Main Engine Cut Off - T+250: LEO and Lunar Commercialization (Live from Space Symposium 2023)

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

Live from the Redwire booth at Space Symposium 2023! I discuss the commercialization effort of LEO and the Moon with Angela T. Hart (Manager, Commercial Low Earth Orbit Program Office, NASA), Dr. Molly Mulligan (Business Development, Redwire), Jana Spruce (VP of Spacecraft, Firefly), and Kevin Foley (Program Director, Commercial Space Projects, Boeing).This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 36 executive producers—Bob, Frank, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut), Harrison, Russell, Robb, Joel, Benjamin, Donald, Kris, Brad, Tyler, Simon, Jan, Moritz, Ryan, Dawn Aerospace, Pat, Lee, Fred, Matt, David, Warren, Theo and Violet, Lars from Agile Space, Pat from KC, Steve, Joonas, Chris, SmallSpark Space Systems, Stealth Julian, The Astrogators at SEE—and 845 other supporters.TopicsCommercialization of LEO and Lunar - YouTubeThe 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 SpaceXWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Main Engine Cutoff here live. We've got quite a tight stage up here today, so this will be real fun. This topic is a little amorphous, as everyone's been a little thrown off by the list of things I wanted to talk about but generally you know we've got a whole set of people here working on low earth orbit and lunar commercial space projects and those don't always sound like they fit together but I find that the approach that people have been taking to find customers in both those markets feels like there's some commonality there there's's in both cases, everyone's in a little bit of an exploratory mode to figure out

how this is actually gonna work, how business cases are gonna close, if they're gonna close, what the right model is. We've got in one case a launch company that's becoming a lunar company, and that's interesting in its own vein. So there's a lot to discuss, but we'll go around the horn a little bit

and just hear from everybody about what your role is. I guess we should start with names too. This is Jana from Firefly, from everybody about what your role is. I guess we should start with names, too. This is Jana from Firefly. But hear about what your role is, what you're working on, and the kind of things that you're up to day to day at the organization. Yeah, thanks so much. My name is Jana Spruce, and I'm the vice president of spacecraft at Firefly Aerospace. We do end-to-end transportation. But my organization in particular is very focused on we just won our

second CLPS mission to the moon so we have lunar landers we also do in-space mobility as well as the launch side. And Molly. Hi I'm Molly Mulligan I work for Redwire I'm a director of business development I'm really focused on all of our LEO payloads so everything from working with pharmaceutical companies on creating new drugs to 3D bioprinting pieces of organs all the way to our 3D plastics printer and our 3D resin printers so I work from our material science to our life science portfolio and I get to have a lot of fun meeting new people all the time doing it. Yeah so I'm Kevin Foley. I work for the Boeing Company. I'm in our Boeing Exploration Systems Division in Houston, Texas. I'm a director for

commercial human spaceflight programs, and that's exciting. We'll talk more about what all that is, but first and foremost, being NASA's prime contractor for the International Space Station sustaining, we start there, right? And we'll talk a little bit more about crew transportation and our Starliner program as part of the new commercial wave of excitement we have looking forward to in the future. Awesome. And Angela, down the end. Yeah. And good afternoon. My name's Angela Hart. I am the Commercial Leo Development Program Manager for NASA. So I'm one of the NASA, the only NASA one up here. We are concentrated on a number of different areas in our portfolio.

Obviously, the number one project and goal for us is to work with industry to develop a Commercial Leo destination to replace the ISS when the ISS retires. to replace the ISS when the ISS retires. Super important thing for both NASA and the U.S. in terms of maintaining continuous presence. We also have within our portfolio the private astronaut missions that are on the ISS, as well as the commercial destination ISS, Axiom's venture on the ISS, and then our funded SpaceX agreements that we have with all of our partners that we do destinations. And we'll talk a little more.

Yeah, and that project itself I've talked a lot about recently because it is such an interesting case where NASA has this clear need in the near future, but when exactly that is going to hit, both from a policy perspective and a budget perspective, but also from the company perspective, developing these things, it's all a little bit up in the air still, and everyone's trying to figure out exactly how that's going to come together. And that's kind of the commonality that I find on the Clips side. Maybe we can start on Clips with you.

Firefly's now got two missions. There's one that's a straight lander, and there's this second mission that also includes this, I forget the exact name that you've got for that kind of orbital transfer vehicle stage. Yeah, it has a transfer stage. We're also putting into orbit an ESA spacecraft called Lunar Pathfinder that will go into lunar orbit. And then we'll have our lander on top of that. And so the thing that we're really excited about at Firefly is that ability to now take some excess capacity.

now take some excess capacity. And that's really what the CLPS office had in mind, was to create this service that then is available not only to NASA but to other commercial entities. We've seen interest from a variety of commercial folks who want to go to the Moon, and even other folks from other countries as well. That's the great thing about Symposium, we get to cross paths with a wide variety of folks. And so anybody who's interested in going to the moon, now there are opportunities to go along with CLPS rides. We recently put out an RFI. So we said, hey, we have this excess capacity. Who wants to go with us? And we've gotten great response from that so far. And that

may enable us to then do a fully commercial mission as a follow-on to our CLPS mission. And so we're really excited about that. You mentioned that Firefly is intended to be an end-to-end transportation company. A lot of us know Firefly as the launch company and are becoming more familiar with an end-to-end transportation company. I know that in the past there were plans for orbital transfer vehicles to take things between different orbits. What's the motivation there to have Firefly be able to do the whole stack from launch all the way to the lunar surface? Yeah, that transfer vehicle really is the in-space mobility piece.

That's sort of the larger end, very high delta V bus, essentially, that can take people where they want to go. It can also host a payload. And so that is really a foundational piece. We're also doing a smaller demonstration of that by the end of this year for the in-space mobility portion with our SUV, which is our space utility vehicle. That's right. That's the kitschy name I forgot about. So in terms of the customer base in low Earth orbit and the way that that market is kind of

developing, things are an interesting spot right now where we do have the ISS up there. There's a lot going on that maybe, Molly, you can talk about some of the stuff that you've been working on that is operating on the station today. And specifically, I'm curious about what the perspective is in terms of acquiring customers that are going to be operating on the ISS and flying payloads to operate on the ISS and things that you're learning from selling that kind of service right now before we even get into, you know, brand new stations down the line? Yeah, I mean, it's a real challenge. People don't know that the ISS is open for business and that not only is it open for business,

but they can do research that they do in their lab today in microgravity. And then people ask, well, why in the world would I do it in microgravity when we live in gravity? And so that education component of going to companies, talking about why on earth you go to space, why on earth do you develop drugs in space or do biology in space, and teaching them that removing that lens of gravity is what gives us the ability to discover new things, to innovate potentially faster, but just to learn something new about the systems we deal with every day. We have a partnership with Eli Lilly that's going really well. We're going to be flying some of their drugs

to the space station this year, and we're really excited about that. We're also adding more and more pharma companies to our list when it comes to our drug development hardware. But we also have a 3D bioprinter on the space station. And while we're not printing organs today that can solve the organ transplant problems, we're laying the groundwork to do that. We're working with the Uniformed Services University to 3D print the meniscus. It's one of the most common injuries to our service members is a torn meniscus. And right now they sew it up and hope for the best. So we're working with them to try and actually print a meniscus that could be used to fix the torn meniscus problem that a

lot of our service folks suffer from. Also a big problem for athletes. So, you know, hopefully maybe the NFL or someone else will take a look at it. We always hope. So, you know, hopefully maybe the NFL or someone else will take a look at it. We always hope. But, you know, a lot of it's education. I don't go to a lot of space conferences, even though I work in the space industry. I go to a lot of material science conferences, pharmaceutical conferences, biology conferences to get that education component out. And, you know, it's a long road, but just talking about this with more and more audiences is what is going to make the difference to help us get people there. And having those people who are willing to take chances today, as this is pretty new still, and having those success stories that we can share more and more. Yeah, and the fact that it is still pretty new today is an interesting situation for trying to build new stations already.

I feel like we haven't actually figured out the situation there. And from the Boeing perspective, I have an interesting perspective on it because you are the prime contractor on the ISS today. So there's a lot that you're learning from operating the ISS. While you also have got eyes towards contributing to Orbital Reef, Starliner is obviously up there as part of contributions to ISS, but in terms of building a functional facility in low Earth orbit, are there portions of the work at Boeing that is taking lessons learned from things that Molly's selling to go up on station and actually operate that you're able to incorporate down the line into a future program? What's that feedback cycle? That's a really good perspective, and the short answer is yes. The space station has been operating for almost three decades. The first was mostly consumed with building.

The second with outfitting and getting our legs underneath us and starting to conduct research and outfitting it. We're in a decade now where we're at full speed. There are over 20 commercial facilities up there conducting science and research. Over 150 countries are participating on the International Space Station. So this decade has really proven that there's a value proposition of being present and conducting technology demonstrations, proof-of-concept work, both basic and applied sciences.

That is always an opportunity for us to see those that can transition into commercial models. The station's a great place to prove that out, not only the technology, but the business cases and the business models around that. So we've got the International Space Station, extended the international partners. We've all agreed that we're going to operate and support utilization of this to 2030, at least 2030, maybe beyond. The platform's capable of operating beyond that. There'll be a time when, you know, when it makes sense to maybe cease operations on that, but there'll be a time where there'll be both the International Space Station operating and these new commercial space stations operating. And that's exciting, you know,

having multiple platforms operating and doing the unique things, you know, having multiple platforms operating and doing unique things. You know, not all platforms are for everybody. Platforms can be designed to serve different segments and tailored to that. And that, I think, will become the bow wave of commercial and government academia moving in a more robust way and taking advantage of low-Earth orbit. And with all of that, where people go, commerce will follow. It's just generally the way things happen. And growing ourselves in that regard, I think, is very promising.

And Angela will talk to you about the beginnings of the conversation that get us at a point where that vision can be realized. Angela, the interesting problem that you're presented with is trying to define a program that says, like, here's what NASA needs out of this. Here's the capability we need. We need this amount of crew time. We need this kind of payload space. But at the same time, you know, it's a funny situation right now in the ISS in that these payloads that are flying on the ISS

as commercial payloads are being operated by NASA astronauts. So to separate, you know, what is the NASA part of this and what is the commercial part of this from like a requirements perspective seems, it's probably less tricky for you being so familiar with it. But from the outside, it's interesting to try to read like what is it that NASA needs from this new program, right? Like, what can you commit to in the future that lets them build, not only to know what they need to provide NASA, but to know how much room is left over that we can go sell to other providers. So what is the approach to, you know, I know that that has been updated over the years.

I think even a couple months ago, there was an update to the kind of baseline requirements. So can you walk us through how that's built out? What goes into creating that model of concept operations, really, for these new stations? Obviously, it's evolving, right? But I think we have made some very major policy decisions recently this year in NASA that kind of lays the framework for what we are going to do in the future, right? We know we want to commercialize future destinations. We want commercial industry to own and operate those, and we want to buy the services. We want to be one of many customers. We're going to build off of what we learned on commercial resupply and commercial crew program in terms of our acquisition strategy and NASA as an anchor tenant. But it is different because in both of those cases, early on we were the sole user and really the sole funding agent for those items.

Not that the industry didn't invest a lot. They did, and they own the IP, and those are certainly their vehicles, and we're starting to see how those vehicles are now being sold commercially. And you really look at just in the last couple of years, exponentially, the number of different services and launches that are happening that we wouldn't even have envisioned five years ago. And so I think that NASA and the ISS and Boeing and all of the others that are on ISS today have laid that groundwork. And I actually think we do know how to work in LEO, right? We've done a lot of work. We understand the engineering.

We've done the hard NRE. We put in the big dollars that it takes to actually show that this is possible. And I think that now it's the time for NASA to pass on that technology to our destinations and our other commercial partners across the board, not just the destinations, but the suppliers and all the other different infrastructure that it takes to run a space station, which is not just building the space station, right? You have the payload operations. You have utilization.

You have astronaut training programs. Across the gamut, there's lots and lots of things. And so what you mentioned before and all of you have talked about is utilizing ISS right now over the next decade is super important even for us, right? We want to use, we want to do as much commercial activities as we can. We want to do as many tech demos as we can to buy down those risks. We want to show those markets on ISS so that we can help build those business cases for industry where we have customers that can move over. And we're starting to have that dialogue with them, as are all of the other folks here that are actually working with those customers, is when is it time to transition from the ISS to a platform, right?

Obviously, we need to make sure we have one up there. I am told I'm not a schedule-driven program, but we obviously, the other big piece of the fact is that the government does not want to have a gap in LEO. We want to maintain continuous human presence. We want to buy services when they're available. We've talked about that 2028 to 2030 being a two-year gap period. But if we don't have destinations till 29, we'll make that work. And fortunately, we have this amazing facility up there that can keep doing lots for us even longer than that. So that schedule is going to evolve as we see that business case and those platforms being developed, and we will all do the right thing and make that timeline, you know, work for everybody.

I've had all of the providers on the Commercial Leo projects on my show from Axiom to Blue Origin, everybody, everybody's been on. And I'm trying to remember if all of them said this, but I think the vast majority of them at some point in our conversation said that an important piece, and this is a real quandary for the situation right now, is that they need to know a date that the ISS has done, right? But that seems problematic just from my external eyes to arrive at a date because there are, number one, like we're using the ISS, so we're working here, like we're doing stuff on this. The schedule of these new stations is unclear. So calling a shot and saying this is the day when ISS is coming.

And certainly you've seen in the budget request, there's a deorbit tug now being percolated through the budget. And we don't have to get in the budget because that's going to be a whole thing if we do. But there are movements in this way of defining what is the end date. Is that a realistic thing to come up with? Well, I think that NASA has been very clear that we're targeting to have commercial destinations by 2028. And so if that were to realize, then, you know, we would be talking very seriously about ISS end of life in 2030, 31, as has been put out in the media. It's been very clear NASA has made that statement. I'm not saying anything that, you know, somebody else hasn't already said.

But we do have a capability to expand the ISS. It has a lot of capability, but we do want to get these destinations working as fast as possible. We want to get them up there. We want them learning. We want to use the ISS as long as we can, and we want to use ISS right to, obviously, it's an amazing platform. We want to use it right to the last day that we can't use it anymore, right?

And that transition, that little messy middle, is where it's going to be really interesting, right? Because we don't want to reduce the services that our communities and our science and researchers see. We see lots of folks ready to step in, but that transition off of the ISS to somewhere is something we also have to look at. NASA has also made it very clear, as has the government, that we want to continue with the U.S. National Lab on these destinations. And so the funding of all that research, that applied science, will continue. So I don't think there's a question there.

I think the question really is, what is the percentage of NASA versus private industry and commercial companies. And I think that's really going to come over the next couple of years where we're going to see that. NASA is going to have a minimum buy that we're going to need in order to support the U.S. National Lab and as well as our technology demonstration to support exploration and our other projects. But we'll see where that other part of the market is and what that means to NASA as far as being an anchor tenant. That's something I really want to talk about across the board as well is that you know NASA's intent in both of these programs is to be one of many customers is like the that's the

catchphrase I think. The other end of that though is that NASA isn't like committing anyone to doing exactly the same service for other customers as they do for NASA. That's just like, we're going to buy this much. You have to make the business case close from there. And the example would be, I had Lori Garver up here yesterday. We were chatting about the origins of commercial cargo and crew. And the way that we kind of saw that progress is that, I don't, she says that she saw this coming from the beginning, but I don't know that many other people thought that a side effect of commercial cargo and crew would be the greatest commercial launch opportunity that has existed

and that SpaceX has created this business. They're flying more regularly than anyone has on the commercial sector. So it's like NASA was one of many customers there, but the services that were being sold on the other side was not cargo and crew to a space station. It was commercial launch, and it was sort of this very related but kind of spin-off thing. So on the lunar side, NASA is buying payloads to the lunar surface. Do you expect that the rest of your commercial outlook for this sort of program would be more payloads to the lunar surface? Or do you think there are spin-off kind of like semi-related programs that are enabled by NASA buying that eclipse.

You know, I don't know if it's, we talked to somebody from Crescent Space a couple minutes ago about building a comms network around the moon. It's sort of a semi-related business. Are there things there that Firefly's looking at? Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that we are excited about with our second mission is the ability to really open that up to a variety of customers. And I sort of jokingly talk about, we need to find the killer app for the moon, right?

What is the real business reason for going there? The science is great. We're very excited about some of the scientific missions that are going, but especially in the ways that that enables then more of a commercial reason to go. And so we're seeing more, I think NASA's investment in the CLPS program has been fabulous

because it's enabled us to sort of prove out that service and convince companies that it's real and that you can go and that there's opportunity there. And even just adding that confidence and lowering the risk is huge in this particular type of endeavor. In terms of the payloads on these platforms, Molly, I've got a question for your department here. Knowing the kind of stuff that you've had experience in the biomed kind of field where these payloads are going up to the ISS, the ISS is continually occupied. There's always somebody on board to manage these payloads. What I'm curious about is, is that a requirement of many of these applications? Is that there's always a human there? Or can you put a payload on a lunar lander?

Can you put a payload in a space station that doesn't necessarily have anyone in it at the moment and just let it run, and when the people come up on the next time, they can grab it and bring it down? How does that work for you? Yeah, so we've actually really focused from the beginning on automating things as much as possible. We love astronauts. They do a lot of great work for us. But not all of them are trained as scientists, let alone biologists. So mistakes can happen. And we've always focused on automation and minimal interaction. We have some payloads right now that

are just so complicated we can't, like our bioprinter that requires a lot of astronaut interaction. But when we look at crystallizing drugs or doing some basic cell culture work or even using organoids to replace animal models, most of that's automated. Once a week, the astronaut might need to go in and change the media, what feeds the cells. But other than that, it's automated. We have pumps. We control it from our payload operation center on the ground. And we are exploring what happens when we go and put up these first CLDs, these first commercial LEO destinations. If they're not manned, what science can we do? That's something we actively talk about every day. And we look to the moon and Mars and

beyond, even Gateway. What science can we do? What science can be enabled by robotics? Or we can just enable it from the ground and then let it sit until someone comes and collects it. So it's something we're actively looking at. You know, right now, we do have astronauts, so we take advantage of them. It turns out, on the Boeing end, as somebody focused on the infrastructure, the transportation, the logistics behind this kind of work, you know, Starliner's in progress right now, and that's meant to serve the ISS capability with, again, what NASA needs out of that service. Looking ahead to contributions to Orbital Reef or whatever it may be where Starliner's flying or you're providing hardware to these systems, are there changes that you're going to be making from that kind of baseline, either in the

Starliner case for transportation or in the case of the hardware that's on ISS today, are there things that you're going to be tweaking, knowing the kind of stuff that we're hearing about from Molly in terms of what the actual market is going to be there in a non-NASA capacity? For Starliner, you're talking about. So, yeah, you mentioned that. Our Starliner is going for its crew test program right now. It's launching scheduled July 21st.

The vehicle's down in our integration facility at KSC, ready to go. There's some paperwork we're going to close out as the air traffic control at station clears out and we get a window, right? We're ready to go. So that's pretty exciting. And hopefully, you know, we get through this and then we can get into our regular service missions and in the cadence to service the International Space Station. We're very focused on that and we're very much looking forward to that. At the same time, we do have an eye towards the future. Angela mentioned in her portfolio is private astronaut missions.

Starliner, we hope, is a vehicle that has customer interest. hope is a vehicle that has customer interest and we would certainly pursue those and entertain those similar to the way SpaceX is doing those private astronaut missions today. But we still have some work to do to get through our test program and start our service missions to station. But those missions will look very similar. They'll look very similar. There's very little, if any, modification we would have to do to our vehicle. There is cargo that we carry along with that. And then the crews and the durations for private astrop missions are somewhat fixed and determined by NASA. We do have a unique feature in Starliner. There's five seats in that vehicle.

We've just gone through the certification for the extra seat. NASA owns the missions, but there is an opportunity to put a fifth astronaut on a mission, and that could make sense if, depending on how the manifest is organized, to get back-to-back missions for the handovers where you would have an extra crew member on board. And with an extra crew on board, I think we're convinced that you get more utilization done, you get more time on research, and that's precious. So the more we can get out of crew time, more crew there, more crew time, more utilization, more yield on the research, and the more we can get done. And I think that's important, you know, to maximize the amount of work we can accomplish in the time we're operating space station. And we think Starliner can help

with that overall plan. One interesting aspect of commercial development so far is that the companies that are bidding are tasked with end-to-end services. And that's different than what today NASA's got. Space station, they buy services, cargo and crew up to the space station. But in that new era, you're asking for

give us everything, right? Provide the space station space, the transportation around that. Why is that? Provide the space station space, the transportation around that. Why is that? What was the methodology behind there? Is there something that you're looking for that you think with that integrated model, you can get better, more predictable pricing or costs or schedule? What is it?

No, I think it really goes back to the overall ideal of commercializing LEO and handing over this area of industry to the commercial sector. If NASA were to do two contracts, and we looked at do we continue to do a transportation contract. Now we're now dictating to that commercial entity, that destination, what those transportation vehicles have to be, what those interfaces now might have to be. We could potentially be disallowing innovation that they may be thinking of that they want to do for their other customers that don't work, like as you mentioned. I could be driving that fleet to only carry X number of astronauts

because that's all I need versus industry working together to meet the commercial needs. And so we still do intend to human rate and certify any services that occur that NASA is part of. So both the portions of the destination that we would be part of and party to and ensure the NASA crew safety, and as well as those transportation vehicles. So we continue, we plan to continue the commercial crew program, certification program for future vehicles. It also allows industry to decide when and how to on-ramp people, right? Because we actually would like to see even more transportation vehicles and different types of transportation, different types of destinations as been noted before, where you may have human tended and unmanned and obviously continuous human presence as well.

And so we think that that broadness of the economy is what's really going to make it sustainable and successful. We are part of that evolution that you're talking about is determining where NASA should set the interface, though, right? How much are we completely hands off, right? Do we define what the docking and berthing interface? Maybe I don't say what vehicle, but I'm going to say you got to do it this part because it's a super important area and it would be difficult for both sides to be selling to have a unique destination to have a whole bunch of different docking and berthing. So we are looking at things like that on how we can maintain uniformity that would allow for, that's one of the biggest fears of having multiple destinations, right? Is that you

got to design payloads to do two different destination. You might have different vehicles, you might have different environments, et cetera, et cetera. And so we are looking, where is that sweet spot of where we control an interface to ensure the right level of uniformity and where we allow enough openness so that the flexibility is there for industry to be innovative and drive those costs down like we saw on the commercial crew program, which is what we're really counting on. It sounds similar to some of the stuff going on on the CLIP side in that there's, and we should talk more about exactly how this goes on behind the scenes, but each CLIP's mission that goes out, there's a set of investigations from the NASA side,

and I think it changed recently where there's like a PI over each mission now that's managing the payload set there. But the point was that they'd be able to call up, put a task order out, say, these are the payloads going to the moon, and, you know, I've talked to the other providers of the CLPS missions, haven't gotten a chance to talk to Firefly yet, so this is cool, but to figure out what is their standardized payload integration process. And in some cases, could things be re-manifested? If a payload's late on that mission, can we swap it over to another one and make it not a huge deal? Now there's laws of physics to contend with of like, oh, now it's heavier or it's lopsided or whatever. But in a wide open world, the standardization of the, oh, now it's heavier or it's lopsided or whatever. But in a

wide open world, you know, the standardization of the payload interfaces, is that a thing that Firefly is focused on day to day? Did you sort of get that sorted out first and build a lander around it? What's the process? Well, the lander missions for Clips are each fairly unique so far. But our second mission looks very much like the first. The lander portion is largely the same. Our second mission looks very much like the first. The lander portion is largely the same. We have a pretty flexible platform to put those on. And our first mission had actually 10 different NASA payloads, everything from a drill to little pods that shoot out and look at regoliths. So, I mean, we had to put things all over the vehicle.

And so that really helped us, I think, approach it from a more open-ended, you know, what all can we take. So that really helped us, I think, approach it from a more open-ended, you know, what all can we take. But certainly as we move forward, you know, we've talked a little bit about is there sort of a CubeSat model for rovers, for example, that we might take on a lander, smaller sized, or for those lunar payloads. But, you know, every mission is unique. That's the hard thing about space. But where we can, we're looking to find ways to standardize and make it easier for people to plug in, you know, to the point of having a standard and something that's known is always helpful for the industry. So we're looking forward to that. To stay on that for a second, though, a thing I feel like is tricky is that you haven't got a lot of reps yet on these lunar missions, right?

And this is where it is quite different from the commercial cargo and crew model where two providers were given a slate of missions to fly. So over on the Boeing side, they could plan out for a certain set of Starliner missions and know that there's going to be a set. So you can put a program in place for whether it's reuse or whatever it is. On the Eclipse side, you're fighting over each task order as it comes out. So you've got two missions. SESH Robotics got a couple. Intuitive Machines has three. So you kind of have to win your way into a manifest where things actually begin to become not reusable in a hardware sense, but processes become reusable,

and you learn exactly what are those things that you can move from mission to mission. So how do you deal with that challenge of not knowing when that next mission is going to hit or how many missions you will fly unless you're secretly planning a bunch of lunar missions that you haven't told us about and you can unveil that here. That's a great comment. I mean, you know, we are in a period right now where NASA is in the driver's seat primarily. But again, you know, we're rooting for everybody to be successful on these CLPS missions. There's one hopefully landing next week. And, you know And we really want to see everyone be successful so that the industry as a whole gains that confidence.

And that's where I think we'll see, as I mentioned with some of the capacity that we have on our next mission, finding out that there's a lot more interest out there maybe than folks thought. And people were probably waiting for the risk to come down to believe that it's real and see what's going to happen. And so as that's progressing, we are looking at building out a fully commercial mission.

And so potentially as a follow-on as our third mission. And what's exciting about that is we've talked with Eclipse office. And if we're able to do that, we may be able to turn back to NASA and say, hey, we have some extra space. What do you want to fly? And make them, instead of being the anchor tenant, put them into, you know, sort of a secondary tenant position, but they still get to take advantage of that service and use it that way. This is one area where the stuff that's happening on station might be able to lend some feedback on this, because I'm sure the racks that are on station today look nothing like the racks that

were on, like, you know, stations in the 60s like we've learned a lot because we've been in space for a long time so in terms of standardization now there's different constraints because there's you know when your astronauts need to go over and access this that's different constraint than they need deck access or they need you know access to lunar surface but in terms of that interchangeability and standardization of payloads, when you're going out to these other non-space conferences, how do you communicate that to people about, I don't know, you can't really get super technically nerdy about what kind of

rack it is and whatnot, but how do you explain that to people of like, these are the options available and here's what you would do with them? That seems like a critical part to finding customers that didn't think about going to the moon or going to Leo before. And what's that communication like for you? Yeah. So we've actually tried to kind of remove that level of things. We have our lockers. We leave them on the ISS. We're hoping in the future that we'll continue to have some kind of locker form factor, but we're prepared to go to a different form factor. We fly back and forth. We try and keep it small and lightweight. And so I can bring it to a different form factor. We fly back and forth. We try and keep it small and lightweight. And so I can bring it and show it to people. We call them cassettes.

We have a couple of different styles. Some look like pie wedges. Some are rectangles. Are these the things back here? Yeah, they're back here. If anybody wants to check them out, we'll have them there. We'll have some out later. But we try and remove that part of things for the customer because we're talking to people who aren't space experts. They can become space experts if they want to, but that's really our job. Our job is to translate what they do today on the ground

to something that will work in space, whether that's in LEO or that's on the lunar surface or that's on Mars. We're agnostic to that because we're just going to take our form factor that we can show them, that we send to to their lab that I can carry to conferences that they can play with and touch and use to get them interested and to show them, hey, it may look totally different. We don't have an incubator where you open the door and slide things in, but it functions the same way. You

just have to get used to the fact that you're not doing it with your hands. We have pumps and we have other things that automate that process. So trying to remove that level of confusion is really what I do because we want everything standard. It's not standard now. It's not going to be completely standard in the future. We know that and we need to be ready, but our customers don't. Is this stuff that comes up in those discussions about the future Starliner missions that would happen to commercial space stations? I think like, you know, Starliner is built to those specs that NASA needed certain up and down mass, certain capabilities of what they're taking out of the station, returning these experiments, that kind of stuff. What if you get five years down the line and Molly's like, hey, none of this works with the stuff that you're flying in Starliner anymore because we've went and commercialized this and changed everything. What is the flexibility there?

I think a lot of the architecture around these vehicles has remained flexible, right? And the little cargo we carry on Starliner, when we have a full complement of crew on there, you know, it's the standard stuff. We're just carrying it up there, making sure it's safe, and we transfer it over to the platform. So those interfaces are just pretty standard. So there's nothing

really tricky about any of that. What Molly has talked about, though, is not a simple thing. She kind of downplayed how complex this conversation is. She could tell. I needed it. By going out and talking about Space Station or talking about doing microgravity research on other platforms and translating what they're doing in their labs or on the ground into

the facilities on orbit. And it should seem seamless, right? Because the work they do and the standards and protocols for which they're doing it in their terrestrial labs have to match what we're doing on orbit. So the results are comparable for their controls and their research can advance. that they have in their terrestrial labs has to, if not be identical, very close to the hardware that's repackaged and operating on these space platforms. And that's kind of a hard thing to go do because the state of the art in terrestrial labs is always changing. There's always a new capability that one would want on

space station and there's been a good inventory of what all of that is and the trick is is finding those customers feeding feeding into those most promising markets and and threading the needle and bringing them into space right and and there's a lot of work that still needs to be done to develop out those markets, develop customers, right, that have a willingness and then enabling the access to space. And we shouldn't let our foot off the throttle on that because this is really the time we have to start building and fostering that right so this transition we're talking about in the next decade um is we just pick up on it seamlessly and continue to grow it um if we do nothing now or we just kind of level

out right we we we risk we risk the momentum that we're we're And a lot of that is in the standardization and the attractiveness of how easy it would be to take what you're doing and then just add a little facet into your research program that will either improve your technology, get you to market quicker, or have you a better understanding, a proof of concept that you can bring back to the markets you're involved with here on Earth. And perhaps if you're dealing in future space markets, too, the transitions, you know, to an in-space capability, in-space production, it feeds forward into that market. So it's a lot of work still to be done, and we have a good start on it,

but we've got to really, really, really focus and emphasize that going forward. Maybe to tie us up, we can have some NASA perspective on, you know, what we've been talking about here is trying to find ways to commercialize that other part of the demand. But from the perspective of people either building the payloads for it or building the platforms for it, when they go to bid for these, and we'll use commercial LEO destinations as an example,

I'm curious about the bidding process and how much insight NASA has or requires or maybe you don't want to know this at all about what those other markets are. And when the pitches finally come in for the real whole thing, has or requires, or maybe you don't want to know this at all, about what those other markets are. And when the pitches finally come in for the real whole thing, we're going to down select to whatever it is, one or two providers at the end. Is that a piece of the decision matrix of like, okay, well, we really like their tech, but it doesn't seem like they've worked out their business case enough. So we're not as confident that that will be a platform that we can use in the future. We'd have to pay too much to make use of it. Is that legally allowed to be part of the bidding process, and is it? It absolutely is legal allowed to be a part of the bidding process.

Now, exactly what our criteria is going to be when we go out for certification and services of a service contract, and it will be an open competition, but I can say in the agreements and contracts we have today, we have already incorporated that into our milestones. It's very important that we're seeing that these markets are being developed. And so we have actually marketing milestones and customer development milestones for all of these destination providers so that we are getting that insight. We're also doing our own research studies

and doing different studies with different companies to understand what they're doing. We're also working with these destinations to understand what does that pricing look like when you go into a commercial market, because that's going to affect what I think I'm going to pay, but it's also going to affect what other people. I do want to just add on to what John and Molly said. You can even see just in, even though there's a lot to go, and we know we don't have a sustainable market today, you're seeing such an increase in interest. And partly, mostly also to do with the fact that you have so many other people talking about it, right? NASA's been trying to build these markets. We've been going out and talking to researchers.

Boeing's been doing it. All the major players have been doing this for years. But now you have tenfold the number of companies that are off doing that. And they're going to different people that we didn't think about, right? And NASA's done this. We've been working on it for years. But we're not business development people. That's not, I mean, that's not our area of expertise necessarily, right? We definitely have people that help us with that, but that's not certainly what NASA is known for, right? And so having all these other folks looking at different ideas, talking about what customers need, and I can tell you what we're doing in this part of the development with NASA to these companies, we're handling this a lot different. We're putting out a lot of RFIs, putting out a lot of requests for information to industry to say, this is what we're thinking. This is how we think this is going to work. This

is, what do you think about insurance and liability? How do you think this model is going to work? Where does NASA need to get out of the way? And where do you want NASA to stay? Because we are still defining what that set of requirements is going to be. And we're trying to make sure that we don't stifle that innovation, but we also don't set these destinations up for early failure because we put out the wrong requirements. And all these little things that we don't, I don't want to say little, all these great things that we're doing on station today,

we're learning from them. We're learning from private astronaut missions. We're learning how to work with private citizens in orbit. They've already brought in new payloads that we haven't seen before. We're learning that tourists don't really want to just look out the window. They actually want to have meaningful things to do, right? And so there's a lot of things that we just, we never thought about that. We thought that we were just going to sit in the cupola all day, right?

Because I would, 100%. That's what I'd be. I'm not too many to work. But when you get up there, you actually want meaningful things to do, and they want to do outreach. We've already reached. They've reached all kinds of different demographics that we haven't reached. So I think that's what's going to get the word out.

That's the kind of things that's going to make change, and we're going to end up finding that killer app, as you were saying, on Lunar. We'll find that for the next destination. We continue and will continue to invest in space manufacturing and all these other areas, even on destinations, as we continue to work that market. So I think it's all of us working together that's going to make this possible. Angela stuck the landing.

That was a perfect ending. Thanks for all hanging out and dealing with my weird jumble of talking about customers across across lunar and Leo areas. I thought interesting mix, put it all together. Cause it's two of the areas I'm most excited. And I've talked about a lot. If you haven't listened to the podcast before,

I got a little cards over there. You can grab a link to where you can find it in the podcast players that you follow main engine cutoff. Thank you all so much for hanging out with me. And it's been great. Thank you. Thanks again to the whole crew that joined me on stage there angela molly jenna and kevin it was a uh very diverse

set in terms of the roles and the organizations uh on stage i hope it made sense to you there was something in my head that kind of put these topics together so i hope that came through for you i thought it was really cool conversation to uh hear some of the similar problems that they were encountering across all those different sets of work. And obviously hearing from Angela directly about, you know, commercial Leo directlyarshot of the nasa booth as i'm like i don't know about this yet so uh hopefully they all took that in stride if they overheard anything but uh i guess that's what i do here anyway just uh usually i record these in my very small office that i'm sitting in now and then i got to do it on a stage in front of everyone who i'm opining about so uh definitely a different experience but one that was a really really awesome week so i hope you've been enjoying these shows and as always thanks to red wire for hosting this all and putting this

together omar austin and everyone else there uh was was so awesome to work with and put this all together and they were totally game to just let me go up on stage and do whatever i was interested in doing had no uh ties to you know needing to cover certain kinds of content or anything like that. So really awesome to do that. So thanks again. And thanks to all of you who made this possible. This is a 100% listener supported show. I could not literally could not do this all without everyone out there supporting at mainenginecutoff.com support. If you want to join the crew head over there. And you could be an executive producer like the 36 people who produced this episode of the podcast. Those are Bob, Frank, Tim Dodd, the Average Astronaut, Harrison, Russell, Rob, Joel, Benjamin, Donald, Chris, Brad, Tyler, Simon, Jan, Moritz, Ryan,

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mainenginecutoff.com slash support is where to go to do that. Hit me up on Twitter at WeHaveMiko, or on email, Anthony at Mainaging Cutoff. Or as I keep mentioning now, work with me at Pineworks, pineworks.co to see the work that we do and what we could help you out with.

That is also a legitimate way to support Miko since it is what I spend a portion of my week on anyway. So check that out if you're interested. But otherwise, I hope you've been enjoying these shows. And there's one more coming your way that was really special. So that is coming up tomorrow or so, depending on when you're hearing this. So keep your eyes peeled. And thanks again for listening.

I will talk to you soon. Bye.