Main Engine Cut Off - T+262: Printing a Meniscus in the BioFabrication Facility (with Dr. Molly Mulligan and Dr. Ken Savin of Redwire)

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

Dr. Molly Mulligan and Dr. Ken Savin of Redwire join me to talk about successfully 3D bioprinting the first human knee meniscus on the International Space Station in their BioFabrication Facility, how this work fits into the near and far future of both health and the space market at large, and to discuss a wide-ranging set of related topics.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 35 executive producers—Donald, Lee, Fred, Kris, Benjamin, Pat, Jan, Chris, Craig from SpaceHappyHour.com, Will and Lars from Agile Space, The Astrogators at SEE, Harrison, Joonas, Steve, Theo and Violet, Bob, Joel, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, David, Pat from KC, Ryan, Russell, Stealth Julian, Brandon, Warren, Tyler, Dawn Aerospace, Matt, Frank, SmallSpark Space Systems, and four anonymous—and 837 other supporters.TopicsRedwire Space | Heritage + InnovationRedwire BioFabrication Facility Successfully Prints First Human Knee Meniscus on ISS, Paving the Way for Advanced In-Space Bioprinting Capabilities to Benefit Human Health | Redwire SpaceNG-18 Research: RedWire BioFabrication Facility - YouTubeThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by Stoke SpaceWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and today we've got two guests from Redwire joining us. One returning to the show, Dr. Molly Mulligan, who works in business development at Redwire. You may remember that she was one of the crew that joined me on stage at Space Symposium to talk about mostly LEO commercial space stations. She's joining us alongside Dr. Ken Sabin, the chief scientific officer at Redwire. They're here to talk about exciting news that they successfully printed a human knee meniscus on board the international space station using their biofabrication facility um we are going to talk all about that about how it fits in overall to some of the health focused um side of uh space development at large both for human

health but also health down here on the ground how it fits into commercial space station markets for sure a whole bunch of different things to dive into from science to business. I think you'll enjoy the conversation. It was a really fun time talking with them. So hope you enjoy the show. All right, we're here with a couple of doctors of all varieties. Dr. Molly Mulligan returning to the show after a couple of months. How's it going out there?

Good. Thanks for having me back, Anthony. Yeah, we got Dr. Ken, is it Savin? I should have asked pronunciation before this. Savin. Savin, got it. Don't know which kind of A it is. So it's been, I'm a little late getting around to finally recording this because your news

was a couple of weeks, if not months ago at this point, based on the schedule of everything. But there's been some really cool stuff that you've been working on up in the ISS. And I really want to dive into the details of that, but talk a little bit bigger picture as well as the way it fits in. And Molly, the last time you and I chatted, we were talking about more the business side of this kind of work that you're doing. So I'm not sure which one of you would like to maybe give us the backstory on the biofabrication facility. And there's been maybe a couple iterations where it was up on ISS for a little bit came back down to the ground and headed back up for this round but I would love to hear the story of how the idea got

started how it was initially developed and where it got to today. So BFF has been a real I mean a real game changer it's the first time people have truly bioprinted in space. And it all started, I would say, from our previous chief scientist, who had the idea to give this a try. And so the first version of BFF was built and flown to the space station in 2018. It was up there, I think, for a little over a year before it came back for some upgrades. Of course, you know, we'd love to get everything right on the first try, but we realized there were some big improvements, small improvements we could make for a large gain on overall capability. So we brought it back and then the pandemic hit, which definitely slowed things down. But we brought it back up

November 22. And since then, we've had a couple of successful test prints just to check everything out. And now we 3D bioprinted the first cellularized human knee meniscus in space. And I will say seeing our senior scientist's face when he opened the cassette, what we print into on the ground, he was absolutely ecstatic to see. And he looked like a mad scientist. He was so excited, but he was ecstatic to see that we had 3D printed a human nemeniscus. And, you know, working on that project has really helped open our eyes to all the things we can do with a 3D bioprinter. And it's a lot more than I think we ever thought when it was conceived, and we were going to print heart cells and make them beat, and just kind of try to

start laying the groundwork for helping with organ replacement and tissue regeneration. But now we realized that we can actually lay the groundwork for it. And it's really exciting to see how well it works. On the science side of things. Help us understand like the way this fits in or the honestly why the ISS was like right testbed for this um it there's non-health related you know printing has been talked about a lot in space when it's fiber optics or tools on the iss that's been used for a while like hey we don't have this wrench and it's going to be a while till you can send one up to us can you send us the you know the part uh file for that and we'll print one out so that we can use it up here but on the health side of things i think it's it's murkier

for people and my wife's a physician but i, I think it's murkier for people. My wife's a physician, but I'm not. So it's harder for me to understand the kind of ins and outs of this and the differences or even honestly, some of the similarities from stuff that we do down here on the ground and why in space is better for this application. Yeah, so that's a great question, Anthony.

So first of all, there are bioprinters here on the ground. People have developed bioprinters for printing small tissue or tissue constructs on the ground. None have been developed for real therapy at this point, but you can see that there's a trend towards that, right? People are going to make more complex systems, and ultimately that's the goal. The problem is when you go to build tissue on the ground, a lot of these, the materials that you're printing with are, you know, liquid. They're not much more viscous than water. So when you print them out, they all just sort of settle out. It's like a puddle just spreads out. So what you do on the ground is you either print into or use a matrix to build it up, right, to hold it all together, or you use some chemical additives. And those end up

being, having an effect on the final product and how you can use it, what it's actually going to be good for. So when you go to the microgravity environment, you no longer need these support matrices. You can just pile up things that, again, are just slightly more viscous than water, and they'll hold their form. Now, it does require us to put them into a special incubator and sort of cure them or gel them over a number of weeks. But once it's done, they're firm enough, you can bring them down just as we did with the meniscus print. And, you know, they hold together and hold their form. So that's the benefit, the real benefit. And ultimately will allow us to print very large, you know, relatively speaking, large constructs that could end up being used for testing or for therapy. And when we're talking about the cellular prints, in terms of material,

what does that actually mean? And then, you know, you talked about the, I think the culturing is the way it was referred to. Is that kind of the phase where it sets into its final form? Yeah. So what we print with is a mixture of cells and a matrix, a material like happens in your body. There's your cells and then other materials and we print them together. And then there's often other additives that you add that will enhance a cell's ability to thrive and to find other cells like it and sort of interact with them and ultimately develop a network, which is what you're trying to get to with a more complex tissue. I got distracted because looking at this video, I think that you were talking about of it being

unpacked. And it is a pretty weird looking thing when it's just floating in free space and not in someone's knee so distract me for a minute um the selection of of the meniscus um you know it's a super common industry injury uh i think my dad's had like i don't even know how many meniscus surgeries over the years he's tried all sorts of different stuff to repair meniscus i think my sisters had issues and none of us are like professional athletes or anything that, uh, it's really impactful. So I know that it's a highly applicable, um, thing, but was it selected purely for that reason that it, that it's a, you know, an area of a lot of focus or, or is there something about the way that a meniscus is constructed that made it a good test bed for this technology? Yeah, we, I mean? Yeah, we were approached by the Uniformed Services University and their company 4D BioCubed

and then the Geneva Foundation to do this kind of work because it's a horseshoe-shaped piece of material and that's a hard shape to maintain under gravity. Because again, trying to print something without any kind of supports or scaffolding or thickening agents or whatever it is, something chemical to make it hold that shape is really difficult. But we can do that in space because it won't collapse under its own weight and just kind of splash out into that puddle. collapse under its own weight and just kind of splash out into that puddle. And so we this is actually the second print of the meniscus, we did an a cellularized test print. And this is the first cellularized one. And it's the most common injury of our uniform service people. But also,

as you said, anecdotally, Anthony, any of us who even play sports recreationally, it's either ourselves or you know one person removed from us has torn it and so right now the only way we repair them is to go in scrape out the scar tissue sew it together cross our fingers and six years later you tear it again so this is kind of that first step in hoping to to be able to replace someone's meniscus because right now we just have no functional way to do it. Like we do many other, like we do joints because it's not actually a joint and there's no good magic cure-all for it. On the operational side of this, from the space station angle, Dr. Sabin, if you can talk about this angle of, you know, what was involved from

astronaut time in setting this up? Is it fairly self-contained or is it something that required a lot of crew time to manage? So there's different parts of this whole study, this whole experiment. First was getting the hardware up there. So that's a piece of it that is, you know, that takes time and effort and we had to fly. And as you said, you were watching the video, you fly up this large apparatus and the astronauts have to unpack it out of a capsule and they pull it over, plug in any wires that have to be plugged into the back and then slide it in. And then it runs through a check. We have to do some test prints and make sure that we're communicating with it properly.

And then after that, on another launch, most likely, you send up whatever you're going to print, the materials, your printer cartridge, if you will, with your materials and what you're going to print out. And that gets then loaded in to the system. And the astronauts have to make sure that it's powered up. It's operated semi-autonomously, so the astronauts don't have to do a whole lot. A lot of the hardware that we develop is put together in such a way that it's minimal astronaut intervention. Astronaut time is expensive, and generally, they've got a lot of other things on their minds or doing a lot of other things, so if we can take some of the load off them, other things on their minds or doing a lot of other things.

So if we can take some of the load off them, doing things on the ground and set them up for success, we found that we're better off. Once it is printed, it then does need an astronaut to pull it out the cartridge, the thing it was printed onto, the little stage, and then that goes into the incubator, which is right next to it, just adjacent. Actually, it's part of the same piece of equipment, gets moved over there and then incubated for probably three to four weeks. And then it gets pulled out, packaged by the astronauts, put into the capsule and brought down. And depending on the situation, we'll either fix it, which is biology jargon for

sort of kill it all, but put it into stasis. So it's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to change. But in some cases, we're going to bring it back live. And that requires us to maintain conditions, both temperature, humidity, and what have you, so that it can survive its trip back. And how about the dynamics of reentry? That might be interesting to talk about as well. Is there certain orientations as a sit-in or anything like that? Yeah. So generally, no. And keep in mind that when it's put into the capsule and sort of packaged up, it's still in microgravity. So it's going to be, you know, disengaged from the station. It then slows down. That's how you bring things out of orbit is you slow them down and then they'll start to fall back to earth. And things are right now falling

into the Atlantic off the coast of Florida where a barge goes and picks them up. And then it gets brought back to the Kennedy Space Center or adjacent centers just off base where it's processed. But you bring up a good point, which is things that are brought back. And you don't often think about this, but there are significant forces exerted on those samples when they're brought back. Both straight G forces as it's slowing down down but also there's a strong vibrational load and when it does hit the ocean even though it has parachutes and it's buffered it's still somewhat jarring so the packaging and everything has to be taken into account to a lot for that and it's i think we're a few maybe year away, two years away from having routine sample returns that are done via a different method that does not have to go through all that type of vibration and jarring.

Molly, can you help us understand the way it fits into the roadmap for this sort of thing overall? Because, you know, you obviously with tech like this, you've got to start printing a meniscus, bring it back, doing a bunch of tests. But, you know, long term, it sounds more like this printing tech is more akin to something that we definitely would do in space and use on Earth rather than print in space, use in space. Like when we're going out to Mars or something, you want to bring a lot of material to print whatever tools you might need because you have no idea what you'll need by then. Maybe one day we'll print a meniscus on mars and do surgery on mars to repair it but um even nearer term than that is is kind of like the bulk production phase of this so um how do we get to that point what kind of steps are between this and that and uh is that given the economics of the day even even a realistic target already, we still have to wait

for some other things to click into place. So please describe the entire economics of low earth orbit between now and 30 years from now, go. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, I mean, I have a great commercialization plan for the whole thing. And it's just going to revolutionize the world. But no, in all seriousness, you know, there's a couple of pieces that need to come together to make this a viable market and a viable solution for the longer term organ transplant shortage here on the ground. I'm just currently going to start with the on-orbit part, is being able to produce enough cells to produce things like the meniscus, or as we move to larger, more complex pieces of tissue, a pancreas, or a heart patch, or a piece of a liver. But you also need to be able to produce those cells in quantity and space, because we're not going to fly thousands of pounds or hundreds of kilos of stem cells to space. It's just not viable. So we need to create something like a cell factory to be able to

grow enough cells to then create the bio-inks and do the printing. And I think you had a really good timeframe there. 30 years is really where I think before we're printing organs that would be usable and printing organs from a patient's own cells to reduce the risk of rejection. One of the things that we need, and Ken really highlighted this, is being able to land things more gently. You know, anything we print right now is not going into a person. So we can have it splash down or crash down even and experience those G-forces, but we need to be able to land things easily. And then the other piece is more regular going and coming up mass and down mass to and from orbit so that we can actually have a regular cadence of organs coming for these patients. And I think, you know, maybe in 15 years, we'll be able to see things like organ patches being printed, possibly a meniscus, something that's pretty small and simple to print.

But there's just a lot of little pieces in terms of the logistics of launch and reentry. And then in terms of physical space to be able to create the cells and have multiple printers to come back to Earth. I think the other piece of this, and I always hate saying it after we've been talking about human tissue, but in terms of, you know, astronauts on Mars, or even on the moon, thinking about things like cultivated meat, where you're actually printing a steak. I mean, this bioprinter doesn't know what the cells it's printing come from. And our incubators don't know where the cells come from. So there's also the possibility of feeding astronauts in the

future with this same technology, taking up a small number of cow cells, a few different varieties, again, growing those cells in space, and then printing a steak for an astronaut to eat. How they're cooking it, that's, you know, another process up for debate. Probably sous vide would be my best bet. It's the best way anyway. So they're in good shape. Yeah. Searing is tough. Searing is tough. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so that's, it's, it's really, you know, we're focused on how we can help people here on Earth every day. But there's definitely interest from groups about how they can use it for taking care of astronauts, feeding astronauts as we go further out to the moon and Mars. thinking in that direction but i mean yeah it's the same fundamental issue is like the the spare parts and tools thing that has been talked about from the early days of like we don't know what

we'll need but we know we need a bunch of stuff and uh in the same way on the food side is like i mean plants you can grow them so we could take a little bit with us and get a lot on the back end but uh you know the lettuce section of the iss has not been the most abundant looking food source. So they'll probably need to figure something else out in terms of calorie output. Yeah, I mean, radishes and lettuce and, you know, what is it, cress are not exactly the most calorie dense foods out there. Not breaking the budget on that side. The functionality of the roadmap they're talking about of being able to produce this kind of stuff in in bulk um i feel like that is i don't know this this starts to make sense to me

when i see the tests at this scale happening and actually being able to see this activity um put some of the stuff in context from the last like 10 years of the visualizations of you know what if we had this mostly autonomous space station that was producing stuff and astronauts would occasionally go up to kind of, you know, help the process, but things would be going up and returning on a regular basis. It does start to make a lot of sense. I'm wondering if you think that the health side, both of you could answer this for sure, because there's perspectives from either angle here. If the health side of this market feels like one that would be earlier than, you know, the fiber optics or pharmaceutical side of things,

does it feel like any of the markets that are leaning more in the direction of turning the corner business case wise, at least first, I'm sure some point between now and forever, they all will make sense. But on the technical roadmap that we're on as a humanity right now, does it feel like anyone has an edge to start? So for printing tissue, biology in general is very difficult. There's a lot of things you have to do to make it work. And it is living its own life, right? And you're stuck at the whim of it in a way. And I think there's a lot of complicated aspects of it that we don't really understand. So with all that in mind, I don't know if it's going to be the first thing that

we actually do. I think even tissue printing on the ground is difficult and people have been working on it for over a decade trying to make it work. But I do think there are opportunities for us to have commercial impact and ultimately benefit to humanity doing things that aren't necessarily full organ or tissue therapy. And I think there's opportunities to develop models that can be used by the pharmaceutical industry to help them improve the way they develop new pharmaceuticals. So when fast, you know, make it faster and decrease the number of failures using these as models. I think there's an opportunity there. I think that has real viability from a commercial standpoint and would ultimately be something that would be very valuable. And there's already been statements from the FDA that

they can get away from animal testing, which is a key, right? They've always used animal testing for things like toxicology. And I think there'll be a point where certain models end up for the pharmaceutical industries to make financial sense, to get away from using a lot of animals, all the cost of housing them and veterinary services, in addition to the ethical quandary that they're in, right? So that's how I look at it. That's what I think. And that's really the reason why I'm pursuing it. Because as Molly said, we're decades away. And that from a standpoint of any type of investment, whether it's your time and my time or somebody's dollars, putting into something like that is tough. But there are stepping stones that will get us there.

And the other thing I would say is, in general, I think people underestimate how fast things are going to happen. They underestimate how fast new breakthroughs will occur and how big those breakthroughs will be generally. So even though I do think it's going to be some time, there's going to be a point where we're all going to see a breakthrough and it's going to be a mad dash. Everybody's going to see it. They're going to use it in a way just maybe similar to something like CRISPR, which in some ways came out of nowhere, but it changed the way a lot of biology is done and thought of. So those are my thoughts. What do you think, Molly? Yeah, no, Ken, I think you're spot on. I think the only thing I would add is, you know, thinking about these models and using them in place of animal testing.

One of the things there that's a really good path for us is the regulatory path. And it's something that I'm always thinking about because it's a really big unknown. Unlike what we do on Earth where someone from a regulatory body walks into a building and checks it, inspects it, makes sure everything's going right. I highly doubt we're going to fly people to a space station to do regulatory checks. So how can we use these models to start this process of being able to get through the regulatory things, even if we're 30 years away from or 50 years away from the first printed organ, starting to think about the regulatory piece today and working towards organoid models for FDA or in place of FDA animal testing to get drugs

through clinical trials or to the point of clinical trials. I should say, of course, we're using human subjects in clinical trials, but to get things to the point of that helps us navigate that regulatory path to create a true commercial economy and create a business where we can help people here on earth every day, whether that's through creating organoids for drug testing or creating human tissue, human full organs in the future. Can you give us a sense for what else within Redwire is kind of on the health side of things? I know there's a whole pharmaceutical section of the website, but again, some of these words are pretty big for my understanding of them. So I'd love a little bit of layout of how this fits into the rest of your health focus overall, now and in the near future as well.

Okay, so I'll kick it off. So we are looking at things. There's a couple of different areas, and I'll just touch on two. The first is one that has been considered in the past in different ways, but it is more pharmaceutical-focused. It's looking at the form that you produce pharmaceuticals in. And generally, if you look at small molecule pharmaceuticals like aspirin or Tylenol, they're small molecules, small organic molecules, and they're generally produced as

crystals. And there's a number of reasons that's done in the pharmaceutical industry. Makes them easy to purify and to sort of understand, make sure that they're pure and that you know what you've got. And then those are taken and formulated into a pill that we, you know, find packaged and we go to the pharmacy. What is, for me, I found to be very interesting is that about half of all of those small molecule pharmaceuticals, the crystals have problems. They're either mixtures of crystals, or they don't form the same crystal every time, or the crystals change over time, or they don't form good crystals at all. And this idea of form has become a key idea for, hey, can we take advantage of making growing crystals in space? It's been shown over the last three, four decades that you can grow larger, more perfect crystals

in space because they aren't suffering from the effects of gravity. They don't form to a certain size and fall out of solution. They don't have a turbulence caused by heat rising and what have you. They're more perfect. So somebody, a friend of ours, Paul Reichert at Merck, ran a study and he showed that Keytruda, which is a monoclonal antibody, a big protein pharmaceutical, when it's grown on the ground, when you grow these crystals on the ground, they tend to be a mixture of crystals. Merck was never able to make a single crystal. And that leads you to problems when you make it. You have to make that same mixture every time and prove it. And it also makes it difficult for formulating and delivering to patients because you're essentially delivering a mixture of materials and you have to account for that. So he had seen, there was literature shown that they can grow not only bigger, better crystals in space, but all the crystals tend to be

the same size and shape. They're uniform. And the pharmaceutical industry, that's an important statement. And he was able to fly Keytruda into orbit and show that it made not only a crystal they had never seen before, but it made a single crystal. And they were able to use that crystalline structure, bring it back down to the ground, and use it to grow other new crystals like it. So we have a number of examples of that that we are flying on this next launch coming up in just a couple of weeks and, and then future launches. And we're going to be looking at that hard. So that's one area that we are really focused on.

I think there's a lot of opportunity there to have impact. It's something that we understand and it's chemistry, which I feel, and I hate to say this because I'm a chemist, but I think it's, it's simpler than doing biology. That's a, that's this one. So just to build on that, another area that we're looking at is production of nanomaterials. And one particular

nanomaterial that has applications in the healthcare sector are gold nanospheres, tiny little golden balls. And it turns out, just as when you grow crystals, we should be able to grow very perfect structures that are like a small golden ball in space and use that. And it turns out there are diagnostic tools that use gold nanospheres and also some therapies that have been developed and FDA approved that use gold nanospheres. So we're looking at that right now. And that's a future launch, which I believe is going to happen towards the end of next year is when we're flying those experiments. Gold nanospheres is straight up a James Bond villain thing though. So you just got to watch on the branding side.

Cause you definitely sound like you're the headline character and who's James Bond now? I don't know if David Craig's still doing it, but I feel like you're seconds away from being featured in that with your gold nanospheres. Oh yeah. Ken's ready to sell gold nanospheres to the world. And I love it because you know, it's, there's so many uses for it. And I think Ken hit really on the highlights of, you know, the fact that chemistry is easier than biology. And it probably is,

you know, from my point of view, I think it will be something more chemistry related that's going to hit sooner. I'd prefer it to be something biological because I think it would probably have a bigger impact in the, you know, short, like a bigger impact overall for the first thing. But people just don't get as excited about a better form of a drug as they do about 3D printed tissue. But that's just, you know, that's why we have great marketing and branding people. But I think the other piece of all of this is, you know, we have so many different fields we're working in. We've talked about our bioprinting and tissue production. We've talked

about crystal growing for pharmaceutical. Ken's even hit a little bit on our material research with our golden balls. The other piece is the plant science, which, you know, we talked and kind of joked about the fact that we're not going to create enough calories for astronauts to eat. But there's been a lot of work and we're developing new hardware for plant science that really has the potential to help with some climate change things. You know, it's nothing's definitive because everything's only been done once or twice. And I'd really love to see someone use some of the new red wire hardware or greenhouse for growing plants to do some repeatable work to see how we can combat climate change with changes in gene expression that occur in microgravity for plants. And while, again, it may not be quite as exciting as bioprinting a new liver that we're going to transplant into someone.

It is a big piece of the research that we're doing and probably a little less sexy than tissue engineering like we're talking about today, but just another piece of all the things we're working on at Redwire. The last question I had written down was to get an understanding of, um, the, the kind of scope and scale of the operations on the ISS today and what you, you know, the last time we chatted, I think we were talking a lot about commercial space stations, Molly, and, and like, you know, that's still in a weird spot overall, but, um, if, if you kind of have a sense of, are you at the limits of what you can do in the ISS today in terms of size and scale and how many other people are on the ISS doing stuff? And what that might look like when you get into the next generation space stations? Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a physical space limitation on the ISS at this point.

And whether that means people need to bring things down, which we're trying to do. We've, you know, we have as a company developed 20 research payloads, have 10 on station. And, you know, I'd love to see all of us who have all these payloads on station, if we have anything sitting there, that's not necessary, bring it down so we could bring more up. I know that actively NASA is trying to make space for testing things for the commercial Leo destinations, the next generation of space stations. I don't know that the ISS has reached its limit of what we can do, but currently the physical space limitation is limiting some of it. One of the things that we're lucky about with Redwire is we have two facilities, two of each of these facilities also. So we have four facilities, two of each of these facilities also. So we have four facilities

that are really modular. So for us, it's just a matter of changing a small piece and reflying it rather than flying new facilities all the time. And so we're able to do more and do new things, because all we have to do is modify this small box, what we call a cassette, that we send back and forth rather than having to modify the whole facility. So I think in terms of science and in terms of breakthrough, we definitely haven't met the limit. But in terms of physical size, we're probably nearing that if not at it. So I don't think we'll see us adding 10 more payloads to the station, hopefully a few more before it's end of life to test them. But you never know, maybe somehow the station will get bigger, and we can add a few other things to

it. You can you can sneak a box or two on the Axiom flights. I think they probably have the room, right? They don't have a lot to figure out between now and building out a second space station on the space station. Feels like you can still get it. Exactly, you know, just call them up. Hey, we just call them up. Hey, we got this little package. What else are they doing? Yeah, but that's, I mean, that's a great example of how the space station

can and is expanding in ways. And, you know, who knows, maybe there's someone who'll come up with another inflatable they want to attach and test. You know, the future, I think, while there's currently an end date to station, I think there's still a lot of possibilities for things that can happen there It's just currently where the physical space limit that exists

But there's not a limit on the science or the technology possibilities in my mind It's also stuff like this though that feeds into the decisions that get made on ISS and for ISS like, you know When you have a breakthrough that that's going to feed back into planning within NASA, how that actually happens. I don't know how much you can talk about that. But you know, I'm sure there are people at NASA that are very interested in what do we actually need to accommodate, you know, the requirements for the new space stations came from somewhere, because it's what kinds of things is there interest in working with what do we need to accommodate. So the more that there's breakthroughs in certain areas and the importance of those kind of facilities goes up then you know there's hopefully more of a layout

and a budget for accommodating that kind of stuff so it's not wholly separate um and you know at the same to the same point that these stations need to figure out who is not nasa that is going to pay them money to do things on station the more there is this market that's outside of whatever NASA is interested in can certainly help them turn the corner on business cases as well and create a better situation overall for the stations. So, Ken, I don't know, on the science side of things, has there been discussions either officially or unofficially about the kind of work that's going on here

and how that might need to be adjusted for future space station plans? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, NASA is keenly aware of kind of their role or their responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to accomplish great things. So when they put out new proposals or requests for proposals, they're always asking for things that they believe

or they've been advised are key areas that need to be addressed. So, for example, there's a big push for semiconductor-related work now that's part of the overall U.S. effort towards semiconductor development. And so they do consider that. At the same time, they're looking to people like Molly and I and the people that Molly and I go out and find, who are the principal investigators, who are the best scientists and engineers, what have you, in America, coming to us saying,

hey, this is the thing you need to be focused on. This is going to be the breakthrough or whatever. So you can see there's a struggle on the NASA side because all this is being brought to them and they're having to work through it. So they have advisors. And if you ask me, do they make mistakes sometimes? Sure, NASA makes mistakes sometimes. But generally, they're getting it right and they're doing the right thing and they're thinking about it in the right way. So in that way, I feel really good about it. I think going back to the comments around resources, like is space on station the limiting resource? I think we have to start also thinking about the number of flights and the space we have on flights. With this SpaceX mission and its return, it will be the first of the last 18 returns that we will have from station that are scheduled for its life.

There are only 18 left. The others, Northrop Grumman flights do not return with payloads. left. The others, Northrop Grumman flights do not return with payloads. So in thinking about that, going back to your point of how do we turn this into a commercial endeavor where we're bringing things back, we've got to start thinking about the plan beyond station, right? That's something else we're thinking about. And use station for what it was intended, which was not to be a platform for manufacturing a lot of things, but to help us find what to manufacture and to prove it out, show that it works. And then the next generation systems will be more built for purpose, right? Allow us to be more specific about how they're

used. And so that's where I see things right now. And the other limitation that I'll tell you has been striking for me is that we're doing this work, let's say growing pharmaceutical crystals. How do we find the pharmaceutical companies that have the problems and get them engaged? And there's still a separation. A lot of people still aren't aware that there's a space station that they have access to that they could use and could help solve their problems. And even if they do know that, I was a principal investigator before my career here with Redwire. And I worked at a pharmaceutical company. And there were people in the company who for eight years, tried to find somebody at NASA to help them fly an experiment and could not do it. They struggled and struggled and struggled. And then somebody called me and said, hey, we had to do this. And I got connected.

I connected them to these people. And they flew it within just, it was about two years from that point. So I think that's the other piece. It's an awareness issue that we have to overcome and get the right people engaged in these types of programs now, sooner than before it's too late, for a station at least. That was a perfect spot to end it. I got a little bit sad talking about 18 returns from the space station, even as somebody who's like, I got to figure out what's after this. I've been like, really harping on that note, but I was like, oh man, that's a really interesting way to frame it. So yeah and and you

know you were talking about gentler returns earlier molly and we've got see what dream chaser gets to when when that starts flying up and down that would be uh interesting in terms of gentler than crashing into the ocean so um interesting times for sure and i hope that we can check back in and talk about this stuff as y'all make progress but i i really really appreciate you both hanging out with me today. And is there anywhere, anything in particular, either of you want to point people to? I've got links in the show notes to some of the videos and the press release about the latest thing. But anything else that you think they should follow along with if they're curious? I think any of our social media.

We always have such great pictures and videos on there. I mean, I work for the company and I still check it daily just to see what amazing pictures and videos I'm not getting in my email from whoever takes them. And it's really amazing all the stuff we're doing and being so excited about everything. Because Redwire is, you know, we're focused today on what we're doing in the ISS. But we're such a diverse company doing so many different things. And it's really fun to kind of learn about all these different facets of space, of space work, really. So I would just say follow any of our social media to check out the fun pictures and cool projects that we're working on in the ISS and beyond. Yeah, and there is a launch coming up. I think it's on the 5th is when it's scheduled for.

But if you get a chance, look on the NASA webpage. They should have that live. And always exciting thing to participate in if you can get there. Yeah, I highly recommended that. It's a nice time of year in Florida, too. So that would be awesome. All right. Well, thank you both. And we'll talk soon. Thanks, Anthony.

Thanks, Anthony. Thanks again to Molly and Ken for joining me on the show. It was really cool to hear about all sorts of topics that are definitely off the path of what we usually talk about on the show, but definitely an area that is of quite a lot of interest to me, not only in how it fits into the overall market of space, but the near future and how it might shape the near and far future, honestly. So really, really cool to hear what they're working on on that side of things.

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