Main Engine Cut Off - T+223: Viper Delayed, Masten Unravels, CLPS Moves On

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is in a tricky spot right now. VIPER has been delayed a year, new task orders are being awarded to new teams like the one led by Draper, and Masten is all but dead.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 41 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, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, and seven anonymous—and 810 other supporters.TopicsCommercial Lunar Payload Services | NASANASA delays VIPER lunar rover launch by a year - SpaceNewsWeMartians Podcast on Twitter: “I feel like maybe VIPER was rushed on to CLPS to give it some credibility. But now it’s two years behind schedule because NASA has changed the design, and the total cost is $433M. We’re not that far off from a Discovery-class mission at this rate.”Cash-strapped Masten Space Furloughs Employees, Moon Landing Mission at Risk – Parabolic ArcNASA Selects Draper to Fly Research to Far Side of Moon | NASADraper wins NASA contract for farside lunar lander 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 NewsletterMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by ESA/JAXA

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and today I want to catch up on NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program because there's been a handful of news items in the last week or so, good and bad, some very bad. But it's an interesting spot right now, right? We're a couple of months away from the first launch of this series. There's task awards still going out. So there's just a lot going on with this. And I feel like it's a good time to check in on exactly how this program is doing and, you know, what we might see in the future. So to start off, there's a couple of news things to catch up on. First off, NASA delayed one of their missions by a year this past

week. And this is the Viper Lunar Rover, the Voltyles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover. This is a pretty big rover that is due to head to the south pole of the moon to look for water ice and Voltyles, as is in the name and to do this they contracted with astrobotic for their griffin lunar lander that effectively at this point because of the shape and size of viper it's like a specially built lunar lander for um viper right there's this uh this whole track that kind of folds out to let this thing down onto the surface now the lander platform could be reused for other things, I'm sure, in the future, but the hardware around Viper is very specific to the size and shape and mass of Viper. So,

it's a bit of a weird one, but they delayed the launch from November 2023 to November 2024. They say that's to conduct additional ground testing of griffin the lunar lander to ensure that they land on the moon essentially right to make sure that this very expensive very unique payload makes it down to the surface successfully to do that they added 67.8 million dollars to the astrobotic order which brings their total value of the award to $320.4 million. They originally were valued at $199 million. So quite a bit of a budget plus up on this Viper mission. The overall cost of the mission is now $433 million. So as my friend Jake Robbins of We Martians quipped, we are not that far off from a Discovery Class mission at this rate.

He tweeted the other day, which was, you know, I think putting it in his language. But that is notable that this is a very different kind of mission than what the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program was supposed to do. You know, it was supposed to be these flights where NASA gets a really good deal on these commercial flights to the moon where they assign a couple of payloads that get bundled up. Whoever's ready goes to the moon. Hopefully you make it. They're not all going to make it. But if we get, you know, half of these payloads to the moon at a pretty good rate over the next couple of years, that's a win. But that's not what's happening here. You know, this is a traditional development situation where they're building what is effectively a single one-off solution for

landing Viper on the moon, right? Now, I know Astrobotic has other plans for this lander in the future, but Viper's size, its changes, its design changes, its requirements are driving so much of this program, at least from what it looks like on the outside, that it's much more akin to, like Jake said, some other kind of bigger mission from within NASA and not something that fits in the mold of the commercial lunar payload services program. Dr. Z, the head of science at NASA, essentially, he used this shots on goal metaphor in the past that NASA wants to take a lot of shots on goal at the moon, knowing that not all of them are going to go in, but you're going to score if you shoot a lot. And so they were okay with failure on a lot of these missions, because they know that's what

they have to deal with, because getting to the moon is really hard. So it just puts Viper in this really weird role that the more it goes on, the more delays, the more it creeps up to a $500 million, $600 million mission, it starts to attract attention to the CLPS program in a way that you definitely don't want there to be an attention on, right? Because this isn't what the rest of the missions are like. The rest of the missions, and this is something we'll get into in a little bit, are, you know, $70, $80, $90 dollar task orders that are taking a collection of payloads to the surface, and hopefully they get there. This is taking a very expensive one-off payload that is very complex down to the lunar surface and probably was a better fit for a different kind of mission. But one of the things that's been interesting about CLPS is that it's kind

of this under-the-radar program that NASA is able to do a lot with this program because, you know, Artemis is taking all the flack from a policy perspective when it comes to the moon, and Clips, you know, at a couple of tens of million dollars per turn, slips under the radar and is, you know, for better or worse, NASA's putting a significant amount of money towards developing an industry around going to the moon. Now, it's not all going to work, right? We're going to talk about companies that are going under because of it. But the hope is that there are companies like Astrobotic, like Intuitive Machines that show a lot of promise. And you're building up this industry around going to the lunar surface. So, you know, I'm not mad at Viper, but I think the more this creeps up

to several hundred million dollar mission, I get more worried that Clipse is not going to be able to keep its under the radar presence. And some of the flexibility and the freedom that NASA feels with it might go away because it's going to start attracting eyeballs from different parts of the political spectrum that are like, well, what's NASA doing over there? Did we ever say it was okay to spend $600, $700 million on a lunar rover? You're going to start attracting that kind of attention if this goes on long enough. And that's my main worry is that, will this attract the wrong kind of attention to the lunar program that NASA has going right now if they can't get this under control in a timely manner? Now, I want to talk about the other end of the news spectrum here.

Mastin Space Systems is basically all but dead at this point. And I want to unpack a little bit about how they got there, what that might mean, how NASA should look at that for the CLPS program, how we should look at that for the CLPS program. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to all of you who are supporting Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 851 of you supporting the show every single month, and I am so thankful for your support for making it possible for me to quit a full-time job and do this full-time. That is all because of your support that I could not do it without you. And this episode was produced by 41 executive producers. Thanks to Simon,

Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, TheEverDashNut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, and Matt, TheAstrogators at SCE, Chris, AegisTradeLaw, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support. If you want to help join that crew, and if you want to get Miko Headlines, which is an entire other podcast that I do for paid supporters at the $3 a month or more level, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and jump on in. It's a great way to support the show, to get some extra podcasts in

your life, and to stay up with all the space news. Let me do the hard work for you. It is a really good show, I would say. I just did a 30-minute one right before I recorded this that had a lot of good stuff in it. So check that out if you're interested. And otherwise, thank you so much for your support. So Mastin Space Systems has unraveled. There's really not a lot of other ways to put it. This is something I've been hearing for a couple of weeks, if not a couple of months, but couldn't really get any solid info and then started putting together from, you know, three, four or five different sources to get a picture of what was going on. And then Doug Messier at Parabolic Arc had a post about 10 days ago. And he's got very good sources because he's very close to the company proximity wise. And everything he's gotten that report tracks with what I had

been putting together individually. And essentially Mastin at this point has furloughed all of its staff. I think at, at one point, if not currently, I heard that the only person left working at Mastin was Dave Mastin himself, the founder, as they try to figure out what to do, uh, with the company, with the obligations they have with the intellectual property they have. There's a lot to still figure out there. But it started back in the spring. They started having issues. The longtime CEO, Sean Mahoney, he departed in April and announced his departure. It didn't sound like something he had planned to do. So I started like, you know, that's what got my ears perked up. And then a bunch of people started leaving after that. And like I said, recently, they furloughed their entire staff.

And it's essentially that they ran out of cash. You know, they got this award for the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. And within a couple of months, they went from something like 10 to 15 people to close to, if not more than 100 people. I might have those numbers a little bit incorrect, but trying to triangulate on the numbers that multiple people have told me. But that's the storyline there is, you know, they had to add a zero to the amount of people they employed to take on this program. And that's just when things get weird, right? I mean, if you've ever been at a company that's grown a lot, you know, I've been at a company that grew

like a small company that grew like 25% and stuff started getting weird meaning there were layoffs and people left and it was chaotic and um and that's like you know i can't imagine adding a zero to a company and you know changing your main focus you're going from doing these terrestrial test beds to doing a lunar lander and it's something they've always toyed around with and had concepts for, right? But maybe those people weren't around anymore. Maybe this time was different because of the requirements that were on top of it, the fact that it was real money behind it. Things can be quite different then, and it just wasn't something that they were able to pull through on. Now, I want to read a little bit from Doug Messier's article over at Parabolic Arc. You should read the whole thing because it's got a much deeper dive in the story with dates

and numbers and, you know, interesting stuff in there. But here's a little snippet that I found interesting. Clips partners are expected to supplement NASA mission funding by carrying payloads for other parties. The source who requested anonymity said that this is where Masten's mission ran into problems. We ran out of money after grossly underbidding. The estimate was $105 million, but I was told that we had found a $30 million private customer who wanted to fly with us. However, that customer later pulled out of the venture. Subsequent attempts to fill the gap failed, the source added.

This is me again. The original task order was $75.9 million. They say they had a $30 million commercial customer to fill in the middle there. And that kind of tracks with what we've seen from the rest of the commercial lunar payload services program, right? Intuitive Machines has a couple of different landers on board. They've already got, I think it's three different missions with NASA on the books. And they've been announcing different commercial companies that are going to fly on board. They've been manifesting others to ride on the launch vehicle that they have for these missions. Astrobotic is similar, right?

They have some sort of arrangement to be on Vulcan's first flight, the new launch vehicle from United Launch Alliance, which I think helps with the funding a bit. They've been talking up their different commercial partners. Firefly is in a totally different spot, which is we might want to set that one aside for this conversation. But that's been a very common theme of other companies selling these commercial spaces or trying to find other ways to offset cost. So that's as expected, but it's just a matter of them having to grow so much to support

this when not necessarily having enough funding from other sources, whether that's private funding or private investments or other task orders. It just wasn't something they could pull off. Now, a NASA statement that Doug Messier got as well. I'm going to read a little bit of the statement he got from NASA. NASA, which is one of several customers with payloads scheduled to fly aboard Masten Mission 1, has been notified that there are some changes taking place with Masten and that NASA's payload delivery will be impacted. The agency is working closely with Masten and awaiting additional details on these changes. In the event Masten Space Systems is unable to deliver the agency's

eight payloads to the moon, NASA will look to schedule the delivery of these payloads on other Eclipse flights. So, I mean, that is the tactic from NASA, right? We should buy a bunch of different flights from a bunch of different vendors. We can get whatever payloads are ready on board those, and if one of them slips or falls off or goes under, we pull the payloads, we put it on a different mission later. Now, unfortunately, they've already had a company, Orbit Beyond, that won an original order and then went away like immediately. They vanished into the night and gave up the task order. Now they have Mastin, who seems to be going under. They are a little bit overloaded right now in both Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines. Intuitive Machines has three missions on the books. Astrobotic has two, right? They've got a Peregrine Lander, which is a smaller

lander, and that'll go first, and then that bigger lander, Griffin, for Viper. If there's an issue with any of those missions or either of those providers, the Eclipse program could be in serious trouble if it's not already because of this. It doesn't really sound like any of these missions are going super smoothly from what I've heard behind the scenes on a couple of them. It is a typical new development program, right? There's behind budget, behind schedule, tight margins, if not negative margins right now. So I don't know, it's getting into an interesting spot where some of these things have to start launching

and attempting their landings to change the perspective on this a little bit. But there's some doom and gloom that I'm sensing around Clips that has me a little worried. And like I said up front, if Viper starts attracting a little bit more unwanted attention

and then you start having a couple of companies go under. If the first three missions go and none of them are successful in landing on the moon, I don't know what the future of Eclipse looks like in that world, right? And that's a little bit of a bad cycle because that could increase the importance of these initial Eclipse missions and further delay them, put more pressure on them to ship on time, which then results in failure, or maybe they're just delayed for a long time. So you could quickly get into a really bad cycle on these missions, and I hope that's not what

happens. You know, I'm hoping that these missions do fly within the next year or two. They're all scheduled, you know, we're going to launch in December, 2022. So, you know, we're not going to see any of these missions until 2023, but let's hope we do see one of them fly in 2023 and maybe two of them fly. And I hope one makes it because it really needs a win right now. You know, it really does need a little bit of validation that this thing can work. Um, because as much as Thomas Zurbuchen wants to say, we're taking shots on goal. Not all of them are going to go in, but we are going to get some wins. I don't know how durable that is if you're five to 10 years into a program and you haven't had any successes yet and you've had more companies fold than have

launched a lander to the moon. Not a great scenario to be in, honestly. So this kind of under the radar program could start getting picked up on the radar. And that's my worry right now, if the news doesn't turn in a different direction for Clipse. Now they did just onboard another task order here. So they awarded $73 million to Draper, a team led by Draper, I should say, for a 2025 mission to go to the lunar far side. That's going to need a relay satellite because you can't talk to the lunar far side from Earth. So Blue Canyon Technologies is going to be building two satellites that would hitch a ride and deploy before they go down for their landing to relay communications back to Earth.

Draper is the prime contractor, but they're using a lander design from the Japanese company iSpace that is working on a lunar lander. There's a couple other companies involved in there as well. So there's another one on the books. But a launch in 2025 is, you know, I feel like the writing will definitely be on the wall by 2025. We'll know which way this is going. But the next three years are really critical for clips to start turning the corner, change some of the doom and gloom that I'm hearing around into something more hopeful, and also successful. I just think if you have, you know, the death knell would be if something goes wrong with Astrobotic or Intuitive Machines internally. Now, Intuitive Machines seems to have ample funding because everything that is within the realm of IBX, which is Axiom, Intuitive Machines, X Energy, which we just saw

in this award from NASA for nuclear power on the moon, they seem to be doing okay funding-wise. They've got three task orders, so that's a lot of money they're committed their way already. They've got a lot of commercial payloads on board to at least some of those i think and they've got these uh deals where they're sharing launches with people astrobotic seems pretty stable um because you know they are pretty far along in getting that lander all together for the peregrine mission coming up they're doing well with this viper mission though there's a year delay. It's not like there's no hardware for it. So there are good signs there, but an issue with one or both of them could be, you know, that could be it for Clips. So it's definitely dire straits for Clips right

now over the next three years, I would say. And I'm a little bit worried about the program that I've tended to be in love with the last several years. So let's keep a close eye on what happens here as we get closer to the launchpad for these lunar landers. So we'll see what happens. Sorry to be a doom and gloom, but that's kind of where things are at right now, I guess, with clips. And we'll see what happens. So anyway, thanks again for listening. Thanks for your support, as always, over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you've any questions or thoughts hit me up on email anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or on twitter at wehavemiko and until next time i will talk to you soon Bye.