Main Engine Cut Off - T+232: A Visit to Astrobotic

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Last week, I took a visit to Pittsburgh to visit Astrobotic, who is working on a few different landers and rovers destined for the Moon. I got to sit down with several team members for a series of conversations about what they’re working on, how things are going, and how the company is approaching the next few years in the industry.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 43 executive producers—Simon, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian, Lars from Agile Space, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, SmallSpark Space Systems, Tyler, nomadic, and seven anonymous—and 837 other supporters.TopicsPittsburgh Aerospace Company | Astrobotic TechnologyMoon Manifest | Astrobotic TechnologyAstrobotic Unveils Peregrine Lunar Lander Flight Model | Astrobotic TechnologyAnnouncing LunaGrid, a Commercial Power Service for the Moon | Astrobotic TechnologyCubeRover Funded for Survive the Lunar Night Mission | Astrobotic TechnologyAstrobotic’s Wireless Charging System for the Moon Can Survive Lunar Night | Astrobotic TechnologyAstrobotic Acquires Masten Space Systems | Astrobotic TechnologyT+88: CubeRover, Michael Provenzano and Andrew Horchler - Main Engine Cut OffT+166: Laura Klicker and Daniel Gillies, Astrobotic - Main Engine Cut OffThe 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 ULA

Hello and welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo and as you can tell by clicking this episode and the duration on there, we've got quite an episode today. I took a visit to Pittsburgh last week to visit Astrobotic, who is one of the companies working on lunar landers for, as part of NASA's commercial lunar payload services program, to land small landers on the moon. They have a task order for Peregrine Mission 1, which is due to launch in a few months, as we'll talk about. And they also have a task order to launch their Griffiniffin lander which will be carrying viper to the lunar surface that is the big rover that nasa is working on to

investigate uh volatiles on the south pole of the moon uh so they've got a couple there they also recently just purchased uh mastin aero mastin space i guess would be the technical name after they went into bankruptcy they purchased them for $4.5 million, which is interesting. We don't talk about it too much because it doesn't sound like they're quite ready to talk about it yet. But we do have a whole host of interviews today

with different team members. We talked to the mission manager, some project managers across the organization, Olivia, who works on their communications side of things. We also talked to the executive director of the Moonshot Museum which is a new museum that's opening up in the front of the building at Astrobotic separate entity as you'll hear about so quite a diverse set of interviews that gives us a good overview

of what Astrobotic's working on, digs into the current status of their projects and overall I just really enjoyed being there talking to all these people and hearing about the exciting work that they're doing. So, before we listen to those, I just want to give you some quick thoughts on my visit in general to Astrobotic. And to preface all this, you know, I want to talk about the reason that I like to take this trip. Number one, they're in Pittsburgh. It's a five-hour drive from me. It's, you know, not that far away. I really wanted to go hang out and see what's going on in the Pennsylvania space scene. And I also, you know, obviously like to see hardware that's going to go to the moon pretty soon. But one of the biggest things that I like

about doing these kind of visits is, we talked about this on Off Nominal recently, if you listened to Off Nominal number 79, I'll have a link in the show notes, you can hear Jake and I discuss this, but I like to go in and do a vibe check. You know, what are the people like at work at these companies? Are they in good spirits? Are they cranky about stuff? Do they look happy and engaged and excited about their work? How does it feel to be there? Are there people actively working on all sorts of different projects or does it feel kind of like you're going into the Truman Show? And, you know, I don't know if you've ever watched the Truman Show, but, you know, the whole town's on rails and the same lady walks by every morning with the flowers and he waves,

you know, when he's in his driveway. Sometimes you can go into these tours and feel like that a little bit, or you can go on these tours and there's not that many people doing things in the office. So I do like to get the sense for what it's like at these companies to extrapolate from that how the work is going for them. And I will say, Astrobotic, the vibes were probably the best of any space company I've visited, space company or organization that I've visited. Everyone was really in good spirits, feeling good about their work. They seem engaged by what they're working on. There was a ton of active work going on. There's people in the high bay working on the payloads and different parts of the lander. There were people running mission sims and mission control. Tons of people, you know,

working on future missions, rovers. There was tons of wheels and rovers around the office. There was a cube rover undergoing vibration testing while we were there that we were talking to some of the people working on that. There's just a lot of activity at Astrobotic, and they do have a ton of different projects as I hear about, so I think that's a really good sign that there is so much activity in all these different departments. But overall, I just got a really good feeling from the team there, and that's hard to quantify, right? It doesn't say what their particular timeline for the mission is, or are they under or over budget. And that kind of stuff is all obviously very important and is the stuff that's typically reported about. But there's just a sense that you

can get from what it feels like at the company that I find is intrinsically important, even if you can't quantify it as much as the other stuff that you can write down and keep track of over time of where their schedule's at. The other aspect of a space company visit that I like to key off of is how much excess hardware is around, right? Is there a ton of hardware that they've either been doing testing with or they tried a couple different things with or they've produced so many different iterations of a particular component that they've run out of space to store stuff, and it's just piled in corners everywhere? Or is it a very neat and tidy office that looks like any other office with just desks and computers, not a lot of hardware around,

and everything is just still being envisioned or being worked on at the design phase? Astrobotic was very firmly in the, I'm stepping over so much test hardware that it's like, I need to keep looking down on my feet at all times to make sure I don't trip over Rover wheels or structural test articles or cabling. Like there was stuff everywhere. And I, the first sense that I got of this was at NanoRacks when I visited there, oh, four or five years ago at this point, there was just hardware everywhere in the NanoRacks office and uh i thought when i first saw that i was like wow this is like you know there's to some extent not that well kept but

it's also just speaks to the fact that they are swimming in hardware in some cases the nanoracks case stuff that had been to space or uh been on a launch like the antares launch that that blew up and they got some of the hardware back there was just stuff everywhere because they had nowhere left to put it and astrobotic was very much like that. There was, you know, if you've seen images of the test hardware they've done for structural test articles or the tests of the ramp that they're building for the Griffin Lander that Viper would roll off of, all this stuff was still around, piled in corners. You know, there was so many, you'll hear me say this in one of the interviews, but there were just Rover wheels everywhere, like on people's desks, under their desks, in the hallways, in the labs

that we were looking into, in some of the areas where they're still creating the hardware. There were just like different sizes and shapes of Rover wheels everywhere in this office. I cannot express enough how many wheels I saw. I should have kept count, but I would have lost count because there was that many. And that is important to note, I think, because it speaks to the iteration speed that is happening within a company. You go to these companies that don't have that going on, and you know that they're spending a lot of time not in physical space. And when you're working on hardware, it's very important to be working in physical space. So I always key off of that as a really good sign that, no, it's, I should mention, it's, you got to be careful, right? Because it could mean that they have tried so many things because so many things didn't work

and they've never arrived at an actual useful output of that experimentation. So there is some, you know, you got to really sense whether this is a good version of so much hardware that they don't have anywhere to put it, or if it's a bad version of that. I did get the sense, obviously seeing that there's flight hardware in the clean room. Uh, the rover that I saw going under vibration test was something that does not yet have a flight slated for it, but it is flight hardware. Um, so the fact that they are getting to flight hardware stage obviously is good that they've, you know, done a lot of testing on those parts, and they are making their way to a legitimate spacecraft. So, you know, using some of that information, it feels like a good sign. Now, Peregrine Mission 1 itself,

here's where we'll get into this. The key thing, the actual chassis of the vehicle, the tanks and the main structure was undergoing pressure testing the day that I was there. I saw a tweet this morning that it is now back in the facility, But all the other stuff was at the facility, right? The payloads, the payload decks, the landing legs were there. They were beautiful looking. They were gorgeous looking landing legs. The engines, this is the one key thing here. I was always saying, I'm going to go in, I'm going to count rocket engines and figure out exactly how many are there or are not there. From their beautiful boardroom conference room that splits mission control on one side and the high bay on the other, just through the windows, you know, so close that I could reach them if I could stick my arm through a piece of glass, were six attitude

control engines that are going to go on Peregrine for mission one. There should be 12. There's only six in the facility, and there are zero of five main engines there. The main engines, as far as I'm aware, are still undergoing testing out at White Sands. Those engines themselves, the main engines, are a very strange lineage that I'm not quite sure I have a full detail on yet. I've heard from a couple of different sources

on the weird way that those main engines found their way to Peregrine. It's part of a NASA program that is contracting with Dynetics, but Astrobotics getting them through a Frontier contract who's working with NASA. It's a weird lineage that I can't quite map out like how it even got to that point. But those none of the five engines are in Astrobotics factory yet. They say they're going to get them sequentially. We'll see when the first one starts arriving. When it does, I'm sure they're going to make some noise about it because when companies have hardware, they talk about it.

That is a key thing that you need to track is like, are you showing me real hardware or not? When you have it, you tweet about it. ULA is tweeting about they've got their first BE-4 in the factory indicator. The other one's on the test stand. You talk about real flight hardware when you have it. So, you know, that's the key thing to track for astrobotics Peregrine mission one is how are those main engines coming along the rest of the attitude control engines?

I'm not sure where they are, but they've got half of those and none of the main engines. So up until recently, ULA put out some statements this past week that, um, they're officially slipping the schedule into 2023. Not a shocker. They're just getting BE-4 engines now. So their statement did pin it on Astrobotic, like, oh, well, their payload's not ready. So they requested to go into 2023. It would be tight for us to still hit December considering the engine delay. And it was like, okay, stop being like that. But that's the case with this mission. Everyone's playing scheduled chicken with each other. Astrobotic'srobotics late ULA is late and they're just hoping not to be the latest one. Um, so that's where they find themselves. Where do they feel

like they're going to land out? Right. You'll hear exactly what the process is. They won't talk about specific timelines. They won't talk about specific engine dates or details. Uh, they're being very protective about that stuff. I kind of didn't think I was going to get an answer. It's a bummer that they can't talk more freely about it but you know i get that there's all these different constraints on generally i think there's a secrecy problem in the space industry that people think things are secret and they shouldn't be uh in my eye like it's it's not a big deal astrobotic's not a public company maybe they're going to be someday who knows um they're not a public company they don't have to be beholden to this kind of stuff um it's not embarrassing if space companies are late on things because uh like everyone is so it

shouldn't be an embarrassing thing that you missed a deadline like that's not a big deal um i just wish people would put it more on front street um so anyway um i feel my, my vibe is that May feels like a good month for Vulcan and Astrobotic to be in a good spot to launch the first mission. Now, the tricky spot for Astrobotic is that they need Peregrine to be ready before the vehicle is. If Vulcan is ready to fly with two BE-4s all tested, ready to go, ULA is going to fly that rocket because they have other constraints, right? They have Space Force missions, they have certification they need to get through for Space Force missions. They have NASA missions coming up in the future that they want to bid for, for science missions, for, you know, all these different commercial missions that they obviously have a bunch wrapped up with Amazon already. But there's other ones that they want

to bid for and they need to be flying for that. So if they're ready and Astrobotic needs another six months, ULA is going to fly. If Astrobotic needs another three months, ULA is probably going to fly. If Astrobotic needs another month, ULA may wait for them, right? That's the balance they have to figure out is like, you know, if they have to really not miss that boat. Because I don't know what the arrangement is. Nobody really will tell anyone what the arrangement is about this first mission.

There's been speculation that Astrobotic getting it for free as part of the first flight of Vulcan. I'm sure they're paying something. No one really talked about that in any regard. Now, what would Astrobotic do if they missed the boat? Well, they did just buy Mastin, who has a flight credit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 that was valued at $14.5 million. Mastin is being bought by Astrobotic for $4.5 million total, and that includes everything, including that flight credit. future on a Falcon 9 if they needed to, if they lose out on the Vulcan Centaur thing. But my general vibe is they're not going to be ready for a couple of months, but I don't think they're

going to be later than ULA is. Just my vibe by everything I'm picking up, what I'm looking at in the factory there, what I'm looking at from the ULA side. I don't think Astrobotic's going to miss Vulcan, but I have been historically and catastrophically wrong about ULA's launch vehicle timing and commercial sales aspect in the past, as many of you know, so I am willing to go down in flames on that one. But May, I'm putting May 2023 as the target for Astrobotic flying Peregrine on Vulcan from ULA, and you can quote me on that in the future. So anyway, thanks again to Astrobotic for having me out to headquarters. Beautiful, beautiful headquarters. If you ever get a chance to visit Moonshot Museum or just, you know, drive by, it's really pretty spot in Pittsburgh and

it's close to all the good stuff. So thanks again to the team there for having me out. Specifically, thanks to Olivia, Haley, Tori for hanging out with me, showing me around, making me feel very welcome. It's as a Pennsylvanian, I'm always enjoying driving out to the other half of the state and seeing what's going on in the world of space in Pennsylvania. So very, very cool day. I'm excited for you all to hear the conversations. And before we get into that, I do want to say thank you to all of you who made it possible for me to do this kind of trip. I am a fully listener-supported operation here. I don't have, you know, corporate travel budgets or anything. This is all because of the support that you all give me. So if you like what you're hearing,

if you like me doing these kind of visits, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. That is the way that I do these kind of things. And it's thanks to the 880 of you supporting every single month. I'm so thankful for your support for allowing me to do this as a full-time gig. It is just a really special thing in a media environment like today's day and age. So thank you all so much. And that includes 43 executive producers who made this episode of Main Engine Cutoff possible. Thanks to Simon, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim, Dodd, David Ashtonotonot, Frank, Julian, Lars from Agile Space. Boy, I'm getting bad at this, huh? Matt, The Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Haymonth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, Harrison, Benjamin, Small

Sparks Space Systems, Tyler, Nomadic, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support, as always, for making trips like this possible. If you want to join that crew, get Miko headlines in your life. I do an entire other podcast every single weekend, running through all the stories of the week. I say weekend, sometimes it's middle of the week, depending on how much news happened that week that I need to read through. But it's a great way to stay up weekly on Space News, support the show, make more of this stuff happen in the world, like these visits to Astrobotic, and get more of me in your ears if that's something that you dig. MainEngineCutoff.com slash support. Thank you all so much. And without further ado, let's get into what is the longest episode of Main Engine Cutoff that has ever and likely will

ever exist. Maybe not will ever. I feel like I could do a longer one someday. But enjoy several hours of me talking with team members of Astrobotic. They will introduce themselves as we go, so you're oriented to who we're talking with at any given moment, but enjoy. My name is Sherrod Baskaran. I'm the mission director here at Astrobotic for Peregrine Mission 1. All right, so we took a nice tour this morning,

saw all the stuff behind us, see Mission Control, they're working in there, doing some sims. Can you give us an overall view on where we are with the mission timeline wise big things coming up and and where you know how the schedule lays out from here yeah we're actually doing the final spacecraft assembly uh and that'll be starting this week um and along with that there's a lot of peripheral activity that's associated with mission like mission sims

software development, builds of some of the hardware, testing of hardware independently, individually. But the bulk of the action and the activity is really surrounding the spacecraft itself, and so that's where we're heading into is that final assembly, and then we'll do testing of the spacecraft and go to Kennedy for the launch. So I guess the main chassis of the vehicle is out at structural testing right now? Yeah, actually pressure testing. Yeah, we have to do it outside the facility because it goes to high pressure, and so just to be on the safe side, we do it at a different testing facility.

But we're just about done, and so we're bringing it back, and I think you've seen the high bay there. All those panels and decks are all the avionics, all the components that go on the spacecraft. So once we get the core of the structure here, which will have the tanks and the propulsion feed system and the primary structure, then we start assembling things onto it, including things like the solar panels go on top. So that's the kind of stage we want to get to because now we're actually really building the final and final assembly phase which is where i think it's most exciting for people to see because they see a spacecraft coming together yeah and notably like when companies have hardware to show they typically show it so it's like always one of the things that i'm watching is like all

right i've seen a lot of pictures of hardware and on the tour i'm like stepping over all this test equipment and just like oh that was the thing we tried for a little bit but you know now we're on to this new version so it's cool to see how much is in in flow yeah and real hardware so everything's here we're not missing except a few items we're not missing hardly anything so we're we're ready to to begin that final stage so what's the process when it comes back in that door what goes on first so what you see out there right now is all the flight components on the decks and panels where they actually get attached to the spacecraft so that's actually those are actually ready to be physically mounted on the spacecraft and then there's the main control harness which

actually is all the cabling that goes between all the components but we've used the last couple months to do electronic testing with all that equipment so that once we actually assembled on a spacecraft and we connect all the cables that we shouldn't see a limited amount of issues. But to your question, when it comes back here, the first thing we'll do is we'll actually attach MLI, the blankets, to the various decks or the various parts of the spacecraft that are at the testing facility now. That's a very delicate operation. We want to do that first before we start assembling. So that'll be the first step. Then once we pass that, that's when you'll see the solar panel going on,

each of the individual decks going on where the payloads are, and then those enclosure panels, start the cable routing. And so it's all going to get kind of just come together as full assembly. And finally the legs will get put on, which you see right behind behind you what is that full timeline like in terms of length of time from coming back in the door to having all those parts behind us on there it's so we don't like to necessarily share the timelines because people can extrapolate from that um and so but but we have a pretty aggressive schedule to get all that done in a fairly quick time frame. And then engines, I see right over the edge here there's a couple attitude control engines. I think there were six there. How many

of those are on the vehicle? Twelve ACS engines. And then four main propulsion? Five main engines. Okay, oh five, that's right. So what's the timeline on that or process for that? Are all five going to come in at the same time? No, we have asked to get those incrementally as they're finished. They're all built. I can't speak to the development of those engines because they're actually developed between a collaboration between NASA and Frontier, our developer. But I can't speak to the progress, but we have planned in our schedule to receive the engines and integrate them incrementally onto the spacecraft. Is that more to, if anything happens when you're integrating the first one that you're learning from, that the second one goes smoother and the third one goes smoother?

Yeah, yeah. Plus, from a logistics point of view, you know, it's a fairly enclosed area to do that welding. And so we don't want to, like, you know, suddenly have to do all of it at one time. And it's better to do it one at a time and then to align it each individually as well. And then once that's all put together, it ships from here, goes down to the Cape. Is it going straight to ULA? No, first we do a testing. Okay, with the testing here. Full spacecraft testing.

Not here. We'll ship it out to various facilities, do the standard vibration testing, acoustic testing, EMI testing, thermal vac testing. So it goes through a full campaign and then send it down to Kennedy for integration. Cool. Is it going straight to ULA? Is it like Astrotech or something else down there? Yeah, it goes to Astrotech, which is the integration facility, which is where it actually gets encapsulated. So there's so many different moving pieces in terms of, you know, you've got the engines waiting to come in. You've got the parts waiting to come back to do assembly.

You've got ULAs working on, obviously, they're still getting their main engines. Have not really seen a lot of Centaur pictures from them yet. So there's just all these different pieces. How does that get managed from your position in terms of, like, are you interfacing with ULA and discussing schedule with them all the time? Is there an overall mission team? And what does that make up like? Yeah, we do actually on a fairly routine basis. We kind of share schedules and talk about the schedules to flight and where we are at with not just schedule but risk associated with that.

And we're well aligned. I mean, we know exactly where we are. We know where they are. They know where we are. In fact, we're going to get a visit here very soon from some of the folks on their leadership team. But it is a collaborative effort because we want to make sure both vehicles are ready at the same time and when we need to be ready. And so, yeah, there's a lot of collaboration and there's a lot of transparency on both sides. What happens if they're not on the same schedule in terms of prioritization of one vehicle over another if ula gets in a spot where you know they have so many other constraints on what vulcan's doing

contracts the space force yeah so many moving parts how does the prioritization shake out from in my mind it's we're going to be there and we're going to be ready and they're going to be ready too so it's basically us coming together at the same time and I'm confident we can both do it. And now if we were ready before them, great. We'll do spacecraft and stay at Kennedy and we can store it for a period of time. But I'm thinking everything's aligning pretty well to match up on that launch. So once it's on the vehicle, starting flying to the moon, what is the process for the team here? I'd love to hear a little bit about the trajectory that you're planning, and I know there's some lunar orbit loiter time. What's the flight profile there? So we obviously will have

some folks down at Kennedy for the launch. I myself will be down there in the ULA Control Center. be down there in the ULA Control Center. Our team will be here in Mission Control ready for mission operations. But once we separate, we are taking one phasing loop around the moon. And that's really mainly, it's actually very similar to what SpaceIL did, and even ISRO, I think, did similar as well. It's a chance for us to gain confidence and gain understanding of how the spacecraft flies for that one phasing loop. We're actually going out to lunar orbit altitude or distance, but we chose to take one loop just to, again, understand more about the spacecraft, make sure we understood where the position velocity is, calibrate our equipment, and then the second time we come around, the moon's going to be there, so we'll get lunar capture and go into

a series of subsequent core orbits, and then get ready for landing. So we're not reinventing the wheel here. This is fairly a standard way of getting to the moon and landing on the moon. In fact, we do the same orbits as SpaceIL did when they went to the moon. So again, we're trying to use tried and true methods to get there. We could go direct, but the decision was made to get a little more time between here and the moon. So is that NASA's deep space network that you're yes communicating with the vehicle because i remember from i think it was space il that that had some communications issue that they

worked during flight um and i you know i don't remember the specifics of what i think they might have like an attitude control problem or something that they had to recover from so is the hope that that phasing loop by going the full distance out you're kind of seeing the full uh range of experiences you'd have on the mission and hope to use that time to sort out any issues. Yeah, I think, again, the first vehicle never flown before. So this just gives us a better chance to, again, understand how it flies. And, you know, we have to do a few trajectory correction maneuvers during the transit. maneuvers during the transit. We get to fire engines a few times, use all our suite of sensors,

prove out our avionics. So it just makes more sense for us to do that this way on the first mission. Does that have constraints on launch windows? Yeah, there's multiple constraints we have on launch windows and that has to do with engine performance. It has to do with how much time we need to be in direct view of the sun for power generation and in direct view of Earth ground stations. So there are a lot of constraints that drive that and drive the number of launch opportunities we have every single month.

Can you give us an idea of that? Because I think we're all now tuned for Artemis launch windows, which are totally different constraints around when things can fly. Do you have daily windows over a certain week period? We have a number of opportunities every month, yeah. And we have the ability to tweak that a little bit based on, you know, maybe we can relax the constraint a little bit. It's all a question of risk and how much risk we're willing to take.

But right now we have established very clear constraints. As we get more data on spacecraft testing and engine performance and things like that, we may be able to tweak that a little bit. But generally, we want to go in feeling very confident that we can get to the moon and land safely and have enough margin on things like propellant to be able to do that. Yeah. Luckily, you've got a launch vehicle that's not exactly like the slimmest margins for this kind of mission. New Centaur is pretty beefy. It is, yes.

I think that helps a lot. Have you, you talk a lot about like first time missions, but that you also are doing some things similar to Space IL and some recent lander attempts. The moon is tough. It's just a hard place to land, especially with this kind of spacecraft, this day and age. There's not a lot of people that have done it, so even some of the knowledge that we have is longer. Maybe you're able to get a couple of people that were around for missions. But I recently had some of the SAE team members on the show.

Oh, okay, yeah. One of them had worked on the last moon mission that NASA did in the 90s, and it's been a while. So how do you look at the recent missions and see what problems they encountered during flight and have you incorporated some of those issues into your sims to be prepared for that kind of stuff what what have you learned from those missions that you can incorporate yeah we did certainly learn a fair amount from Space Owls mission essentially what they published online and and publicly so based on what they published online and publicly. So based on what they revealed about their mission and their failure, we did kind of take that into account and made sure that we don't make that same mistake.

ISRO is a bit, I don't think we really found out a lot about their mission and what happened. But you're right. I mean, the last American landing was 1972. So all that knowledge is pretty much long gone. But we do leverage a lot of lessons learned from those programs, as well as NASA. We were part of the NASA Catalyst program back in, started in 2015, I think, and ended in 2019. So we were able to get a lot of NASA knowledge and assistance early on, which was invaluable, in my opinion, to get where we are today. Airbus was also a partner of ours for many years.

So we didn't start from scratch and just assemble a team here with no prior experience. We had help. But to a certain extent, we do also leverage, again, what lessons were learned that we can have access to from those other missions. And even other agencies that send spacecraft to the moon, whatever they publish and make public, we do read that stuff and try to get better ideas of what we should and shouldn't do. There's a lot of landers that land on the moon that we don't have a lot of info about. Yes, exactly. So, yeah, I think that's tricky.

You can maybe look at the pictures, but I don't know that you're going to get much from that. I'm curious about your interaction with the NASA CLPS office as well, because I feel like the payload side of the CLPS office is one thing, right? You've got assigned a set of payloads. You're working with them individually to get them on the vehicle, figure out what they need. But the NASA Eclipse office at a higher level that's managing the program overall, not just Astrobotic, but intuitive machines, Draper, Firefly, et cetera. Are there times at which you're able to talk with either people from NASA or the other companies to share some notes? And how much is there cross-pollination

between the teams? I couldn't speak for between the teams. Our business development side has more interaction with the other teams from IAM at various conferences and things. But, you know, again, the Clips model is really a service delivery model. Here's our payloads. You get them to the moon by a certain date, and, you know, it's a certain capability of comms and data, et cetera. a certain date and a certain capability of comms and data, et cetera.

So it really is we don't get assistance from NASA, technical assistance. It's really up to us to find the right resources, whether it's industry. We can go to NASA to get assistance. It just has to be through a reimbursable space act agreement. But through the Eclipse office, no, we don't. I haven't personally sought assistance, and it's not really part of the model. The whole idea is just like FedEx. You want a box delivered somewhere, you tell them what the mass is,

what size, when you want it delivered, and they get it to you. They get it there for you. So I think that's the same model that we've been trying to hold to because this is a whole new model completely. I mean, it leverages off what was done on commercial cargo and commercial crew at the station, but it's another level of NASA really just saying, you guys develop this spacecraft, your mission, however you want to do it. You just need to show us that you can get our payloads and get the science that we want accomplished reliably and at a high cadence. So, yeah, we don't use them for that technical assistance.

I think that's a key difference, though, between commercial cargo crew. It is. I think a lot of people think, okay, fixed price contract, commercial contract, it's the same vein, but it's wholly different than those where those had a development phase that nasa was deeply involved in even the operations nasa is deeply involved in so it is easy to think that it's so similar but it is drastically different in terms of and there's a reason for that too because commercial crew and cargo are going delivering to a nasa asset

which is space station whereas we're going to a place that's not a NASA asset. So they can be a little bit more, I guess, more creative and more cutting edge on this program. A little more hands off. A little more hands off, yeah. Do you think that would change down the line if, like, if Artemis goes well based on the moon, you're delivering supplies to a land asset or something? Like, I'm just wondering about how that model,

like, where the end of clips is would there be is this interaction model kind of have that handoff moment where if it's more complex mission it's fitting into a different architecture that you would want to see a different management style from nasa if you were part of that program i mean i think the whole idea is to is to establish this model where nasa can hand over to commercial companies for delivery services and to ultimately do science. It's not just to deliver just bricks to the surface. Though at some point that might be helpful. Yeah, for construction, sure. But again, think of, I don't know, 20 years ago, whenever when

the moon was considered just the realm of space agencies, the Russian space agency, NASA, et cetera. We've evolved from that to now. We need to be successful, obviously, and frankly, in my opinion, more than one company needs to be successful in the delivery service. But then think about the next step. What is the next step? What is the next evolution of that model? Is it going somewhere else in the solar system? You know, who knows? But I think this is a foundation for a whole new

way that NASA does business. And NASA then stays involved in the far reaches of the solar system and really, truly one-off type of missions that do cutting-edge exploration science. But eventually, the commercial side catches up to that. You know, just like now we're potentially catching up to the moon, hopefully eventually we catch up to deep space exploration and science as well. In my opinion, that's the whole progression of this. You mentioned about the wider program, how we need more than one company to be successful. This is something I've been wondering about, the way that Clips is laid out,

that there's, you know, you've got Peregrine, you've got Griffin, but you don't have anyone slated beyond that right now. Intuitive Machines has a couple missions, Firefly Draper starting their process. When NASA talks about the shots on goal approach and they talk about how this is a riskier setup, right? They embrace that in their messaging. Does that feel weird to hear that

talked about as someone who's focused on, like, we're going to nail this mission? Well, keep in mind, when they say shots on goal, they're talking about the cadre and the pool of vendors. I consider ourselves a provider, legitimate provider, that our goal is to actually land. And so they may look at a shots onon-goal cross to, again, the pool. But as a company, we are focused on delivering paragliding services to the moon, period. And if that means that they get one shot on goal successful or we're one of three, ultimately for me and for Astrobotic, it's about proving that we're a success, we can do this. So that's kind of the way I look at it.

And that's certainly the way that the program is structured in that they give you, was it 14 of the payloads on mission one or 11? 11 payloads. But you had to go out and find a whole bunch of other payloads to fill the spacecraft out. So it's not like they're just giving you a full set of payloads and like, alright, have fun with that, good luck. Here's the next set coming in for the next mission. Like your business in a lot of cases is more dependent on the success for the customers that are on that mission, not just NASA. So it is an interesting balance again, to compare against commercial cargo. It's like, that's just NASA payloads.

Essentially there's other companies on there, but it's all went through NASA to get to the ISS. Right. So that the way that's awaited I think, is interesting to consider in terms of the constraints that it puts on you and the way that you have to think about the mission wider than just the NASA payloads on board. We do. And keep in mind that we had commercial payloads signed well before Eclipse came on board. So it's a good combination of both because we actually do have science payloads commercially as well which i think is really fascinating that some of the experiments they're flying are really pretty interesting um but ultimately you know regardless who our customer is it could be nasa it could be another space agency it could be purely commercial it could be

you you know on fly something an experiment is going well, but not that well. No. In the future. The whole idea is that we want to make sure that every payload, every customer is successful. So it is our job to make sure that this payload, NASA payload is next to the commercial payload, that they don't adversely affect each other, nor does it either affect the spacecraft and the reverse. So it is a process to evaluate everything and make sure there's no conflicts, there's no emissions that one creates that cause another,

and there's no vibrations that one creates that cause a problem for another. So that is our job, to do that. But that's the same thing the Space Station Program did, the Space Shuttle Program did. We're just, again, the service provider for all that. I was involved in the Shuttle Program, Station Program. We had to analyze all that as well, make sure that this payload doesn't adversely affect the other one. Something you said a second ago about NASA and the shots on goal approach, I don't think I've put it in the same context that you did,

that NASA may see the shots on goal as the program overall you mentioned. And they could mean not the missions, but the overall collection of bidders, right? Because we've seen some that have already folded. Masten is now part of Astrobotic. There's corporate-level shots on goal that I don't think I've put in that same context. But for you personally here at Astrobotic, looking into the future, are there future Peregrines in mind? What's the process for flying those?

Is it something that, you know, we saw with Intuitive Machines, I think they announced IM3 before they even had been on a NASA mission. So they were getting the process rolling for future missions. Is that something that we might see from Astrobotic as well? Yeah. After Griffin, what's the process? We're constantly, not me personally, but our business development organization is constantly looking out there to sell more Peregrines and more Griffins and variants of those. Peregrine is not a static vehicle, meaning it's not just one design. There are variants that can go to different locations and do different things, deployments in orbit,

go to polar locations. So the whole idea is that these two product lines can be provided to commercial government customers in the future maybe if somebody wants to buy an entire vehicle and we build a vehicle and hand it over to them for actually integration of payloads and whatever science they want to do think of it like an airplane you know the the boeing builds an airplane but airlines actually buy them and then use them for their own purposes, cargo or transportation of passengers. So, same way, I think we could do that as well. But we've learned so much on Peregrine to date. I mean, it's just, you wouldn't believe all the things we've discovered every day and the process we've developed to build the spacecraft that I think are invaluable that could be used for another Peregrine applied to Griffin as well. But I see a

future for both product lines and I'm confident Peregrine will be a successful mission. So why would we, especially why would the industry or the commercial, the market go away from that because it is a proven technology at that point in time. Are there things that you mentioned that you're learning on this first Paragon? What's the process for capturing that and figuring out where's your notes for Paragon 2? Let's do this better. Let's change that. Yeah, each of the subsystem teams, avionics, propulsion, et cetera,

they all have their own internal working groups. I mean, a lot of people working on Paragon are also working on Griffin, so they have a way of sharing the knowledge to make sure we don't make that same mistake on Griffin, or we found an interesting new way to do it. Let's do it on Griffin. So all that's kept in each substance. I keep it kind of at the program level. There's a lot of things, obviously, at the program level we learned about how to manage this kind of program in a small company, as a startup. You know, it's a whole new game to do it this way. And we're trying to make it cost effective so we're trying to find ways to do it very cost effectively and so there's technical

things we've learned that we're going forward with there's programmatic things budgetary management things you know schedule management everything is being used to to make our future programs better and to make our offerings better for our customers as well. It's probably potentially too early to talk about the Masten side of things and how that changes Astrobotic overall. But, you know, you've got the premier terrestrial testbed for this kind of application. They had a task order for Clips. How do you foresee that playing into the near future of the missions and the programs that you're a part of here? TBD. It's still early, and I'm focused really on Peregrine Mission 1 and making it successful.

But I do know that, I mean, we use Mastin's terrestrial capability for our early testing on Peregrine as well for some technology. Was that the terrain relevant? Yeah, TRN. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Very successful test, actually. So I think there's a lot to be determined. In fact, I'll be going out there soon to meet with them and look at their capabilities as well.

But, again, my focus, given the timeline for Peregrine, is to get Peregrine off the ground and a successful mission. But a lot of people are thinking now about how to integrate Mastin, and that's kind of on the program side of what we're doing. Very cool. Well, thanks again. This was really cool to hang out and talk about the mission. I'm excited to see it fly. Eclipse is one of my favorite things that NASA is working on these days. It's a very exciting model, and I'm glad to be part of it.

I'm glad to be kind of building it as well. Yeah. Thanks again. All right. Thank you. So my name's Haley Moos it. I'm glad to be kind of building it as well. Yeah. Thanks again. All right. Thank you. So my name is Haley Moosberger. I use she, her pronouns. And my job here at Astrobotic is that I'm a project manager, primarily working on Peregrine.

All right. So we've just taken a nice tour. We saw a lot of test hardware, a lot of the... Oh, we're sitting right in front of the clean room where there's all the parts for the lander. hardware, a lot of the... Oh, we're sitting right in front of the clean room where there's all the parts for the lander. I want to talk about all that, but let's talk about your particular role on the mission

because we've known each other for a couple years online. It's finally cool to hang out. Talk me through how your position works here in terms of the type of interactions you have on the particular mission or the interactions you have with the people providing payloads for the mission?

Yeah, so working on Peregrine, there's a million different teams that all have to come together, all really in service of our customers, right? So when we start a mission, right, it starts with the spacecraft, but the spacecraft is really there to service, you know, everybody that wants to do science

or be on the moon. And that's been really integral in our business model since even before Clclipse was started. So when we sign a customer, my job is to work with that team and make sure that they understand everything that's required to qualify their payload for space to make sure that it's going to work with our spacecraft

and that it doesn't introduce any risk to any of our other customers to make sure that everybody can be as successful as they can be throughout the entire mission. So we work with them from day one to develop things like interface control documents. And then we move into the testing phase where we make sure that, you know, each system is compliant with everything that we wrote down and said it would do. And that they both, you know, work really well together. And then looking forward from that, we'll work with their teams., we'll work with their teams,

and we already work with their teams to practice for things like integrated mission operations between a dozen payload teams that are scattered all across the world and our team here that's operating the lander and making sure that all of those teams work really well together and can work together to have a successful mission.

So when somebody has a payload, and I think I'm wondering exactly how you put this group of payloads together on a vehicle and what the process is. Is it a first come, first serve? If somebody comes to you and says, I have a payload that needs this particular spot on the vehicle, do you have to, what's that process for getting different, and I guess maybe what are the different locations that the payloads are going on for Peregrine 1? Absolutely. So for our NASA payloads and our commercial payloads, that's a very different process. For our NASA payloads, the CLPS office puts out an RFP. We respond with our proposal for how to meet all of those requirements, and then they select the provider that they are

going to move forward with for that process. So we kind of get all of those requirements from the NASA payloads on day one as a single unit. We get all of those together. You're building the flight around. And that's specific to this payload needs surface access or that needs sky access. Exactly. They'll define any keep out volumes, power requirements, all that kind of stuff. So for then our commercial payloads, what we're doing is we'll engage with those customers sometimes years before they're ready to actually fly a mission and help educate them about what capabilities does our lander has? When is it most advantageous for payloads if they need a high power draw at some point in the mission?

Where in the mission does it make sense so that they can kind of design their con ops around, you know, the stress points and capabilities of our landers. And then when we get to the point of signature, you know, we'll work with them before we sign to understand, you know, and say, you know, if it's a rover, I need this much volume in order to access the surface. And we'll go look at everything else that's manifested on the mission, kind of play the Tetris game to see where, you know, where on the spacecraft we could accommodate that, decide if we need any special accommodations like extra brackets or something to interface with the payload. And then that'll all be, you know, agreed upon at a high level before we start the contract. And then once we sign the contract, we really work with them to kind of

educate them about all of our standard interfaces that we try and hold to because that's part of our commercial model right is and it enables things like signing payloads you know after the spacecraft has been built because we have a bunch of standard interfaces that allow the payloads to come in and say you know hey i know you're flying next year but i really want to fly on that mission and we can say well we've got you know this much you know power and data and these interfaces and if you can match match those, we can fly you. So it's standard interfaces, power and data, but not necessarily physical connections to the vehicle or placement, things like that?

Yeah, so we have a standard interface for payloads to interface with us on several areas of the lander. We have two primary payload decks on Peregrine, and then a couple of secondary locations share an Isogrid interface where they can come up and design their bolt pattern to be agnostic of where they go on the lander. And that's published. You can find it online if you want to design your payload before you ever talk to us.

You can still meet that interface. Some payloads require special accommodation. For example, we fly a payload on Peregrine that is demonstrating solar panels. And so for them, they really need to be pointed directly at the sun. And so we work with their team to understand what their requirements are, where the best location on the lander is. And if it's early enough in the mission, we can incorporate those non-standard interfaces like bolt holes on enclosure panels where there might not be normally bolt holes and allow them where there might not be normally bolt

holes, and allow them to meet their mission requirements. Does that feel like stuff that's going to still exist on future Peregrine missions or Griffin missions, that there's always going to be a little bit of this customization? Or do you feel like you're trying to use this process to learn the range of things people ask for and design more standardized interfaces in the future? Yeah, so we're always pushing for standardization wherever it makes sense, right? And this pays a lot of dividends in things like particularly data interfaces, where when there's a standard that everybody can go, you know, dig up the same specification that was written a long

time ago, or even, you know, something where there's a library that every operating system uses. We really like to rely on those kind of standard interfaces because it makes testing so much easier and narrows down the kind of debug points that we could get wrong to like four or five instead of kind of an infinite number of variables, right? And so we really like to push that. However, that's not a good fit for every single payload. For example, some of these payloads that we work with have been under development for, you know, 10, 20 years. And so if we come to them and say, you know, hey, we really want you to rewrite your software interface to the lander, you know, to match our interface, in the next two years, they're going to, you know, look at us and laugh. So we do work with our customers to really understand, and that's part of our requirements gathering process before the signature to make sure that we understand what their needs are and that we can meet that and provide that service

successfully. So we will provide those options as needed, although we really prefer to work with standard interfaces because we think it works better for us and for our payload customers. it works better for us and for our payload customers. So we are, I'm trying to remember when I did that last show with Laura and Daniel. I think it was probably like, yeah, a couple years ago. Right after. Olivia is also here. So let's go. So at the time, like just there's been a lot of life that has happened between then and

now. So I'm curious to hear about now that we're this close to flight, how payload integration's been going, how the process has been working with NASA on that core set of payloads from the Eclipse program, and has it been smooth sailing? Have there been things that you learned that you're tweaking still, and what's that like?

Absolutely. I mean, I learn so much every single day here. There's never a day that I walk out of this building knowing the same things that I walked in. Sometimes I learn the same lesson three or four times over, but we are always learning, always looking to improve. So to give you the brief summary of what all has happened since 2020. So I believe when you started,

when you did your last interview with us, we were just preparing for our first interface simulator testing with payloads. So we flew around all around the country to work with all of our customer teams, make sure that the software interface we had defined on paper was matching with an engineering unit we built and an engineering unit they built so that we could test and verify that all of that interface was going to work successfully. Then past that point, all of the payloads really moved into their flight qualification program, where they all go through environmental testing, where they go through vibration, you know, thermal vacuum, EMI, EMC testing, to verify that the payload is going to meet a

standard that we call do no harm. And that basically means that the payload is not going to cause problems to the spacecraft or any other payload. And that's our standard for acceptance. We don't try and make the standard artificially high where we say the payload must have a successful mission. All from a service provider perspective that we require you show is that you're going to do no harm.

Obviously, we work with our customers to really help them and give them the best chance at mission success, but we don't wanna be an artificial gate that stops somebody from flying when they have something that might work. So we worked with all of those payload teams

to define and agree upon exactly what the testing that we were gonna require is in order to say that we felt confident putting it on our lander. That includes things like defining the vibration environment for each payload, finding out exactly what the thermal requirements for each payload was going to be and whether certain payloads needed to meet thermal environments. And so all of that process happened. And then the payload started getting delivered to Astrobotic, which is one of the coolest days of my life when the payloads started showing up. It starts as a slow trickle, one or two, and then all of a sudden we have payloads in every

single day for several weeks where we were having a payload team come in from Florida or from Germany or from California. They'd all come in and work with our team to go and mechanically integrate the payload to the spacecraft components that it interfaces with. And now we've actually moved on to electrical integration with the payloads where we test basically the power and command and data handling interfaces between all of the flight electronics and software and the flight payloads. And so we've been really working with the teams to do that as flight-like as possible.

So testing where we have a payload here in Pittsburgh in the clean room connected to our flight avionics that actually runs through our mission control all the way back to the payload mission controls all across the world, where they're sending commands and telemetry from Germany or from Maryland all over into our high bay. And so that's been the last couple of weeks' work actually for us.

And it's been absolutely amazing to kind of pull up my screen at my desk and watch telemetry stream in from a flight payload in the high bay. It's been a dream come true for three years. The actual mission itself and the timeline there with all these payloads in mind, is that something that this process also included scripting out what's happening in what order? Or is there, because you don't exactly know what day you're launching and what time you'll get to the moon, is there some variability that you're going to figure out on the fly of what order things happen? Absolutely. So mission operations, we like to be as planned as possible

because we'd like to test everything we're going to do before we do it exactly like we're going to do it on flight. So that's something that we refer to as test like you fly. And so we like to plan out, you know, as much as we possibly can, every detail of mission operations. Obviously, there's always going to be, you know, something that goes

wrong that we have to adapt to on the fly. We practice all of those things too. We practice things going wrong, making sure that the team can recognize, recover from those faults, and still have a successful mission. And so we really work with our customers to understand what everybody's needs are, to plan for this is the payload that really wants to do science in the morning, and then they're going to overheat in the middle of the day if they're operating, so they need to take a siesta, and we're going to turn them back on at night where they can see the fall, or other payloads that really want to see that kind of very hot, sun is right in the middle of the sky.

So we work with all of those teams to kind of map out against the spacecraft resources exactly how all of these things are going to fit together. And what's the flow like as you've been working on this? If a certain payload has a change or is still figuring out their operations that might impact the scheduling of other payloads, are you the arbiter of that? And you would go to these other payload providers and say, hey, we actually need to shift this around a little bit. What's the

ebb and flow between these different providers like? Yeah. So we, at the end of the day, it's Astrobotic Spacecraft, we are providing a service. So typically what happens is at contract signature, we have a defined service offering that we're going to offer each payload. So that includes power, mass, data, and that's all defined in your contract up front that says, you know, Astrobotic is going to provide these things. So we might schedule those a little bit, but we're going to make sure that you get your required service offerings.

If you need to go over and above something that's in the contract, you know, that's something that we then talk about, you know, and understand whether it's something we can make an exception for or whether it's something that we need to go back and reassess at a contract level to make that change. But most of the time, we spend a lot of time investing prior to signature to make sure our customers really understand what they're signing up to so that they can be successful and that they can understand their constraints on day one and meet them. And then on the flip side, we understand all of the things we're signing up to do and that we can meet all of those for all of our customers. In terms of the actual manifesting

of the flight, are there other prioritizations in terms of like if there's a payload that does not come through that door? Is there a particular date when it's like, okay, you missed the bus and we're flying anyway? Or are there a certain set of payloads that are making it and your flight would be delayed if they're delayed? Like, how does that prioritization check out? Not even just for this mission, but overall the policy that you've got? Yeah, so that works differently for every customer. And it's something that we kind of have to, you know, we're really upfront about that kind of process and what our needs from them in order to have a successful mission are. And so that's something that we negotiate with each individual customer. Yeah, obviously Griffin is not going to leave without Viper, but it's just, it's interesting

to consider, you know, you have, I think you said yesterday, 24 different payloads on Peregrine 1. It's like, it's a lot. You know, you see, you see all these SpaceX ride chairs that go up and it's like, well, a couple missed, but you know, missed, but it's just interesting to watch how NASA's managing Eclipse program. And I think there was a change in the Eclipse program at some point in the past where they went from individual payload PIs to a mission PI. I don't remember if that's a thing that you even know what I'm talking about at this point, but I feel like you're one of the initial missions, so you're probably like for the NASA payloads, it's all individual

PIs that are running this thing, right? It's not an overall kind of office? Yeah, and for the most part, you know, across all of the missions, once we get down in the technical details, you know, there's always going to be different teams working, you know. You know, if you've got a different component, there's probably a different mechanical engineer, and you, you know, you interface with each of those different components separately. So there's definitely, they're working on their process, and we're working on ours. But for the most part, it's really on a per payload basis that most of our interface work happens. The strategic level science stuff kind of happens above our head.

science stuff kind of happens above our head. How about these, you know, there's, I don't know if there's any on this mission, these payloads that can be deployed in lunar orbit instead of going all the way down to the surface. Are those, is that just as valid as a service as you want to provide down to the surface? Or that kind of like, if you have leftover space on the lander, you know, we've got the ability to deploy a one U-cube set or something like that? Absolutely. And that's something that, you know, it's a permission thing, right? If we have a customer that wants to go to lunar orbit, we will be more than happy to deliver them to lunar orbit. You know, we're not precious about our surface service

versus our lunar orbit delivery service. Both of those are service offerings that, you know, we can work with the customer, understand their requirements, and make sure that we're, you know, delivering them exactly where they want to go. I guess the only other thing I was wondering about is when they're on the service, I guess even if they're being deployed as well, the communications that they are I'm sure this is part of the package that you negotiate with each customer, but how do you determine who's got communications time or is it

the lander has communications time and the payloads all do their own thing or are there specific communications that each payload is asking for? Yeah, so the lander communications on the surface and the payload power and payload communications on the service, we really try and give as continuous a service as we can

so that the payload can design their con ops within that. So we try and land and, you know, give you your, you know, 40 kilobits per second from the moment we touch down until the moment we end. That works for a lot of payloads. A lot of them want to operate for as long as possible, you know, within their allocation. For some payloads, they're a little bit more periodic than that. And we kind of work with them on a case-by-case basis to say, you know, we'll give you your window of high data rate here, and we'll schedule it around this other payload that needs high data rate here. But they just want to operate periodically and get, you know, once an hour,

once every 24 hours, a measurement that requires a higher data rate. So what is the roadmap from here? As we mentioned, there's people in the clean room now working on probably some of the stuff we're talking about. Exactly. So what is the roadmap for the things sitting behind me? Are there still payloads yet to come in for the launch? What's the process from here to the moon? So we are fully integrated for all of our payloads for Peregrine, which is very exciting. It's been a long time coming. So all of those payloads are working at a sub-assembly level. The next step is that they will get integrated to the full spacecraft structure.

And then at that point, they will go through environmental testing with our entire spacecraft in kind of a combined system to make sure that that entire system is going to meet all of the requirements that we need in order to make our launch vehicle on the Vulcan Centaur. And then at that point, once we're on the pad, we really transition into mission operations. And so that's a point where there are now mission controls all across the world from Japan, Germany, Kennedy Space Center, Ames Research Center, Goddard, that all talk to our mission control, which is sitting right behind me. And our teams have been training with the payload teams for over a year already to really understand how we're going to interface starting at the launch pad

all the way through separation, transit to the moon, descent, and surface operations. All right, let's talk about some of the specific payloads that are sitting behind us right now. We were just talking about there's one that launches a bunch of robots onto the surface, which sounds really cool. You've got the rover that I think you knew up close for many years. Let's hear about some of those. Yeah, so as I said before, we have two. We have payloads from NASA and payloads from our commercial customers.

And so some of those at NASA are tech demonstrations. Some of them are science. And then on the commercial side, some of them are tech demonstrations. Some of them are marketing. And some of them are science as well. So we have payloads from NASA, obviously. We fly an instrument suite that really spreads the gambit. We have a team from PILS that's working on a solar panel demonstration. We fly an instrument suite that really spreads the gambit.

We have a team from PILS that's working on a solar panel demonstration. They work at NASA Glenn. We have almost the entire VIPER instrument suite, so the EMSOLO, NERVIS, and NSS payloads from Kennedy Space Center and NASA Ames respectively that are all a trio of payloads focused on finding water at the moon. So they'll fly on Peregrine as a demonstration of the instrument's capability,

and then they'll fly again on Griffin, integrated as part of the Viper rover to go search for water at the South Pole. Are those the same scale that'll be on Viper as well? Absolutely. They're the same instruments. Not like literally the same ones. You're not going to go get them back. We're not getting these ones back, unfortunately. I'm sure they would love to.

But if we're going to bring something back from the moon, it's going to be samples. That's totally right. But we are going to fly all of those payloads as well as a variety of other payloads from NASA, other mass spectrometers, magnetometers, all sorts of good stuff. On the commercial side, we kind of span the gambit. I'll talk about maybe four of them. So we have the M42 payload from DLR,

the German Space Agency. So they actually are one of our last active payloads to sign. So they actually reached out to us in the middle of the Peregrine mission and said, hey, we have a radiation sensor wes to sign. So they actually reached out to us in the middle of the Peregrine mission and said, "'Hey, we have a radiation sensor we wanna fly. It's already flight qualified, but how do we get this on your mission?" And so we worked with them to understand

what their needs were, said, "'Hey, it's not too late if you can do this really quickly.'" And so we actually worked with them over the course of nine months, which if you know anything about instrument development and integration, it's really short to define the payload, what it was gonna do, how much power and data it needed, to test the payload with our electronics

and to integrate it to the spacecraft over the course of nine months. So that was really impressive, I think, from both our team and demonstration of all the capabilities and processes that we've built up over the last three years, as well as, you know, a huge effort by their team to actually build, deliver, flight qualify that instrument that quickly. So there's that instrument. And then from Carnegie Mellon, there's the Iris Rover, which I worked on when I was in college and I think was on a MECO episode several years ago.

Yeah, yeah, probably low tens of episode number. The audio quality is probably a little worse at that point. Totally true. So that rover has been developed by students over the course of several years. Ander, our lead systems engineer on Peregrine, actually worked on it when he was at Carnegie Mellon almost a decade ago.

And then I worked on that right before I graduated and came to Astrobotic. And it's a small two-kilogram lunar rover, so it'll be the smallest planetary rover anyone has ever flown. And it has been, over the course of that 10 years, designed, prototyped, developed, and flight qualified entirely by a student-level-led team at Carnegie Mellon University. So they're going to deploy off of Peregrine and go look at some of the ways that our thrusters

interact with the lunar regolith to try and understand more about what implications that might have for both the properties of the lunar regolith in a scientific manner, and also how that affects future lander missions. Then we have a couple of other payloads. We have LDCP from being developed by Picari Sweat and Astroscale. And it is a marketing demonstration

that is a collaboration between those two companies. So that one's coming from Japan and has been absolutely phenomenal to work with them. And then we have payloads like Colmina, which we were referencing earlier, which is a collaboration with the Mexican Space Agency and a university in Mexico who has been developing a set of small rovers

that are essentially tied down in a catapult. So when we land and after we touch down and get communications from Earth to the spacecraft, they will deploy those really small rovers onto the surface and they will do an autonomous demonstration where they basically co-localize, find the other rovers, drive towards them, and send a signal back to their, you know, deployer that says that they've found each other, and that'll be a demonstration of kind of the

really small-scale swarm operations on the lunar surface. So we're really excited about all of our commercial and NASA payloads that kind of span the gambit. The rover, how closely related is that to CubeRover and stuff that's going on internally here? I feel like there's some connective tissue between those two programs. Maybe that's just people, but is there anything hardware-specific

that's common between them all? Yeah, so there's a lot of people that have worked on Iris and CubeRover, and both Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon have collaborated for a long time on rovers, so there definitely is a shared heritage of work there. That being said, at this point, the Cube Rover line has really, you know, been worked on for three years here at Astrobotic, focused more on, you know, providing a commercial platform for a rover that can kind of extend our

service beyond, you know, touchdown on the lunar surface to providing real mobility and capabilities to a generic payload. Whereas the IRIS rover at this point is a really, you know, hyper-specific mission focused on meeting the requirements that they've set out for themselves. And then Moon Ranger is, how does that fit into all this as well? Yeah, so Moon Ranger is another collaboration between Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon. I think Jay Eckert is probably the best person to chat about with that today. That kind of falls under his team. Yeah, for sure.

It's just, yeah, there's a lot of wheels on the tour. There were wheels everywhere on this tour. There's a good amount of wheels here. I'm excited to watch it. It's going to be, I don't know, It's going to be a really great new era. And you know I'm excited about clips generally. This is some of my favorite stuff. Very much excited to see it all fly.

Thanks for hanging out with us. Absolutely. My name is Jay Eckerd, Senior Project Manager in the Lunar Surface Systems Group at Astrobotic. John Landrenaud, Project Manager at the Lunar Surface Systems Group at Astrobotic. So you've got a lot going on in your departments these days. Probably every mission that's going on right now is somehow related to something that's in your department. We were talking earlier about some of the rovers, and I would love to hear a little bit more about the rover systems and what's in the process and where those projects are at um to start and then we can get into the the vsat project as well yeah certainly um so uh

we've got a couple of different platforms that are in development um so uh cube rover is is probably our flagship product and i'll let john talk about and you know kind of the the technical details on it but um really what we aim to do with Cube Rover is provide mobility as a surface on the surface of the moon so so unlike a traditional NASA program where NASA will be procuring their own rovers and and you know operating them and and you know being responsible for for the whole thing we essentially provide a means for customers to for a service fee to get to the surface of the moon, to, we operate the rover on the surface of the moon, and we help them execute on their scientific or their commercial, you know, objectives. So, so Cube Rover is, it's an ultra-light planetary

rover. It's, it's, I believe it's the lightest in its class, and of course, you know, in the space industry, that means the cheapest. We're orders of magnitude less than any other platform out there. And we're extremely mature in our development. So, John, you want to go ahead and talk about some of our kind of ongoing contracts for the development of CubeRover? Sure. What's really exciting right now is we're finishing up the test phase of our proto-flight model. And we're recently awarded an opportunity for flight, which, as you probably are aware, surviving the lunar night is extremely challenging for any platform. That contract specifically is focused around the Cube Rover um not only performing its mission but also surviving the lunar night um and will be again like jay had mentioned the the first the lightest

and um the first opportunity sorry the uh the first survive the night platform commercially provided and astrobotic will be providing that service it's it's incredibly exciting how does the process go for um those kind of missions right they are outside of the payloads assigned from from clips missions um so is i guess i'm wondering in the future on these clips missions viper out notwithstanding that's a different different rover situation altogether, but could there be a set of payloads that are, you know,

for the lander and a set of payloads that are for mobility systems, or would that always fall outside of the task orders in clips? So, so we want to open the door to, to any kind of commercial payload or, or a government payload that's interested in a ride. There are a lot of, you know,

maybe orders that get picked up outside of that, that, you know, we do our own acquisition and, you know, looking for opportunities. There are task orders that involve payloads that, you know, need mobility as a service. So we really want to be able to just kind of be versatile and answer any of those calls. And in many cases, you know, I talk about the mobility as a service thing again. Again, that's, you know, the payload provider comes to us as the rotover provider. We work through the lander provider and the launch provider subsequently and basically take that all out of the hands of the payload provider. They just need to say, we want to go to the moon, and we take care of the rest.

We develop the platform. We book the lander flights. We book the, you know, we work through them to make sure we're aligned on the launch vehicle, and we get them a scheduled time, you know, on one of those task orders lander flights. We work through them to make sure we're aligned on the launch vehicle, and we get them a scheduled time on one of those task orders or commercial flights. And that doesn't necessarily mean an astrobotic mission, right? Like it could be on other landers. Absolutely, absolutely. Obviously, we want to fly on as many astrobotic landers as we can.

That would be good, yeah. But, I mean, the growing market right now in the commercial landscape, competition is good for all of us. It strengthens the market. It allows NASA to get more bang for their buck, get on the moon more often. And as one of the leaders in commercial services for the moon, you know, making that market healthier and strengthening it, it's our benefit. So if an upcoming task order, if a customer has a sooner deadline and we want to work through another launch provider, we will do so. We may not be able to offer as preferential of a price, but there's that market out there. So Jay had mentioned mobility as a service, and the 2U platform is our most mature platform right now.

But we're also developing the other U-size cube rovers. So I think you saw when you toured our lab, we have the 4U-size rover that's going to currently under development with a neutron spectrometer to discover water ice at the lunar poles. And the 6U rover, which Jay is is managing that one has a ground penetrating radar on board um it's not configured specifically to those instruments we again mobility as a service we have that space that can be offered to any scientific package really yeah i saw the i think it was a to you on uh going under five checks today so um looking at that way those payloads are integrated, you basically have a CubeSat slot in there.

What kind of access do they have to the lunar surface? Does it depend on what they want? Is it configurable to some extent that the access they have outside of the vehicle itself? Yeah, we advertise that you space for the instrument package, but we're also flexible in the design. And there's some other instruments that required, let's say, elevation off the lunar surface. So we can reconfigure the

rover for those packages specifically. What we test for and qualify and really advertise, though, is that internal volume within the Cube rover. But yeah, we are flexible design wise to provide other services the survive the night mission um i'm curious how that plays into future rovers as well like is that a is that a thing that that you wanted to pick off as a development challenge and this was a good opportunity to do that and then you would roll that into future rovers that you're offering would that be an added package if somebody was going to buy a rover they could choose which options they want well we think that's an incredibly, you know, commercially appealing technology to be able to offer. We can say that, you know, one of the leading, you know, technologies we're chasing is

procuring and utilizing commercial radioisotopic heaters. So in the past, that's been, you know, big barriers of entry, you need presidential sign off, and you need to get your hands on some plutonium. You can't really pop into the corner store and grab that. So we're looking at other isotopes. A bit of a plug here, John and I are both nuclear engineers by trade. We function as project managers here, but we kind of offer some consulting auxiliary work in our group for some of those heaters. But really, you know, by demonstrating and kind of trailblazing technologies like this, this is opening up the door for, you know, these long-term missions that we so hope to support.

You know, nobody wants to pay millions of dollars to go and die in 14 days. You know, we want to be able to offer extended missions through the night, to go and die in 14 days. You know, we want to be able to offer extended missions through the night. And those technologies are going to be directly scalable to larger rovers and much, much larger systems that, you know, may need heating on critical components. So right now, that's never been done commercially. We aim to be the first one and we are funded to be the first one. So, you know, keep your eye on that one because that'll be a really exciting mission.

How does it work for these payloads themselves? What other services are these rovers offering in terms of, is it communications always through the lander? Is it direct communication? What is the power and data relay system like there? Yeah, so we offer kind of an out-of-the-box power and data configuration for customers based on their payload size. But like John said, the platform is incredibly configurable. We can kind of work outside of

those bounds because everything's not really cookie cutter in the space industry. But we want to do our best to get it there to bring those costs down. And part of the recent contract that we won is communications of the rover with the lunar orbiting assets itself, not just being dependent on the lander. Right. So communication-wise, we're going to be configurable as well. As of right now, the baseline system just communicates directly back to the lander, which has its direct-to-Earth comms. But in our upcoming mission, we want to demonstrate communications with an orbital asset around the moon that then can be relayed to Earth and not rely on keeping a lander alive through the night to communicate with your rover that is already capable of surviving the night. There's a rover in the clean room behind us that is going on Peregrine Mission 1.

That was a Carnegie Mellon project over many years. We've talked a lot about that earlier. I'm curious to hear, you know, what the connective tissue is between that, the rovers you're working on. Is there stuff that you're paying attention to for this mission that will feed into the work that you're doing? So that's Iris.

Iris is kind of the spiritual predecessor to Cube Rover. They were born out of a lot of the same kind of desires. And actually a lot of our team members on the lunar surface system had direct work with, you know, we have some systems engineers and mechanical engineers that actually did a lot of the work for IRIS. Really and truly to this day, you know, where Cube Rover has matured to, you know, there's some shared heritage, but not a lot of, you know, continuing DNA there. But absolutely, we're going to have our eyes on that rover. And, you know, everybody on our team is rooting for it. And, you know,

it should demonstrate a lot of exciting things just for the capability of small, lightweight planetary rovers. But, you know, we want to stress that Cube Rover has, you know, significant levels of funding that have matured it well beyond kind of what Iris as a proof of concept type thing has done. In terms of deployment down to the surface and the way that it integrates with landers, are there particular constraints as to where this could be placed

on any given lander to be deployed to the surface? Does that constrain how many you could take at a single time? I was talking earlier near that five table that, like, how many could we fit on this lander? Gary was spitballing you could fit eight or nine, depending on math. I'm curious about the constraints of deployment.

I won't go into the gory details right now because we're actually pursuing a patent on our deployment system. Just for IP's sake, I can't say much about it, but the current baseline system is designed to basically repel down from the lower side of a deck and kind of gently place the rover onto the surface. There's a lot of design considerations in place to make sure that the unevenness or the unassuredness of the terrain is not in effect.

And we've actually had a lot of really kind of successful novel progress on know, progress on building that deployer, so much so that we're, you know, chasing a patent on it. But again, you know, I just want to keep stressing that the KubeRover is absolutely, you know, while we strive for kind of the standardization of the platform to bring down cost, it is a configurable platform. So, you know, who's to say that if somebody wanted to put 10 KubeRovers on a single, know, peregrine class lander, we couldn't figure it out. We absolutely can. Maybe we'll shift over to the VSAT model that's sitting over there. It's there's probably two parts to talk about here, the VSAT program that NASA has been running and then how the Luna grid plays into that as well.

So maybe we could start with the VSAT side of things. plays into that as well. So maybe we could start with the VSAT side of things. So the problem, or maybe not problem, a challenge with powering the continued occupation on the moon for all the Artemis missions, anything science that's human rated needs continuous power and a lot of it, frankly. So NASA put out a call for a minimum 10 kilowatt system end of life with a 10 year service mission.

And Astrobotic was fortunate to be one of a few companies that were in competition. And just very recently, we were down selected to show our concept, prove and elevate the technology readiness level for it and show that our system is going to be viable for that problem. It is a 20 meters, a 60 foot tall solar panel that we are offering what we call the lunar infrastructure trailer it's a mobile solution to it so when we deliver the platform to the moon we aren't constrained by the lander's accuracy or let's say constraints when it actually does land that mobile solution will be able to drive out to any location get the ideal spot that's going to get the most sunlight out to any location get the ideal spot that's going to get the most sunlight and unfurl the the 60 feet up into the technically atmosphere but yeah there's no better word for it and and

provide power so we have a bunch of different options i'll get into the lunar grid talk a bit more but it'll provide 10 kilowatts of power at a minimum at the end of life. That will also provide the ability to provide power for assets such as the wireless charger system that Jay is managing. We'll have a couple of those on board. And LunaGrid will then be focused specifically on a lot of the cable development and providing external power to resources around that system. So there's a lot of different components there. There's the VSAT program that NASA has. So they've down-selected, I think it's you and two others.

But that is carrying up through basically design reviews, development reviews. Are you building actual hardware to fulfill that contract? Where does that end? So over the next two years, we will be showing our stability of the system itself. And then we will be shipping it to one of the world's largest TVAC chambers. Our partners at Redwire are providing the solar panel itself, the ROSA system, which that's on board the International Space Station.

Recently in the news with the DART mission. Yep. space station space station um recently in the news with the dart mission yeah but they're going to be demonstrating that it can unfurl in the simulated uh lunar gravity um and that'll elevate the trl of the entire system and then that is the same technological basis that you're developing these other plans on but nasa hasn't necessarily contracted for specific deployment of these assets yet but you're yeah working on these tech development projects with them and then your own solutions that you're offering that obviously have a big hand in you know what they're planning with artemis but there's no set plans on that yet and you're looking

elsewhere as well to try to figure out who else would be into this kind of work i assume some of our own internal projects would make use of this kind of stuff. So is that kind of the roadmap that you're looking at? So I'm focused on the VSAT development itself. That is very closely associated with the LunaGrid project, which is very much internal right now that Jay's been more involved with. He can talk probably more detail to that. Yeah, you can kind of imagine, you know, VSAT and LunaGrid, they're

very tightly coupled, but really VSAT is part of a grander architecture that is LunaGrid. And that grander architecture, you know, you can imagine that, you know, VSAT is like your power plant or a solar farm that you might see along the side of the road. Whereas LunaGrid is going to be not only the power lines running down the street, but the crew that goes and installs those power lines, the crew that comes and hooks them up to your house. And all of this that is Lunagrid is being built on the backs of our very mature technologies that we're developing in other development contracts. So Lunagrid is the architecture to stitch those all together. So VSAT will be out there to provide power.

CubeRover is going to be a workhorse. It's going to be delivering power lines across the surface. It's going to be interconnecting the VSATs to form a grid. You know, many people that are familiar with the power industry know that, you know, you can't rely on any single source power generation. You put solar panels on top of your house. What happens when it's nighttime? So we need a micro grid. That micro grid is going to span across portions of the south pole and essentially create a backbone of power that anybody can tap into you know obviously for the the cost of the electricity so we take that technical portion of deploying that system we're delivering power to you with the cube rover for instance if eclipse provider wants to put down

their lander you know they work with us ahead of time to make sure that they're capable of interfacing with us then we send a cube rover across the surface of the moon pulling a cable along to them and then we can connect to them we have different forms of connections with them we can use some of our physical dustproof connections that we're developing. We have a system of wireless chargers that we're developing in partnership with a company in Seattle called Wybotik, who does these terrestrially. And that in and of itself is a very exciting technology. But really and truly, just like you see the power on the side of the road, we want to do that on the moon. And this is a very near-term thing. This is very attainable.

We've already developed a lot of the components that will go into that. How are those systems deployed? Is it individual landers for what we're looking at, the model over there that would be driving around the surface with the solar panel? Would you need to send a specific lander for that, or could that be part of a larger mission? So that is sized to our Griffin lander right now and the concept would be that upon landing it would roll off, similar to how Viper would roll off and then go to

its location. On board could be a handful of cube rovers that are attached and then deployed on site that then could deploy the cables as needed. And those would be on the rover itself that's carrying the solar panel or on the lander? the lunar infrastructure trailer, yeah, the LIT. But that whole...

That whole concept, the con ops of that is what's being developed under the Lunar Grid program. And that's where, in my mind, this gets really exciting. The VSAT is not only providing power to stationary permanent assets, but it also opens up the door for any of the mobility assets such as excavation services or let's say a rover that needs to travel into a permanently shadowed region in the moon that isn't going to have the ability to power itself it can go down in a tether with power provided by the VSAT. It just opens up the door to all kinds of these services that are needed for the future mission, permanent missions that NASA is intending

to perform. I think with the question of deployment here, one of the important takeaways that we want to kind of help people understand is in in making this a very attainable system with a single launch we can deploy the most baseline uh kind of smallest um set of nodes of a vsat to which then can be scaled upon you know with with further launches but you know the minimal attainable system is just a single griffin carrying a single vsat uh with a few cube rovers that you know can deliver the power and then as vsat rolls off andvers that, you know, can deliver the power. And then as VSAT rolls off and positions itself, you know, you have a set of interconnected nodes between the lander and the VSAT. And, you know, we can branch out from there. Yeah, and then that's what is I guess,

what is the range or the lifetime of the LIT? As the saying goes, like, what is the, would that be deployed for specific missions or would it be able to be reassigned after a certain number of years or service lifetime and maybe you know the next artemis mission is ready to go and you're going to roll over to that one so the vsat system specifically is designed to survive 10 years continuous and where lunagrid kicks in is the use of that system over essentially the 10 years it not, we aren't developing for a specific asset on the moon. And that's where, again, Lunar Grid is saying we have this power, we can use it with this different means. Yeah. The Artemis missions are all focused around very specific scientifically

interesting sites that are tens of kilometers apart. These aren't on opposite sides of the moon like some of the early Apollo launches. I mean, there's very specific craters and plateaus and rims that are, you know, a short drive from each other, relatively speaking. So if we, you know, as we grow this technology, we're going to build a grid surrounding these sites that, you know, whenever astronauts and future robotics explorers and things like that show up, they can essentially set up in areas of interest.

They can tap into an existing VSAT or Lunar Grid node that's already there so we can deliver a habitat directly to one of those places. And the power and the quote-unquote utilities are already there to hook up to. And this will span the Artemis campaign and allow ease of con ops and all that through the entire lifespan of the Artemis program. Just want to note too, it is a mobile platform. So let's say we get there with the intent to do specific con ops. If that isn't exactly what the mission was expected to perform,

this is set up to roll the solar panel right back in, and we can deliver it to a new site of interest. Yeah, it seems important based on what we saw with the Artemis landing spots. We know the region, we might not know the site until we launch, and then where's the lighting at, and what's the date of time? Mobility was a key aspect to this design that I think is one of the aspects that set us aside with all the competitors is that we have a very mature

cube rover system, avionics associated with that can be very similar to the LIT. So it wasn't a far reach for us to make a mobile system for this power source. With the last couple seconds we have, I'd just love to hear what are the things that we should be watching in terms of milestones or certain missions, and, like, what are the hardcore roadmap items

that we should be watching in the next couple years? Yeah, like I said, keep your eye out for that Cube Rover mission where we're going to be demonstrating long-range comms and, you know, overnight capabilities. This is not only going to be the first, you know, commercial rover to be able to do that, but it's going to be the lightest and most attainable one to do so. So we're proving technologies and we're opening the door for anybody to get on the moon, really. The other big two, I think, would be the wireless charger development and then the

VSAT itself. It's a very aggressive schedule and we're going to be demonstrating it over the next couple of years. Awesome. Well, thank you both for hanging out. This has been really cool to chat. Yeah, thank you both for hanging out. This has been really cool to chat. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having us. I'm Sam Moore, Executive Director of the Moonshot Museum. How did you end up as that?

How did I end up as that? So I ended up with Moonshot kind of by a curving and not very traditional space path. My background is in history museums and museum programming and operations. And I was working at another museum here in Pittsburgh, came across this very unique opportunity

without a lot of detail attached to it about building this new museum with a space company in Pittsburgh, building it entirely from the ground up, everything from programming to the built environment to fundraising. And it was too interesting and frankly, weird an opportunity to pass up, right? Those opportunities like that don't come up a lot in museums, which tend to just kind of be.

And so it ended up here just shy of two years ago, and we've been building a lot since. Can you give us a little bit of overview of how the museum came together, its relation to Astrobotic, how we should think about that setup? Sure. So there's a pretty unique relationship between the Moonshot Museum and Astrobotic. We are a standalone 501c3 nonprofit organization that has existed for about two years. And we are wholly separate from but tightly partnered with Astrobotic Technology, the company. So we are technically on paper we're tenants of Astrobotic, and they have set aside about 3,000 square feet for us, have donated that space to us, absorb our utilities, and most importantly,

provide that kind of front row seat into the work that they're doing. So we have an independent board of directors. We have a professional paid staff that exists solely kind of in our domain and Moonshot Museum. And what that has meant is we've had access to incredible subject matter experts on the astrobotic side of the house. And then at the same time, have been able to build out a museum space that is focused on contemporary space as a whole, right? So while we do talk about astrobotic, they're not the only company we're talking about. They're not the only space exploration work we're talking about. We're talking about what is happening in 2022 and beyond in space kind of all over the world. Yeah, I saw some starships in there.

Yes. Everyone will be excited about that. Absolutely. You also have an incredible view of the clean room, which is like, that would be enough of also have an incredible view of the clean room. Yes. Which is like, that would be enough of a museum for me personally. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, and that's the backdrop to the work is we have these two enormous bays of windows that look straight into the high bay where Astrobotic is building spacecraft. So right now, our visitors will be able to come in and see Peregrine under active assembly. They'll be able to come in and see Griffin under active assembly over the course of the next several months. And that's really unusual, this idea that you in Pittsburgh, of all places, can come in and watch this work happen in real time and know that what you're looking at is going to end up on the surface of the moon in the months that follow your visit,

particularly if you're in the north side, our neighborhood here in Pittsburgh, right? This is happening in your backyard. And as far as we know, it's really one of the only places you can come in anytime, pay the really low price for admission and get to see real spacecraft and know you're going to get to see that anytime you come. Yeah, you mentioned that, and I'm trying to rack my brain of all the clean rooms I've looked into. I'm like, yeah, I don't think you can get to any of those windows. You probably knew someone to get to those windows, right? Yeah, you mentioned that, and I'm trying to rack my brain of all the clean rooms I've looked into. I'm like, yeah, I don't think you can get to any of those windows. You probably knew someone to get to those windows, right?

Yeah, 100%. And I guess there were certain days when you could go in and see James Webb Space Telescope being assembled, but it was like those were special days. Exceptions to the rule. Yeah, it's just not a common thing. And the Pittsburgh part of it is really interesting to talk about because we're sitting, I can look out this window and see downtown and see where the Steelers play. That's no longer called Heinz Field, unfortunately.

Stadium formerly known as Heinz Field. Yeah, unfortunate for all of our Pennsylvania listeners. It's just really interesting to have this right here in a place that you would never think of this kind of thing. You're right. I'm from the eastern side of the state. There's not a lot of space stuff going on in there. I've been to like, I guess this is my third Pennsylvania space visit.

There's a training facility north of Philly. There's a facility outside of Philly that does kind of like trajectory analysis, mission design software. Boeing, I guess, has a couple of things that they build space components near Philly, but like it's few and far between this way. And so much so that when you're growing up here, right, I grew up just outside of Philly. It didn't seem like likely that I could do space things nearby. So you mentioned when we were on the tour that that's one of the main focus of what you're trying to get across in the museum is for kids that are in middle and high school that they could do this in their backyard.

Was that, what does that inspire from? Is that just from all of you here knowing how unique that opportunity is and feeling like more people should be excited about that in the local area? What is the inspiration for that being a main driving force behind the exhibit? Absolutely. So I think when we look at the space industry as a whole, right, $475 billion global industry, trillion dollar industry before too long,

the reality is that Pennsylvania as a whole, and then our wider tri-state region of Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania play a pretty critical role in space exploration, right? If we were to combine all of our states into one single state ecosystem, we'd be the third biggest in the entire country. We'd be second to Virginia and California, bigger than Florida, bigger than Colorado, bigger than Texas, right? So there's

already exciting work happening here. There isn't necessarily wide public knowledge of the exciting work happening here. The fact that Astrobotic is one of, I think, 16 space startups in our wider region. And so that really drives at the core is we have a community of people here in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. We have a community of people here in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. We have a community of kids who are going to be making big decisions about what comes next for their lives in the next five years. And we want space to be on the menu for them as much as robotics is in Pittsburgh or health care or higher education technology more broadly. You can build spacecraft in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can work heavily in the space industry in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And that's a message that we want to get out as

much as possible to kids right on the edge of that career readiness and workforce development journey as they enter college or trade school or apprenticeships or whatever it is they want to do. And to talk about the industry as a whole, we need to get the word out in a bigger way because already exciting work is happening, and our community should be benefiting from that. Our kids should be benefiting from pretty well-paying jobs in this industry. And if we can get a hold of that now, while it's still growing at such a fast clip

and really secure Pittsburgh's point of pride around space exploration and its role, as well as have kids and have our community making conscious decisions to invest in this work and get involved in this work, it's the best thing we can do. It's also interesting when you were mentioning about the local area that we're in, from my side of the state to this side and a little bit south of us, and then think about the future of space and how much space mining is talked about. I'm like, well, we're pretty good at digging stuff out of Earth.

We're great at that. We'd be really good at sending us out there. My five-hour drive was like, oh, yeah, all these people, we could do this kind of thing, but out in space. Exactly. That would be great. We build things here, right? We go after resources here, right?

And there's no reason why we shouldn't use all of the tradition of innovation that's here in this region, the tendency towards industry here in this region, and focus that on the new frontier. It's even kind of what you were talking about, that people might not think that they would have a job in space because they're not like an engineering type. They don't want to build a robot. But there's so many things that are space jobs that are... Because it's a whole industry. You need everything now, yeah. Exactly. I mean, us in this room, none of us have traditional space engineering jobs,

but we have space jobs. So that's cool that you can connect that. Because when I was growing up, it was like, you know, I got interested in software and iPhones and stuff because that came out when I was growing up, it was like, you know, I got interested in software and iPhones and stuff because that was, you know, it came out when I was 16. It was the coolest, the hottest thing at the moment. And at the time, you know, early 2000s, like space didn't really have that same shimmer that it has in 2022, where the timelines felt really long. I could go work for Lockheed Martin and Boeing, I guess, but my uncle does that, and that doesn't seem that exciting. There was just a different vibe to it.

Whereas now, I think a lot of companies, the newer companies, SpaceX, Astrobotic, these companies that are doing really interesting things capture imagination of public in ways that we haven't seen probably since the 60s. Right. And so anything that you can do to stoke that is great, not only because it creates more future listeners to my show, but it's like,

you know, I don't know, it's really cool to come out here and talk to you and the company here about, like, you know, there's so many people that are from this area that are working on the coolest spacecraft. And I'm like, even though I'm from Philly, I'm rooting for, like, the local crew over here, right? Well, Pennsylvania's returning America to the moon.

It's awesome. It's totally awesome to see. And to see how much hardware there is around, and then have the windows, you can go right up to it. And, I don't know, people on the other side might not enjoy as much as faces are going to be pressed on the window. They're warming to it. We get waves pretty often. And if you give a middle schooler a wave, acknowledge them, they're a lot less likely to tap on the glass. It's like the aquarium all over again. Exactly.

Yeah. All right. So we've got a couple minutes left, but can you give us a rundown? I think you're opening in like a week and a half. What's the process for people to come in and visit? Yeah. So we're opening on October 15th, Saturday, October 15th, and we'll be open from there on out five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can learn more, plan your visit at moonshotmuseum.org, find us on social at moonshopmuseum. And the other thing I want to stress is that our admission rates are real, real low. So it's $10 for adults, $5 for kids, really affordable membership options as well. And if you can't

afford those rates, we're going to get you in anyway. So come and see us. We're right on the edge of building something, opening something, you know something brand new, really exciting, and hopefully building a little bit of a new model for the industry to follow when it comes to getting people close to the work that's happening. Awesome. Thanks for hanging out. It was great. Definitely.

All right. My name's Olivia Chapla. I'm the director of marketing and communications for Astrobotic. We talked all day about the nerdy side of Astrobotic, the hardware, the payloads, the software. Let's talk about telling side of Astrobotic, the hardware, the payloads, the software. Let's talk about telling people about Astrobotic. We sort of talked about this a little bit with the museum of how strangely positioned Astrobotic is and like being in a very non-traditional space market. And we've talked a lot about talking with local media and trying to get them to see what

Astrobotic's working on, less so people like me who are well-versed in it. So how has telling the story felt? Are people surprised to find out this is the kind of mission that's happening? Are they intrigued that, like, why is it here? Where do they expect you to have an office, I guess? Is it like, oh, I thought that would be in Florida or something? Oh, absolutely. So what's funny is when you say, oh, I work at the space company down the street in Pittsburgh, people are like, well, sure you do. Like, all right. They kind of don't believe you at first. And I think that's really funny because, I mean, we're known in the space industry, people know who Astrobotic is. I can pick up the phone and call Space News, and they know exactly who we are. But in the city of Pittsburgh, they may not.

We've been pretty good about national press lately, but when you go and you say, there's a space company in Pittsburgh, we promise, we swear, it does make sense because we have such a tech hub here, and we have, of course, companies that have started here and have expanded here. Google's here, Uber, Aurora, whoever. There's a big Apple team here, and they're not in a lot of places. Yes, and it's surprising. But space is even more surprising because they're like, well, what about Florida and Texas and California?

And we do launch from Florida, but we don't build the rockets ourselves. So it makes sense that we can still build it here and do it here. And especially with the, you have Carnegie Mellon there, you've got, I mean, the amount of people I know at space companies that came out of the Penn State program is quite interesting. Like, there's a weird underground Pennsylvania space community that is awesome. It reminds me, like, the punk underground that used to be in Pittsburgh. It didn't survive, unfortunately, I don't think, as much as we're hoping the space industry here will. But what's interesting, too, is we have this company called the Keystone Space Collaborative. And they formed their own separate thing.

But they contracted Bryce Tech, which is a fact-seeking company, a study company, and they discovered that because of Astrobotic's presence here, all of this other space industry business has started flourishing. So there's so many companies within the Keystone region, which is West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. And we found out that us contracting manufacturers and different companies to make things for us has just grown it, started the space industry here. We call it the new space industry in Pittsburgh, the Space Race 2.0. We have all those phrases, but it's here.

Now you finally have people, even people that ship spacecraft. Now they do that here. They used to ship other things, but now it's space. Astrobotic itself is interesting in the roadmap of projects that they've been involved in and how tightly coupled it feels from the outside to NASA's CLPS program is probably not how it feels inside. So I feel like that's interesting to dig into as well. What the story has been, roll the clock back to 2015 or something,

and how the story has changed over time, and what areas you feel like people missed in that storyline from the last couple years. Oh, there's so much. I think one of the most challenging parts for me as a marketing and comms person is trying to explain the legacy, one, of space and why we can't just copy-paste Apollo, right? Like we're landing on the moon, but we haven't done that in so long.

And with that, it kind of evolves to also how did this even occur, as you said, and why is it here and why do we have the money that we do? So to start, AstroBug was like an eight-person company for a long time. And they kind of started engineering and thinking about and feeding the idea that we needed commercial space, that we needed to go back to the moon. It's our nearest celestial neighbor. We needed to go and discover what we missed, right? And actually not just plant the flag, but continue there. What happened is we took off, as you would say, we launched. And now we have a company of over 200 employees. And that was not just from CLPS programming.

It was obviously instrumental in our development and in our growth. But aboard Peregrine alone, we have 11 NASA payloads from the CLPS program, yes, but we also have 13 other payloads. These are people that we've signed commercially. They're government space agencies, Mexican space agencies, sending little micro-rovers to catapult to the surface. We have DLR, a German space agency, but we also have weird stuff, too, which I particularly like. For example, DHL sponsored us, International Shipping Company. They said, all right, we want to show that we can send stuff to the moon, too. We're past international, which is really fun.

But they sponsored this program called Moonbox, where for a few hundred bucks, you can purchase a moon capsule. I know. I missed the deadline. Oh, you should have emailed a moon capsule. I know, I missed the deadline. Oh, you should have emailed me. What's going on? I missed the deadline. Maybe next one. Yeah, I'm waiting to get signed up.

All right. Maybe, you know, we'll throw you a bow and we'll see. I got to back up the podcast. That's right. It's got to be legit. Anyway, I cut you off about what this actually is. Oh, you're fine. So for a few hundred bucks, purchase a capsule,

and you can send what you'd like to the lunar surface with us. But how this grew and the ways that it grew is just crazy. For example, we have something, Writers on the Moon is a group, and they all contributed stories and poems and all different kinds of literature that they themselves wrote, and that is on a micro SD card that's in one of our moon capsules. We have another guy from Reddit. His name is Adam Broden. And he just said, hey, I have a giant amount of space on my SD card. Who from Reddit wants to join on this mission? I'll put your comment on my SD card. 33,000 people commented. I imagine that was a nightmare to sort through.

Like probably a lot of good karma. Oh, a lot of it. And, but what's great is like these 33,000 people are now a part of this with us. It's not just the commercial payloads that are, you know, more scientifically driven. It's also just humanity itself. And there's everything on the Reddit comments, everything from the Shrek movie, for some reason, all the way to, you know, photos of loved ones and the Encyclopedia Britannica is on a board. Like, it's just a big chunk of humanity that's really cool. But we also have weird stuff like hair, for some reason. People really wanted to send their hair um which is great because it's low weight right every gram matters totally true but yeah i feel like this this kind

of stuff people can be like whatever like roll their eyes out but i think what's interesting about it is that it's like i am pro being able to send weird stuff to the moon. Like if that just means more stuff is going to the moon, whatever, man. Let's do it. Yeah, send your weird stuff to the moon if that's what we're doing. I mentioned that one of my colleagues, Blazer Dan is what I've deemed him. Yes, now it's making it on air. Businessman Dan. He's my boss.

Love him. He's been in the space industry for so long. He's so intelligent. But he raised a point. He said we were asking like where's the cutoff? Where's the limit? Where do we stop when it comes to who can send stuff and the sort of people or sort of things or whatever it is?

And he said, well, our kind of mission from the start was make space accessible to everyone. And that may sound like corporate-y or whatever you want to call it, um, or cheesy. If you, if some people think it's cheesy, whatever,

whatever you think about that, we're allowing anybody, um, Mr. Beast, um, the YouTuber, he did a whole campaign.

and it's maybe Mr. Beast isn't your taste. Maybe he is, but we're not going to limit that. We're not going to say gatekeeper. You're not the gatekeeper. We're not the gatekeepers here. You want to be aboard, you can contract us to do that. So it's pretty cool.

And that extends, of course, to the scientific instruments and things that are doing the real core science. For sure. But it's also the fun stuff. I mean, we even have a Bitcoin aboard, and we discussed it's sort of like a treasure hunt. You know, whoever finds it can get that Bitcoin and cash it in. Like, why not?

So it captures that humanity and the fun part of space as well as the serious. It's also like, I think if NASA or if commercial companies or if any one individual already knew what would be the successful thing to stoke a cislunar economy, they would be doing that. Whereas this is more like, let's figure it out. You got ideas? Because you're selling payload space. So if somebody has an idea for a payload that is a profitable economic thing to do, then they've got a space to do that. thing to do, then they've got a space to do that. And the experimentation of not just how do we get a small lander to the moon and deploy payloads, but the experimentation of business models or strategy, that's a big part of what

I think even NASA wants out of this program. It's like, they don't know what people want to do with moon landers. They just know that they should have some moon landers. So let's see what happens when we offer this kind of space out there. And we exist because there was a demand. There were people that wanted to send things. And I mean, there's so much possibility still. I mean, imagine I'm pushing here, like any artists out there.

If you have a record and you're trying to be the first, you know, musical record on the moon, that's still a possibility that's still open, that can inspire. Maybe it's a female artist or a minority artist, and they're encouraging their audiences that you can do something out of this world as putting your life's work, your music, on the moon. If you had to pick two bands, hypothetically, to send music to the moon,

why would it be our two favorite bands from high school? Can you tell the story? I would like to hear this story on the record. Sure. Okay, fine. Okay, so I talked about Blazer Dan before. He's my boss, and his wife wanted to go to see Dashboard Confessional

as well as Andrew McMahon, as some of you may know, was also in Jack's Mannequin, something corporate, and they were in concert, so we decided to go together. We put on our punk best, and we went to the concert, and it just so happened that I ran to the keyboardist at the merch table and said, oh, hey, you guys have a lot of space songs. So can we, you know, you want to see some spacecraft? And he's like, am I getting murdered? But like, are you going to take me back to your building? Like, what's going on?

This is a really weird offer. Really strange offer. This late in Pittsburgh. And as you said, as you said, like people don't expect a space company here. So they're just like, okay. So I showed them articles, like we're legitimate. But, you know, let me know. So exchange numbers.

I did not expect you know I expected to be stood up Dan's wife Kathleen we were picked up by Blazer Dan and Wyatt he's Blazer Dan now is because this man showed up after being on the couch in his pajamas like reading or something or watching whatever he was doing to pick us up he got fully dressed he put a blazer on and he's like, we got to talk to the bands. We got to do this. Like, Dan, you're meeting rock stars.

Like, you're meeting the coolest rock stars that I never got to see growing up. That's like my favorite, favorite bands. And Anthony, you said you went to so many Dashboard. And Enriched Man shows over the years. Like, countless, yeah. It's a dream. So not only, so like I'm meeting my, my,

my stars here and we have blazer Dan in a blazer, like waiting to do a pitch. So I'm threatened Dan that if he didn't let me talk, I would be very upset. No, but we wait, we're at Astrobotic at it's almost midnight. I finally get a text and it, the whole crew is coming. We're walking over now. So just like, the whole crew? What does he mean?

All of them walked in. All of Dashboard Confessional. Andrew McMahon and his band. And Cartel, weirdly enough, that was also the opener. Another great throwback. Oh, my god. And I think the tour was Gandhi's tour. So it was all about the older music and they played something corporate

on stage and things like that it was just amazing, but they all just walk in and they think we're cool Yeah, what were they into? Because this was fairly recent I remember you saying one of these recent singles were released while they were here and I was like oh, that's pretty recent then. Oh my god, yeah

they walked in and the keyboardist looked at his watch phone or whatever. And it was two minutes to midnight. And he says, in two minutes, our song Stars is dropping. Like, how serendipitous. So they were here like a few months ago, I guess. Yeah, this must have been a month or two ago. And they toured the entire facility.

And they were just like, what are we doing here? Like, how is this even possible? We took a nice photo next to our mission patch for Peregrine. And they're interested in maybe even creating a soundtrack for the Moonshot Museum and exploring, like, what is sound in space? What does space sound like in 2022? You know, it's not that sci-fi, like, boo-wee-oo. Like, it's actually, like, what are we going to do? So we're still looking to partner with them and create it.

But that was a high school Olivia dream come true. Yeah, right. If you could roll your back to like 16-year-old self and be like, you're going to work at a space company. You're going to give these people a tour of a space company. You'd be like, none of that makes sense. No, and I sent my friends a photo of me and Andrew McMahon. They're like, are you kidding?

Like they're mad. Okay, this is the kind of stuff, though, that I feel like is a thing that many companies would be like, no, we're not letting those people into our facility. Like, why would we bring those in? So I don't know, like, how much of that do you try to inject into what you do to try to get Astrobotic Story out? Because, I don't know, they could have sent some cool tweets

and posted some stuff that would have gotten interesting attention. Like, there's always that chance. So I'm just curious how, is that kind of interaction something that you try to do in, like, communications? You know, outside of reaching out to people like me or just space tutors. But, like, how do you try to get it out to the non-spacey types? Oh, yeah. So, well, that's where I was. I mean, when I first started at Astrobotic, my Google history was so strange. It's like, why moon dust bad? And like very weird things because I just didn't know. I didn't have that legacy knowledge. I didn't study space. So, yeah, when it comes to trying to connect to the general public and people that aren't as familiar with it, I really, I'm passionate about that part.

with it. I really, I'm passionate about that part. And to what I love about our little scrappy astrobotic, like we're very impressive. You saw our facility. It's incredible. It's professional. It's amazing. It's the work we do here. There's so many incredibly smart people here. And I oftentimes say, joke that I'm the dumbest one in the building, but that's not true. Just different skill sets. But what I, what I like to do, because there's no red tape. I mean, if I say, hey, I want to give this a shot, see if they might, you know, talk about us, do do a partnership with us. You get to try like shoot your shot. Right. So that's what I do. I even approached Jeff Goldblum's agent. He's a well-known Pittsburgher. Jeff Goldblum's agent.

He's a well-known Pittsburgher. And we just thought, hey, he's in space. And he plays in space movies and things like that. And he was from Pittsburgh. So maybe he'd like to come aboard, if you will. So we can try weird things. I mean, we're the weird company. We have the legacy of so many different things as well,

like so many different technologies. Like we have this hazard detection. You know, there's no GPS on the moon, as we know. There's no way to orient yourself. So we have to figure that out and do it autonomously, robotically. So just talking about taking things that are as complex as that and reasons why that's really difficult and boiling it down to something that maybe somebody could relate to. Like, you know, when we, we have wireless charging on earth, but it's especially important on the moon because plugs, uh, you don't want the dust to get in there and prohibit the

power from being transferred. Um, so instead of saying to mitigate regolith on the power distribution, you say wireless charging on the moon with no dust. Great. Like trying to get people to understand and, um, doing more relatable the moon with no dust. Great. Like, trying to get people to understand and doing more relatable things. Yeah, yeah. Like Dashboard Confessional. For sure. That's super relatable to at least half of my audience. That's amazing.

If they're our age, then they'll get it. Oh, yeah. I want to talk, too, about how the positioning of Astrobotic and some of these missions interacts with the NASA side of things. robotic and some of these missions interacts with the NASA side of things. It's kind of a weird setup in that it's like NASA contracted mission, but you're not flying a NASA mission, right? There's a very subtle difference there where SpaceX is flying cargo or crew to the station or if Boeing's flying them, they have to communicate as NASA, right? As a NASA mission.

Whereas this is a commercial mission that NASA is buying space on. So are there strict limitations on the way that you can communicate that mission out? Are there things that, you know, NASA has requirements for their payloads, but do they also have requirements for communications and the way to talk about the mission, or do you have a lot of leeway on how to communicate that? So that's really interesting you brought that up. It is an interesting territory because we are commercial.

We're a commercial company. Astrobotic purchased a service from us. So, like, we are the prime on a contract, and we're responsible for purchasing the launch vehicle. So for Peregrine, the Vulcan Centaur, of course, we purchased that from ULA, and we're the head of the mission, right? And we have so many, we have different customers aboard, as we said.

So with any of the customers, we're going to be respectful and communicate in a way that is good for everybody aboard. You know, we have to walk that line of the fact that they are our customers. So, yes, we're going to be respectful, and we're going to craft messaging together when it comes to their items, their scientific instruments. So there is an interesting give and take in that way that you would expect between a client and a customer. But we, of course, are commercial. So we can do the weird stuff like Jeff Goldblum and getting Dashboard Professional here. We can do those things. We're

free to do those things. We're free to talk about astrobotic as astrobotic, but we would never presume to assume what NASA, we would never speak for them. Yeah. But it also makes sense because you want to sell more of these missions to other people too. So it's a big part of how NASA structured the program is that you have to or you incentivize to.

So getting the message out about your product is not is not like uh it doesn't come into conflict with what nasa wants out of the mission too so exactly exactly we all want the same things and i even say like yes we have competitors but honestly the more the more of us that are successful the better it is for all of us yeah um so i'm over here like rooting for the other companies um no you're totally totally right. It's a weird spot. It's just an interestingly positioned program from NASA in that way. Yes, you're competing on task orders, but zoom out a bit. It wouldn't be great if the competition got so cutthroat

that it would harm the overall program. So it's a weird program. That's why I love it, because it's just interesting. So it's super cool. And all the engineers, I mean, when we see a mission fail, like when you see, you saw a crash into the moon, all the engineers felt that here.

You know, we know how hard it is. We know how much it takes. We know the passion, like the dedication, the amount of hours, the effort. And you just hate to see it. We don't wish harm on any mission. The industry is like three people wide, especially when you're talking about Moonlanders.

So yeah, it's not very big. No, what is it? The law of... Kevin Bacon? Yeah, we're like two Kevin Bacons away from anybody. Yeah, if that. Awesome. Well, I think we're wrapping up our day here.

It's been really awesome to come and see everything that's going on. I talked about how much equipment I was stepping over on the tour. And, like, there's a lot of why I wanted to come out here was just a vibe check on how everyone's feeling right now. And it's awesome to see everyone. Like, there's legitimate work happening. A lot of times I've been on tours that feel Truman showy. Like, what are these people doing? But there's, like like prep for a sim going on behind you. There's people working on payloads behind me. It's very active. And that's cool to see. Oh, yeah. And it's, you

know, we've we've proven our salt. We've shown our cards. We've shown our lander. We've, you know, been pretty transparent in the process. So I think that I mean, this is a typical day. Everybody's going to be ignoring us as we walk by because they got stuff to do. Right. But also, and I will say, I'm going to plug somebody that's our, it's actually one of our mission sponsors commercially. La Prima is this little coffee roaster in Pittsburgh. And we got to go make a deal with this amazing Italian man that owns it and operates it. But we're powered by them. Like, we don't need the fuel as much in the spacecraft.

We don't need the computers, the software, the power. We do need the coffee, though. There's a riot when this runs out. But anyway, like, that's, I don't know. It's just the commercial aspect of it that we get to go after those fun, better things. Non-traditional stuff. Non-traditional stuff. But anyway, I'm so glad you came by and got to hang out with us.

And maybe you'll get a Peregrine beer one day since we basically fund the local brewery. Yes. Of how often our team's there. Yeah, I need to stop by there. Well, thanks again. This has been really cool. And thanks for showing me around. Thank you.