Main Engine Cut Off - T+225: Astrogation with Space Exploration Engineering

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Mike Loucks and John Carrico of Space Exploration Engineering join me to talk about astrogation, mission planning, missions they’ve worked on, how they interact with teams of all types, and everything else they do at SEE.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 811 other supporters.TopicsSpace Exploration EngineeringSpace Exploration Engineering (@SEE_Aerospace) / TwitterMike Loucks (@Astrogator_Mike) / TwitterAstrogator John (@AstrogatorJohn) / TwitterRocket Lab’s CAPSTONE injection profile comes from SEE’s broad experience in cislunar space | The Astrogator's GuildThe 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 Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and we've got a very, very fun podcast today talking with Mike Lauchs, who is the CEO, and John Carrico, who is the CTO of Space Exploration Engineering. They do all sorts of interesting work, a lot around the trajectory design and mission planning in cooperation with a bunch of different mission teams and companies around the world. They've flown a lot of things to and by the moon or out near the moon,

a lot of very interesting trajectories that they've worked on. Specifically, they worked on the Capstone mission on the Rocket Lab photon side of the trajectory planning. The day that we're recording this, just a couple hours from now, they have a hand in the mission that's heading to the moon from or a South Korean mission. It's on top of Falcon 9. But that's the Korean Pathfinder lunar orbiter, and a bunch of historical ones as well, which I'm sure we will talk about. So I'm really interested to talk with them, especially in this day and age where we are looking at upcoming missions to the moon as

part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, to talk to them about how to get to the moon effectively, how a team like SCE works with mission teams and other companies in the industry, why that kind of niche exists, and to dive into some of the nerdy details of different trajectories to get to the moon. Because there's a lot of ways to get to the moon these days with all the commercial launches available. And trying to figure out which is the best one for your mission is a really interesting problem to solve and something that they do a lot of writing and thinking about and coaching on. So going to be a very cool conversation with them. without further ado let's give them a call all right

we are here with john and mike from space exploration engineering i should have also i probably wouldn't have said this in the intro because i would forget about it when i go to do the intro uh everyone here is the astrogators that is see in the executive producer segment and this is them they were talking to them right now so but they did not pay to be on the show here we just were chatting a lot over the past several months and uh turns out y'all are up to some really interesting stuff uh right now so um let's start so everyone has context uh just go through who you two are what you do at SEE and uh and then we'll get into the company and some more specific missions. So Mike, why don't

you start us off? Sure. Yeah, SCE was originally a company that I founded back in 1995 and it was me and another guy, a gentleman named Brent Hellickson, and we were Orbital Sciences employees in Boulder, Colorado. And Boulder OSC had an office out there, and they were working on OrbCom and a bunch of other things. It was kind of a, they bought a company out there, and they had an office that was working on a bunch of different projects. The main office, of course, was in Dulles on the East Coast, and they had made some acquisitions and stuff, and they were moving things around.

They decided to close the Boulder office, and when they did that, Brent and I were in the middle of working on a program that was called C-ST at the time or Orbu2 and so we just hired back as consultants to finish that and we formed a company to do it and it was instant business because they laid us off and closed that office and so we just said, oh, we're going to form a company

and hey, you've got these desks and computers and all these things you've got nothing to do with, maybe you should just give us some of those. So we just made a laundry list of stuff, and I thought, well, we'll just ask and see if they can say no. But they didn't. They said, yeah, take it. So we took a bunch of stuff and got filing cabinets and desks and all this stuff. Things that were useful in 1995. I mean, we had brand-new computers, actually, at the time, and they were like 486s or something.

No, they were Pentiums. The Pentiums had just come out, and so they were brand new, and then we had desks and filing cabinets and software and all this. So we just asked for it, and they gave us the stuff because they were going to go stick it in a warehouse somewhere if we didn't take it. And so we started working. I had met John a couple years before that when I was in graduate school at the University of Colorado. And he was out at Goddard, and I'll let him fill that in later. But I had met him. He'd come out to see you and had demoed some software and stuff for us with some folks from Goddard Space Flight Center. So I knew John from

there. As we started doing work in 95 as se later on um i i ran into john again when he was at uh at agi analytical graphics incorporated that was in where the heck we were where's the extant at the time john not in my hood yeah yeah general vicinity but um it was malvern malvern and extant yeah yeah we're getting real local on that's right that's right and so i i ran into agi out there because because I had some of my own orbital mechanics code and stuff that I was using that we used on C-Star. But AGI had graphics and other things, and they were better programmers than we were. And so I kind of came across them and started working with them. Got introduced to Paul Graziani, the CEO at the time, who just retired,

was it, I think, last year, or, but, you know, got working with them, ran into John there, and started working, and our company just kind of went along, you know, over time, Brent got out of the business in 2002, and I moved from Colorado, where I was, up to Washington State, and still continued to work with John when he was at AGI. And then eventually John left, you know, and I see at that point was just me. John left AGI in 2006, I believe, and went to work for a company called Applied Defense Solutions, ADS out in Maryland. And I continued to work with him there. And we started working together on projects. You know, I had a bunch of different other things that I did, but, you know, I started working with John specifically on IBEX in 2006.

And IBEX was an interstellar boundary explorer that is still alive and functioning and kicking and all that in a large orbit. What is it, John? Is it eight days? Yeah, three to one lunar resident orbit. Yeah, three to one lunar resident orbit. days yeah three to one lunar resident orbit yeah yeah yeah three to one lunar resident orbit so john and i worked on that together with actually with lisa polycastry and several other folks that are now within our company but um so i started working with lisa and john on that lisa also was um was former agi and at ads at the time and then you know when we when ibex flew right after that we got involved in the laddie project which was a lunar orbiter out of NASA Ames that launched in 2013.

But we started working that right as IBEX was flying, the initial stages of that mission went on. And so we had a team of people at Ames that flew that mission. And a lot of those folks are actually in SCE right now. They kind of went to different places and went to ADS and some other folks went to Google and came back. And there was a bunch of that. But we were all kind of working together on different projects um and uh and then in uh we kept talking about wanting to work together as a in one company but uh that didn't really start happening until 2016 or 2017 I started using them as John and Lisa as consultants to SCE,

and then we eventually decided, hey, let's just reincorporate the company and have the four of us, John, myself, Lisa, and Lisa Hawkins, form the company in, I think, 2018. And then from there we've hired a bunch of people, and there's 16 of us now. But we do a lot of different things. We're orbit mechanics and navigation folks. We've been involved in a lot of different things. We're orbit mechanics and navigation folks. We've been involved in a bunch of different missions and have any number of things working, all going on at the same time.

But I met John in 92. I think we decided I met you before I met my wife, but it's close. Right. So John took longer to convince? Is that what happened? No, no, no. I started working with him right away. I met my wife in August of 92, and I think I met John in like February or something of the same year.

Yeah, I was working as a contractor at NASA Goddard, and I was in the flight dynamics group. But one of the things I was in charge of was getting the trajectory design software off of these things called mainframes. You may have heard about in history, but I was like one. So yeah, reporting reported a lot of the software to the PC. And then, um, and I met Mike when,

uh, um, some flight dynamics folks at NASA Goddard got invited to go present at CU. So I, Mike actually helped. I have a fax where he's helping us find a hotel and everything. So that was the beginning of our relationship. But then I was in charge of this program called Swing By,

which we used my first mission operationally was the Clementine mission to the moon. So I was also in charge of the software, but also worked on the flight dynamics for that. And then we commercialized that. I was with a company called Computer Sciences Corporation. We commercialized that. We eventually sold that to Analytical Graphics, and then I got sold to Analytical Graphics as well. And we renamed it Astrogator. Did they trade you for a couple of draft picks or something?

Yes, they did. Yeah, a little seven-town pick. And then Mike and I, as Mike mentioned, we started working together on all these different things. And so we,

you know, we do trajectory design and maneuver planning and orbit determination. And so we've been doing that forever on all these missions on LCROSS

and LADEE, like Mike mentioned, IBEX. And when we finally reformed the company, we started supporting South Korea, the Korean Aerospace Research Institute, the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, which is going up as we talk, going up today.

So on August 4th. So that's very exciting. And we work with Space IL on the Bearsheet mission. We help them with operations. And kind of our business model is to help other people learn how to fly satellites. That's right. You know, we like to find people that want to fly something. They hire some people to be flight dynamics people, whether they know how to do it or not.

And then we train them how to do that. And then you always need extra people in operations. So we do search support. So one of the most recent ones we just got back from was doing the photon part of the capstone mission for Rocket Lab. So we can talk more about that. But Mike and I and Ryan LeBlanc were down in New Zealand and Elisa Hawkins was remote back here in the United States.

And that was very exciting. And then we pushed Capstone off on a translunar injection to their weak stability boundary ballistic lunar transfer trajectory. So that was really, really cool. And KPL is about to go on the same thing. Different reasons why they're both using the BLT, but they're both using it. And interesting histories behind those things. But, yeah, that's right. I mean, the Rocket Lab is sort of a really good example of how we work with our customers.

Rather than, you know, going in and being in charge of the flight dynamics, their guys, their GNC team down in Auckland was in charge. And we trained those folks and got them up to speed of how we did things and we work with AGI a lot still so AGI software was involved and brought in and we we showed them how we would do this kind of a mission how we'd set it up in the software and that kind of thing and then their guys were in charge we and we we filled in as part of that team so there was a a team of six flight dynamics folks down there, and we were part of that team, and then we had support back in the U.S. as well with people that weren't on site.

And the same thing is happening now with KPLO. Their folks are flying it, and these folks are great friends of ours. We've been working with for six or seven years now. They're in charge, and they have their own software that's kind of wrapped around the SDK and ODK products, their flight dynamics software. But we have two folks out there now that are part of that team. Craig Nickel and Tiffany Finley are out there supporting them. And then when they get closer to the moon, two more of our folks will go out in December and be there when they do LOI to support them and make sure that if any contingencies

would happen, that we're there to help them. But I want to dig into this for a little bit because i think it is from an outside perspective it's it's um maybe surprising to know that there's uh you know if you look at like what a space mission needs trajectory is pretty high up in the list of importance and uh i think it for outsiders it's interesting that it's not you know people within a company that are that are doing that primary job like why why don't those roles exist to the extent that they need to within any particular organization or mission team? And why is it that there's outside experts like yourselves to come and help? And they want, I mean, the companies want to have that typically, at least our customers, you know, and that's sort of the niche market for us is the companies that we go to, or even in the case of NASA in 2013, the team at NASA Ames,

they didn't have a flight dynamics team there on site. Goddard Space Flight Center does that all the time. And JPL does that all the time. And they have standing armies, if you will, of people that are great at do all those things that are experts. And those are our friends. And we know those people. And eventually you convince them to come work. That sometimes happens. Collecting them from all these. Yeah, that does actually happen. Yeah, we have had that happen where we don't typically try to hire them directly with when we're working with the people because our customers get cranky about that.

But they do end up, you know, in the taking routes that end up with us. We have a Stephen West that's with us now that was at Ames and then went to Goddard and then left Goddard and came to work for us. But we were working with Ames. We wouldn't have tried to take him because that would have been, you know, they would have got cranky at us for that. But,

but when he left and then went to Goddard and wanted to leave, then, you know, then he talked to us on his own and that was different. But yeah. So it's just organization type, like some, some places build up this team internally and some don't yet have the

resources or maybe they're. And it's all, it's a whole spectrum of that. And, you know, if you talk about like the clips teams or or space il or cari the international folks that we've worked with you know they had folks there that have flown missions but not not deep space lunar missions and then the like at space il there was a whole group there that were really

experienced flight dynamics folks that had done a lot of geo missions and were really sharp you know gray beard folks that really knew their stuff they hadn't done geo missions and were really sharp you know gray-beard folks that really knew their stuff they hadn't done lunar missions and so we kind of came in and showed them a little bit how to do that and then they ran with it and they were they were really top notch and we you know we supported them and with with with carrie same kind of thing um you know that they had flight dynamics folks there that had done other types of missions but not lunar missions and um and the other thing is is you know you don't launch a lunar mission every day you might be launching one every couple years how many people do you need

in your company the whole time you honestly i think you need to i think you need at least two flight dynamics people when it goes to launch two people aren't going to do 24 7 ops for three weeks right and lunar missions really require that. So we do search support. You know, they're our friends. We like to do operations. So they can have two people. And when you get closer to launch, you know, we show up and, you know, hang out with them and do operations.

Yeah. And you have all that. I mean, you mentioned some of the missions that you've worked on. And I think the expertise that you bring is notable with missions like bear sheet where things didn't go as planned and you probably had some insight as to like okay this is going on maybe we should look into x y or z or maybe this you know we've seen this before we did x y so like the historical perspective that you bring having worked you mentioned clementine john that worked on was in the 90s right i feel right people forget that we sent some stuff to the moon in the 90s right I feel right people forget that we sent some stuff to

the moon in the 90s like ours is getting all the hype at that time right but that's right yep yep yeah that time was was fascinating and that was an interesting one because we were working with the neighbor research laboratory we I was on contract under NASA Goddard so we we already had kind of this whole thing where Goddard was training the folks at neighbor research lab you know so that was kind of that same pattern because wedard was training the folks at Naver Research Lab, you know, so that was kind of that same pattern because we were trying to hand that over. And finally, when we got to the moon, Naver Research Lab did take that over. And, you know, our main job was in low Earth orbit and getting them to the moon.

And then all the upfront trajectory design. But it's a really fun collaborative environment. The cool thing now is that commercial companies are doing this. So like the Frock Lab, that's a commercial company that did the TLI. So that was super exciting what the photon can do. And Beresheet was a commercial company. And now we support some of the Eclipse missions, and we've worked on HLS. And it's really fun to see that the government kind of figured out how to do this.

NASA has, as Mike mentioned, has gray beards and people tell beards as well, doing all this stuff. And now that technology is available commercially. Like I said, the software that I worked on was originally NASA Goddard software. We got the commercialization license and that's now

commercial software. It's been exciting to see. It used to take armies of folks and now it can be kind of like these lean teams. Well, the thing that you mentioned, too, about these teams not necessarily having that, I mean, that's been like a theme throughout my career, that companies will be starting up. They're like, hey, we need to have a flight dynamics group, might be a eclipse team or whatever. But I remember even back into the 90s, Jim Benson at SpaceDev, which is now Sierra Nevada. I think they were absorbed into that.

And I think Dream Chaser was actually from Jim. But he was, like, trying to do a commercial asteroid mission and, you know, really wanted to do that, pioneer kind of stuff, but, you know, couldn't quite get the funding for it. And it was like, well, I need you to come work for me. I'm like, right, but you're not flying missions yet. And so if I come work for you, I won't have anything to do most of the time. I'll be sweeping the floors or doing other things.

And I won't even be as good at what I do because one of the reasons that I'm good at what I do is because I do it all the time. And so I got different customers coming all the time asking me to do things and proposals and all this. And so you keep fluent with the software. Yeah, you're still with Atrophy by the time. Absolutely. And so that was always the dilemma. It's like, well, we want to hire you. I'm like, yeah, you're still with Atrophy by the time. Absolutely. And so that was always the dilemma. It's like, well, we want to hire you. I'm like, yeah, you don't.

I mean, you really don't because you don't need me until you actually fly stuff. Now, if you get to the point where you're flying stuff every other month, okay. Now you've got to have somebody like me. But on the Clips teams that we have, they come from different places. Some of them will already have folks there. Some of them come and bring us home and they've got nobody. And they're like, well, we've got to hire people. So we're like, okay.

So we've been through this enough times where we can tell them, well, once you hire the people, they've got to have these skill sets at the end. How are we going to get from here to there? And so we do training and coaching. We use that word a lot, and I think it's apt. I think it's a good model for what we do. Sometimes we're player coaches a little bit when we have to go in for ops, but a lot of times we're just showing them how we do stuff,

how we set things up in the software, and how the software can be used to do this and kind of teach them through all that. And Rocket Lab was a great example of that. There's a company that had flown rockets, and they had people there that were GNC folks for rockets. But what do rockets do? You launch them. It's a sequencer from the ground everything is pre-planned on

the ground nobody's commanding anything or tracking anything it just goes up and does its thing and you know and then it's done well if you got to go up into orbit and you got to take GPS data and then you got to do orbit determination with that you got to plan maneuvers and do all those things that's all different than what they've done so they're smart folks and we can teach them those things but they haven't done it. And then they can start to hire people to do those things. And we're on a phase two SBIR

where we're doing the same thing for the Space Force. We're just taking the materials that we've done, putting it in terms of an analytical framework, as it were, but giving them tools and training materials so they can teach their folks how to analyze and monitor and fly CIS lunar missions. Because it's a body of knowledge that just isn't really taught in courses yet. It's still kind of an apprentice relationship.

I had strong mentors when I was at Goddard. Mike had mentors. We learned it. We're passing it on to other folks. Right. But there's probably more people that forgot how to do that than actually do that today like the amount of right just if you look at the bulk of lunar missions in history there were more people that used to know how to do this than yeah currently exist that no yeah yeah certainly i mean obviously when the apollo missions were

for flying and stuff there was a whole you know boatload of knowledge there that uh you know that disappeared and because you know we didn't fly stuff after that but some of those there that disappeared because we didn't fly stuff after that. That software we developed at Goddard, my boss and mentor, Lem Hooper, he said he wanted to make the software he wished that he had when he was flying Apollo. And so that's, at Goddard, that's the software we built and then,

like I mentioned, commercialized and we use today. That's cool lineage, yeah. Let's talk about some of these weird trajectories, because they are pretty weird. You've got all sorts of different diagrams. I put up a blog post. I think it was a blog post, Mike, that you wrote a couple of weeks ago

after Capstone was on its way. So you mentioned that Capstone and KPLO have different reasons for using this ballistic lunar trajectory transfer. There's a whole name that John can rattle off. Can you explain what it is first? There's two different names. It used to be called the weak stability boundary. Okay.

Some people still call it that. Yeah, there's a group of people that call it the weak stability boundary. And there's a group of people at JPL that call it ballistic lunar transfer. And there's a kind of a, yeah, there's a whole history of that that we don't want to go into here, where a gentleman left JPL and used a particular set of phrasing.

JPL was cranky at him. They didn't want to use his phrasing. And so there's politics behind who uses what phrasing. So it's only a ballistic lunar transfer if it was made at JPL? Is that how it works? It's like champagne, but for trajectories? No, I mean, you know, like Jeff Parker, our great friend at Advanced Space, he was at JPL for a while. And he, you know like like jeff parker our great friend at advanced space he was at jpl for a while and he you know he likes blt and i i don't know if he came up with that phrase while he was at jpl or not but but uh he likes it because he likes the blt sandwich i was gonna say

he came up while eating lunch and that's right also because he used to be pork chop plot jpl does pork chop plots. Food-driven. But Jeff will say BLT and then there's another gentleman, Ed Bilbruno, that used to be at JPL years ago and left and he's not at all on great terms with everybody. He called it a WSB and

claimed intellectual property ownership of it and some other things. So there's a whole history of that kind of stuff that went on. So we call know, there's a whole history of that kind of stuff that went on. We call it WSD slash BLT. That's right. Yeah, and there's literature from Ed where he talks about it back in the 90s and probably earlier than that, and he talks about it being a weak stability boundary,

and I think that was his phrase. And then the other folks, you know, Jeff and those folks will use BLT. And then our folks, our friends in Korea, I think they know it as a WSB. So if we say BLT, that confuses them. So sometimes we use both things. But ballistic lunar transfer or weak stability boundary transfer are really the same thing

in the context of how we're using them here anyway. Yeah, and we've been working with Kari for a while and we've been working with them, what, Mike, since 2016 or something. Yeah, 2015. Yeah, and we've been working with Kari for a while, and we've been working with them, what, Mike, since 2016 or something. Yeah, 2015. Yeah, 2015. And, you know, they look at other transfers. They look at direct transfers and phasing loop transfers to the moon, which we're big advocates. But this transfer does save them propellant.

So it will cost them. They get a ride to orbit on a Falcon, but the amount of propellant they need to expend on their spacecraft, they can go into lunar orbit and they don't need as big of tanks. But remember, though, that what's happening is the energy is still being spent. So there's a lot of talk about VLTs and WSBs being energy efficient. The same amount of energy really is being spent. It just depends on who's doing it. So in a BLT, the rocket, the launch vehicle throws you high, and then your spacecraft

doesn't have to do that. And you save energy up there when you come back to the moon, because the solar perturbations and the rockets throwing you high has saved you that. But, you know, somebody had to spend that energy. And if you were in low earth orbit with your spacecraft and fuel and didn't have the rocket doing it for you you wouldn't do the blt well and and so and that's what's funny about capstone is we were you know supporting the photon side of capstone we're on the electron photon team right we're doing these large you know thousand meter per second maneuvers this is in no way a low energy trajectory doing, you know, six pretty decent maneuvers. Super exciting doing them almost like every 12 hours or so. And the press is saying, oh, going on a low energy trajectory.

I'm like, these are some of the biggest maneuvers we've ever planned. But then when we dropped off Capstone, you know, we did the TLI, ejected them. They did the low energy part because they were a smaller satellite. They didn't have the tanks that the photon had. So like Mike said, someone pays for the energy, but is it on the launch side or is it on your satellite side? Well, it's different these days, right? Because if you're designing your own moon mission that includes designing the payload and the rocket you would make different choices but we're not in that world today where you're buying i think you should call the photon a tug people talk about tugs all

the time well what happened this thing had capstone on it came off a rocket an electron yes it's part of the rocket but it's its own satellite it was a tug and and like you said you know there's a different ways to slice it. So in the beginning of Capstone, Advanced Space 1, the SBIR Phase 3 to build the spacecraft, and so they had to design for a small CubeSat. Well, the small CubeSat doesn't have the Delta

V to get out of low Earth orbit all the way to the Moon. So they said, hey, this is how big we are. Someone's going to put us on a BLT and our small spacecraft with the propellant it has on it can capture into the NRHO, which is actually a really nice trajectory to get into from a BLT because that doesn't take much energy to capture. You're coming in with low energy. So those two things match up nicely. But now someone on a rocket has to come and say, how are we going to put all that energy into that thing? And so in this case, you know, Photon did that and did all

that. But then when Photon was done, you know, it still had a bunch of fuel in the tank. Photon could have done a whole bunch more. You ask, well, okay, if we were designing this from scratch, is there other ways we could have solved that problem? Yeah, there are, and I don't know that they're better. They're different. But you could have imagined, you know, I could imagine with the Delta V we had, you know, could the photon have gotten to the moon and gotten to the NRHO directly without going to a BLT? Yeah, they could have. But, you know, but that's not how the history planned out.

I mean, Advanced Space had the spacecraft. They had won that and had a great design for it and the science they wanted to do. And then the RFP that went out was, hey, someone give us a ride to the BLT so we can go do it. Nobody came back and said, hey, please redesign the spacecraft and do your own thing. We worked with Rocket Lab on the proposal and are actually very excited about that trajectory. A series of phasing loops at the various perigees just keep kicking up your apogees and slowly adding energy to the orbit um and what's the easier thing to so in the context of these missions that we have you know

right now the last couple of weeks and into the next five years a lot of them are these small commercial missions that are going to be shopping around for launches is getting into that blt uh easier to shop for than going to find a launch vehicle that's going to be able to take you directly to uh lunar transform is there any differences from the the commercial you only need a ride to low earth orbit that's the thing you get the photon to low earth orbit and there's a lot more rides going to low earth orbit from there we can get to the blt but we can also go interplanetary with that. You know, you're so close to escaping the Earth-Moon system when you go on the BLT,

or the WSB as well, I should mention. That you could also, you know, Rocket Labs talked about going to Venus. This is the same trajectory we can fly to do that. Yeah, not the BLT, but I mean, just the phasing that we do up. I mean, really what we're doing from our perspective is we're just, we're raising up the orbit and hitting an outgoing asymptote, and that might go onto a BLT or it could go to Venus or Mars. And of course the energies would be different and the directions we're flying would be different, but getting on a BLT, you know, for the mission we did on Capstone, you know, what happened was Advanced Space had their spacecraft.

BLT, you know, for the mission we did on Capstone, you know, what happened was Advanced Space had their spacecraft, they did all the design for the BLTs that they wanted and gave us days and days of trajectory, you know, 40, 50 days at a time of trajectories that we can, but on each of those days, what they gave us was, you know, at this time, you hit, you know, this energy, your perigee is here, and the right ascension of the node is here. And so on each of our days, we had a target to hit. Now, if we were going to Mars, we'd have exactly the same thing. You know, when JPL does a Mars mission, they have a launch period. They have, you know, asymptote conditions on each day and each hour even, you know, that you're trying to hit. So hitting the BLT is no different than that.

There's a direction and an energy in space. You're going to do that. When you want to hit a BLT, there's trajectories to the moon where that makes sense, and depending on the size of your spacecraft and what the rocket can do. I mean, if you've got a rocket with a whole bunch of extra capacity compared to the size of your spacecraft, yeah. But, I mean, like I say, if you're starting from Earth orbit and you were going to take your spacecraft and propulsion from there and go to the moon, going to the BLT as opposed to going direct it's really it's a wash it's really

close and and then you know being as close as it is i think the blt wins out just like by percentage point or something but you spent three months in orbit getting there and that's more complicated and you got to pay people to sit around and do that and and so you know those are those there's no you know right answer i mean it's all trades at the end of the day. It all trades. And so like on the Kari mission, for example, when we started that off, you know, we thought that trajectory was going to look a lot like landing. We were going to have three and a half phase and loops and go to the moon and go into lunar orbit. But as the spacecraft design, you know, progressed, as all spacecraft designs do, it got heavier. And at some point it was too heavy to do a direct,

and the tanks were ordered, and the things were ordered, and it was too heavy. And so they're like, oh, we're on a Falcon 9. The Falcon 9, if it doesn't have the extra payload on there, actually can kick us to a BLT. That's going to save us, you know, 150 meters per second when we capture at the moon. Now we can get into the moon.

So that just kind of kicked us over the body so we could get into orbit there. And that's the other cool thing about the the blt is you can capture with a lot less ltv you don't have to do all 300 meters per second all at once you know there are blts where you can capture you could come in with a solar electric propulsion so so um it might be a wash on the front end, but on the back end, actually arriving at the moon, you're saving there. Yeah. And like you're saying, if solar electric, like you couldn't, some of these things are going to be limited by how long you need to do a burn to get into an orbit. Not necessarily the actual number, you know, meters a second number that you need available.

It's like, can I even do this with the performance I have? that you need available. It's like, can I even do this with the performance I have? And it can be, you know, when you have a spacecraft the size of what Capstone is, now you've got to go look and, you know, what propulsion systems are available because you don't have an infinite choice of vendors and infinite choices of performance. So, you know, the folks at Stellar had a system

that would work for that within the Delta B range of what they wanted to do coming in from a BLT into the NRHO. So that worked perfectly. But if you don't have you know if you if you want to come in and you need to capture it 600 meters per second there's no vendor for that well now you got to design your own system and you know all that gets into comes into play so there's there's always trades you know of what things exist and what things don't and what the vendors are and then what your spacecraft looks like and it's not a perfect old pick the great, this is the best orbit because it saves you delta beam.

The communications too, you're about, the BLT, you have to go about three times farther away than the moon and then come back. Unfortunately, there's an inverse square law in there that tends to bite the communications folks. Yeah, your dish has got to be bigger.

The dishes that change between the Earth and the moon are on the hairy on there that tends to bite the communications folks. Yeah, your dishes have got to be bigger. The dishes that change between the Earth and the Moon are on the hairy edge of... DSM, of course, can do it because they've got their big 34-meter dishes or whatever it is. But then you've got to pay for that. And then if you're using a commercial thing like SSC, they've got 13-meter dishes or things that are smaller.

And so the Moon is kind of the hairy edge of that. You get out to the 1.5 million kilometers, million kilometers starting to get tough without you know dsn size dishes so it's not impossible and those things are kind of coming along and that is as we go forward but um you know there's always hard considerations with it's everything right because you gotta buy your launch and uh so john you mentioned a couple minutes ago, like, in some cases, it's easier to get to VLT from a low Earth orbit. And to me, that makes me think of, you know, some of these lunar missions are going on rideshare flights, they're trying to get, you know, the cheapest available launch slot on a SpaceX rideshare or something. Is that both for like the lower inclination low Earth orbits and sun synchronous orbit? Is that, is there really a difference there or uh would that be an option as well i'm just thinking about like no you can you can find a two million dollar launch slot you better take it if you know the cool thing is the moon is far enough away that you can come out of pretty much any inclination at the earth and still

go into the orbit you want around the moon so it's that's kind of cool it's like but you can imagine throwing a baseball at the moon, you can throw it over the top or to the left or to the right. So a sunsink is fine, but then someone has to do this big, you know, three kilometer per second burn out of Leo. Is that the tug or is that the upper stage? All these rockets have different capabilities. It's your spacecraft.

So, yeah, I mean, if you have a small spacecraft and want to get out of Leo and go to the moon, okay, your spacecraft just got a whole lot bigger, you know, and well, and you saw pictures of, you know, capstone compared to photon. Photon was a great big thing with a bunch of tanks on it. It was all fuel and capstone, the little guy, right? So, you know, there was a whole bunch of stuff that we had to do to all bunch of energy we had to spend to get that out of there. And, you know, if you're, if you're going to do a ride share on like a sun-synchronous orbit, well, you know, you're likely not building your spacecraft big enough to do that. If you want the upper stage to do it, well, that's kind of complicated now because the upper stage has got to go up.

Let's say you're on a Falcon 9 that's putting starlinks up. Well, so it's got to go up. It's got to kick off all the starlinks, get them out of the way, and then it's got to turn and relight with you on there and put you up in a really high energy you know thing on the way to the moon and it has to have the fuel left to do that after it's kicked off the starlings and all the things it's going to do and you have to be lined up the right way and so part of the one of the things that was interesting about photon was photon could survive for you know five or six days a normal upper stage you know on the falcon nine second stage it can't survive for days.

It can be there for a couple hours and the batteries run out. It's not built as a spacecraft. So that's harder. And you won't, you know, you aren't necessarily going to get things lined up like on the Space I.L. mission. The main payload there was a Maxar spacecraft that was going to geo. And the geo transfer, you know, in order for for them to work in order for that to work for the moon the space al folks had to be able to to request a particular alignment of that orbit

and that was the first time anybody had done that and we had been trying for years all the way back google x prize things and back to blast off and that to find geosynchronous payloads that would consent to that you know, in theory they can, or the urban mechanics doesn't keep them from doing it, but there's often things about geometry and where they want to be with respect to the sun when they're firing their motors at apogee and, you know, all kinds of things

that they've historically done that they might not want to do or might not be able to support on their spacecraft. Or, you know, so that was a really, you know, a hard sell and the Space AL folks worked with Space Flight Services, Space Flight Inc. and Maxar to make that happen. But that was, you know, just logistically the planning of that and getting Maxar to okay it was an amazing achievement because that just hadn't been done. But you can do it.

I mean, the orbital mechanics allow you to do it. But, you know, someone has to want to do it. You've got to have the knowledge. The human mechanics don't necessarily. Yeah. Right. allow you to do it but you know someone has to want to do it you got to have human mechanics don't necessarily yeah right i mean especially in the case of geo satellites if these you know there's entire companies doing their financial projections on when that satellite's going to come online and that's right let's say you know oh sure we'll take you well it's going to take an extra week for you to get to your slots like no i can't do that because i'm going to miss my earnings call exactly and it can also be right you know we've been flying geospacecraft for 30

years we always do it this way. We don't really want to change that because, you know, that's one of the things you find out when you go from folks that have done geos to doing these lunar missions or whatever. They've got an exact way of doing it, and it's all just cookie cutter because it's all the same. And lunar missions are, you know, they're all different. We're not doing them often enough where we've gotten to that spot where everyone's you know where there's some kind of a good way

now yeah well is it as far off as we might think right i'm curious how you two are looking at the the clips situation at the moment there's some i just did a show recently about you know maston's having some trouble right now and there's a lot of predictable payload delays on the first couple landers going off but john i don't know if you have any insight from the 90s there when you were, let's do a moon mission again for the first time in 20 years or whatever it was at the time. This feels like a new era to some extent, but do you think there's a reason that it will go different this time and it will be a much more flourishing market than it was last time?

Well, so first of all, when I started on Clementine, that was an orbiter, right? And I've written on the CLIPS program, they had said that you had to do an orbiter before you do a lander. Because orbiters are actually simpler, but that's a big part of getting there and how to do that. The lander puts all these other constraints, and it's very specific to which landing site you're going. So the different QIPS teams actually have very different things, you know,

where they're going to put the solar panels if they're near the equator, if they're, you know, near the pole, all sorts of stuff, all these different constraints on it. But the other thing is that we now have commercial tracking. You don't need DSN, right? So we've used SSC on Bearer Sheet. We used them on IBEX. We actually had them on LADEE. We used both DSN and SSC on LADEE. So now you have a commercial ground infrastructure. The software that used to be only at the governments is now available commercially, as we mentioned. So that's a new enabling technology.

You have a whole bunch of commercial radios now. So that's coming down in price. So there's these deep space commercial radios. So everything's lining up so that it can be different. The question then is, is there enough revenue? Is the market there really to do it commercially and uh it's exciting to watch them try to to get these commercial customers in addition to the nasa because the nasa doesn't pay for the whole thing but that's the whole question is can

can we get enough um of a market is there really enough of an economic demand to keep the to keep it going you know commercial lunar payloads well and if i look back at like you know the analog is you know resupply of space station the commercial what they did with spacex and and uh and orbital and and the other folks that what's it uh kistler that started on that and didn't finish you know do they require those folks to fund you know their development with commercial things like they're requiring on the Cliffs missions? And I don't think they did. And I think there's an argument to be made, especially with the Masten thing happening recently, that maybe we kind of got a little bit ahead of ourselves here. And the other thing that I'm seeing, and this is something that I saw that really hamstrung the Google XPRIZE teams,

is that there was a thought there when the Google XPRIZE thing came out that these teams were somehow going to be able to come up with a launch. And that just didn't turn out to be true. That was just a bridge too far for all of those teams. Beresheet ended up being able to do it, but they had a funding source, a guy that had a lot of money and could afford to do that. But the other teams just absolutely couldn't get that. We had supported several of the other teams. That was just a huge, I mean, even with the Falcon 9 coming in, which was kind of at the end of that coming in and being as good as it is

and repeatable as it is and the price coming down, that was sort of at the end of the Google XPRIZE stuff. But even still, if you were thinking $60 million a pop, the teams just didn't have that. And so there was a strong argument to be made, and I would make it and have for years, that maybe the better way to go was to have funded, bought a launch, said, okay, NASA, I've just bought a Falcon 9. And, you know, in September of whatever year, you know, I'm going to put four landers on this. And, you know, if you're ready, your lander goes and we're providing the launch. And then we fund you guys to make the launch, to make the lander. And that's not how they did it.

And the teams are out trying to get their launches themselves. And for the launch vehicle folks, they, you know, only have so many rockets to sell, right? So they're trying to figure out which team is real. So it's both on both sides. It's, you know, chicken and egg of do we have enough money to raise it, and will you trust us to hold the spot? So that launch is super hard. Astrobotic has got a deal from Vulcan where they're getting a really cheap rate because they're the first to fly on Vulcan.

But they won't get that rate the second time. And then Intuitive Machines is flying on a Falcon nine, but they're trying to sell off extra capacity that they have on the launch to get their price down. And, and that's, you know, that's a challenge for them to do that. I mean, that may be the way to go, but we'll, we'll see that when they fly and if they can, if they can, you know, not lose their shirt by doing it and, you know, Mastin faced that same thing, you know that same thing. They came in and bid at whatever it was, $70 million or something. But, I mean, how do you bid at $70 million when your launch cost is $60? So, I mean, that's a real challenge.

And I think they had ideas about trying to bring in money from outside, and they all have that idea. But if that doesn't come through, you're just way in the water. As you mentioned, a big part of the success of airsheet one of the only the only google linux team you know to fly was they made a business negotiation with maxar you know that it had nothing to do with rockets or landers or anything well they got it they got a launch but they had to you know they had to negotiate that and then they also had to get their spacecraft paid for and they had ssc and they had a pot of money and um and they and they brought in um you know the the iai folks the you know the that had a long history of flying stuff in israel so that you know they had a different

setup but um the i think clips teams are kind of facing that same dilemma that you know they got to go find a ride somehow and that's a huge hurdle and then they got to build up a team from scratch and then they got to go try to find you know other people that want to go to go find a ride somehow, and that's a huge hurdle. And then they've got to build up a team from scratch, and then they've got to go try to find other people that want to go to the moon for commercial reasons, and I don't know that that's quite there yet. I'm really excited, though. Like you mentioned, Kotz, I'm really excited that NASA is looking to commercial providers rather than doing it. That part of it is, I think, real brilliant.

The question is logistics on on launch vehicles just aren't quite ubiquitous yet so well if you two ever needed to fund a launch i feel like you could do it by selling your domain name because your domain name is see.com and i feel like i don't know what domains are going for these days but i feel like you could probably get between six and eight digits for that. Cause it's a common word.com three letters. I was like, Ooh,

that's their domain name. Well, when you, when you have a chance, go on to the stock exchange and see who the symbol, who has the SCE symbol. Is it someone that you're getting emails from frequently? But we've heard from them.

And it's actually a company called sealed air Air that owns the trademark for Bubble Wrap. And they're a packaging company. But their stock symbol is S-E-E, and I think they'd like to have our domain. Apple has that show. There's a lot of people with a lot of cash out there. Exactly. We could rebrand our swag. I'll tell you what.

The amount of money that you'd get for it, you could rebrand all your swag. No problem. I'll tell you what, there's other stories behind this. We got that domain for $50.95, and I just told my buddy Tom Svitek, who was at Orbit all the time, and he walked across the street and just bought it, and it was nothing. We didn't think about that at the time, because we had bought Coke.com or whatever, too, right? But no, we got it. We have had offers on it. It's actually, the domain has actually been stolen from me twice by hackers and whatever. And I've had to get it back and it was successful both times.

But yeah, it's a story for another day. That sounds amazing. Well, thank you both so much. Is there anything else that you would, I mentioned I'll put in the show notes a link. You've got some blog posts that are really awesome reads with a lot of visualizations of these orbits as well and different reference frames. Very helpful if you're listening to us talk about all these orbits and you're like, I don't understand what's going on. Visualizations will help immensely. So I'll put that on there.

Is there anything else that people should check out and follow along? Yeah, I'd say go to our website. If people have questions or whatever, you know, send us questions. There's an info at sce.com, information at sce.com on there. If you send that, we'll get it. I'm happy to talk to people. You know, one of the things I like to do and I've been successful doing for several people now is people will call me up and say, hey, you know, how do I get a job or how do I get into the business? And, you know, we have a decent network of people. So if I can help people get jobs or kind of give them advice on stuff, I'd like to do that.

It's, you know, I had a lot of that help me when we all did, you know, people that mentored us and helped us get into the business. So if we can do that, you know, anybody, you know, has ideas or wants to brainstorm with us, you know, get a hold of me and we'll, you know, and I'll chat with you. So I'm never afraid to do that. And that's actually quite rewarding. So, you know, we, we do coaching and training and stuff for our, for our customers, but you know, we'll, we try to help people out as well that are trying to get into the business.

So that's a, it's a big point of emphasis. Yeah. We've been in way too many meetings where we say, we wished we had like a 10 minute phone call with you two years ago. Right. Yeah, because there's a lot of issues. Awesome. Thank you both for hanging out. This has been amazing. You bet. Real fun. Thanks, Anthony.

Thanks again to Mike and John for coming on the show. It was an awesome conversation. We got pretty nerdy. So as I mentioned when talking with them, there's a blog post that talks about the trajectory that Capstone and Photon took as part of their launch and trajectory towards the moon. You should definitely read it because there's a lot of good diagrams in there as well of exactly what kind of phasing orbits they're talking about, the transfer orbits they're talking about. I think it's really helpful to get your head around what's going on with that kind of mission. And it'll make a lot of that click in your brain if it's not something that's clicking as we're describing it through words alone. So definitely check that out. That's in the show notes over at mainenginecutoff.com. You can get there. And other than that, thank you so much to everyone out there who supports Main Engine

Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 853 of you supporting this show every single month. I'm so thankful for that. And there are 42 executive producers of this podcast. Thanks to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, David Ashnot, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Matt, the Astrogators at SCE, there they are. Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, SmallSpark Space Systems, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all once again. If you want to help join that crew, help make this

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