Main Engine Cut Off - T+277: SabreSat, VLEO, and DARPA’s Otter Program (with Spence Wise, SVP of Missions and Platforms at Redwire)

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Redwire announced today that it has been awarded a contract from DARPA to serve as the prime mission integrator for its Otter program. For the program, and for the industry beyond that, they’ll be developing SabreSat, an air-breathing spacecraft flying in VLEO. Spence Wise, Senior Vice President of Missions and Platforms at Redwire, joins me to discuss the program, VLEO generally, and to dive into the technical and operational details of SabreSat.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Josh from Impulse Space, Benjamin, Pat, Steve, Lee, Ryan, Pat from KC, Donald, Warren, Theo and Violet, Harrison, SmallSpark Space Systems, Matt, Bob, Joonas, Joel, Frank, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Stealth Julian, David, The Astrogators at SEE, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Fred, Russell, Kris, Better Every Day Studios, Tyler, Jan, and four anonymous—and 813 other supporters.TopicsSabreSat Orbital Drone - Redwire SpaceRedwire Awarded DARPA Prime Contract for SabreSat Spacecraft Very Low-Earth Orbit Demonstration | Redwire SpaceRedwire wins contract for VLEO demonstration - SpaceNewsThe 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 NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. Today we'll be talking with Spence Wise, who is the Senior Vice President of Missions and Platforms at Redwire, to talk about Sabersat. It is a new spacecraft platform that they've been working on, and it just won a contract with DARPA to work on the Otter program as a tech demonstration of operating in very low Earth orbit.

It's also an air-breathing spacecraft, which is the craziest sounding thing I've heard in a long time. It flies in VLEO, where there is enough atomic oxygen and other things that they can collect and actually use to sustain propulsion. so it's a really interesting spacecraft and it also looks really cool i mentioned this when it came out i think on a headlines episode or something like that but um very very interesting looking spacecraft and i'm excited to dig in to talk about what it is

how they started working on it what its intended use cases are how it fits into the industry at large in terms of launch and payloads and uh what whole section of the market, this VLEO market that seems to be gaining more and more steam these days, you know, how this all plays together with where we're at in the space industry today. So without further ado, let's talk to Spence. All right, Spence, thanks so much for joining me on Managing Cutoff. I've been very excited about this show in particular since I learned about SaberSat, so thanks so much for coming on to talk to me about it. Yeah, Anthony, thanks for having me.

I'm excited too. There's different components that we probably should dig into. There is the spacecraft itself. There's also the domain that it flies in, very low Earth orbit. That's a thing that is different in a lot of ways than what people are doing today in low earth orbit that's a thing that is uh different in a lot of ways than what people

are doing today uh in low earth orbit uh those those aren't necessarily unrelated right the spaceship definitely is shaped like it is because of the domain it flies in so uh we'll start more general though can you can you fill us in on sabersat itself the history where it came from, and what the design behind it really intends. Oh, yeah, that's exciting. So yeah, so SaberSat started just about a year ago, when our CEO Pete Canedo had shared that our European counterparts at Redwire were working on their own VLEO platform. And he brought forward the hypothesis that there would be value to having a US-derived version for DoD and IC customers. And we started out kind of interviewing various government representatives and pretty quickly,

in fact, learned that, yeah, there is a strong value proposition, but there's a lot of challenges to get through. And that's kind of what we've been spending the last year getting through. The kind of intent of it, right? There's the big news today that you are working on DARPA's otter program and this will be the bus for that was it is it something about that mission specifically that that led to the design of sabersat of like i think we can go for this one i think we can build something to match or is there is that a good first landing spot and this is something that you see in a much more general use case oh yeah so certainly otter is a wonderful first landing spot for

Sabersat. Though we did begin Sabersat prior to engaging with DARPA. I'd say, you know, maybe some of the things that you could point to, DARPA very clearly in their solicitation was looking for an air breathing, very low Earth orbit satellite to demonstrate some novel electric propulsion technologies. And it turned out we were very well aligned with DARPA and those needs and brought a lot of the enabling technology, if you will, to making air-breathing systems work. So, apt timing, I would say. work. So, uh, apps timing, I would say. Yeah. The, uh, there's the air breathing spacecraft is a very weird juxtaposition. So can we dig into that a little bit where

you're, you're in the domain of very low earth orbit where, uh, you know, there's, there's been an increasing trend of people interested in this for either closer imaging or, you know, lower latency communications communications there's a whole branch of the star links in the future that might be flying in this area as well and it's low enough that you know drag is significant so there's talk about you know we need something like near constant propulsion to maintain your orbit and you're fighting against what little air there there is left um i always took that as like you know an inconvenience and something to be worked around, but never thought there's enough there to breathe. And so I would like to understand what that actually means in terms of scale and how it functions.

Yeah. So, you know, maybe I'll start out with kind of, kind of explain this is, this is new, but maybe not all that new. example if you you look at the international space station they regularly have to reboost the international space station because it's actually uh kind of coming through at its lowest portion of the leo and it is running into atomic oxygen which is creating that drag so we're kind of just leaning on that same, there's drag and we've got to get over it mentality. We're using a variety of electric thrusters on that program. And again, that are going to get proved out. But the air breathing itself is somewhat new. There have been technologies that have looked at some systems and how you would do this. I can't get

too much into the details of how that works for a few reasons, but a short end of it is you're trying to catch all the atomic oxygen that you run into, compress it, and use that as a feedstock for an electric thruster, maybe not too dissimilar from a Hall effect thruster like LEO satellites have. There's an interesting combination there, though, where you want to design your spacecraft to have low drag in that environment, but you also want a big enough cross section to be able to catch the atomic particles that you're looking for. Like, how do you find the balance? What's the right size? It's something that you could, you know the the shape that you've got now is a very elongated spacecraft with the very imperial shuttle style solar panels and whatnot but you know is there is there a

balance to be had in terms of cross-section versus drag versus how much you can collect and and is that dependent on how much propulsion you actually need for the vehicle itself? Yeah, it's actually a very complicated trade and everything's interconnected and self-referencing. So when we started SaberSat, we sat down first and looked at the challenge of drag and just modeling that is complex. and just modeling that is complex. In fact, it requires three different types of physics models along with a trained atmospheric model to even really begin understanding what the satellite is running into and what kind of drag it'll be seeing.

So I'll point that out first is that you have to start with the simulation, the mod and sim that really understands the environment you're flying through. And then you start layering in things like solar charge state because, as you could imagine, we can't track our solar panels like classic satellites which track the sun because if they go totally perpendicular to the direction of travel, it creates a very draggy surface. So understanding charge state along with that collection state is very important.

And it does inform the optimization of the satellite. And what I would highlight is that the approach with Sabersat, the core of the satellite remains effectively the same. But we can add modular elements to it, bulkheads, to increase the length. And really increasing that length does two things for you. It adds a lot more solar cross-section, so we can collect a lot more solar power with longer solar panels, essentially. But it also creates a lot of space for us to accommodate payloads. And, you know, we've looked at a few versions, kind of a small, a medium, and a large configuration for the purposes of optimization. And it really is important to sit down and model

how that's going to travel through the lower thermosphere and what mission objectives you're trying to accomplish. And then we configure the satellite based on those needs. Yeah, sizing is interesting as well with this. You know, it's shaped a lot differently than many spacecraft these days. So are there considerations that you're making in terms of typical shapes and sizes of payloads that you might be integrating on this? And then also, how does that impact the launch side? Is this something that fits certain class of launch vehicles pretty well, but other ones, it's like, well, we're, we're a little too, you know, cigar shaped for typical, you know, small, small spacecraft

launch vehicle or something like that? Yeah, let's start with the launcher question. So as I mentioned, there are various lengths that we can configure to and, of course, the longest configurations, which are, you know, five meters or perhaps more, those will require something like a Falcon 9 dedicated launch. But you can think of them like kind of candlesticks in that you could accommodate many into a single launcher. The other end of it is for the more, I would say, common sizes, the smaller sizes under maybe six feet or so. Those we can fit on some of the new launchers of Fireflies, et cetera. So there's a lot of optionality in how we can get to orbit. And we do intend to inject slightly above VLEO and then come down to VLEO.

So that gives us some flexibility in the architecture in what altitude are we getting dropped off at. That's an important early driver. The bundling is interesting. So you're going to be kind of bundling it up like you're gathering, you know, sticks for a fire or something like that. What is the, are there deployment, especially deployment mechanisms that you have to separate them in that environment rather than, you know, a stack like Starlink or, you know, CubeSat deploy or something like that? This is not sure that anyone's done the bundle of sticks approach

for deploying satellites before. Yeah, I may be oversimplifying it a little bit, but one of the things that maybe a lot of people aren't aware of is Redwire out of our office in Albuquerque, we actually design custom launch interfaces and deployments so that we actually have worked closely with that team

to optimize how many we can fit in a given launcher. And they bring a custom separation configuration for that. It's been very helpful. In terms of the payloads that you can adapt to these different buses, are there specific markets that the team was going for in terms of, you know, communications or imaging? Or is it somewhat configurable between different markets as well? Yeah, that's a very

good point. The short answer is it's ultimately, the bus is designed to accommodate any number of payloads. And we can even reconfigure things like where the solar panels are. You may be looking at the configuration that we've been putting out in the press, which has kind of one tall dorsal fin, if you will, and then two small pectoral fins. That configuration, for example, was optimized to accommodate a belly payload. So if we wanted to attach it maybe maybe like a, like a belly pod, you'd see on an F-18 fighter jet. Um, that's kind of the mentality we had there. It would be recessed a little bit for drag efficiency, but you can easily put EO or RF payloads in there. Um, so a very wide variety. One of the things I'm always curious about with these drag-minded designs is that certain payload classes, like you mentioned, Earth observation, have very specific pointing and slewing needs and things that come in conflict with maintaining the minimum drag orientation as you fly through space. orientation as you fly through space. How is that handled today? Is there maybe something you're thinking about for the future where you can maintain that orientation, but you know,

the payload itself is articulated or are there different ways of approaching it than what people do now, which is just swinging the whole spacecraft around and dealing with it basically? Anthony, that's a wonderful question. The best answer is probably both. And what I mean by that is, you know, certainly our satellite, like other LEO satellites, does have fine pointing capability. The difference being, of course, is our drag. So, you know, if we turn the satellite entirely sideways, that creates a large drag surface. That can be overcome just by additional thrust once you get back on course. But probably more long-term, looking at payloads that can articulate or point on their own are advantageous. And there's a long history of that sort of solution. If you look at the SR-71, it had an optical payload that was able to slew for what it was doing because they suffer some of the same challenges, right?

You can't pop a spacecraft sideways. You can't fly the SR-71 sideways for sure. Yeah, so we kind of call that the sr71 problem uh in our thinking when we're talking about it and yeah there is a level of articulating payloads that seems advantageous there are also others that uh like from an rf perspective uh can be electrically scanned so you know esas and planar arrays uh that scan without any mechanical moving parts. And those are certainly advantageous as well. Do you know that? Is there any? I mean, maybe you can't tell us, but are there payloads out there today in terms of the imaging realm that that operate more in SR 71 mode? Or would

that be something that is a new thing to build out and deploy? Yeah, you know, I think the answer is yes. It's just a question of scale. So it's not unusual to have telescopes or cameras that look at fast-scanning mirrors or optical-grade mirrors that are able to articulate in multiple axes to essentially repoint that imager without having to physically move the big telescope itself. Because some of these telescopes can get quite large. I mean, you can imagine one that's just picking a size, you know, 50 centimeters in diameter. I mean, that's a pretty large

primary mirror there. So you don't want to be swinging that thing around because it could introduce a lot of modes. So that would be a place where it'd be advantageous to have a scanner on the end of that telescope how does it how do you figure out in terms of operations um if you're you know not using articulated payload and you are doing precise pointing that is you know off minimum drag uh attitude how do you figure out operationally like how much of that is, you know, off minimum drag, uh, attitude, how do you figure out operationally? Like how much of that is okay per orbit? Is it something where you have to be a little bit more selective about, all right, we can only do per orbit per percentage of orbit. We can do like, you know, some percentage of off axis pointing, and then we've got to get back to

maintain orbit a little bit, or is it much more case by case where somebody might need a longer pass of off axis pointing, and then you're gonna have to say like, all right, well, then the next orbit, we're going to be maintaining the operational altitude that you need. So you've got, you know, you can either do a lot of little things, or you've got to like group all of your interesting stuff on one orbit so that we can deal with it on the next orbit. Yeah, that's, you know, it's interesting. That is, should be the operative question anytime we engage with a customer. And it pretty quickly is where we get to because, you know, there is an innate understanding that, you know, drag is what we're fighting here. So you've got to be able to overcome and budget for

it. But it also cascades out into power and then, of course, fuel state as well. So when we talk to customers, what we start with is our mod and sim capability. We use what's called our Acorn simulator. And we have a it's an open architecture that allows us to plug in the multi physics to do this high performance modeling. multiphysics to do this high performance modeling. And we'll take that and the customer's requirements, you know, how many times do they need to revisit over a given period of time? How much, how many images do they need to collect? You know, any variety of operational questions. And we can condition our simulator so that we optimize around those. And that actually does change the configuration of the bus. How many batteries do we carry? How large of a fuel tank?

Which altitude do we fly at? So the answer really is we start with the requirement, we budget for that, and then optimize the constellation or satellite to meet that need. What do you find are the use cases for the sufficiently motivating use cases for flying in VLEO that make it worth dealing with all of these extra considerations, you know, in use cases that couldn't just go, well, you know, we'll go up to 600 kilometers and have a lot more wiggle room to deal with this and get most of what we need. You know, what are those things that seem to jump out of that and say, no, no, there is a really, really good reason to fly 300 kilometers or even lower than that? Well, so, you know, I think the most obvious one is simply proximity. I mean, same with taking a picture with your iPhone. You know, if you're

so far away, image gets blurry and you notice if you move closer, it gets clearer, right? So same base physics apply here. So if we can fly at, you know, 200 to 300 kilometers instead of 600 to a thousand kilometers, that's a very substantial improvement. And it is a squared function. So it's not a one-to-one exchange, it's quite more. So that value is quite impactful. But the follow-up question to that should be, well, obviously you can put large telescopes in space already, so what advantage does it get you? And what I think it really gets to is that balance of performance and value, and that we can, by moving closer, can still achieve incredible performance on our image collection. But we can get away with much smaller telescopes

and smaller telescopes are much more affordable. And, you know, even in the extreme, you could start to say, well, are we going to get to like GoPro kind of camera systems? And, you know, with a little bit of upgrading customization and the right size telescope, you may be able to do something like that. So I think that's really the value prop, the best value proposition in my mind is get closer so you can get away with less exquisite payloads and still get very impressive performance out of it. But that's the primary. There are other things that are beneficial as well. One is, obviously, as you look to the resilience of orbits, space debris is a big discussion point at a global level. And you notice that most satellites

that fly in LEO, they have a de-orbit requirement so that they reduce the amount of space debris they create long term. Well, the advantage of VLEO is that you're already in the regime where your satellite will deorbit and safely break up and essentially incinerate without any added efforts. So the risk of creating space debris for more than, you know, days is very low with P-LEO, whereas LEO or above, those can be, debris can be there for decades or more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stuff, once you get to like 800, it's centuries. So it's not great. There's also a balance that i find interesting where we might in in

decades past might not have been able to consider this regime because spacecraft themselves launch vehicles everything was much more expensive and um you know the the tech iteration cycle that we've gotten to at this point means that you can get you know less expensive spacecraft that you can replace more often because of that because you have hardware that is built you know very inexpensively so it might not last as long but because it's more it's less expensive you can buy more of them over time and replace them and that wasn't really a trade that people were willing to make in you know 80s and 90s. For sure. Those were things where they were looking at 15 years life cycles, or even more than that.

But now people have gotten comfortable doing, you know, doing math around what is a five year lifetime actually give me in terms of upgrading this tech. And, you know, when you're talking about imaging, specifically talking about smaller sensors and smaller optics, those are things that are because of the world that we're in getting better every day you know the gopro today is way better than five years ago and five years before that so specifically in that space there's a certain iteration cycle that really lends its hand to this so it's kind of interesting to look at that whole package and realize that like oh that's why this is a thing that people are interested in now

is because all of that has come together to really create like an interesting combination of all this stuff. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's a it's a it's a special time right now where we're, we're able to hit an inflection point for VLEO. One thing I would highlight as an example is, you know, prior to the Space Development Agency, which is now, you know, a multi billion dollar low Earth orbit constellation that's getting built in multiple tranches, it has really shown for both the U.S. government and I'd say commercial industry that proliferating satellites into low-Earth orbit that are more affordable than heritage systems that might be out in, you know, MEO or GEO is really practical and it does work. And that's why we've seen the great success out of the Space Development Agency that we've seen. And I think if you take that mentality down to VLEO, there are even more missions that we can enable there at low cost points that keep it very

exciting. And, you know, the why now part, you know, electric propulsion has come a very long way. And with the advent here of this air breathing technology coming in, we can also now make VLEO a sustained orbit. Whereas before it was the domain of sounding rockets and, you know, very short lived ballistic coefficient missions where you shoot something through VLEO, you know, collect what data you can, and then you deorbit. And that really drove a mentality where you couldn't put impressive payloads into VLEO, that it was going to be destroyed in moments. So now with the ability to air breathe and use electric propulsion, we can sustain these orbits. So you can actually get a return on the investment of payloads in

there. So you go from wanting to put very, very, very cheap payloads to now you say, well, let's go find what's the highest value and actually collect a lot of data that's very interesting and very competitive. Let's talk about the hardware a little bit more too, just to get a bit deeper in that. You mentioned different sizing, different configurations. Can you give us like payload sizes and masses that those accommodate? And then what the overall spacecraft at that point is massing at? And, you know, we talked about how it fits in fairings. But what about from a mass perspective? Yeah, yeah, no, I appreciate that. So you know, the the smaller end, looking at something that's maybe you can imagine an ESPA class satellite, two of them stacked on top of each other, that stack is the height or

length of our bus in its kind of minimum configuration. And that has, you know, kilograms and, you know, tens of watts of power available for small demonstration payloads. And these would be things like Langmuir probes, RF sounders, all sorts of interesting things that, again, typically fly on sounding rockets, but now could be kept up perpetually. So that's a good low into a couple hundred kilograms of payload that we can afford for swap perspective and hundreds of watts available for payload. And scaling all the way up to, again, the five, maybe to seven-ish meters in length, it gets even higher from there. So it's interesting,

like we don't feel very payload constrained. What I'll say is that probably not a great fit for a payload that, you know, deploys very large. It's not going to be a synthetic aperture radar. Yeah, big parabolic antenna, probably not a great idea. But again, there's other planarized arrays that can be used and such. It's just an interesting methodology where the driving force is the frontal cross section. And then you can, I assume in most of those configurations,

you're kind of extending out lengthwise and then changing the solar configuration to provide the requisite power for that? Or is there other adaptations that happen to the hardware as well? Yeah, the solar panel is probably a great one to talk about. So, you know, we can have one dominant fin, if you will, and that in certain configurations provides enough power while leaving, you know, a whole side of the bus available for, for payload space. Or we can go to a, to a two wing configuration, which is a bit more typical.

And you can imagine that being either in a vertical configuration, or we can roll to be sort of a horizontal position. And that, that rolling state is actually one of the major trades in how you architect the constellation. Like when will the satellite be true vertical versus horizontal? And where will it be on battery state and mission collect? Really, it's just an interesting mindset to get yourself in

to think about these shapes are interesting to consider when you're like trying to figure out where's the sun when do we need to be charging when do i need to be boosting uh in terms of the propulsion side of things you mentioned you know perpetual emissions and and things like that the air breathing aspect of this is that meant to prevent losing all of your propulsion quickly? Or does it really, is it able to sustain itself almost indefinitely? So there's a lot that varies by altitude and what your operational objectives are. But at a minimum, it's extend. What we're targeting, though, is sustained operation, which is to say the product as designed can peg in at VLEO

and stay there until the life of the hardware. That's pretty wild. Really sci-fi looking. For the DARPA side of things themselves, I don't know how related this was. I think they announced phase four was working with them for an air breathing propulsion system. Is that the same one that's being used in this program, or is that them looking at multiple different options and trying to understand how multiple providers would go at this? Yeah, actually, if you look at the solicitation, which is public on SAM.gov for

Otter, you can see that DARPA made a decision to break this solicitation into two parts. There's tech area one, which was for thrusters, which I can say they do have multiple providers. And yes, phase four is one of those. And then they created a section section, which was TA two, which is really the spacecraft prime role, which you bring the air breathing technology, you bring the orbit design and mission operations and the,

you know, the total satellite solution, which includes integrating the TA one thrusters as part of the satellite. And of course, that is the opportunity that we just announced this morning that we won as the TA-2 Prime. The mission itself, could you describe a little bit of the mission profile and what the objectives are and how you might be flying a spacecraft? Is this a, you know, general kind of tech and implementation demo, or are there some operational things that are meant to be drawn out of it as well? Yeah, the solicitations are pretty directed that this is a technology demonstration mission.

So it's demonstration for the sake of technology advancement. And that is in the area of both air scooping or air breathing and electric propulsion. So how does the mission work? We'll inject into a rideshare orbit, most likely, and then provide some base checkout and proceed down to our VLEO operational altitudes, where we'll turn on the full system, if you will, to demonstrate both the collection and thrust capabilities. Is this something where circular orbits are intended in this environment? Or do you almost find it better to have a slightly elliptical orbit where you're dipping down pretty deep into VLEO and then coming up for a higher pass on the other side? And hopefully your interesting target is down near perigee, but you've got the apogee

to kind of reboost. How does that balance work out? Yeah, so that yet again, is another one of the strengths of why red wires's in this domain. Our digital engineering mod and sim solution, which includes our Acorn digital engineering tool, is built around unique orbits and very precise timing, and in this case, thrust and drag inputs. So we have looked at both orbit types types and there are definite advantages to each. I'll say from an operator perspective, it's certainly an easier, more predictable day to peg into a circular orbit and then put the satellite into flight operation mode that just sustains orbit. That's the easiest to think about, but maybe a little less exciting

than doing an elliptical orbit that brings you to a very high altitude and then back down through the lower thermosphere. But both are certainly options available to customers. I feel like the elliptical side kind of gets more interesting if you have like a full-blown constellation where you're able to sync up where those perigees occur and make sure that you've got the coverage you need and you know i think there are some nro satellites that do a little bit of that where they got like closer imaging passes and then uh they try to use that to phase into where they actually want to target so i know there's people out there that do it um and i'm sure some of the commercial imaging companies have like experimented with that before to get uh to see what that imaging looks like

there's a whole class of imaging companies coming up i think albedo is talking about flying mostly in v leo for their thermal imaging that they're doing so it definitely feels like something that we're going to see a lot of people try different strategies and different implementations for so should be an interesting few years. Yeah, I think so, too. And, you know, we keep up with the Albedo and EOI and a few of the other folks that are working on their own constellations. And, you know, it's interesting because it's a challenging environment. So we're finding a pretty collaborative space for discussions and

engagements. And, you know, we're looking at, I think, squarely different pieces of the market as it's beginning to come to life here. So, you know, Albedo and the others are looking at how do I create a commercial imagery constellation that can be tasked. And that's excellent. I think that's a very viable piece of the market. What Redwire is focused on is for the DoD and IC, bring me your unique mission set. And through our mod and sim capabilities with our Acorn tool, we will reconfigure and optimize both the bus and our

constellation to whatever it is you need to do so we're we're kind of a modeling first uh mentality and intentionally a bit flexible which of course makes it always a little challenging to talk about what are sabersats capabilities and you know you want to say you can do everything it depends well one of its capabilities is to look awesome and my final question is will you paint one of these to look like a shark and or an imperial shuttle that's gotta be it's gotta be in the plan somewhere yeah i i will say i'm partial to the imperial shuttle and that is has become the uh the the uh the talk around the offices. We're going to have to call one of them an Imperial shuttle,

but it's exciting. It's fun. It's an old code, sir, but it checks out. Awesome. Is there anything else that we missed out talking on that we should have mentioned about Sabersat that comes to mind? Well, maybe one thing is just to talk a bit

about Sabersat versus Phantom. I think surely folks have noticed that we've talked about two VLEO platforms in a very short period of time. And a lot of it has to do with catching up in a sense that the catching up with reality because the Phantomantom platform, which are European union counterpart and red wire,

they're actually pretty far down the road on an European space agency program. I'll let them talk about that in their section, but they, it was a good step to bring forward that platform as a, an offering that anyone can come and get and that's the phantom product but they're they're also different between red uh red wire's sabersat and phantom um one is you know obviously we're built in the united states for u.s government customers here with sabersat uh, Phantom similarly so in the European Union for European Union missions.

But SaberSat is also first and foremost an air-breathing satellite, whereas Phantom is not. And we can choose to be air-breathing or not, but I'd say the PhantomSat is specialized kind of in that configuration. And there'll be certain missions where that's what we want to go put forward is a PhantomSat versus a SaberSat. So it's an exciting and important differentiation.

Yeah, and there's a size difference there as well, where Phantom can fit on something like an Electron, where it doesn't sound like even the smallest configuration of SaberSat would by mass and size alone. Now, there's a lot fewer launch vehicles in the Electron class these days, everyone has grown up a bit. So I feel like that's less of a thing than this would have been a year or two ago. And I would have said a bunch of other names that were working on Terran 1 and Virgin Orbit, but pretty much Electron is the last one standing down on that end. But you know, on the European side, there's also Vega and Rideshare spots

that are going to crop up on Ariane 6 that fit that size class better, and maybe even the shape better, right? That's a much more satellite-shaped satellite than SaberSat is. So there's instances where, you know, I'm not even sure if you said that the smallest configuration of SaberSat

used S-class satellites as a reference point. But would this be able to be put on one of those slots if there was one available on a mission? Or is it the metrics of it just doesn't quite work out for those kind of use cases? Yeah, actually, as I mentioned briefly, we are looking at rideshare configurations for the satellite for Saberstat. And we have a method for accommodating that. I'll say it is an interesting challenge because your length does put you at essentially two quarts on, on a stacked ESPA rings. So it's can be done.

It has to be thought through carefully. And that's again, part of what our folks down in Albuquerque are bringing to the table. Awesome. Yeah. And as a good transition, we'll be having a whole show about Phantom coming up in a couple of weeks as well. We'll talk about that whole side of things to compare and contrast a little bit.

So this is really cool to get an understanding of this program. I'm really excited to follow along with as these things develop. And I guess I'll have to come out and visit as this thing gets put together because I would like to see what it looks like with my own eyes. It looks very, very cool. Thanks, Spence, so much for hanging out and talking about this stuff. Where should people follow along if they're curious about Saberstadt? Are there anything that you'll be putting out there?

This might be more of a question for Omar, who is hanging out with us in the chat, but I'm not sure if you know anything in particular that we should point them to. Omar, do you want to talk to that? Yeah, sure. I would go to the Redwire Twitter page or X page and our

LinkedIn page as well. We'll be posting updates there regularly. Cool. Thanks. I'd love to have you out for a visit once we get into manufacturing. Yeah, I gotta I gotta come out and see it. I'm trying I'm making an effort this year to go see more spaceships. That's my goal. I've been like emailing some people to line up some visits around the industry to go see some spaceships. So but thank you so much both for setting us up for hanging out and talking about Saberset. Thanks, Anthony. Appreciate it. Thanks again to Spence for hanging out and talking to me about SaberSat and to Omar for setting this up and hanging out with us as well. It's always awesome

talking with Redwire folks. And as I mentioned, we'll be talking about Phantom on an upcoming show in just two weeks. We'll be talking about that whole side of what Redwire is working on in VLEO. So very excited for that show as well. But for now, that is all I've got for you today. This episode of Main Engine Cutoff is brought to you by everyone over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 33 executive producers who produced this episode of the show. Benjamin, Pat, Steve, Lee, Ryan, Pat from KC, Donald, Warren, Theo and Violet, Harrison, SmallSpark Space Systems, Matt, Bob, Eunice, Joel, Frank, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Stealth, Julian, David, The Astrogators at SCE, Will and Lars from Agile Space, Fred, Russell, Chris, Better Everyday Studios, Tyler, Jan, and four anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for making this episode possible, for letting me do what I do here on the show. If you like what you're listening to, head over to managingcutoff.com slash support, sign up there. If you're at $3 a

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