Main Engine Cut Off - T+224: Northrop Grumman’s Commercial Space Station, with Rick Mastracchio (Director Of Business Development)

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Rick Mastracchio, former NASA astronaut and current Director Of Business Development at Northrop Grumman Space Systems, joins me to talk about Northrop Grumman’s Commercial Space Station concept that they are working on as part of NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 42 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, SmallSpark Space Systems, and seven anonymous—and 807 other supporters.TopicsCommercial Space Station - Northrop GrummanCommercial Space Station Data Sheet - Northrop GrummanNASA Selects Companies to Develop Commercial Destinations in Space | NASAA Closer Look at Northrop Grumman Commercial Space Station – Parabolic ArcThe 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

Hello and welcome to Managing Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo and today I'm very excited because we've got a great guest who also completes a little bit of a series that has been going on here on Miko for a while now. We will be completing the cycle of having all of the providers that are trying to work on their own commercial space stations as part of NASA's commercial LEO destinations program on the show at this point because we've had, well, we've had Axiom Space on, I think, three times,

different members of the team talking about different things that they're working on. They are, of course, working on a module that will be attached to the International Space Station. Right now, they're planning for 2024. And then these other three companies are working on free-flying commercial space station concepts. There was contracts given out a couple of years, a year back now, to develop these designs, concepts that would run through about 2025, in which point NASA would make some selection down. And those three companies, NanoRacks, we talked about Starlab with Marshall Smith on the show. Orbital Reef, we talked about with

Brent Sherwood of Blue Origin. And finally, we're talking today with Rick Mastracchio, who is currently the Director of Business Development at Northrop Grumman. He is as well an astronaut, former NASA astronaut, flew on three shuttle missions and Soyuz flight, long duration Soyuz flight, and did about nine EVAs, I think it was, spent 53 hours outside. So quite a career as an astronaut. And I think, I have to admit, hours outside. So quite a career as an astronaut. And I think I have to admit, I think this is the first astronaut that I have had on the show. I've certainly I've talked to Dylan Taylor, who had has since become an astronaut, if that fits your definition of astronaut, I guess. But I don't think I've had an active, you know, when I talked to them an active astronaut on the show before. So

cool to do that. Although somewhat somewhat embarrassing it took me 225 episodes uh to get around to that but i guess that's just not the topics i cover from from uh time to time in this show so anyway uh it's going to be awesome to talk about north of grumman's concept with rick because i think it's uh it gets less attention because blue origin and their partners are all flashy with orbital reef nano racks is kind of a cool company that i've tracked a lot here on MECO. Northrop Grumman, I think to some, just doesn't inspire a lot of excitement. But, you know, I'm a Cygnus fan, so I'm excited to dig into what's going on over at Northrop.

So without further ado, let's give Rick a call. All right, Rick, welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. We were just talking right before we started that this completes the cycle through the commercial LEO space stations that are coming in the near future. So thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks, Tony, for having me. It's great to be here. And I love the I love the name of your podcast, Miko. Yeah, as somebody who has certainly experienced a lot of them. You're an absolute legend. And I think actually, you are the first person I've talked to that I watched in person go to space. So that is a fun fact.

Which mission? Which mission? Your last mission. You were on SDS 131, I believe. Oh, beautiful, beautiful launch. Yeah, that was right in the midst of I lived in Florida for the last couple of years of the shuttle program. So I got to see seven or eight shuttle launches. So great.

And looking to talk to somebody I've watched go to space. So this is the perfect time to do it. Good. Happy to be here. Actually, maybe we should start there to talk about how you got involved on the Northrop Grumman side of things. You've been involved in a couple different programs in your time there after NASA, so maybe you could just run us through, after the career at NASA, how you joined the team and what you've been working on up until now. Sure. After a long career at NASA as an engineer, flight controller, and then more than 20 years as an astronaut, I decided it was time to do something else. And this was around

2017. And so I ended up going to what was Orbital ATK to work on the Cygnus program. I was director of operations for the Cygnus program. Of course, shortly after I joined, within six months to a year, Northrop Grumman bought up Orbital ATK, and we became part of them. And since that time, I've gone through a couple of different jobs, but now I'm business director for all the human exploration and operations programs and pursuits that we have at Northrop Grumman. That includes the Cygnus program. We're also building Halo, which is the habitat and logistics outpost. It's basically a small space station that will orbit the moon. We'll be launching that in two years or so. We're working on human landing systems. We're working

on our commercial space station, CDFF, that we'll talk about more today. And then there's a lot of other things going on. So Northrop Grumman is really expanding its human programs in many different ways. And I'm happy to be part of that. Now, Cygnus has been interesting because it's obviously been doing a lot of cargo to the space station, but everything that Northrop's involved in in the human spaceflight side has some sort of Cygnus-derived something or other, whether it's some of the cases I think there's been. Is it avionics or something that's been reused over in the robotic side, the mission extension vehicles and things like that,

or the Halo module as you're talking about? When I look at the Halo module, as you're talking about. When I look at the commercial space station that you're working on, there's a visualization out there of this modular architecture. There's clearly a Cygnus spacecraft docked there. There's some things that are looking like longer and shorter versions of Cygnus. There's some things that are wider versions of Cygnus. So I'm curious how internally you think about Cygnus as a platform and at what point does something stop becoming Cygnus derived and just being Cygnus-like?

Is there a difference internally about how you think about those things? I think there is. I mean, there's a lot in your series of questions there. Let's back up a little bit. The Cygnus cargo vehicle is strictly a cargo vehicle and has been for you know since its uh inception more than 10 years ago and over time we've added more and more capability to the cygnus cargo vehicle we we stretched out the volume we expanded capabilities like adding the ability to reboost the International Space Station, do more secondary payloads after we leave the ISS, spend more time on orbit. We actually have one mission where we spent 10 or 11 months up there. So we've been constantly upgrading the Cygnus as ISS and the NASA program ask us for more capabilities or we recognize they need more capabilities. We try to add them to our Cygnus spacecraft. Now with that, we also look, well,

how can Cygnus do other missions or Cygnus-like, as you say, can it go cislunar to provide logistics for the Gateway, for example? Yes, it can. You know, the volume is volume, but now you just need to upgrade. Maybe you need to upgrade the avionics, put some more prop on it for it to go cislunar. How can it become a space station? Well, we stretched the Cygnus. We added some radial ports to it. Now it forms kind of the heart of the gateway with the habitat and logistics outpost, the halo module, if you call it that. halo module, if you call it that.

And, of course, that's a big jump right from a small cargo craft to, let's say, a small space station orbiting the moon. We had to add a lot of new avionics, life support systems, the radial docking ports, the fact that it has to survive the radiation environment around the moon. So that's a huge leap from a LEO cargo vehicle to a cislunar habitat. So even though it has its roots in the Cygnus, the Halo module is quite a bit more advanced. Now we're using all of that now to take all those parts and pieces and trying to get the initial piece of a LEO commercial space station or commercial destination free flyer, the CDFF up into low earth orbit. We're using the halo structures.

We're even expanding on that a little bit. We're utilizing Cigna systems, halo systems, even some things from MEV to put all these parts and pieces together that are all proven in orbit. Of course, the Halo is at critical design review. It's not yet in orbit. But a lot of work has gone into these pieces, and that allows us to have a very low-risk commercial space station very early in the process. So that's why we try to build upon things we have. It really reduces the amount of technical risk that is involved in doing process. So that's why we try to build upon things we have. It really reduces the amount of technical risk that is involved in doing that.

And certainly the production side probably doesn't hate it either that there's existing processes in place. Even, as you're mentioning, upgrades to Cygnus. Cygnus itself on the cargo missions had gone through some upgrades. If you look at the first versions of Cygnus, they were shorter than the ones that fly now, different solar arrays um so the platform itself is not you know foreign to upgrades and versatility right it's flown on antares it's flown on atlas exactly we just found out it's going to fly on some falcons in the future so um you know i think that aspect is is uh pretty unique to the cargo vehicle that's flying today. Yeah, and we'll continue to upgrade that.

We're stretching it even longer for future ISS missions. We're stretching it longer for commercial space station missions. We're adding prop to it, et cetera, et cetera. So Cygnus continues to grow as the market evolves, as the missions change. So when you were coming up with this architecture for the space station, I think you got into a little bit of the thinking behind this, but was the process, you know, kind of looking at what NASA required, what NASA wanted, and figuring out the delta between that and where you are today with what you can do with Cygnus? Or were there any other

influences into decision points along the way with how you ended up at the architecture we see? Yeah, we tried to put ourselves, you know, having been at NASA for 27 years, it was kind of easy to put myself in NASA's shoes, right? So to roll your head back a couple of years, yeah. Yeah, exactly. What is it that NASA's looking for? They're looking for options. There's going to be multiple providers. We knew that. And we knew that a lot of these providers, if not all of them, were going to be building a spacecraft for the first time. And that didn't have the heritage that we had. So we decided, well, why try to compete with a brand new design and brand new hardware where everybody else is going to have brand new designs and brand new hardware? Let's utilize our heritage hardware.

Let's utilize our experiences that we have operating on the ISS. And let's give NASA an option to utilize something that is, again, low technical risk. Maybe it's not as pretty and doesn't have as good a name as some of our competitors, right? But it brings a lot to the table in that it's low risk, reliable. It's all built on heritage vehicles. So we wanted to give NASA an alternate option that we knew other folks would offer up to them. The second half of that was, what is it that we want to do going forward with Cygnus and habitation and things like that? So how can we utilize what NASA is asking for to build upon what we're trying to do strategically as a company? So we put those things together, and the CDFF you see in some of those illustrations are what we came up with. Now, is there a phasing to that? Is there a particular,

you know, setup for the initial, you know, initial deployment and meeting those bottom requirements from NASA? And then what's the expansion from there? Like, how does that configuration start and grow over time? Yeah, absolutely. So our thinking was utilize as much heritage hardware for the first element that goes into low Earth orbit. Maximize what we've already done for minimum risk and to get on orbit as quickly as possible. You want to get on orbit as quickly as possible for a couple of reasons. NASA may want you there sooner than 2028 or even 2029. There's a lot of uncertainty or some uncertainty with the International Space Station.

Also, the earlier you get up there, the revenue starts rolling. This is a commercial space station. And I've said it many times, building the space station from a technical perspective is not that hard, especially for us at Northrop Grumman. Building the business around a commercial space station, that's a lot more difficult. That's a lot more challenging. It's something that hasn't been done. And everybody's used to using the ISS where the governments are paying for most things. So it's going to take time to get those commercial customers to figure out the business arrangements with the internationals, with NASA, other government agencies, et cetera, et cetera.

So we need to get something up there as quick as we can, even if it's just a kind of a foothold, if you will, with a minimum of four astronauts doing 100 experiments a year or something like that. Then we designed in and it has three docking ports. Then the second element is much bigger volume. It goes up to a four and a half meter diameter. It's a longer module, and it has four docking, four radial docking ports. So it's much, it's more like an ISS type of module. up as the second element one or two years later, depending on the market. And now you've got this fairly good-sized space station, can handle four people permanently, probably some visitors of four coming up and down for maybe one or two-month missions or short-term missions. But you got two things. You got six docking ports, and you got the volume to handle a good number of crews and experiments. And one thing you learn in operating space stations is volume is king and docking ports

are also very helpful for operational flexibility and for adding more modules. So those six docking ports allow us plenty of visiting vehicles, three or four visiting vehicles coming and going. And it allows us to add even more and more modules over time. But we don't think much past those first two or three elements because we really want to see where the market's going to point us. Do we need a payload airlock? Do we need bigger volumes like an inflatable module for tourism? Do we need a manufacturing facility, research facilities? What is it the market's going to push us towards for those future modules? You mentioned docking ports a couple times. Are all the ports,

docking ports specifically, is there any berthing? What is the strategy there? Because I did notice in the NASA source selection statement, it dinged you guys for using smaller hatches, they say, that can accommodate larger payloads, which is a problem on the ISS today. In the past, they've talked about not being able to fit spacesuits in and out of the docking port. They had to redesign some components or figure out how to repack them, so now they can. So it seems like on the ISS they've mitigated that,

but I don't know how internally you would approach the sizing of docking versus berthing ports and the accommodations there. Well, I mean, everything we talk about today is being traded. We're in phase one of this development, technical development right now, and will be for the next two or three years. So of course, everything is traded, but we're doing that trade. Do we only have docking visiting vehicles? Do we have some kind of berthing? So berthing, like you said, berthing gives you a little bit bigger hatch, but it requires the overhead of a big robotic arm to capture the visiting vehicle and plug it in. and in space, there's pros and cons of each. So we're looking at trying to, right now our baseline is have everything docking, but we're looking at ways of increasing the passageway of the docking system. And so we've got some ideas on that as well. But again, this is a trade that our customers are going to have to help us out.

If our customers come to us and say, hey, I have a payload, a device, a blivet that's this big, and I'm going to need this thing to fly 100 times a year, and you're going to make billions of dollars off of this, then we're certainly going to try to accommodate that customer and have a birthing system as necessary. So it's really what are the customers telling us they need. In terms of partnerships on this, I think I saw Dynetics mentioned as a partner on the program. Are there any other big ones? I know, I guess you might include, I don't know if Thales Alenia would be involved since

they build the pressure vessels for Cygnus. Any other top line ones that you'd mention? Yeah. So Dynetics is in this with us. They're helping us with several different systems. And then, of course, Thales Alenia is involved in terms of the structures and the modules. And we're in the process right now with bringing on a lot more partners. So we, Northrop Grumman, are great at building the space station, and we're probably be great at operating it since we've got much experience with our sigma spacecraft and iss but we don't

have a lot of experiences with going out and reaching all these different commercial customers we need help with that so we're we're creating partnerships with multiple what we're calling channel partners who are going to help us reach out to all the corners of the world, the internationals and the U.S., find out who all these customers are, help us bring those customers to the Northrop Grumman Space Station and make sure that we can provide them with the facilities and capabilities that they're looking for. So we're in the process of bringing on numerous partners, and we'll be issuing information on those as we finalize those agreements.

Very cool. Are there things about the space station architecture that are that if NASA was, you know, not involved in this program, if they were not, you know, creating these two different tracks of commercial space station programs with the attached module that axiom will have and then the free flyers are there things that would be different about the architecture um if it was purely a commercial station you know not related to nasa requirements or do you feel like and you know as you mentioned you've been in space a lot under the nasa flag and uh they've figured a lot of things out over the last couple decades in space so are there commonalities there are things that you might differ from if it wasn't you know if it was outside of their eyes uh there's nothing that jumps off the top of my head

but i can't say that nasa will levy a lot of requirements that are safety related requirements which are of course important and redundancyancy requirements to protect the crew and to protect the customers from various failures and losses of some hardware, et cetera, et cetera. So I guess I would say that if NASA wasn't involved with that, guess I would say that if NASA wasn't involved with that, I'm not sure that all of those safety requirements and requirements for various levels of redundancy, those probably would be relaxed a little bit. And I'm not saying the space station wouldn't be safe, but I think NASA is, there's a trade-off, right, between, and I use the word safety, but I really mean, when I say safety, I mean if the crew is on board the space station and you lose power system, for example. The crew is still safe.

They get in their spacecraft and they go home. But what happens is you lose the mission. We used to say loss of mission. So you lose the crew being on orbit. So NASA's really strict on course crew safety as they should be. And I always was glad they would. And they're also very, it's also important that the mission is always successful in terms of they don't have to leave the space station for some period of time while something gets fixed. It's hard to pick out any specific requirement off the top of my head, but NASA really drives that.

NASA really drives the levels of redundancy for visiting vehicles and for the science experiments on board and what gets done on board and things like that. So I think there would be a difference if NASA was not involved, but I think it's important that they are involved so that we don't swing too far over, away from all those safety lessons that NASA has learned and things like that. But, you know, NASA understands that they could push things too far where it becomes commercially unfeasible because they put too many checks and balances into the system. And so that's why they're listening to the commercial providers,

all the commercial providers they're working with, and even folks who they're not actually working with right now are able to give feedback to NASA and tell them, hey, instead of asking for this much redundancy, you should change it to something else that is more commercially acceptable, for example. So NASA is trying to figure out that sweet spot between commercialization and too many rules and requirements. Yeah, and that's the thing we heard, you know, even in the days of cargo and crew, there being a lot of back and forth between NASA and the contractors. So definitely very much in line with that. You mentioned Halo a little while back in terms of there being differences in the environments that Halo and the initial.

Is there a name for the space station concept right now that I could refer to it as? Or is that what you were talking about with you don't have as fancy the names? Yeah, we're just calling it the Northrop Grumman Space Station. Got it. Rick's World.'re just calling it the northrop grumman space station got it rick's world i'm calling it rick's world i don't think that too many people would like that yeah um i know like you know me i'm not a super expert out there but i can even you know delineate some of the differences in the environment of cislunar space and low earth orbit radiation thermal that kind of stuff. How does that actually shake out to hardware level differences?

And this might be too in the weeds, but if you took Halo and operated in low earth orbit, are there things that just wouldn't function? Or would it be, like you were just saying, like too thick of margins because you're rejecting too much heat that you had to deal with in cislunar space? What is the breakdown?

And I guess the root of my question is like, why not build two halos and fly one here and one there? Right, right. So probably, I think you touched upon them, right? The differences are the thermal environment, whether you're in low Earth orbit, low lunar orbit, cislunar space, the thermal environments are all different. Some places are hotter and some places are colder. Radiation is another big difference.

Some places are hotter and some places are colder. Radiation is another big difference. When you go beyond low Earth orbit, you don't have the protection of the Van Allen belts and whatnot. So all your hardware has to be much more radiant, protected and radiant tolerant. And then, of course, communication is another thing where you've got a lot of infrastructure in low Earth orbit, like communication and things like that, that you don't yet have in cislunar space. So can you cut and paste a halo module and put it in low Earth orbit? Two things. First of all, I don't know if the thermal, you might have to tweak your thermal. Low Earth orbit may be warmer than cislunar space. I'm not sure because you're so close to the Earth.

And then the other big thing is it's just going to be cost. Because halo is in cislunar space, a lot of the avionics and other boxes are probably more expensive because they have to be more radiant tolerant. So you can get – if cost wasn't a factor, you didn't care, then yes, all you probably need to do is tweak your thermal system and you might be able to just put halo in low Earth orbit. But cost would be the big driver. Yeah, I'm sure interior probably matters a lot too, right? There's going to be different configurations needed for the requirements that NASA has for the missions that are going to the moon, but also the ones that are happening here in terms of how much experiment space do they need and how long are they going to be on station, et cetera. Right, right.

But internal configuration is not hard to rearrange the furniture, so to speak. Move some stuff around. I'd be happy to do it. Yeah, all right. We'll keep that in mind. I'm very tiny, so I can fit in very small spaces. It's great. The other competitors that are you know doing their

designs right now as well nano racks orbital reef team they all kind of have different um orders of priorities in terms of you know orbital reef is is looking at this much larger you know business park development program where they're trying to bring in others to add on to their business park in the future nano racks is is focusing on creating an architecture that can be primarily served with a single launch. So they launch this whole structure. Is there somewhere in that spectrum? Is there, you know, where do you feel comfortable sitting? You mentioned that you have this initial deployment that is, you know, a single module.

But is that, you know, a single module, but is that, um, you know, are you very much towards that side and, and this bigger module in the future is still notional. Um, or do you feel like you have this very expansive vision, much closer to like, let's build a whole business park in space. Where does that, where do you fit on that spectrum? Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? How the three CDFF competitors and then even throw Axiom in there, all four of us have quite a different approach if you look close enough. Yeah, Orbital Reef, it seems like they're just going to expand, expand, expand. It's going to be huge amounts of volume, huge numbers of people eventually, right? It's going to start out and then eventually grow, grow, grow.

And then the NanoRacks one, yeah, it's like a single launch and you got yourself a space station. And I've heard even them mention that they're going to have multiple space stations. Maybe they'll launch one in different inclinations. Maybe one will be dedicated to science. One will be tourism. You know, all these different concepts I assume they have. have. And of course, Axiom is, you know, they're tying their space station to the ISS, building three, four modules, and then flying away and operating independently of ISS. And we're kind of in between all those, it seems to me. We're not, certainly we're not going to get as big as

Orbital Reef, at least what they've been saying. And I think we're going to be, we're not using inflatables. I mean, we got more modules than we will have for nanoracks, but because they're using an inflatable, the volumes may be comparable. I don't know their volumes exactly. But so we're somewhere kind of in between. Again, I think because we're taking the approach of utilizing, you know, the heritage hardware, I keep saying that, but because we're doing that, we're going to look very ISS-like. look very ISS-like. We're going to look like a little miniature international space station, especially for the first two, three, four, you know, five years as the, then maybe in the future, as we start adding maybe inflatable modules and other things, it'll start to diverge from what an ISS looks like. But, you know, it's interesting. It's all across the spectrum and we're kind of in the middle of there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's ideal how that works out because as we've seen over the past 10, 20 years, uh, having these different approaches, you could place bets at the beginning, but it's hard to tell exactly who will shake out as, as the best option or the right option.

If there will be a best, or if, if two different things, you know, work out well, you just look at the diversity of how cargo vehicles get to and from the ISS, especially with like Dream Chaser coming online. It's interesting to see all the differences. And, you know, you look around on Earth and everything has, every industry has tons of different ways of doing things. And it's good that we have that diversity. So definitely something that we want to keep around in space. Yeah, it's great for NASA. It's great for NASA to have these diverse solutions. Because like you said, some might be stronger than others and be more successful. But who knows which one it will be.

In terms of the market in the next, you know, medium term, not super long term, NASA obviously anchor tenant of these space stations, in some cases the only tenant of these space stations. in some cases the only tenant of these space stations are there things that that you're looking towards as potential markets or markets that would be particularly worth you know going into whether that be scientific research in space or other governments that don't necessarily have part in iss today but want to have throw an astronaut core um anything in there any verticals that you're particularly noticing? Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, there's, there's a lot, a lot I could say there, but obviously, um, you know, NASA is going to be your anchor tenant. So we're working with NASA and we're constantly pushing NASA to tell us more, tell us what

it is you want, when you want it, uh, what facilities you need for what science, et cetera, et cetera. And they know that all, you know that not just Northrop Grumman, but all the potential providers are asking them to give them details because we're all trying to build the business around the space station. We're all trying to build our business models, and we need that information from NASA. That's step one.

And it's kind of somewhat random. The next thing that comes to my mind is all the other users of the International Space Station, the Japanese, the Europeans, the Canadians, anybody else who's currently using it. Maybe less so the other one right now. all the different research, you know, like what's the national lab? How's the national lab? The cases, folks, how are they going to use it? All the various researchers in the little bit of the commercial industry that's using that right now, how are they going to use it? So that's the next kind of group you have to go talk to.

Then the next group down is like, well, you got the Australian Space Agency, India, the UAE is getting involved. What about all these up and coming countries who want to have some kind of space program? So you have to start talking to them to see how they want to utilize it and what's the business arrangement with them. And then there's, you know, there's manufacturing in low Earth orbit. That's kind of, you know, I joke to say that everybody's looking for the golden goose in the manufacturing. Who's going to come up with something that you may have to manufacture in low Earth orbit and it brings great value to the folks on Earth because it's more interesting

or it performs better or has better characteristics than what you can do on Earth. And the cost trade is worthwhile going up there to do this. So that's huge. And I think that's the area that has the most potential is manufacturing. I don't think we've even really scratched the surface over the past decades on what we can do in terms of manufacturing a low Earth orbit. Now, it may still take another decade or two to get to a point where lots of things are being manufactured in a low-Earth orbit,

but I think we will get there eventually. And it's really, like I said, we're bringing on all these different channel partners because you don't know who can take advantage of a low-Earth orbit environment in so many different ways. So we're trying to reach out, and all our channel partners kind of provide us all these tentacles to reach across the whole world to try to encourage folks to come up with ideas and be clever on how they can utilize our facilities.

It's interesting to watch the, just in the couple of months since Axiom flew that Axiom 1 mission to the space station, NASA and there's a National academy study that's going on right now kind of changing some of the requirements or um ways to think about you know private astronaut missions nasa's putting this new requirement in that is going to require uh former nasa astronaut so if you're looking for a new gig you could maybe uh be a chaperone up to these uh up to the space station missions uh the national academies is doing this study about potentially flying you know non-astronaut scientists up to the iss for short duration missions to either train astronauts

on how to run their research or to do short-term studies and it seems to me that these private astronaut missions are in addition to being interesting business models for companies like axiom or whoever else wants to fly them um really interesting testing grounds for nasa to figure out what works to figure out what the actual economics are um if there are scientists researchers that would pay the kind of money um you know that that they would need now they're only able to sell three seats on a flight so does that economic model work where you can't charge you know 50 million dollars or whatever it was you have to charge a lot higher than that so are is there any kind of um are those missions part

of, even though it's separate from your program as the commercial free flyer space stations, are the conversations around those missions and the architectures of those missions, that's something that you're able to talk with NASA or even Axiom about, or is that something that you have to watch from the outside, just like the rest of us? We have not had conversations with Axiom, but NASA has talked to us about it at a very high level and that they indicated that there was lessons learned. Anytime you do something for the first time, you fly a private astronaut mission to the ISS, there's going to be lessons learned. That's everything we do in space. The first time you do it, you learn a lot. Second time, you're much more efficient at it, and then eventually you get fantastic

at it after you do it a few times. So it's all pretty standard and no surprises that they did learn lessons on a first private astronaut mission. So they did say they were going to share some of those lessons learned over time, but they were just working with Axiom to try to figure out what information they can and cannot share. You know, they've got to be fair to Axiom since they're the ones who put all that together and paid for it, so to speak. But, yeah, it is part of our business model. Probably not the first stage when we're only having no more than four astronauts up there,

but when we get to a point where we can have up to eight astronauts, we envision exactly what you said, private astronaut missions. You know, there's four folks living there permanently. I'll call them, you know, the professional astronauts, so to speak. But then there's four people going up and down for various lengths of time. And that could be a bunch of researchers. It could be tourists just looking out the window. It could be whatever we want it to be or whatever the market wants it to be. So we have to know. We have to figure out how to do that.

That's for sure. The last thing I want to talk about is just a bit of the policy side of all this because it's certainly a huge bit of the feasibility of these programs as they exist now, the realistic nature of the environment that they're operating in. Commercial Leo got its full funding for the current fiscal year, which is the first time it got substantial funding from Congress. NASA's asking for a pretty big increase next year. It certainly looks like they're going to get that increase based on some of the stuff that's starting to come out.

There's the volatility in the ISS that you mentioned with regards to the war, but also the hardware. There's been some hardware failures in the last couple of years that are concerning, to say the least. So how do you navigate that political environment? Are there particular areas of it that you're paying attention to or anyone that you're talking to on the policy side to get a read on what the roadmap looks like? Is it just your own intuition? How do you navigate that? Yeah, great question. So, I mean, you mentioned all the budget and the problems that the ISS has been having recently in terms of keeping the Russians as part of it and some of the failures that have been going on. So we all understand that ISS is a fantastic vehicle and probably will be up there for many,

many more years. But there's no guarantee the Russians will be there. There's no guarantee of what's really going to happen with it. So again, that's why we're trying to position ourselves to get up there as quick as possible. So budget is one thing, right? Budget is, you know, and I think because of all those things, that actually is a good thing for the commercial space station, because that shows the politicians, they need to get serious about replacing the International Space Station now, so they're there in time. So I like to think that they're all going to make the right decisions and eventually NASA is going to be able to have more than one choice on commercial space stations in the year 2028-ish. But the other part of your question, I think what you're asking is, yeah, what are all the policies?

What are all the rules and regulations for putting up a commercial space stations? How do we certify a space station? NASA doesn't want to be a regulating agency, they told us. So do we have to go to the FAA to get permission to fly? What kind of indemnity and insurance and regulations do we have to follow? Certifications? That is a big, big unknown right now. And NASA recognizes that. So NASA's working that. We are working that. We're talking to NASA. NASA's including the international partners. And so that's a huge issue that has to be figured out over the next two, I'd say two years, or if not less. We have to figure out because you can't put together a business case, for example. If NASA says, hey, you're going to be liable for everything that happens up there and it's going to affect, you know, it's going to cost you this much to do these different things to get certified, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Then that affects your business case. So you need to know that. So when you're going into building this thing, you know what you're up against. Yeah, the other aspect there is, you know how long the iss has authorization to the we just extended it to 2030 and you know i think if we're all being realistic space uh thinkers you know aiming for 2028 for a space station to be up there wouldn't be shocker if it was 2030 by the time it flew and so that that's not an alarming overlap right but if hypothetically the isis was just extended to like 2040 at some point it becomes an issue for companies like

yourself to um you'd be competing against a gigantic space station um so that that's just something that i'm i'm unclear exactly how it shakes out it might maybe it's the as they see more momentum from north of grumman and the others building these space stations it starts to be more realistic that the iss authorization date you know doesn't just keep getting pushed out and out but do you feel like there is you know we're far away from it at this point so it's probably not worth worrying about too much but do you feel like there is at some point um there comes a time when you all have to have a realistic conversation with nasa that's like you know if we're doing this, we got to make the switch at some point. I just don't know how you handle that and what kind of influence you have on that whole process.

Yes, absolutely. So, you know, NASA is a big organization. And this is absolutely something I'm already thinking about. And I've told NASA this and that. NASA is a big organization. Some folks will never want to see the ISS go away. They'll want to see the ISS go away. They'll want to see the ISS go and go and go and go on forever.

And you're exactly right. My concern is for these commercial companies, we put up a commercial space station, say it gets there in 2029, pick a date, and the ISS is still up there. And you hear the ISS program say things like, look, we're not going to start winding down in 2028. We're going to go full speed all the way till the end. Okay, so can NASA afford to be buying space on a commercial space station still while the ISS is running 100% operations? So there absolutely has to be a serious conversation of how that transition from the ISS to the commercial space station happens to make sure that NASA has the budget to support these commercial space stations as well as operate the ISS. Now, it may be too early to have that. Like you said, maybe it's when we start cutting metal

and we got a more firm launch date and what the capabilities are and things like that. But there has to be a point where we have that conversation and NASA gives capabilities are and things like that. But there has to be a point where we have that conversation and NASA gives us some hard facts about that. My last question is kind of off the wall. It wasn't even in my notes. I just realized I should, I feel like I should ask a question from this angle, but you were an astronaut for quite a long time. I'm sure you still have a lot of friends in the astronaut office have you thought at all about how the astronaut office is viewing this program and specifically around when the ISS isn't the program of record anymore

when that day comes how the astronauts feel about these missions where you would be flying up to some commercial space station, there could be multiple in orbit there could be just one it's going to flip the relationship they have with the vehicle they're flying on in in an interesting way where it's not like you know not that they own the iss in any you know more substantial way than i do because as a taxpayer but it does feel more ownership over the iss today probably than they would when they're flying to a commercial space station that you and your team has put up so i don't know if you've talked to anyone within the astronaut office about how

that feels or or do you have any thoughts on how that might go as someone that was in that boat you know a while ago right now that's a great question no i haven't i haven't talked to anybody about it i really haven't thought about it but i guess the way i see it is if i if you know if i was still in the astronaut office the way I would see it is it depends. Now, if NASA is saying, hey, we're going to leave low Earth orbit and we're just going to continue to have a couple of astronauts up there doing some science, but the majority of our missions and the majority of our astronauts are going to be heading towards the moon, working in the gateway, working on the lunar surface, maybe Mars transit, etc., etc. As an astronaut, I would say, fantastic. That's what we want to do, right?

We want to go do missions. Now, there's some astronauts who are in it to go do science in zero-g or in low-Earth orbit, a lot of them, but I'm sure there are some who that's very interesting for them. So I think the astronaut office, you know, this is my own personal feeling, but as an astronaut, I would think of it as a great thing because I would look at these commercial space stations as more as like training facilities or a place to go while you're waiting for your mission to the moon. You know, go up there, get some experience, participate in the science and research that's going on, help maintain these space stations, do whatever it is we're going to do with them. But then eventually, you know, you get your chance to go cislunar. Because, you know, a lot of mission, a lot of folks are not going to be able to go land on the moon,

especially in the early days. It's going to be a very select few. So you're looking for other ways for astronauts to get experience in space. So these commercial space stations are certainly a great way to do that, to get your astronauts experience and to test out hardware that you're going to use on the moon and other things like that. It's kind of like, think of it like now as what some of these suborbital flights that NASA might start flying astronauts on.

You may read in the news that they might start utilizing some of these, maybe the Blue Origin or the others. You know, it's not, it's not the ultimate destination for an astronaut, but it's certainly a good thing to do while you're preparing for your ultimate destination. I think eventually that's how we'll look at Leo for professional astronauts.

It's a training ground. Have you, this is total sidebar before we leave, but have you watched for all mankind, the Apple TV show? I have seen not all of it, but yeah, I've seen much of it.

I think there was a scene in the first season where, uh, the main character gets reassigned to Apollo applications and he's all angry. He's like, might as well have a desk in Siberia. I hope it's less contentious than that because, uh,

just thought as like a space nerd, that little bit of the show was just hilarious in an alternate, uh, alternate universe. But that's how astronauts think. Yeah, exactly. All right, Rick, that is all.

I'm going to let you get back to your day. But thank you so much for doing this. It was awesome to chat with you for this long. And I feel like it was a really good conversation around the commercial space station. And let us know when it's finally renamed Rick's World, if you will. Yeah. Hey, Anthony, I'm working on that. I appreciate it.

And I look forward to listening to your podcast thanks thanks again to rick for coming on the show it's certainly awesome to talk to somebody uh with such a awesome career and uh talk about what they're doing uh after being an astronaut because they always find their way into interesting projects and uh so anyway that was some really cool insight into the commercial space station that north of Grumman is working on. We've got a couple years to go before we see exactly how all this will shake out from the NASA side of things, what they'll select, what kind of architectures they'll select, what kind of funding they've got. But now we've completed the cycle of at least talking to someone from every one of these teams, and we'll track their progress and I'm sure

have some or all of them back on in the near future as they work on their concepts. But before we get out of here for today, I just want to say thank you to everyone out there who makes Main Engine Cutoff possible. There are 849 of you supporting the show every single month, and I'm so thankful for your support, including the support of 42 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, the Everett Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, the Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew Harrison, Benjamin, SmallSparks, Space Systems, and seven anonymous executive producers. anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for the support. If you want to help join that crew, and if you want Miko headlines in your life, that is an entire other podcast I do every single week. I put out an episode running through all the headlines of the week, give you my thoughts on the stories that are going on, keep you up to date on things that you might have missed in the

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