Main Engine Cut Off - T+249: Space Symposium Round Up Plus Drop-In Guests (Live from Space Symposium 2023)

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Live from the Redwire booth at Space Symposium 2023! I discuss news, announcements, and happenings from the conference, then talk with a trio of drop-in guests: Sean Bedford (Director of Business Development, Astrobotic), Mike DeRosa (Co-Founder & CMO, Gravitics), and Jason Hopkins (Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, Crescent Space).This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—SmallSpark Space Systems, Matt, Donald, Jan, Robb, Bob, Kris, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut), Warren, Russell, Stealth Julian, Harrison, Lee, Ryan, Frank, Steve, Chris, Benjamin, The Astrogators at SEE, Fred, Tyler, Theo and Violet, Simon, Dawn Aerospace, Joonas, Joel, David, Lars from Agile Space, Brad, Pat from KC, Pat, Moritz—and 845 other supporters.TopicsA Classic Main Engine Cut Off - YouTubeRocket Lab Introduces Suborbital Testbed Rocket, Selected for Hypersonic Test Flights | Rocket LabRocket Lab to refly Electron engine - SpaceNewsLeidos working with NASCAR on Artemis lunar rover - SpaceNewsAstrolab to send rover to the moon on SpaceX’s Starship - SpaceNewsTerrestrial Landers | Masten Space SystemsGraviticsCrescent Space | HomeThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen 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 John Kraus for RelativityWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello everybody, welcome to the lunchtime Main Engine Cut-Off here at Space Symposium. We got a fun couple hours coming up. I'm gonna be up here for like four hours so get strapped in for that. So first up I'm gonna just talk a little bit about what I've been walking around looking at the show talking to people all morning so I picked up some interesting stuff there's been some news. Rocket Labs make a lot of noise so talk about some of that and then we've got some guests stopping by from Masten, formerly Masten now Astrobotic. We've got somebody from Gravitics and somebody from the new Lockheed Martin spin-off, Crescent Space,

coming by to talk about a comms network around the moon, so that'll be cool. And then later on, we've got Peter Beck stopping by with Caleb Henry, a couple others. We've got people from the commercial Leo in Lunar Space stopping by, and then off-nominal for happy hour, there'll be some beers here for everybody to partake in the off-nominal spirits. So to start, like I mentioned, there was some Rocket Lab news that I thought was interesting. hour. There'll be some beers here for everybody to partake in the off-nominal spirits. So,

to start, like I mentioned, there was some Rocket Lab news that I thought was interesting. At the start of the show, they announced that they'll be doing suborbital launches, hypersonics. It's kind of a new target domain for them, which is really curious because it's no secret that the small launch side of things have been struggling to find payloads to fill out manifests, especially in the era of SpaceX flying rideshare missions. So they've been trying to find new markets to go into, and Rocket Lab has been a bit of a sweetheart of the Department of Defense lately. They've flown a lot of NRO missions and Space Force missions,

and that kind of dedicated rideshare or dedicated launch, in the case of the bigger satellites they've flown, has been a big market for them. They're working on first stage reusability. So being able to fly a mission that's a first stage only, specialized upper stage to deploy hypersonic targets is a weird new market for them. But it's a niche, right? So they can probably sell those for more than they could other launches out there. So good business model, I think. They've already sold a bunch of launches and I feel like there'll be no shortage. So good business model, I think. They've already sold a bunch of launches and I feel like there'll be no shortage. So who knows, the Virginia launch site

might just be more suborbital stuff and that's what Wallops does, but it feels like that's a good market. And similarly, they announced that they're gonna start reflying their engines from their first stage. So they've been recovering them out of the ocean. They originally were gonna do helicopter recovery. Didn't work out for a couple reasons

in terms of weather like, weather constraints and everything else that comes with capturing a rocket on a helicopter. But they found that fishing them out of the sea and cleaning off the engines, they could fire them again, and everything was looking good. So they're going to refly one on a mission. I was talking to them earlier, asking, like, why start there? And the engines are the hard part to figure out, you know, cleaning out saltwater and a lot of issues you've got to worry about to be able to fire them again.

So it seems like they were focused on that early on to make sure that part worked, and now they're moving on to the rest of the stage, the tankage, make sure that's all good. But if that's the case, right, these suborbital missions, they can recover the first stage, fly it again. There is a specialized version of their kick stage that would deploy these targets for the military. I'm just really curious how that's going to work out for them. So I've been enjoying that news. Similarly, I walked over to, and I say similarly as in finding some new markets. There's an Astrolab rover a couple booths away that I have never really known what to make of them, but I got a chance to stop by and talk with them this morning and figure out like what is your deal. That's

basically what I went up and I was like, I got to be honest, I don't know what to make of you guys. You're selling a giant rover to the lunar surface and it's a market that doesn't exist yet, but they have, I think it's like 1500 kilograms of cargo space on that rover. They're selling in 12U CubeSat increments, 25 kilograms for $10 million. They stated a price. They just told you the price if you walk over there. And they have a flight booked on Starship in 2026. So insert whatever your schedule adjustment is in your head for when that would actually fly.

But the way that they're going about that is they've said that inspired by nano racks and companies like that, that have flown that sort of payload on a launch side before, but offering that to the lunar surface, they're doing it in a way that is, and this is a common theme with when Gravitics gets up here, we'll talk about there's, there's a section of the industry right now that is playing in the space of like, okay, if Starship works out, then what do we do? What do we do with all that mass and volume that we can, how does that change the economics? We don't have to miniaturize stuff. We don't have to spend so much money getting something so tiny and rad hardened and everything.

We can build bigger structures. We could take more payload. Because what we're finding with lunar landers right now, Eclipse and the smaller landers that are out there, they still cost a lot of money to develop as we could talk about They cost a ton of money to develop but you're flying smaller landers So if you can spend a little bit more to develop a bigger lander But you can sell more on that the economics start to turn in your favor

And certainly starship has plenty of mass to go around so they're kind of calling their shot and saying that we can do this rover, put this much cargo on the lunar surface. And schedule wise, as Clips seems to struggle to the launch pad, it's taken a while to get there, which is no surprise given the constraints of that program. I have problems with the task order based mentality to some extent and the race to the bottom that we've seen in those task orders. But if something like this, if Astrolab starts pulling this off, that changes the game for what NASA is going to be looking for for Clips. And they currently don't have a setup on Clips that allows them to just buy a single payload space on a mission.

They're more looking at, we're going to buy half of a flight or half of a lander and let the lander company fill out the rest of the vehicle. If something like this works, that changes it entirely because they could find a new lane within that commercial lunar payload services program to say, well, we just want to buy a single 12U slot for $10 million. And, you know, maybe there's a certain set of payloads that that makes sense for. So they're also going to be bidding that apparently for the lunar terrain vehicle contract that NASA is going to have out there,

which is more of like, think about the lunar rover the Apollo astronauts drove around on. You've seen, if you walk over to Lido's booth, which is not too far away, they've got their model out there with a NASCAR logo on it, which is a thing. I've heard people talking about that being more of the sponsorship mentality than anything else, but we'll talk about that later, I'm sure. sponsorship mentality than anything else, but we'll talk about that later, I'm sure. And I haven't been able to figure out that whole trend because everyone's announcing their own lunar rovers. There's going to be some rounds of RFPs that are going on in the near future from NASA. But it's yet to be determined exactly how that sort of thing is going to shake out in terms

of what does that contract structure look like? Are they going to buy one of these? Are they going to buy many of these? I was talking to the Leidos crew about there's certain decks on that lunar rover that they're going to sell payload space on to commercial companies or whoever wants to buy it. Maybe there's other governments that want to put payloads on the surface. So they're going to co-manifest commercial payloads

on a rover that's built for Artemis astronauts on the surface. And there's just all these ways where what was that Klipsch mentality of like, let's commercialize payload space on the surface. And there's just all these ways where what was that Clipse mentality of like, let's commercialize payload space on the moon is cropping up in all these different spots, whether it's purely commercial mission, or if it's co-manifesting on Artemis mission. They even mentioned the fact that, you know, maybe there's a certain fee for like Artemis astronauts delivering payloads between landers to the rover, vice versa, repositioning them on the

surface. And that's part of the business model of that program is that theyers to the rover, vice versa, repositioning them on the surface. And that's part of the business model of that program is that they have to figure out, much like all these other programs we've talked about so much with the spacesuits and the commercial space stations, NASA is going to pay for a certain part of it. And you have to figure out how to close the gap from there to an actual business. So watching them try to find those different niches is like that's where the money is going to be made. That's where the program is going to succeed or fail. So watching everyone place their bets is kind of interesting.

And the Litos one, I'll give them credit, looks more realistic than the other ones. All the other ones look a little sci-fi to me. And this one just looks like they were like, okay, what does it actually look like if we were to build one of these? And that's kind of what the vibe I'm getting there is. So we'll see if that works out. One or two other things I want to mention. In a similar vein, I did get to talk to the team from K2 Space, who is similar mentality as I talked about with Astrolab of what happens if there's this much cargo space available to us, or this much mass, this much volume?

How does that change the economics? They're working on building satellite buses that are matched for the current crop of big launchers coming up from Starship to New Glenn. These things that provide significant more mass, significant more volume, and it changes the way they need to build the actual buses for these things. it changes the way they need to build the actual buses for these things. So they're trying to make them simpler, cheaper to build for a significant size that we just haven't seen that sort of mix on the matrix before because there was no space for it. You had the small sats that people are flying, CubeSats, 200-kilogram satellites that are a certain class, certain capability. You have the big satellites that are going out to geostationary orbit

or something like that. But this kind of mix of being able to take economics of building these very off-the-shelf satellites, integrating it with payloads that are cheaper because you can build more of them for less dollars up front. But being able to take advantage of volume, that's totally different. Like you could do different applications like synthetic aperture radar needs a big volume of a satellite, which typically brought huge costs. But now if you have a cheap giant satellite, that really changes your economics for synthetic aperture radar applications.

So I'm just trying to make sense of that part of the market right now because Starship's on the pad. I have barely come to grips with this is on the verge of happening, and it's going to be a long road from here to being their commercial success or flying enough to really get payload deliveries started. But if you're smart and you're seeing where the trends are going and you're saying what happens if this does work out in five or ten years, it's hard to bet against the outlier.

And SpaceX, for whatever the mix is, is an incredible outlier. They always have been. And watching the rest of the launch industry, it's tough to bet against them at this point. So any of the businesses out there that are, and if this is anyone here, let's chat, like what happens when this works out five, ten years down the line, whatever it is, even if it is ten years away, the math is different in that era. And we're now seeing all the launch companies

grow into a Falcon 9 size to compete. We saw Relativity basically do a Falcon 9 clone, announced that last week. Rocket Lab's moving up to half a Falcon 9 size, which Peter Beck is coming on later, so I'll give him some questions about why it's that size. I feel like it's a little too small. But by the time Starship's flying, New Glenn's flying, and we're in that next class up,

will everyone be going up another size class to sort of take advantage of that mass and volume? So a lot of interesting trends. I'd love to bring on Sean now from Astrobotic so we can talk about what they've been up to out that way. So Sean Bedford, welcome. Welcome aboard. Thanks very much for having me, Anthony. Long time listener, first time caller. So happy to be part of the broadcast today. Yeah, let's start. First off, I just want to hear from you directly what your job title is. And you're from what was formerly Mastin is now Astrobotic Test and Propulsion Division. So maybe explain your role and also what this merger has been like in terms of organization structure.

Sure, absolutely. So I'm the Director of Business Development for our Propulsion and Test Department, which was formerly Masten Space Systems. We acquired Masten's, substantially all of Masten's assets and most of its programs back in September of last year. We've been going through the integration process and really trying to fold the former Mastin workforce and facilities and assets all into Astrobotic as a part of the integrated company. It's been, you know, obviously the circumstances surrounding the Mastin acquisition were not what anybody had hoped. However, I will say it has been incredibly revelatory to have a chance to sit down with a former competitor and say, hey, what were you guys working on?

What are you guys working on? And find all those complementary technologies that, you know, maybe we didn't know that we had this opportunity to work together, but when you pair them all together, the opportunities to look at what we have and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts is mind-blowing. And specifically as it relates to Masten, this has allowed us to, in a lot of ways, kind of get back to what was the bread and butter of Masten Space Systems for a long time, which was the vertical takeoff and landing terrestrial flight testing with our Zodiac

vehicle and its predecessors. I'm excited to announce that Zodiac will be returning to flight as soon as next week. So we're really excited. We've got a full manifest for flight opportunities this year. We'll be flying NASA's Tech Leap Challenge coming up here this summer and then flying payloads from UCF, Purdue, Draper, and one for, I guess, an in-house payload now for Astrobotic. Yeah, that's interesting because a lot of the speculation when everything was going down was okay, we know that the Eclipse

mission is kind of what tipped Masten over the edge, what its former role was, and everyone was questioning what's going to happen to these vehicles out in Mojave and we've seen a lot of videos of different things being tested on those platforms in the past. Certainly we've seen terrain relative navigation payloads

I think flying on that. And there's a lot of interesting applications in it. And it's like kind of the one platform that does that really well. So it's good to hear it's not going away. Well, yeah. And credit to Astrobotic and the team, the leadership team at Astrobotic for recognizing that this is a unique national asset. There's really nothing quite like Zodiac. It's the most, I don't mean to overstate it because we're talking not exactly apples to apples, but it's arguably the most reliable rocket vehicle in history. It's flown 150 plus missions, no failures, no mishaps, no anomalies. It has done exactly what it was designed to do. It consistently lands within

two centimeters. I'm going to make a shameless plug if I may real quick while I've got the entire space industry around me. If you are interested in flying on a VTVL rocket lander simulator, come talk to me because we'd love to fly you. But no, I do think it's really great that we were able to recognize that. And I think it speaks to sort of what we're doing and the ability this has given us to vertically integrate the company. Because we're, you know, we flew Astrobotics TRN system as a customer. And I should say the propulsion and test department did way back when they were in Macedon. That's now going to the moon. And you're just talking about how unreal it is that Starship is sitting there on the pad.

We're weeks away from launching to the moon. I mean, this is all really happening. We live in the future. It's incredible. The other aspect about this news is interesting because when the acquisition happened I was like okay this was a way for Astrobotic to get another Clips mission on its manifest but that's

unfortunately not going to be true so the mission one that was under Mastin is not going to be flown as it was so it's kind of I mean we probably can't talk about it because there's all stuff getting renegotiated I'd have to defer to the Clips office on that I've not been part of those discussions lately. But just generally, knowing that that news is out there, it again changes like, okay, what was the motivation for

Astrobotic buying Mastin? And it's more seeing the value in that test environment. So are there particular integration bits that you could talk about from, you mentioned an in-house payload, is that kind of the main crossover areas, testing things on these platforms that are going to fly on Peregrine or Griffin? Or are there extra areas beyond that that we should look at? Well, I think there's a lot beyond that. If you look at some of the work that we've been doing, returning Zodiac to flight has been a high priority, but it hasn't been the only one. We just wrapped up an SBIR phase two on a non-radioactive survive the night

technology that's going to provide heat and electrical power throughout the lunar night. As I'm sure most of your listeners know, the lunar night is very cold and very dark, and it's very hard to keep machinery alive during that time. But Mastin was working on what we call our night system, first under an SBIR contract, and now we're wrapping up a tipping point on that as well. But looking at those collaborative, again, without using the same term over and over again, complementary technologies where we look and say, well, Mastema's developing this. How can we apply it to some of the, for example, the lunar surface work that Astrobotic has been doing with its rovers for a long time, looking at ways to combine that technology.

So it's, it's a lot more than just Zodiac and our vertical takeoff and landing rockets. The other aspect I find interesting is that the name of the department that was formerly Masten is the Test and Propulsion Division. Can you give us any intel on why propulsion is so, is called out so, you know, obviously there's engines on these vehicles, but is it going to go beyond that? Is it going to be something that we will see you grow into engines as well? I can't really speak to that yet. We're still going through the integration process and really figuring out what our long-term strategy is. So I am not quite ready to break any news there. I will tell you, we just wrapped up an SBIR phase one for NASA on rotating detonation rocket engines and on a very special injector

design for that using some proprietary materials. So we're very excited about that future and the direction that could take us. I'll also just share a quick anecdote because I think it speaks to sort of the core of propulsion and what it means to the identity of that department is, you know, we were comparing, we had a little slideshow where we showed sort of like everyone's mental conception of like what the other company had been as sort of a welcome to the team moment. And the picture that the astrobotic team picked for Mastin was for Mad Max and just showing us firing, you know, with fire and V trucks out in the desert. And, you know, we're obviously a lot more buttoned up than that,

but I do think it sort of speaks to that mentality. I've heard some stories, probably back in the day stories, but yeah. Yeah. Mostly back in the day stories. It is, I just, it's such an interesting thing in the market that I don't feel like people really think about a lot is, is I don't know. Mastin was always something that people would point to because it was really cool. They had interesting looking vehicles, but it was hard to really sense like what was going on there. So just to hear the way it's being integrated in some of this stuff now is encouraging for people that there was a lot of Mastin fans out there that were like concerned when this all came about. And certainly we were talking before this, like

it's a tumultuous time in the industry. There's going to be companies going out of business over the next year or two, just because of general waving my arms around at the situation. Like there's a lot going on, a lot of chaos out there. So the fact that Mastin is living on in this way is awesome.

So we're all pumped. Yeah, no, we're really thrilled to be part of Astrobotic and having a chance to go to the moon with Peregrine Mission 1 here in the very near future. It's incredibly exciting. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. I'm sure we'll talk more in depth in the future, but it's been a pleasure hanging out with you. And I was out at the office last fall checking out the new space out in Pittsburgh that they are working on the

moon landers and all that kind of stuff. So I'll have to make a trip out to the other side now to come out to Mojave. Yeah, open invitation other side now to come out to Mojave. Yeah, open invitation anytime you want to come out to Mojave. We've got some really cool stuff going on there that I'm not quite ready to talk about yet. But I'll be sure to let you know. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much, Anthony. Thanks, man.

Good hanging out. All right, we've got... That was awesome. That was great. So next up, we've got Mike, if you're ready, ready to talk. Let's do it. We've got Mike, if you're ready, ready to talk. Let's do it.

So this is going to be fun because Gravidix has been on my list for a while, Mike. I just tweeted I'll be live in 10 minutes. Oh, sorry. Well, we're cruising here. Yeah, ahead of schedule. I realize I have at least 15 to 20 minutes of things I want to ask you about instead of 10 minutes because you've been on the list. It's great to talk with you. I literally started off this whole thing talking about people that are working on what happens now that Starship is a thing problem. And I feel like Gravitix is – am I saying it right?

Oh, yeah. Gravitix. Gravitix. A lot of people say Gravitix, but it doesn't bother us. It looks like gravity most of the way through the name. So that's why we say Gravitix. Gravitix. Gravitix is not a good name. So stick with Gra the name. So that's why we say Gravitix. Gravitix. Gravitix is not a good name. So stick with Gravitix.

I love that. It's Gravitix. Give me the pitch on what you're working on because it's such an interesting problem set that you're working on. And you're thinking differently about this kind of space. So what's the deal? Yeah. So, well, I'm Mike DeRosa. I'm a co-founder and marketing at Gravitics Inc.,

which is building space station modules. And I'm super excited about the future of what we're going to do in orbit with large space structures. With Starship specifically, we're kind of skating to where the puck is going, to quote Michael Scott, to quote Wayne Gretzky. And we're actually building for any next-gen launch vehicle, so we're not just only banking on Starship. But we feel that there's going to be a pretty big shift in the paradigm when these more capable vehicles are putting things in space. So we're saying, okay, let's build

modern structures to put in space. And that's what we're doing. And I feel like I've gotten a little bit of this from trying to figure out what you're working on, and then I've seen a string of really interesting people joining the team, and it's raised my interest more and more, but what's

the methodology behind building them? Why are you doing it different than other people? What is your shtick about how these things are built? Well, we took a little bit of a page out of SpaceX's book when we saw what they were doing with rapid prototyping. And it's kind of like a hybrid of shipyard-style building as a combination of aerospace traditional-style building. And we opened up a facility in Seattle, and we're bending metal and putting parts together and developing our own thrusters and pressure vessels and all the components that you need to have a space station module and have a modern 2020s space station module.

And so when you're focused on modules, I think that's the part that's interesting to me as well, is that you seem to have a different focus than, I will point around, and there's like eight companies working on commercial space stations, right? They're working on like a full-up space station. And that comes with a lot of questions about how it integrates into the NASA program. So are you doing the whole thing? Is this going to have all the features, or is this a module that is meant to be added on to something else out there? So one of the reasons we say modules and we're building full space stations

is because we're not planning to immediately operate the space stations because we have the CLD program, and we have all of these companies that you just mentioned that are going to operate space stations, and we feel that we can augment their designs and offer them another option, an option that's built all in the USA to bring more volume and more capability to their designs

if you just add one of our modules onto what they're currently working on. Separately from that, you can use one of our modules for other use cases as well. It's really kind of like a piece of space infrastructure. We like to call it a building block of space stations. And it doesn't have to be a space station thing. It can be a totally separate free flyer. A single module can just be in orbit. You could, you know, visit it with people. You could, I mean, there's so many use cases for the different possible things that you could do with a large volume. That's just a

spaceship in low earth orbit. And that's basically what we're building. Low earth orbit spaceships. So how do, in that model, how do you go to these other companies and try to sell them on acquiring something? Is it is it are they waiting like, OK, show us first and then we'll maybe buy one? Or is there negotiations that you can do up front to say, you know, what, try to find out what their cost is for building a module or building a certain volume would probably be a better example, because when you're building larger diameter structures, your volume goes up pretty substantially, pretty quickly. So maybe comparing on a volume basis is an interesting way to do it. But are those discussions that you're having now or are you still on the like, let's figure out how to do this shipyard style first? Well, I mean, in some ways they kind of

sell themselves because they're bigger, better, faster, safer. When you're launching on next-gen launch vehicles, you have more margins for mass, and you can have thicker walls and more space armor. I think one of the big things is that we're a new company on the block, so we're making good friends. We have good partners. As you said, you've heard of the people joining our team.

We have a stellar team of engineers, designers, and builders. And so we just need to get our first module in orbit. And I think it's going to be, why don't, you know, all the companies who are working on space infrastructure in low Earth orbit are going to say, why don't we have a Gravitics module to host whatever we're hosting in space, you know, and outfit it in whatever way they want to do it and have large volumes in space. The other aspect here is that you've decided pretty heavily on outfitting on the ground and building these things on the ground and launching them. As opposed to inflatables. As opposed to inflatables and outfitting in orbit or even take it back to

Skylab doing a wet workshop. You know, they bailed on that because they were like, oh, that's a lot to outfit once you got to fly everything up and then integrate it all. So did you consider any other type of situations or were you from day one like we're going to build these whole things on the ground, outfit them here and launch them all as one? Well, so our name is Gravitics. And that's because our North Star, you know, our vision for the far future is rotating structures and humans living a whole ecosystem in orbit. To get there, we said, okay, let's build the best zero G modules we can. And we'll work from there. We'll future proof them as best we can so they can take the, you know, sideways loads if we ever wouldn ever wanted to spin them in the future.

And we considered actually doing a CubeSat demo that just spun. And we said, you know what? We want to build bigger. We want to start bigger. And in fact, when we were first pitching investors to invest in us, one of the big feedback thing we got is we weren't asking for enough money. And so we had to up it further and say, you know what, we're going to build big modules and we need a lot of money. And that worked. In terms of inflatables, you know, we see a lot of value in being able to outfit on the ground. Like you said, I mean, it's, imagine getting up into space and having to set up a whole science lab once you're already there, or you can have things kind of rigid structures that are put together on the ground and it's kind of ready for you when it

gets to space. And then there's external payloads is another thing. You know, you can't really put external payload all around an inflatable. I'm sure there are rigid sections of it that you would be able to. And I think inflatables, most of them that I know of, I could be wrong, have that apple core in the center that kind of takes away some of your volume. And one of our visions

is to have large open spaces to throw a soccer ball around, float around like Superman, Superwoman in orbit. Of all those things, we do think that there's a good case for inflatables. We're a fan of what some other companies are doing with inflatables. I think eventually, I'm trying to imagine something that's our size

on the ground that can inflate to something even larger in space. And so we're building eight-meter-wide modules at our largest. Those are the ones that fit on Starship. And you mentioned being able to support other launch vehicles, New Glenn up there. There's bigger fairings that are being worked on as well. So are there tooling specifics that, like, are you wedded to a certain diameter or is this, like, you'll figure it out? We're not wedded, yeah, to a diameter. We have a design goal of being able to be kind of diameter agnostic.

You know, the tools that we're developing in Seattle at our facility can, you know, produce an 8-meter module. It can produce a 7-meter module, it can produce a seven meter module, a six meter module. And it's really, as I said, skating to where the puck's going to be for not just Starship, but next generation launch vehicles. New Glenn would have to be a little bit smaller, but still so exciting when New Glenn eventually does get off the ground to say, hey, we're doing this next launch on New Glenn. And it's a slightly smaller diameter, but still way bigger than what's on the ISS currently.

You mentioned artificial gravity as being a thing that you're interested in long term. So clearly, you're looking at these orbital stations. Are you considering surface habitation as well? There's going to be a lot of starships on the moon in the not too distant future, if all goes well. So did you try putting one on a crane yet? Well, we have to lift them with cranes. So it works. So can you put them down once you have it on a crane? In theory, on the moon, everything's lighter. So maybe it's a little easier. Maybe it's a little harder. I don't know. You know, we're trying to focus on low Earth orbit first. And we see humanity flourishing throughout the solar system eventually. We'd love to have, you know, the best space stations,

Gravitics partners. It doesn't have to be just Gravitics. You know, our vision is like team space. We want humanity to flourish throughout the solar system, have space stations orbiting the moon, orbiting Mars, going to, you know, Saturn and stations orbiting the moon, orbiting Mars, going to, you know, Saturn and Jupiter. And Venus, sorry.

I know people are fans of different planets. I shouldn't have started naming planets. But, you know. God forbid you bring up Pluto. Hey, you know, I'm a Ceres fan. I'm a planets, everything's planets to me. So I'm a radical. Is Ceres a planet to you? Yeah, everything's a planet.

Okay. Alright, Ceres gets a big win here on Miko. I don't feel like spending time discussing it anymore. It's just all planets. Is Luna, our moon, a planet? Yeah. It's all planets. We can talk about this later. Everyone's getting mad here, so it's fine.

But for putting a star match on the surface, we'll have to develop it differently i think for that kind of use case you know mainly just have a it have its own stand its own feet that's uh you know strong to kind of make it kind of a permanent or semi-permanent structure and the real challenge there is the launch vehicle the lander the logistics of getting it to its destination and putting it there. Otherwise, it's like, you know, we can build lighter, we can build heavier. And right now we're saying, hey, let's build kind of heavy. We're kind of like mass agnostic because we're

saying next generation vehicles, the most modern space station modules you can have. Yeah. I just, I really appreciate the mindset because I always use this example of when Google was starting, there was one of their motivating principles was like, instead of spending a lot of money on a really expensive server, let's just buy a bunch of cheap ones and half of them are going to die, but it will have more computing scale than everyone else will. And that mindset of like, put your head five years forward and like what thing will be cheap. And if it's mass and volume, what does that do to your business is quite interesting. And then the other aspect is like you are on the outside looking in right now on the NASA CLD program, but not necessarily like Blue Origin and CR Space on Orbital Reef have specifically said they want to have this like business park where people are adding on to their station. I don't think any of them would be like, nah, we're good. Like we don't

need more space on our space station. If anything, that's going to make closing their business cases easier by being able to support more activities. So you're hedging against what I've been kind of pessimistic about recently, which was the commercial space station projects as currently run, by being able to offer something to all of those aspects. So that's why I've been particularly intrigued. And it's definitely good to hear the mindset behind this. And I'd love to hear, too, team structure and what size, how much you're growing, how many people you're at right now,

what is everyone doing day to day. A little bit about that would be cool to hear, too. like how many people you are right now, what is everyone doing day to day, like a little bit about that would be cool to hear too. We are pushing up to above 40 full time employees. We're a startup but we're growing. Every week we hire one or two new people. We're looking to scale up way higher than that. We need a lot of people working on a space station, right?

Our leadership team is really insane. Like, every meeting I'm in, I'm the dumbest person in the room, is what I like to say, you know? You know, we have Bill Tandy, who worked on JAPE's Webb Space Telescope. He is responsible for designing. I think he was in charge of the design of just orbital reef in general, before he left Blue Origin to join us. Scott Macklin coming from Virgin is a propulsion expert. He's going to get mad at me because I was just making fun of him saying like, you're a rocket scientist trying to get him on film saying it. And he's like,

he's like, no, no, no. He's so modest, you know? And I'm like, you're an expert on propulsion. And we have this really cool propulsion system that we'll probably talk to you about on another full episode, just for, you know, orbital station keeping and eventually de-orbit if we need to de-orbit a module because we want to be, you know, sustainable and everything like that. And that's just to name a few, you know, it's just a bunch of all-stars. Jeff, uh, our, uh, COO, um, developed robot arm for a Mars mission that actually failed, but the backup, uh, made it to Mars. So he had a, I was always like, Hey, this guy has a robot arm he built that's working

and it's on Mars right now. It's like the coolest, what's cooler than that. Absolutely. Um, the last question I have for you is how are you going to ship this to wherever it's going? How do you get this to the launch site? Did you figure it out yet? Yeah. Well, that was the first thing we asked ourselves when we were developing our facility. We said, you know, we could build in Florida and then launch right there. We looked at Texas. We looked at Alabama. We looked at every place in the US where people build space stuff. And we ended up in Seattle, just north of Seattle in Marysville.

One of the reasons we wanted to be there is because of talent and we want talented people working on our project. And as you can see, the vision has got awesome people that were already there or want to move there. And then to actually ship it from there could be challenging. It depends on if it's for a New Glenn diameter, we might be able to put that in an airplane. There's some large cargo airplanes. We can also ship it via boat through the Panama Canal to Florida for launch. I'm not sure we'll ever launch from Texas,

but if we wanted to, we'd go on a barge through the Panama Canal. And we're already talking about the mayor of like, all right, we're going to get a helicopter to bring it to the barge. And what's that going to look like? And the mayor of the city there was saying, oh, we'll remove all the traffic lights and stuff. Oh, nice.

So you can bring it down the street and get to the barge. So that'll be really cool. That's like space shuttle stuff right there. Love that. Yeah. I mean, it's big modules. That's like space shuttle stuff right there. Love that. Yeah. I mean, it's big modules. That's awesome.

Well, thank you so much for hanging out. My pleasure. Yeah. You guys are interesting. I don't know how much you're showing off that other, that Oculus thing. If people want to check it out. Oh, yeah.

We have, anybody here on site, we have a virtual reality kind of interior concept tour. So you can get a sense of how big these space station modules are because it's hard to, it's kind of hard to imagine it, you know, when it's one of our modules is almost half this volume of the ISS currently. I need to do that still. I want to give a big thanks to Redwire and thanks to you so much for hosting this and

having us. For sure. Thanks. All right. Thanks again having us. For sure, thanks. All right. Thanks again, Mike. All right, so, I think we've got Jason heading up, if you're ready. Thank you. How's it going?

Good to see you. Good to see you. All right, so you are from the newly minted Crescent Space. Am I saying it right? Crescent Space Services. Give us a rundown on what your role is, and generally, I was asking questions at the booth this morning on what the relationship is between Lockheed Martin and Crescent Space, and then we'll dive into what you're working on. Yeah, absolutely. So Crescent Space Services is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. So we were created in Lockheed Martin to service the industry as a lunar

infrastructure as a service company. So we saw a need of a service-based industry growing in the lunar economy. And we wanted to have an agile offering out of Lockheed Martin and the way to do that is outside of Lockheed Martin. So we created this wholly owned subsidiary. And then for myself, I work in development and strategy for this entity and so we're looking at not only our initial offering of lunar communication and then what's next for future service offerings for the lunar economy. So I'm really interested in the general idea behind Parsec,

and that's the name of the network that you're going to be building out. Can you just give us a rundown on the what behind Parsec before we get into the why and the how? Like a couple of satellites, is it a small constellation that will be providing communications at the moon? Yeah, so Parsec is the name of our lunar communication system. Right now, we're launching the first satellite in 2025 and the second one in 2026. It's a mesh network of satellites. It will be a constellation as the economy grows. So we're looking to start off small to service the initial customers. And as the lunar economy grows, we will have the ability to add more nodes into the system to allow for the expected growth. Yeah, and that's the aspect that's interesting here because we talk a lot about the people that are going down to the

surface trying to find their customers. And that's been a whole thing that we've talked endlessly about who are the customers for these landers. But from a communications perspective, there are a ton of landers going to the surface there's a ton of Artemis activity over the next 10-20 years Astrobotic has talked about putting a lot of hardware on the surface to provide power on the surface and all this

and in all these cases you need communications and some of the missions have said oh we'll send along an orbiter like a co-orbiter with us but that's only going to provide communications some of the time So what I was surprised by was, to be frank, Lockheed Martin saying, we're going to do this. We're going to start this business that you see the opportunity there. So can you give us a peek behind the curtain of the motivation to start this internally at

Lockheed Martin and why it rolled out as its own thing? So a couple things that really piqued our interest to start Crescent. One is our heritage in deep space communication. So we've got heritage with all of the communication assets around Mars, so servicing those missions. And so we wanted to take the goodness of what we've done at Mars and obviously bring it closer to home to service what we're seeing as the expansion of exploration on the moon. And then the other piece to why we – shoot, I forgot what my shit is. I got you.

Well, wait, quick side jag. Yeah, yeah. You talk a lot about Mars, and everyone's talking about communications at Mars. You have experience there. Are you stopping at the moon? No, no. So again, and so we are looking to leverage what we're going to do out at the moon

to how it's extensible to Mars. I mean, it's not a giant leap, if you'll accept that pun. It's not a giant leap to go from the moon to Mars relative to the technologies, especially since we're backward leveraging what we've already done at Mars. The other thing I'd say, too, is what we saw as an economy grows, communication is foundational, right? I mean, like you look at what's here on Earth and what's needed, like we're all interconnected. I mean, we're, you know,

cell phones and comm is key. And so we saw that as a foundational infrastructure need out at the moon. And like you said, with all these missions coming up, you want to start exploring the far side. We want to have 24-7 coverage of assets, especially when humans are on the moon, right? And so knowing that's coming, we saw the need and a hole that we wanted to fill. And it's interesting because Lockheed doesn't operate services like that today, at least on a commercial level. You know, they're not a satellite communications provider on a commercial communications network here on Earth. Probably provide the buses and components and expertise behind it and launches in the case of ULA. behind it and launches in the case of ULA. So I'm just enthralled that Lockheed's like, yeah, we're going to step into the services business. Is that part of Lockheed's business,

or was that the reason that it rolled out as its own system, its own company? Because you're going to be providing a different kind of operating model than what Lockheed is doing day to day. Yeah. It's definitely the reason. It's why we started. And then the beauty of what we're able to do now is we're also able to form other strategic partnerships to leverage those who are in the industry, who are experts, who have the best technologies and the best capabilities.

And so us as a separate entity now opens the floodgates for us to bring in those partnerships too. So we can now not only offer these services with the backing of Lockheed Martin, but also with strategic partners who have the expertise. So what is it like trying to go out and sell services to companies that are still working on hardware that's supposed to go to the lunar surface? It's pretty niche. It's niche, but it's really fun because I don't think there's definitely no one here.

And generally speaking, when you talk to people, space enthusiasts, that don't see that the moon is the next step of human exploration. And so from one sense, it is a little challenging, but no one, everyone knows it's a need and everyone believes. And so it makes it a little easier. It kind of works together, yeah. There's both sides of the coin, yeah. What is the model? Is it that somebody would come, like if somebody out there, somebody here building a mission that's going to go to the surface,

would they come up and sign a deal for that particular mission, or is this like a monthly service fee? Like what's the actual model for the customers, the end customers? We have a subscription, and we have one-time use options. So we're looking to have almost like you look at cell phone service plans, right? It's a very similar model to that, right? Again, we're not trying to reinvent the wheel here. So we have customers who have one-time needs, and we have customers who have long-duration missions.

And so we're looking to have subscriptions and one-time service models. Very cool. And you said first satellite launching in 2025. Are there details of how it gets there? Or is that TBD? It's still TBD. Or TB announced? Well, it's TBD. We're still looking to find the right ride. But our goal is to be agnostic to any launch vehicle so that as the need arises to replenish the constellation or add more, we're not beholden to any specific launch opportunity, because we expect to see even the launch opportunities increase to the moon as well. So we want to be able to jump on any ride that's available and be able to continue to meet the needs of our subscribers.

Awesome. It's a really exciting segment. I'm very intrigued by it. I'm sure we'll have you on for a full discussion on the show at some point because there's so much to dive into about how that works and how it integrates

with big programs at NASA but also, you know, the kind of one-off commercial companies. I was talking about Astrolab earlier. Excellent. There's just a lot of stuff

going on at the moon that is all interesting in its own way and the way it all works together is quite interesting and Parsec, a big part of that in the near future so super cool thank you all so much for hanging out and thanks for stopping by and uh yeah thanks everybody for hanging out for this first session we'll be back in a couple minutes with a whole new cast of people

so stay tuned and thanks again thanks again to sean mike and jason for stopping by uh during this session thanks again as always to omar austin and Jason for stopping by during this session. Thanks again, as always, to Omar, Austin, and everyone else at Redwire that helped organize this and were game to host me at their booth on the show floor. I thought it was a really fun time hanging out there. It was really cool to see people stopping by, listening to a couple minutes of the show at a time, and getting a chance to chat between shows. So if you're somebody I met out there, that was really awesome to meet. There was a lot of you that I've met that that have not really made contact before, either because of their job, they're not really able to make contact or they're just not on the platforms that I use too much. So it was cool to get to talk in person

to a lot of you out there. So thanks again for stopping by for grabbing stickers and everything else. It was a pleasure meeting you all. And thanks again to everyone who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 881 of you supporting the show, which is just an awesome number. We're creeping our way to 900. So join on in and get us over the ledge there. And you could be an executive producer like the 36 of you out there who produced this

episode of Main Engine Cutoff. Thanks to SmallSpark Space Systems, Matt, Donald, Jan, Rob, Bob, Chris, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, Warren, Russell, Stealth, Julian, Harrison, Lee, Ryan, Frank, Steve, Chris, Benjamin, The Astrogators at SCE, Fred, Tyler, Theo and Violet, Simon, Don, Aerospace, Eunice, Joel, David, Lars from Agile Space, Brad, Pat from KC, Pat Moritz, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for supporting the show, for making this possible that I could take a trip like this and take the show on the road. It's all because of the support that you provide. There's a 100% listener-supported show, and I could not do it without all of that support. So thank you again so much. If you want to reach out, the email is anthonyatmanagingcutoff.com, Twitter at wehavemiko, on Mastodon at miko at spacey.space, although that's getting less popular lately. I feel like that's kind of

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that we've done and what we can do for you. So anyway, until next time, thanks for listening, and I will talk to you soon.