the rundown on advanced space, what what you're working on,

you know, not day to day, but like longer term, what was the vision from the start? Where are you at today with it? Absolutely. Yeah, great question. Also, thanks for having me today. So Advanced Space has an interesting story. You know, it's one of those things where we've been in business, we started the company over 11 years ago. And so as you mentioned, people are starting to hear about us now, kind of out of the blue, but we've been working on this for now over a decade. So something we're super, super proud of. And to kind of go back, you know, 11 years ago, me and my co-founders, when we started the company, you know, we had, we really focused kind of on our purpose. And our purpose at the time and why we were doing what we were doing at the time most of us were in, you know, graduate school, we were studying, was we really wanted to enable the sustainable exploration, development, and settlement of space. to enable the sustainable exploration, development, and settlement of space.

And that is now obviously not a unique ideal, but at the time, honestly, there wasn't a lot of companies that were willing to talk about long-term visions and having that goal. And so for us, we started a company because quite frankly, there wasn't a place we could find that we could go do what we really wanted to do. So we felt like we had to create that environment. could find that we could go do what we really wanted to do. So we felt like we had to kind of create that environment. And for us, that vision, like each word of that vision is super important or that purpose for us. And I'll just kind of give you the context a little bit so you understand it. So for us, it's enable, which is for us really important. It's like, we're not doing it alone, right? We're not going to like go fund everything and go do the settlement of space, right? For us, it's we want to be a good partner working with, you know, NASA and other partners to accomplish our vision. And then in terms of

sustainable for us, really, this gets to, you know, part of our purpose is to support the settlement of space, right? That's not something that happens in like one to two years, right? So sustainable for us really means we have to have capabilities and really a company with like a long-term perspective. And so for us, it's really to have capabilities and really a company with like a long term perspective. And so for us, it's really focused on how do we create the capabilities of the future, not just what we need today. And so, you know, then for a sort of exploration, development, settlement of space, you know, that's sort of the phases we think of scientifically explore, commercially develop, and then ultimately people living and working there. So that's kind of why we started the company. That's what motivated us. I'm sure you talked to a lot of entrepreneurs. Starting companies is glamorous, but it's not always fun. And so for us, that's been kind of the vision and

the purpose behind why we did what we did. And then what we are doing now as a company, we're almost 50 people on our team here and really focused on delivering kind of three types of capabilities or services or solutions. The first of those we call flight dynamics. So basically, we help people fly their satellites. That could be constellations in low Earth orbit. That includes operating at the moon. We actually support NASA's Gateway program directly, not just through our capstone mission, but through actually an independent effort, as well as we have missions where we supported interplanetary exploration and other destinations. So that's the first one, sort of flight dynamics.

Second area we talk about internally is technology development, which is very obviously broad, you know, almost meaningless term. But for us, what it means is really building the technologies that we'll need to support flight dynamics in the future. And so that looks like for us, automation of key operations for a satellite, automation both on the satellite, but also on the ground. And some of that technology that we're really excited about recently is that we have several projects looking at how we deploy machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, actually deploying them on satellites to enable automation in a very efficient way. And so that's really where we think of, you know, flight dynamics and what we're doing is how do you do it today? And then for us, technology development is how are we going to need to do it in the future? Because we see a future and it's starting to happen quicker than we thought, right? Where there's many more missions, many more satellites operating. And so the traditional, you know, many people per satellite they're operating kind of

ratio has to flip, right? And it has to be, you know, few people operating many satellites, or there's just not enough people to operate all the missions. Yeah, SpaceX would need to like quadruple their size if they wanted to have one person per satellite, let alone how many you actually need. No, the paradigm shift there has been quite dramatic, honestly. So we kind of are seeing that happening and building those capabilities. And then the third key area, which is actually kind of a good segue, is that we kind of call it rapid turnkey missions. And that, for us, is best exemplified in the Capstone mission, where we're the prime contractor.

We own the satellite. We're in charge of operating the satellite for our customer, in this case, NASA. And so that's the best sort of example of how it all works. But for us, that's really a capability that we've used to take, you know, people who come to us and say, hey, I've got this idea for a mission. And we go through and we figure out, you know, what's the sensor? What's the payload? What's the spacecraft? What's the launch? And really quickly iterate, not just to identify, is it feasible? But like, what would it take? Or are there specific things that would get in the way and that that in some ways has spun out to a lot of different support projects

we have helping customers fly smaller plan and then ultimately fly spacecraft missions that are very exciting um that are not just ones that we're in charge of you got onto it for a second there capstone that yeah it's it's weird like i don't know if i know the full history of how it came about but it it reads like this was a program that you were thinking about internally starting to develop internally and uh by way of nasa's trajectory and what they're working on there was a good opportunity to to pitch that to nasa because it wasn't something that nasa put out this big rfp with multiple bidders and there was you know i was talking about on the show like there wasn't any of that. It was through the

small business, I'm going to forget the whole acronym. The SBIR program, the Small Business Innovative Research Grant program. Yeah. So let me do my best to give you kind of that story. It's not a short story, but I'm going to give you the context. And first, let me start, well, let me spell out Capstone. That might help, right? So Capstone is the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment. I said that like 100 times a day. So for us, I kind of break that in sort of two. So the first four letters of Capstone is the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System. And that's sort of the core piece that started all this. And that is a navigation capability that

we've actually been developing for, I think, almost seven years now. So it's not an it's not actually a new idea. It's fundamentally probably one of the most mature lunar navigation, you know, technologies that's out there. And that to tie it back to what you just mentioned, that was part of the like, let's push the, you know know future barriers that we've got absolutely we can feed it into our flight dynamics program and this just happens to be a great example of all three of these columns of your company come perfect yeah no i couldn't set it set it better yeah so for for us where that came from is is you know today we don't need uh autonomous scalable evolvable navigation system at the moon there's just not not that many satellites at the moon

go ahead and count them but you can you could feasibly drive them all with humans because there are so few flying around the moon right now. And they all are, exactly. Yeah. So it's not necessarily that you need it today. But even again, seven years ago, and I would tell you also, seven years ago, the moon was not the focus, right? The Artemis program was not the nation's priority. There was other priorities. And so we looked even in that era and said, hey, at some point in the future, we envision that there will be dozens of satellites operating at the moon, you know, landers, bases, orbiting stations, all this other stuff, right? And in that world, in that future paradigm, right, you start to run out of not only people

on the ground, but also the ground infrastructure to do all of the day-to-day sort of housekeeping tracking of satellites. And so if you have to do all that, ground station to single satellite and back again, multiple times a day, you could fill up the Deep Space Network schedule just with future missions at the moon. And so for us, that was really the impetus. And the goal was, how do we kind of unleash the future from those constraints? And that was really the impetus behind what was CAPS. And then the transition of that. And so just to be clear, right, CAPS, we will be flying that software, we'll be demonstrating that technology on Capstone, that's super important for us. And that was sort of the nucleus around which the Capstone mission

came together. And what I talk about is sort of the technology operations and navigation experiment, the last four letters in the acronym. That's really kind of how we got the hook to make it happen. And so for us, that is focused on demonstrating the ability to operate in these, you know, very unique, but also highly beneficial orbits at the moon. And so the orbit specifically we're flying in is a near rectilinear halo orbit. The reason it's special is because it's an orbit that only exists in the earth and the moon sort of both pulling on it. So we call it three body orbit. More traditionally, you'd hear about those

as like a Lagrange point orbit or a halo orbit or something like that. And so that capability, and then tie this into sort of the formation of the company too in a second, that capability, and then tie this into sort of the formation of the company too in a second, that capability, only NASA and the Chinese Space Agency have ever demonstrated. And the NASA demonstration of it was on something called the Artemis mission, which was actually, I was something super grateful that I was in a small part of before I started the company. And so seeing what was the potential of these orbits when I was working at NASA and understanding that, you know, my PhD research was how do you navigate Earth, Moon, three body orbits, seeing that potential is really kind of what spurred actually the creation of the company. And then ultimately as NASA was saying, Hey, we,

we plan to build a reusable service module in the gateway at the moon. And we believe the right orbit for that is in this near rectilinear halo orbit. So as those conversations were happening, we were talking with NASA and said, hey, we think it would be really beneficial to do a, you know, a rapid flight demonstration, you know, get some muscle memory of how to operate in this orbit, which in the NRHO, no one's ever operated in. In broader Earth-Moon three-body orbits, again, only a couple missions have ever operated in. So really having that capability, certainly we need it for Capstone. But one of the exciting things is that to get ready to launch, we've had to demonstrate that capability. And now that's available to support other missions that are going to go fly in these

orbits. And so that's super exciting to us. But how that made, how did we get started to your original point was talking with NASA. We said, Hey, look, this is a thing we can demonstrate with a small spacecraft mission. We can do it pretty rapidly, we think. And we basically brought this to NASA and said, Hey, here again, to your point, it's not something they necessarily were asking for, but they said, Hey, we have this problem. And we said, Hey, we think we can, we can, you know, solve it. We can give you some information. And so one of the things we were able to do is because we have been working on this technology for several years, we were able to fly this mission as what they call a phase three

SBIR contract. And that's why it was able to be so quickly awarded and executed and moved forward. So that's sort of like a little insider, probably maybe some people's eyes just glazed over. We talked about contracting, you know, stuff, but that was sort of how we were able to do it. And it was really, really exciting and really collaborative because from day one, this was really a collaboration with NASA, right? We were able to iterate to figure out how to make it most successful, most valuable, and have had to, you know, through the challenges of the last now two and a half years, we've had to really, you know, work as a team together to make this happen. It's interesting, too, because I take it that I want to dive deeper into caps a little bit in the show, too. But I take it that you wanted to get a flight demonstration of that somewhere in

the universe. And so I'm not sure that there is another company that would have pitched this kind of thing to NASA. Um, just because you have such a clearly vested interest in, in flying this mission and NASA has an interest in flying this mission too. So I feel like you, you threaded the needle perfectly on, on serving both sides of that,

uh, that mission, but were there other things that you had in mind, like, you know, before the gateway was even talked about or when it had its horrible names of the past lunar orbiting platform dash gateway yeah yeah yeah were there other missions that you had in mind as like where caps would fly first because you haven't deployed it until this mission

correct that's right yeah i know so we we had um we had traded a whole bunch of ideas like potentially flying it like even on like orion or on other platforms, we didn't really have a solid answer, right? And that's why when this opportunity came up, we kind of jumped at it. And in part of the alignment that you mentioned with NASA that I think is actually hard to kind of pull out now because it's almost so seamless, but was really all of the capabilities that we needed

are really aligned for this. And what I mean by that is that, like, all the way back to, like, how do you get to this orbit, right? What transfer do you use, right? And so, the traditional, like, direct approach to go to the moon, right, takes just a few days. And, you know, everyone's familiar of the Apollo program, how they did that. But for us, we actually get to take, you know, three to four months. And that, you know, really efficient transfer to the moon kind of enabled the whole mission so like if we just went in and said hey we want to go demo demonstrate caps in a near-rectilinear halo orbit for you and like if that's where our you know expertise stopped we actually probably could not have even

formulated the mission because this effect you would have added a zero and then it probably wouldn't have gotten huge and then it would have taken 10 times as long and cost as much absolutely and so knowing congressional budget wrangling there was a lot more than i think you came in you know under 14 million on that the contract exactly yeah so so for us the key is really from you know it's a convergence of technology so one is how do you get there efficiently and that was sort of these efficient sort of ballistic transfers we call them in fact our CTO, Jeff Parker, actually wrote a book about ballistic lunar transfers. You can find it. And so that was sort of like, you know, miracle one. And then miracle two was that my PhD research, as I mentioned earlier, was navigating Earth-moon three-body orbits. So when we were talking to

NASA, forget capstone, but just how do you operate on these orbits, we were talking to nasa forget capstone but just how do you operate and navigate on these orbits we were able to talk really detailed about what's that going to require right and so then we kind of add that up okay well now we can know we can do a small spacecraft we know what it's going to take to actually operate there and then we have a technology we want to demonstrate and it really all kind of aligned and a sufficiently motivating uh national program it's yeah this is a great example i always get annoyed when anyone says it's just a thing, like it's just this or that. And it's like, yes, this mission is just a small satellite

going to the moon that required somebody who wrote a book on how to get to the moon, somebody who did a PhD on how to fly around the moon and a nationally coordinated program that made sense enough for those three things to come together and produce. Oh, and also a small satellite industry that exists that you could source you know other suppliers from and it's just like there's so much more to what the actual mission is that i find very interesting uh yeah it's such a mission of

the early 2020s i feel like yeah well and i think it also it's really interesting and i'm gonna i'm gonna poorly quote history here i apologize to you and your listeners but but it's actually really funny because we think now on timelines and aerospace that are like, you know, like our original objective, I'll say like, it was 18 months from contract award to being ready to fly. Now it's going to be about two and a half years. I'm super proud of that. I'm like, given the pandemic and all the problems that we've run into through the, like along the way, that's great. But I think we could have done it in 18 months. Like I think if we did it again, it'd be quick. And people tell me, they're like, that's just crazy. Right. But as it relates, like people forget, like the Pentagon was built in 18 months, like the whole

building from like start to finish. Including all the floors underneath that you don't know about. Everything. Yeah. And I mean, like there's all these examples of like, you know, kind of like where there's a will, there's a way. And in some cases you need to kind of like push it, I think. And that's something that we found is that we've had to push it. We've learned a lot by just going out and doing it. You know, like a lot of times, like some of the, you know, conversations we have with people is like, well, couldn't you just simulate this? Like, yeah, of course you could simulate it, but you could simulate it for 10 years and not learn some of the lessons that we learned by, by going out and getting ready to fly it. And so it's, it's, it's sort of this old mindset, uh, of sort of like, you know, test

flights, right? You got to go like do things, you know, do not, they're not going to be huge things, but you got to do things frequently and learn from them as opposed to, you know, putting all your eggs in one basket and kind of waiting for, for, you know, a 10 year program and, and hope it works. Right. And even to that extent, if you roll the clock back five or six years, I feel like the economics of this look really different. Like, you probably would have had to spend a lot of time trying to find some science mission that would want to go there that could foot some of the bill, find, you know, a secondary payload slot.

Like, there's a lot of pressure that wouldn't have made a $14 million mission with a small satellite possible. Absolutely. pressure that wouldn't have made a $14 million mission with a small satellite possible. So- Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, yeah, the partners that we have at Tyvek and Rocket Lab for launch, Tyvek for the satellite, you know, without that industry existing, to your point, absolutely, this is impossible, right? In the cost or in the schedule that we're talking about. And so I think that is a great thing to point out. And I think that's something that we're really excited about because we see that, you know, we see Capstone in this respect as really just the beginning. Like we see, we think that the flood

gates are going to open and we're going to see, you know, and maybe it's not all CubeSats, but let's just say broadly small spacecraft, right? Exploring a lot of different places that we've never even thought to do before, right? Now, to be fair, hardware can scale down, rockets can scale down. One of the things that we are working on here is that the amount of people time it takes to do some of this stuff, that doesn't scale. In fact, that sometimes gets harder with small spacecraft. So that's something that we are, from a technology perspective, working on. Because when you have a major mission, it gets to tell the rocket where it's going to go, right?

If you're a secondary payload, you're along for the ride, right? And so that means you have a lot of variability in where you might be launched, right? So that makes our job harder, right? The sensors and all the tracking and all the stuff on small spacecraft are not exactly the, you know, platinum version of all those sensors and capabilities, right? So that makes it a little harder, right? But then, so you have a harder problem, but then also you have a way smaller budget, right? And so the expectations are everything needs to be less. And one of the things that we've been really excited about is that we're unlocking ways to do that stuff more efficiently where, you know, it doesn't, for us, it doesn't take a standing group of 10 people

from start to finish to do mission design for a program, right? That's been like a key thing for us. And so I think to your point, right, as we have more launch vehicles available, more ways to get to space, more small spacecraft available and payloads to put on them, like we're looking at a huge boom. And that's where we kind of see downstream, where does that bottleneck happen? And we see it in sort of mission planning and operations. How do you get that to scale in a similar way way it's something that we spend a lot of time thinking about now that before we get into caps itself the trajectory you mentioned this ballistic lunar transfer um was that necessary for this kind of mission given the constraints of like the

performance on you know electron being smaller smaller rocket smaller you know you still like you're saying you got to fit a lot of functionality in that mass so it gets tight on the budget there uh is that is that the pressure to use something like that or is there another advantage to getting to the moon in this way great question and uh there's a few different advantages and so sort of started from day one we knew in order to get to this type of orbit in a cubesat we had to use this type of transfer. It's like a two or three X savings over if you try to do a direct transfer to this orbit. So like it went from being a, you know, a 12U CubeSat to a hundred kilogram spacecraft, like if you didn't do it that way. And is that primarily the insertion, you know, Delta V insertion that you need when you get to

the moon? Yeah, great question. It's entirely around what the spacecraft needs to have, right? So there's a little more of a requirement on the launch vehicle actually to get out there. But the key in our mind is optimizing around the mission itself, right? And the mission itself is, you know, the spacecraft operating at the moon. And so that is where the fuel savings are. And then the other piece, and so to back up even further, right, that was from day one, what we needed, we know we needed to do. We went then when NASA went out to purchase the launch, which is the way this program works, NASA bought the launch from Rocket Lab. The interesting thing is that we didn't even realize that the other benefit of this is that we had flexibility in where we were going to launch from. And so originally, our plan and the plan of the program was to launch from Wallops, Virginia, which was going to be super cool.

Would have been nice for me. Very close to Washington, D.C. So there were some stakeholders there who were excited for a variety of reasons that changed to New Zealand, Mahia, New Zealand, sort of Rocket Lab's current primary launch site. And one of the interesting things is that if you look at a traditional transfer to the moon, that change would have potentially caused every part of the spacecraft to have to be redesigned. But that the orbit transfer itself, this ballistic transfer is actually what made the whole thing robust to changing, you know, entirely different parts of the world we were going to launch from. And that's sort of the benefit is that the requirement on the spacecraft for this type of transfer is totally independent of where the launch site is, which in our case, certainly really of approaches mean that you can envision future systems that can be designed once, and they could be launched from the US, from Europe's launch site, from New Zealand, from any of these places, from Japan, et cetera, et cetera, without having to necessarily redesign the spacecraft. And so we think that is a cool benefit of this technology approach, because it really allows

for some standardization and how we think about operations. That's very cool. And I kind of feels akin to when my co host on the other podcast, Jake's gonna kill me if I don't get the Mars mission, right? I think it was, was it insight that launched from Vandenberg? Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, everyone going through that was like, wait a minute, I thought you need to launch to the east to maximize, you know, the rotation to get off the Earth. And it's like, no, when you're going interplanetary,

it actually does not matter, basically, which way you're coming out of Earth orbit, as long as you're heading on the same path on, you know, relative to interplanetary space. And is it because, you know, this is going significantly farther out than most transfer orbits would go. So is it mapped to, like, being more akin to an interplanetary launch than a typical lunar launch? Is that why that flexibility exists there? Yeah, that's a great question. So, yeah,

I think really what it comes down to, so we're going about over a million kilometers, about a million and a half kilometers from the Earth, so pretty far out. And then we come back to the moon and kind of the way I think about it is that when we're out there at that distance, the sun's gravity is actually changing our orbit parameters to, you know, raise our perigee to the distance of the moon and to change our inclination so that we come back and match the moon. So sort of the analogy I've used with some folks is like, you know, it's sort of like traditionally we use speedboats to get everywhere. You know, we just like fire the engines and go. And this is almost more like sailing, you know, we kind of go out, it takes a little bit longer, but we use these sort of gravitational benefits

of the sun to change the orbit instead of using fuel. And we can actually use that technology to come back to earth orbits as well, which is a technology we've evaluated. And really for us, we think it could have the potential to be a really interesting paradigm, where if you started using these type of transfers more, like one of the nice things is you can envision, you know, a mission to take this type of transfer could send a spacecraft to different spots of the moon, you know, it could be to one to low lunar orbit, one to L1, L2, like you could think of sort of like, you know, secondary payloads could then end up in many different places from the single launch so i guess as more missions are going to be flying out there we see this as a potential opportunity and and to your point too sort of thinking of it almost as

like it's on the gravity well edge kind of of the earth right is that you could also then from there think about going to other places uh in the solar system right or the primary could go there again and then as a secondary and come back so that's it as very neat and kind of nerding out a little bit here on orbits. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like a really interesting way. You know, you see, even today, you see a couple of the landers that either have flown or are flying soon as secondary payloads on a Falcon launch to GTO or something. And that's like a cool way to make use of that. But, you know, if you've got, I mean, in the ideal future, when the commercial lunar payload services program has all these landers ready to go, you know, send it on a whole batch and they're all going to different spots on the moon, but they get this, you know,

shared ride to where they need to go. It's like a very cool. I hope we have that many landers that we can do that someday. Right. We're very excited about it. And even like to take it into the weeds further is that, you know, a lot of those companies want to go directly to the moon, which is fine, but we can, as a secondary payload on one of those future missions, do a lunar flyby and then do a ballistic transfer and come back to these orbits very efficiently. So you can almost get best of both worlds, right? As opposed to having to have a customized launch target to get onto this type of transfer, you certainly can do it as a secondary as well, which opens up a whole range of opportunities. One of the things people don't

think about when you're talking about landing on the moon is that one of the constraints from launch is what time of day you want to launch on the moon, right? And you sort of back that up in the system and the concept of operations. And so like timing, a lot of these things become around timing. And if you have orbits that can be flexible to that, it opens up a lot of trade space. Very cool. Well, we'll have to have you back on to talk about navigating landers once they start flying in a couple years that'd be very cool um all right let's dive into the positioning system so make sure we get to that before we get you out of here um this is a very cool situation you've got here so this is going to be primarily using not primarily using only using the lro spacecraft as its basis. So can you talk a little

bit about how the positioning system works? What the intended goals of it are? Is it only for the spacecraft to be able to know where it is so that the mission team can refine it further? Or, you know, why is the word autonomous in the name of this? That's a great question. Yeah. So let me start at the beginning of that. So our primary data type, I wouldn't say the only, because I'll get to that in a second. So the primary data type for the demonstration is, as you said, a cross link with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Now that in and of itself is actually a pretty impressive and exciting technology demonstration because as you can imagine, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was never designed for this experiment, right? It's been there for a long time. So what

we had to do is basically find a way where the capstone spacecraft is the only thing that we could customize and the LRO spacecraft has to be exactly as it was built and as it's been flying. And so doing that cross link for us, for CAPS is primarily a matter of how do we get a estimate

or get a range and a range rate data product that feeds into our estimation filters, right? But the same capability of talking to LRO to get that sort of lays the foundation now for a future that many people are thinking about, which is to say, well, can spacecraft at the moon, like we do at Mars, relay data through each other, right? And so that's not part of capstone per se, but it's sort of a fundamental thing you have to be able to do in order to have a future where you're relaying data. So we're sort of demonstrating that as a future technology as well. But then as it relates to positioning,

figuring out where the spacecraft is, the primary data type that we'll be demonstrating, we'll take this information from LRO. And then the algorithms in the system will be able to, just from that information, this is super important, right? So no ground-based information required, no ground tracking, but just from that cross link, the software is able to determine where both spacecraft are. Now this is, to get into the weeds again, sorry if I'm boring some of your audience, but really this is enabled because the Earth-Moon gravity field is not symmetrical. So like if you had in Earth orbit a measurement between two spacecraft, it could be in any two configurations when you try to estimate where they are because of the lines of symmetry in the gravity field.

But because the Earth and the Moon system are both pulling on the spacecraft in this case, there is not that symmetry and that allows you to get not just a relative estimate, but also like absolutely where those spacecraft are in space. Now I said primary data type intentionally, because CAPS as a system is architected to be much broader than only that data type. And one of the things that we're super excited about that we added to the CAPSTONE mission during development, and this sort of gets a little bit to the innovative approach is that during development, some of our really smart engineers were like, well, why don't we add another data type?

Because it wasn't a big impact on the, on the system design. And so we actually added a chip scale atomic clock. So this is not like an atomic clock that flies on GPS. That's like really exquisite. This is like a lower, lower, you know, tier capability, lower stability. And that system will actually enable us to do something that we're also very excited about, which is another data type for CAPS is a one way uplink ranging. So if you're familiar with the deep space atomic clock, which is a demonstration NASA did a couple years ago, they were taking a much sort of higher

performing atomic clock and sending a signal down to the ground. So in one one direction, they were talking to the ground. The ground was able to figure out where the spacecraft was. We're kind of flipping that around, which may seem unusual, but we're actually having the ground transmit. The spacecraft will calculate where it is based on that signal. And this gets to your question, I think a little bit too about what's this enable. And so for us, there's a paradigm shift that we're trying to create, which is to say that if a satellite knows where it is, right, traditionally a moon mission, the ground operators know where a satellite is. The satellite has no idea where it is and just does what it's told, right? So what we're envisioning is a future where the spacecraft actually knows where it is well enough that it can then start to do things to support automated operations, right? So if you know, if the spacecraft knows where it is, then you can start thinking about technologies

that would allow the spacecraft to start designing its own maneuvers to stay in certain orbits, right? Never do we think the spacecraft are going to be operating without people paying attention to them in the near future, at least. But we can envision a world where, you know, the human operators on the ground are monitoring the satellite, but assuming the satellite's not doing anything that violates any constraints or is thrown in the airs, a lot of that day-to-day, I kind of call it housekeeping, you know, standard sort of, where am I doing maneuvers to stay where I am, that kind of stuff, station keeping

is what we would call it, you know, that can be done on board as opposed to on the ground. And so that is kind of where those capabilities we see evolving. And then just to be clear, you know, we see caps as an architecture again, that would infuse other data types working on several other data types to make it more robust. But ultimately the sort of primary, the first one we'll be demonstrating is this cross link that in and of itself has this whole new capabilities that will enable.

And then we're looking from there on, on other things. And let me just say before I see you have more questions for me. Another thing that we think is super important about this is that we really want to make it accessible to almost like the smallest possible spacecraft. And so there's other thoughts about how you would do positioning at the moon, they require big antennas or big hardware. And one of the things we realized very early on is that the space missions that are going to be most in need of what CAPS will provide are going to be the smaller or the commercial missions, right? Let's just be blunt, right? Humans on Orion or humans on Gateway will have no problem getting tracking time on Deep Space Network. Like they will have plenty of navigation, like there will be no shortage of information, right? But it's those CubeSats or those commercial satellites or other missions, those are the ones that are going to need, potentially need help with, you know, navigation or other services.

And so for us, that's really where we wanted to start. And so, you know, every mission is going to have a radio to talk to the ground. Can we use that radio talking to other spacecraft to figure out where it is? That was sort of the impetus for that first data type. And then from there, we're sort of expanding it. So we see it as something we hope that will actually enable future missions that maybe otherwise couldn't afford or wouldn't have access to the data they need to fly. Yeah, I mean, the humans around the moon won't have an issue with that.

But, you know, you put your head a couple of decades in the future, humans at Mars, they go behind the sun because they're on the other side of, you know, solar system. They're going to need it then. Like there is a time when that kind of thing would be necessary. So there's like several different ways I can go. I always feel like I see these, you know, can we use GPS at the moon conversations kick off of like, how can we repurpose all this GPS there? And it's, you know, weird because they're quite a bit closer to earth than they are to the moon so you know is there enough that you're able to use to actually get positioning data how can that be integrated um do you see caps more as a

way to like you like i mean if you haven't mentioned there you use whatever we can to inject into the system to be self-sufficient with enough input given to like refine that as as refined as you might need for any given mission is that the intended future that like as new stuff comes online or if there's a new orbiter that's going to the moon soon you can also enable that and have a bigger peer-to-peer system is that the general direction here yep absolutely so you know we've been doing this for only 10 years but we're're also students of history. So context, right? One of the things that I hope was not a controversial statement is that the timing of planned missions to the moon and other places is, I'll say, unpredictable at best.

And so one of the challenges we've seen is... Fan fiction by default is what I would say. Yes. And so as we've looked at that, you know, realistically over the last several years is, you know, if you knew for sure when you were going to have this huge demand at the moon, then it might make sense to go spend a lot of money and build, you know, GPS 2.0 at the moon, constellation, a whole bunch of satellites and have that service. 2.0 at the moon, constellation, a whole bunch of satellites and have that service. But as we looked at it as a company, we said, well, like, look, if we were going to go do that, you know, these systems might only have two to four year lifetimes, depending on how you design them. So like, if you get there and people are late, like that could be all for absolutely nothing. Right. And so we've kind of had to think, and our approach has been to make something that is sort of an highly evolvable system. And you totally hit the key of it, right? Which is that in its first instantiation, we see it as a peer-to-peer system.

So as more spacecraft fly, the network gets better and better, right? And at some points in that evolution or growth of spacecraft operating, potentially there are dedicated spacecraft that are like super caps nodes. And their job is to be the arbiter of all these different spacecraft. But in those early days, we see the real challenge. The challenge is not when there are dozens of missions. It's how do you get from one to two to dozens, right? It's sort of that transition point where it's not probably viable to go build out a ton of infrastructure for one or two missions. But if you don't have that infrastructure,

you're never going to get to 12 to 24 missions, right? And at a time. And so that's kind of how we see this as very much like an evolvable system. And that's also why we're trying to be as flexible as we can in terms of how that, you know, cross link in the case of LRO, we had to design very, you know, flexible, because LRO couldn't change. But also as some of these other data types, right, if there's other systems, the spacecraft is going to have that can give us data, then we want to make sure we can incorporate that. Because that makes, again, the whole system better and sort of a peer to peer way, right? The better we know one, the better we can know others. You mentioned LRO with the cross-link section.

How much cooperation do you need from the... Well, you'll use LRO, but any kind of assistant satellite here. How much cooperation do you need from them to enable this? Is this something that is passive for the LRO team? Are they actively changing some of their operations to support the positioning? And if that's the case, is it every couple of days? Is it constantly? What's the level of involvement there? Yeah, that's a great question. So as we envision it now, this is all sort of an active process. And most of the reason for that is that unlike, you know, our cell phones, which

don't have to point at the tower to talk, all of these antennas on the spacecraft have to be conscious and intentional about where they're pointing to be able to talk to each other, right? We don't get this sort of omnidirectional performance. And so for us with the LRO specifically, since you asked, that's something I think is a great part of the story, because we've had amazing support from the NASA team, you know, across the agency, but in particular the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter team, right? So we're coming to them, and we've come to them and been working with them, you know, they have been flying that mission for a long time, they've got it figured out, right? And so we're now coming in and saying, hey, we want to do something different, right? And so they've been

great working with us, because what they actually have is a high gain antenna that's on a gimbal, right, that can move around. And so what we actually have to do is generate for them commands and basically say, Hey, please point your antenna at us. And then we generate the data and we just say, Hey, put your, uh, your radio in a certain mode so that it will return the signal to us. We are effectively simulating what a ground station would look like to the spacecraft. And so again, the spacecraft, LRO wasn't going to be able to change software or radio configurations or anything, right? So we basically had to take what they had and change our approach to get it to work. And then I think thus far has been an incredible collaboration, you know, between what we're doing here as an industry partner and NASA Goddard, who is flying LRO, and then obviously our other NASA

customers at the Gateway Program Office at JSC and our program office fordard, who is flying LRO. And then obviously, our other NASA customers at the Gateway Program Office at JSC, and our program office for Capstone, which is actually NASA Ames. So we have a lot of different parts of NASA that are working together. It's actually, again, kind of a wonky story, but it's, you know, pretty exciting to see that come together. Now, how much of this depends on having a really good idea of where LRO is at any given time? Like, is it, you mentioned that it's not necessarily derived on even LRO knowing exactly where it is. And it's, I don't know, based on some higher level math that I will never understand. So maybe don't even try explaining that part to me. But it does not rely on LRO being really well defined on where it is at any given point in time? Yeah, that's a great question. So, in theory, you actually don't have to know anything about where the satellites are, as long as, practically speaking, as long as you could still talk to each other, right? So, you have an RF... I don't even understand this because it's like, well, then how do you know where anything is at that point?

That's the point, right? So, like, practically speaking, so mathematically, you don't really need to know. But realistically, you have to know, because those antennas that I mentioned before, right, they, they don't transmit every everywhere. So you have to be within that beam, beam width to be able to talk to them. And so for us, that looks like, you know, for Capstone, LRO knows really well where it is. The key, though, so so that helps us to be able to figure out where LRO needs to point to us to have that, you know, to be able to get the data. But the key for us is that as you think about that scaling, right, that knowledge could actually be maintained just by frequently having that cross link, right? So it's a pretty broad, you know, target range, just to be able to talk to each other, that's sort of the threshold, if you will, right. And then from that, you would be continually updating your estimate. You know, there's this, there's this truth among spacecraft navigators that people don't really always love to hear, which is that you actually never really know where your satellite is.

It's always just you have a best guess at any given time where it is. That freaks out, you know, a lot of people. But it's like, you never really know. There's like, you have no way to know, but you have an estimate. And so really what it comes down to is how certain are you about that estimate? And so that uncertainty is really what the filters are doing, what the software is doing, is constantly trying to reduce that uncertainty. Now, if there was going to be an LRR2 or if India is working on a lot of different lunar programs, if another commercial company wants to do, if Planet starts sending imaging satellites to the moon and they want to be be a node in CAPS, if you can put it that way, what would the changes be?

Or maybe this is something that even Capstone does. What would be the network effect, the ideal kind of configuration for these satellites that want to integrate this kind of stuff? What would be their configuration? Would it be something more passive, or do you think it would be still a very active process? No, great point. So operationally, I think it would be still a very active process?

No, great, great point. So operationally, I think it would still be active. But in terms of what would have to be added, that's a great, great question. So for us, the minimum thing that has to be added is new software, right? So we have software that does this. Like that's the minimum you have to add to be able to do caps. And then as we were talking about earlier, like if you start adding or if the spacecraft has other capabilities, like a chip scale atomic clock or potentially higher performing atomic clock, right, or different radio, you know, ways to talk to different software, right? And maybe I should say it's a software and maybe it's a computing, you know, element, right? Depending on some of the spacecraft. And this is what makes it hard to make it a general statement here, right? Because some spacecraft are designed with basically

the computer that they have is basically, you know, they use all of it. And other spacecraft have a lot more computing capability, right? And so basically it's software with some ability to do computing as the minimum. And then we would look at adding, you know, adding features if you wanted to add different data types. And then also part of that gets into that evolution is that, you know, if there are, you know, future systems that are, you know, super nodes for caps, that that then can do some of that work for other satellites. Right. So you could think about, hey, maybe, you know, these imaging satellites will say LRO 2.0, and it's more than one satellite, right? Maybe they all are talking to a single partner spacecraft, and that is doing the navigation for all of them, if that makes sense. Oh, that's very cool. Yeah. And then how does, is there any future in which this could extend to ground assets as well? Maybe rovers, if they're, you know, that's part of the Artemis

program, if even some of the commercial programs have rovers, would that be something that they can use to base where they're at? Absolutely. Yeah. We've, we've looked at that in some, some different studies of ground tracking. Now, the interesting thing there is that you sort of have two different problems, right? You have one, which is where are you on the moon, right? Generally. And then there's also, if you think about like future con ops or you have a base or whatever, then it's really like, where are you with respect to that base, right? Like, how do you, how do you get home? How do you, you know, do the turn by turn directions? And so we sort of see both of those as things that could definitely be, you know, CAPS could help. The challenge is just, you think about the communication systems

is that, you know, an astronaut walking around on the surface might not be able to talk to something tens of thousands of kilometers away, right? They might be talking to a base, you know, a quarter mile away or something as an example, right? And so I just mixed units. So people are going to, you know, savage me on that one. Deal with it. This is an international podcast. But you know what I mean? So those requirements are going to be different, right? So we probably wouldn't expect, you know, astronaut walking out there talking to something in deep space to figure out where he is or where she is, because they'll be able to just talk to other assets on the ground but that is something we see as part of an architecture and we see it's probably going to be sort of modular right you're going to have

like a mode that gets you down to the surface to get to the base right and then you're going to have your like local area network when you're there yep um all right we're getting close to time here we're also getting close to launch of this thing. You're a couple of weeks away. The one thing I didn't ask about NRHO is, you know, a lot of this mission you even mentioned is like, let's try out the orbit. And it's always seemed kind of funny to me. It's like, I don't know, we've been pretty good at orbits lately. Are we more concerned about this one?

Or is it just merely like we've never done it before, so let's try it out and see if we forgot about something? What's the level of confidence, I guess, how how sticky that orbit is in going to be overall yeah that's that's a great great question and i would say start by saying i think you know we have great ability to model orbits and operations and so i think there is uh i'll say very confidently there's no risk that like the nrho doesn't work like that's there this is is not like around the first perigee or periloon you're like oops there it't work. Like that's, this is not like- You come around the first para-lune and you're like, oops, there it goes. No, like that's, it's really, it's less like, is this a real orbit?

No, we know it's a real orbit. The question is just sort of how do we operate in it intelligently, right? And part of what is unique about it, and again, it's what makes it beneficial. It's actually a very good thing is that the orbit only really exists when it's being influenced by both the moon and the earth at the same time. And so what makes that different is that when you start thinking about how do you operationally do what we call navigation or orbit determination, that setup, that model has to include both of those influences, right? Where if you're just in low earth orbit or you you're just in low lunar orbit, you know, you don't really have to worry so much about it. And so that's really what we're focused on. And it's really just a matter of understanding how efficient can we be. And one way to think about it is that it is about a seven day orbit, effectively a seven day period, so about one week. And so for about a day, it's basically a lunar orbit. And for six days, it's basically an Earth orbit, like a very high Earth orbit at the distance of the moon.

And so you can imagine, like, as you're trying to think about how do you, you know, model the orbits of it, like that's a big difference, right? Between high Earth orbit very far away and, you know, lunar orbit pretty close. And so what we're really focused on, the type of things we'll be demonstrating and are demonstrating today are things like, well, what are the strategies for doing station keeping maneuvers? And so once a week or so, we'll do a really small maneuver just to stay in that orbit to cancel out other perturbations or other errors. And so one of the things that we've already done working with our partners at NASA is said, OK, we had an initial idea of how to do station keeping maneuvers. And then we're working with NASA said, well, hey, think this, like this different approach could be more efficient in modeling, we've seen it to

be more efficient. So now we're going to go fly it, you know, later this year, and we'll show, you know, was it more efficient. And so really, it's a matter of capturing some of those, you know, like, where do you want to do a maneuver? And some of it just gets to practicality of, you know, how often are you going to talk to it? Right. Do you want to schedule, you know, maneuvers at midnight on, you know, Saturday or at noon on Tuesday? Right. And there's a bunch of that just sort of real world stuff that certainly you can figure out when you do modeling and simulation, but once you get to flying it and once you get the software being, being used to fly it, now you can start to be a little more efficient, or maybe you can automate

certain things even on the ground to make that less of a time intensive activity. So it's really what it's about is sort of muscle memory. You know, let's operate there a little bit, learn some things, and then that will inform Gateway certainly, but also, as I mentioned, definitely we expect and it is already informing other missions that are going to go there. Because part of the challenge is just having a system that can do this operation. Right. Yeah. The gateway is, I mean, it makes a ton of sense when you put it that way, because they have to, like, they have to figure out daily scheduling of, you know, astronaut time.

And when can we do maneuvers? Is that going to interrupt other operations going on? Do we have to do, how do we plan spacewalks around the maneuvers that have to happen? There's so many different considerations from a practical level that having the reps in and, you know, especially when we've got a couple of years before that thing is out there, it's like,

it's going to be great. So, right. Well, there's even crazy stuff too. Like I'll just give you a little teaser, right? Like there's questions about like,

when can you flush the toilet? Because if that gets X, you know, if that gets ejected from the spacecraft, that's basically a mini maneuver and you need to make sure, you know, like, when are you doing a mini maneuver? Can use it to station keep you might be able to yeah you know you gotta figure that out the problem is porcelain driven station keeping is that is

an incredible you make a new acronym for that one and fly some mission that is just a small satellite that hosts a toilet then there you go yeah yeah no there's definitely potential for that but that's the type of stuff right when you start getting into the operations planning you know there's not a lot of models and simulations that you know include flushing the toilet makes me concerned about how stable those orbits are then though yeah no but that's that's the benefit no that's a great question except when you flush the toilet then you're like yeah yeah no because you want to be in a spot that you can easily get into and get out of you know sort of uh it's a great middle ground there.

Is this your favorite weird moon orbit? There's a lot of weird moon orbits. That's a great question. I don't know. Because the one that Chang'e 5 is in now, DRO, is a weird one, because that's not even technically a lunar orbit. That's an Earth orbit. Well, I think I have to like be, you know, this is like, you know, what's your favorite kid, right? And so I only have one mission going to the moon and capstone and it's going to NRHO. So I'm pretty sure that has to be my favorite orbit right now. Yeah. Okay, great. I'm gonna ask everyone that from now on.

Good question. Yeah. Brad, this has been awesome. This was an incredible conversation. I loved hearing about this. I'm excited to see the mission fly. Is there, for anyone that's not following along already, is there places that you would point them to follow along with the mission? Absolutely. Yeah. So our website, advancedspace.com, we have a mission page that will be updated as we get to flight. Certainly our partners at NASA have been putting out great information. We're on social media, so you can look for us at Advanced Space. But also again, NASA has been putting out great stuff as well as we talked about earlier, our partners at Tyvek and Rocket Lab. So I think you'll see it out there if you

look for it. We're incredibly excited that after two and a half years of really working hard through a lot of challenges, and our people have had a lot of challenges, not just a pandemic. We had a wildfire, a bunch of our team had to evacuate. People had kids, people got married, like life happens in two and a half years of focusing on going to the moon. A lot of stuff has happened. And I just say, we're pretty proud of, or we're very proud of what all the team has overcome and where we are going to the moon, uh, very soon, very excited about that and ready to use that as a starting point for, for more. Yeah. I can't wait to watch. I've been, this has been on the list for a long time of like missions I'm excited about. So

thrilled that we're this close and that we got to talk so close to launch. So good luck with everything. Thanks again for coming on for spending so much time diving in. I'm sure everyone is going to love this conversation because I did. It's one of my. One of my favorites that we've had on here recently just got into the right level of details for everyone listening. So I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And if you want more of this kind of stuff, you can help support this show directly over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. I quit my job last year. This is my full-time job now. So it is all thanks to people like you who like what I'm doing here and want more of

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See if it sticks. But if it does, you're going to be pumped. So I'm very, very excited to get that out there. But for now, thank you so much for listening. Thanks for your support. And I will talk to you soon. Bye.