Main Engine Cut Off - T+68: Mike Lewis, CTO of NanoRacks

Episode Date: December 20, 2017

Mike Lewis, CTO of NanoRacks joins me to talk about what they’re working on today, as well as their big plans for the future, including their upcoming airlock and the Ixion project—their ongoing work to turn spent upper stages into useful spacecraft. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 23 executive producers—Kris, Mike, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, and five anonymous—and 108 other supporters on Patreon. NanoRacks | The Operating System of Space NanoRacks (@NanoRacks) | Twitter Mike Lewis | NanoRacks' Chief Technology Officer NanoRacks’ 4th External Cargo Ship Satellite Deployment Mission NanoRacks Successfully Deploys First Customer Microsatellite from ISS NanoRacks Airlock Passes Johnson Astronaut Training Exercise Contract for Commercial Habitat Concept Study Signed NanoRacks on Twitter: “We see the future commercialization of #LEO in re-using and re-purposing spent upper stages of launch vehicles. Here's a new look at #Ixion.” Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Listen to MECO Headlines Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Buy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off Shop Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Welcome to the Main Engine Cut-Off. I'm Anthony Colangelo, and I've got a very special guest with me this week, Mike Lewis of NanoRacks. How are you doing? Doing well, Anthony. Thank you very much for having me on. So yeah, this has been about a month since I was down in Houston. We walked around the office a little bit, saw some fun space hardware. I talked about that on the show a couple of weeks ago, but now I wanted to get you on to cover some of the topics that we were focusing on during that visit. Yeah. I definitely appreciated you coming. And I'd like to defend one thing. You noticed that we had a lot of stuff here.

And I kind of want to set the record straight. When you said we have a lot of the spaceflight hardware and activities and everything like that, in my defense, we had just done a handover of a whole bunch of CubeSats, a whole bunch of payloads. Such is the NanoRacks way. Our timing is just always perfect. And so you came in right at the end of a handover. So not that I have anything to defend there.

No, it's great. You guys were really busy around that time too. We had the Cygnus flight that just finished off. Everything went well with that. Some new deployers that we'll get into as well. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's an exciting time. I keep waiting for it to slow down, but that's just the nature of this ride we're on. It keeps going. So yeah, things are going well. Let's maybe start there with like the state of NanoRacks itself today. When I was down there, you mentioned that you recently had the idea to count all of the things that you've been deploying and have hit more than 200 satellites deployed, more than 600 payloads sent up. And you've got these new double-wide

deployers, which is one topic of excitement when we were talking. Yeah, no, that's a, it's crazy. I actually, um, I was just going through my, my year in review kind of thing, you know, looking at the stuff that we'd done. And, and a year ago we were at 135 satellites. Uh, and right now we're at 207, uh, including two that are this, this larger microsat class, the K2M and the simple satellite we deployed this year. So that was a huge, huge deal for us using our KBR deployer. We've had just great success with the satellite deployment off of the Cygnus vehicle.

That's a really exciting program for a number of reasons the biggest of which is that we deploy above the station so we get a lot of additional lifetime and then like you said we're over 600 payloads which is just absolutely crazy to me

we're a big part of the allocation for payloads for the ISS's national lab. It's pretty crazy to think about when you step back a couple of years and think what the ISS was doing before you guys came in and started making such use of it. And there was a couple of things that you mentioned about how NanoRacks has influenced some ISS management, specifically with regards to the resupply flights. Is there anything that you can mention about that publicly? I don't want to get too much into stuff that's off the grid or whatever, but I found some of that stuff very interesting. No, it is fascinating.

So you make a good point. Back before folks like NanoRacks were around, the station was being used differently. You know, they're building the space station. There's a lot of the activities, the EVAs, everything like that were focused on construction and assembly and, you know, moving components around and things like that. And I think, you know, we came in at a really good time in space station construction because they're getting close to finishing it and realize, oh, no, we need to use this thing. And we were one of the first companies to get a Space Act agreement, which basically gave us access to the ISS as a national lab, much like any other national laboratory. You know, you can have that kind of access. And, yeah, we've been kind of at the forefront of it since then. interesting things. You say we kind of affect the way that the station management kind of views payloads and things like that. They're in a neat spot. They want us to be successful. And we have incredible support over at NASA. The interesting part is they want us to be so successful that we create a market that competes with ourselves.

So when you say, yeah, we've influenced the way that the station's used, it's definitely true. It's pretty interesting, too. You've got some things like you have some ground hardware that matches what you have on the iss so that you can carry out you know people think about that sort of thing a lot with mars rovers you have a an engineering unit on the ground that you can test some things out before you send commands up or help debug issues uh and that's the sort of thing that you know for a private company to be doing something like that with a bunch of hardware on the space station i find particularly in that you know just kind of amazing that that sort of operational ability is

there today because like you were saying they were in this construction mode with the iss and then i think you know people think now well the iss is done being built and you know maybe not the people that listen to this show that are super into the day-to-day space stuff but a lot of people out there they're like well well, we're done the ISS. What are we doing now? Whereas people like NanoRacks came along and said, well, let's use this thing while we've got it. Yeah. Yeah.

We kind of, we like the term, we use real estate. You know, we're using the station as an existing resource. We're in the real estate business, which is, yeah, we used to say we're in the shipment business. Yeah, calling ourselves FedEx in space or something like that. I think there's probably some copyright issues with that. No, really, we try to use what's there you know a real estate company uh you you brought up a kind of a cool thing and something that we're really proud of here uh the the ground controls and the ground models of everything um yeah as as i kind of reflect on on you know where we've

been as a company where we're going as a company. That's something that I like to talk about. We built out our ground control or our mission control that has the ground controls for all our facilities, identical to the ones that are on station. We also, as far as I know, we're the first and only commercial company that has ground-to-space, base-to-ground comms. So we run all of our experiments from our mission control.

We call it the bridge because we're, yeah, I won that battle and I'm a starfighter. But we're able to command and control all of our experiments from here, from our little shop in Webster. And we're also able to do direct comms with the astronauts and all that. It's just an exciting time to be in commercial space. It seems like that would have been impossible before. Yeah, I didn't know if that was something that you're allowed to talk about. But knowing that you are, that was something I didn't mention when I talked about the tour that you gave me of that.

Because that was kind of the, there were two moments when I was like, wow, this is incredible and kind of lost my sense of words for a minute. One was standing in front of the airlock module, which we'll get into in a second, or the mock-up. The other was turning this corner and seeing this mission control setup that you have, where you've got live views in the ISS, you see the hardware that they're working with, you've got the hardware there that you can work with by side with them to fulfill whatever you've got going on there. And that's, I don't know that there's been a lot of pictures posted of your setup there in Webster, but I don't know if that's stuff that can be published, I would recommend putting that out there because that's something that I think a lot of people would find pretty amazing. Yeah, no, we're proud of it. And, you know, I've recently made some upgrades to the bridge. So this is the fun part. You know, once we get it, we've got everything working, you know.

And the past couple of years, we worked with Marshall Space Flight Center and the HOSC and the POIC group over at Marshall. And we've got this room where we can communicate. And the astronauts are our team members and and marshall are our team members and we're able to do all that that was the hard part now we're now we're in the fun part where like i installed fun speakers and fun lights and uh you know we we all we got the whole company in there and and that's where we watch the the launches you know we watched spacex 13 launch last week and and that was that was a big uh yeah it has a festive added festive atmosphere you know

and and it really does become mission control but also like kind of the the focus of the company yeah we'll go there so So that's the fun stuff. Yeah. So you mentioned SpaceX 13. That leaves maybe six flights before you all be gathered in mission control. Maybe a little bit more nervous

than you've typically been for these launches. And you've got an airlock module manifested now, as far as I know. SpaceX 19. 19, yep. Yep, absolutely. coming to a space station near you in fall of 2019 the nano rex airlock uh commercial module it'll be a commercial element

i believe we're classifying it as um yeah we're we're flying uh flying a commercial airlock, something that's going to be able to give access in and out of the space station. So one of the things that when I talk to people about the airlock and they're wondering, you know, how is it? What is the main difference between what the airlock will do for NanoRack's workflow on the station compared to what you're using now? Because you seem to be quite busy now. So how will this really change the things that you're doing day to day on station? Oh, it's going to be exhausting. Nothing like multiplying workload. Yeah, no kidding.

So before I answer your question, a little something about NanoRack. So before I answer your question, a little something about Anorexia. We're about 50 people, and I think a lot of people are really surprised to hear that because we have our fingers in so many pies, so to speak. In boxing, you say we're punching above our weight. And it says a lot about the openness of the industry and the excitement that's still involved with aerospace. People want to, if you're doing something exciting, people want to be a part of it. And this airlock's a great example. We saw an opportunity. Basically, we've been using the Japanese airlock for a number of years.

It's, you know, for our satellite deployments, we have a facility that's mounted on the external facility of the JAX module called NREP. We use the airlock quite a bit. And we saw it as kind of a bottleneck for a lot of our our business streams um so we we saw that there was a an open spot and we went and we asked we asked nasa hey do you mind if we put something there and uh fortunately we were ahead of the curve because uh there's not a whole lot of spots left. Yeah, there's some big competition for at least the one that is getting a lot of attention these days. Yeah, yeah.

There's one that's got a lot of people fighting for it, that's for sure. This one, fortunately, has no 3 port. There's a CBM there. There was an adapter that's been moved around. It's right next to the Beam module, which was the awesome expandable thing that was used, I guess, last year. Yeah, so we recognized that there was a spot there. We also recognized that there was a need for more for more airlock cycles you know um the japanese control the the airlock and it's it's a wonderful resource it's great it has its limitations uh the biggest of which is the volume

you can only put so big of a thing outside and uh and we maximize that with our satellite deployers, with our in-rep. And I know a lot of other payload providers are maximizing that volume, could really benefit from it being bigger. Second biggest obstacle is just the amount of openings. It only opens so many times a year, and it's a resource that we're all competing for. And it's a resource that we're all competing for. So we saw this opportunity to put something else out there that could be used for a lot of the same stuff, but also be used for bigger, newer, more capable uses. One of the things that I think people have a hard time conceptualizing is that limit on cycles between open and closed. You know, you think of it like a door.

You can just open and close as many times as you want. But there are these limitations with airlocks on the ISS. And can you maybe dive into that a little bit? Like, how does, you know, for instance, the Japanese module can do, what is it, 10 or so a year of cycles? And then the NanoRacks airlock, not sure if you've decided on a particular number, but what is it that gets you to that number and makes that the number that you're kind of stuck with to deal with? Well, a lot of it's limited by the hardware. So the airlock itself connects much like, I don't know, Cygnus when it births to the station or something like that.

It's got these common birthing mechanism. And there's an active part on the station and then there's a passive part on the component, in this case the airlock. airlock um it it connects together and and you know there's some some uh motorized gizmos and and gaskets and things like that and it and it pulls it together and uh connects now that that's been a limit because it's only certified for x amount of openings and closings and uh and and one of the things we've actually done with the airlock is Boeing, who is the manufacturer of that has gone in and recertified this. We, uh, it was only certified for about 10 openings, 10 times connected before. And now they've, they've figured out that the parts that they've made are actually much, robust and better, for lack of a better term.

So they're able to do that. So that was kind of, it's been a limitation of some of the components of the station. And when we were first looking at the airlock, that was going to be our biggest limitation. It's not just a door with a couple of gaskets that you can open and close. not just door with a couple of gaskets that you can open and close. The next thing that's kind of limiting on this is the, well, there's two things that kind of go hand in hand, and they both have to do with the depressurization of the actual airlock.

One, there's the physical act of removing the air from the airlock, and that means you have to close a hatch and run a pump. And as part of this effort to build the airlock, NASA has also, under a separate contract, had somebody else build an air-safe pump for that exact purpose. They have a couple of other applications for it too. So it was, you know, it's just, this ended up being kind of the motivating factor for it. The other part of that is the crew time associated with closing a hatch.

For those of you, you know, you got educated listeners on here so they'll know that the uh the cbm hatch uh has in its in its uh current configuration has these motor drivers that stick out into the volume of it and it you know anytime you're going to close or open one of these hatches you have to install these motor drivers and, and that takes time. It takes, I think the allocation is four and a half hours crew time. And it's because they have to get installed, and they do all this other stuff. And the bad part is that when they're installed, it decreases the actual space that you can put stuff through. So NASA saw that this was going to be a problem.

This is a problem that they've always had, and they used this opportunity to fix that, too. So they're called CVM CPAs, the Controller Panel Assemblies on the Common Birthing Mechanism. They've built these. They've got under another contract that's made to build folding brackets that allow these controllers to be installed permanently. So it greatly reduces the amount of crew time. So both those challenges, closing the hatch and opening the hatch, as well as removing the pump, are two of our biggest obstacles. And they're two things that NASA is addressing directly and helping make this a more economic and time-sensitive solution. Yeah, and that's the kind of thing that NASA wouldn't necessarily do on their own

if there wasn't any you know motivation to do that sort of thing so if they see a resource like an airlock like this coming along i don't know why siri just triggered on my phone something i said sounded like hey siri uh but uh they see this kind of thing coming along and you know four and a half hours to do a single thing like that is is just a crazy amount of crew time when you consider how long or how short these astronauts are up on station. So if they can eliminate that and get a ton of more utility out of something like this, that's something that, you know, that outside motivation is pretty huge to making the ISS

better today. And that's, you know, we talked for a little bit about the hatch mechanisms when I was on the tour, looking at the CBM there and seeing how big of a problem that was. It's kind of cool to think about getting back to the station in that way. Well, it's one of these things, you know, you see how, why it got designed that way. You know, it was almost as an afterthought, but then you go, okay, well now I want to put something big through this hatch. And with those motor controllers sticking out, you're restricted to a 30-inch passageway. Now when it folds all the way out, the full hatch is 50 inches. So you're right.

We end up being the forcing function on this. They say, here's a problem, and it hasn't actually been a problem until now. Now we want you to fix it. And, and, uh, to their credit, they said, absolutely this will, this will get fixed. So where's, where are you at now with the airlock itself? Um, you're moving in, you're about, what is it? A year and a quarter away from SpaceX 19, maybe a year and a half. Uh, so you're getting down the stretch here. Where,

where are things at with the airlock today? They are, uh, they're going really good. Um, we, you know, we were, we've done this unlike a lot of our other programs. Uh, we thought ahead and, and, and, uh, you know, a number of years ago, staffed up, got some real rock stars in here. Uh, a guy named Brock Howe is managing this program for me, and he brought in just a great team of people. And that's been extremely valuable, you know, because as any project, excuse me, any project is only as good as its manager. And that's what we're doing.

So it's running very well. The CBM has been fabricated. One of our partners in this is Boeing. They have partial ownership of that. And their contributions include the CBM, the passive side of the common birthing mechanism. That's already, I believe, that's completely done. And then they're also doing in-kind verification and engineering services that, you know, it's just part of getting things to the station. We have a really mature design, and we're closing in on who's going to manufacture that. Actually, I think by the time this airs,

we'll have the contract signed, which is exciting for us and it's with a really well-known manufacturer of other parts of the space station. What we're still having a lot of fun with is the use cases for the airlock. You know, in its simplest form, it's a jar, you know, an open-ended jar that we stick on the side of the space station. And we use the space station hatch. We use the space station controllers. We use that kind of stuff.

So we're just a big, dumb metal shell. controllers we use that kind of stuff so we're just a big dumb metal shell but we're also a big dumb metal shell that has a lot of opportunity and real estate we're gonna you know we're looking at the sites on the outside uh we've baselined using a connector from ocean hearing called the gold and the gold two connector it's a it's kind of a similar connector to the uh mda cpla wedge or or uh an alternative to a frame a smaller frame i'm sorry a smaller a smaller version of something like that but it allows us to do power and data feed through to the outside of the station so so we can mount we can mount payloads on there so uh so we. So we're still working on what's going to go out there. And do we need to do some specialty connectors?

Do we need some specialty real estate? Things like that. That's cool too, because you think, you'll come up with a bunch of stuff right now, but that gets attached to the station and it's flexible enough that two years down the line, you could have another brilliant idea for a different configuration or something else that you'd want to the line, you could have another brilliant idea for a different configuration

or something else that you'd want to do. And you could, you know, send some hardware up to make a new configuration on the fly, really, in a lot of ways. It's absolutely right. You know, it's funny. There's kind of two conflicting schools of thought here. Like one is the whole, just keep it simple,

you know, the KISS method. But there's this other thing that we've done and demonstrated on a lot of our other hardware, and that's the Field of Dreams type thing. If you build it, they'll come. those two deploys in its simplest form, you just plug in electricity and it just come in, that goes straight to a release mechanism and the satellite goes away. But we knew we wanted to maybe do something else with that, so I built in a ton of additional capacity into this thing. You've got the ability to do all sorts of commanding,

it's got digital IO, analog IO. It's got USB built into this. We've got camera drivers already built into the thing. And the thinking there is, okay, we've got something in space.

We've got something on station. Why not make it extremely capable even though we don't have a use for it right now so so we're kind of trying to think like that with the airlock like what can we put in there that is going to make make sense you know in three four years from now and make us look just super smart but but without risking the you know the the the simple and and essential components of it right yeah that's awesome uh you know i i think it's going to be particularly exciting to see that go up in a dragon trunk and get it attached and really

see it up there because the size of it is is really quite impressive i'll put some links in the show notes to some of the photos that you guys have posted out there with people standing next to this uh it's pretty like i'm not a very tall person as you may have experienced uh but it is still the scale even to me was just incredible when you really you know you see all these photos of the station but it's hard to really comprehend the scale of things until you're really standing in front of them um so it's crazy to see how much space there is there it was so we brought that so we built a you know this mock-up that you're talking about and it's a one-to-one life-size

mock-up and and that was the main purpose of this was to show people hey this is this is how big it is and this is what you can do and uh we actually brought that mock-up up to spacecom and uh it was fun we didn't we didn't realize this was a kind of a side effect but the the hatch opening on it kind of made a perfect photo booth. Just sit on the bench and hang out. Yeah, take my picture inside the airlock. So there's another added benefit. That's awesome.

Unless you got anything else in the airlock, I've got a ton of questions for another quite exciting project that people are probably dying for us to get into at this point. I know, man. I have to apologize to your listeners for my long- into at this point. I know, man. I have to apologize to your listeners for my long-windedness. No, no, no. I want to know about the airlock, so they can deal with it if they don't like it.

But I am wearing my centaur shirt for you. Fantastic. Because we're going to get into some Ixian stuff. Previously, we've seen some illustrations of it with Common Centaur and a node on top. I think it was maybe two weeks ago or so, this new photo was released of what appears to be Centaur V with some sort of node in the middle there.

A ton of questions surrounding that. If you can dive into any of that and tell us about this new configuration that we're looking at of the new module. So the Ixion project, it's part of NASA's Next Step program. We are the lead on that, one of many teams that was funded by NASA to do a feasibility study on basically future stations, future habitats, things like that. Um, our team consists of, uh, SSL space system of morale, you know, the MBA part, uh, ULA, which, uh, you've foreshadowed with your centaur shirt. Um, you know, it, it also has a lot of interest from,

from a lot of other, uh, a lot of other people. Um, you know, we, uh, the thing is that we, we proposed an idea that's not new. Um, we, we proposed the idea of the wet lab, which was a Von Braun idea, uh, basically to reuse, uh, upper stages of rockets. And, and, you know, it's, it's along the same themes that that i've said a couple times you know it's it's real estate it's something that's already there let's just find a use for it so um so yeah uh the the status of the project um we we completed the feasibility study uh that's all done uh final reports are in and everything like that we We're moving on to the next step, which is the ground tests and that part of the feasibility. We're playing a little catch up, as I'm sure you know, that some of the other teams have already

started the ground stuff. We're not too worried about that, though, because our plans are for this. We have tail numbers for upper stages, and we've got plans. We'll see in which period of performance we do this, but we're going to do flight tests of this. It's exciting. As you can imagine, there do flight tests of this. Um, it's, it's exciting. Um, as you can imagine, there's a lot of trades, you know, pictures with Centaur five, there's pictures with the, uh, he says there's pictures with, yeah, heck with the HTV and with new Glenn and like all kinds of things like that.

Uh, right now we're still baselining that, the, the Centaur and, uh, and we're and we're baselining kind of a node approach, where there's a connector between that and a vehicle that tugs us there. Something like the Cygnus vehicle. you know like the cygnus vehicle so that new configuration with the cbm kind of in the middle is that kind of just an illustration at this point you know one of many design studies or is that something that people should look at and draw some conclusions from i think uh people should look at it and draw conclusions and and uh and you but the conclusion should be it's being considered as as an option okay yeah so the you know i think some people would look at that and say this is a super modified upper stage not something that just you know was flown and discarded and then converted into a wet lab of that of that sort but from what it sounds like the concepts all

the technology that's being developed as part of this um you know that that's still applicable to any given upper stage that's out there if you were to go up and capture an expended upper stage the things that you're working on are meant to be open-ended enough that you could convert that to a habitat yeah and that's that's the best way of saying it you know like i don't want to yeah i don't want to play favorites or or you know say that one thing would be you know better than the other that's that's the point of the study is to see what what would work and really what's yeah with who's who's most willing to work with us? We want to show this capability. We want to have stations up there for a number of reasons.

You can do a lot of manufacturing, things that you don't want man-tended. You can do things like habitation, and's the ultimate ultimate purpose here uh but you know there's there's a ton of other applications and we don't want to yeah not look at one or the other because of yeah it's also been a while since anyone's really looked at web lab in a serious manner and you know taking another look at it in today's environment so you know even if this if this applies to a different upper stage than you're currently thinking about, I think that's still a valuable thing to have out there is like, we've done all these studies about how this concept could work today with the tank structures we have. Cause the last time we looked at this, it was either like the Von Braunian, you know, very heavy structure or the Centaur style balloon

tanks. And that was kind of what you were looking at at we've got a lot of other things going on in fabrication and and different ways of you know different architectures that exist so it's you know something that i think somebody needs to do this work and it's good to see somebody is doing that work i think that's what excites a lot of people about something like this one of the common things that we you know that we see as we're as we're doing this study is that, it's something you point out, there's a lot of modification that has to happen. So it's important that whoever, you know, whatever we're working on is, you know, that that company is a partner, that they're willing to do these things. Things that seem really simple, like welding on another truss or something like that,

might invalidate the, I don't know, a couple loads analysis of the upper stage of this and things like that. And so it's really important to work with those people and have them on board and willing to do stuff. So that's a big part of this. No matter who it is, they've got to be headed towards that same goal. So one of the big trades in wet lab kind of concept generally is that you have to bring up fit-out hardware of some sort. Yeah. So I think that's when you look at people that maybe criticize wet lab idea or try to poke holes in it, they say, well, how does this really trade well in that?

You know, maybe you send up an upper stage, but you've got to bring all this extra hardware up on either the same flight or another flight entirely. So how does that sort of trade play out in the work that you've been doing so far? It's a real good point because you get in a trade, why not just build something purpose-built and launch it up? I think what we're discovering in doing this trade is that even with modification and with bringing up other stuff,

say on CRS vehicles, which half that space is for payloads, so we're able to use that. We're finding that with that trade, it still makes sense to bring up this big pressure structure. You still have something that's 80% of the way there, and you're not spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a rocket launch just for that. Right. I see some parallels to the way that you're thinking about the airlock in that it's a big dump space and you can configure it as you need. And I enjoy that parallel between the way that you're approaching the airlock as a configurable volume and the way that we're looking at wet labs like this as a configurable volume, because you're not locked into one specific design, which I think is something that is interesting.

In a hypothetical world, you could offer two different wet lab flights that have different configurations and different end goals. And one could be that robotic kind of stuff that you're talking about. One could be a crew habitat. And the concepts apply equally across the board there. you're talking about, one could be a crew habitat and the concepts apply equally across the board there. You know, something interesting that we've been really conscious of is that, you know, if you kind of a stretch of an analogy, but if you carry a hammer long enough, everything starts looking like a nail, you know, if you're a robotics robotics person you're going to probably want to design something so you could put robots in it you know if you're a inflatable or expandable person you're

going to design things for that you know soft goods etc etc we've been really conscious to try to not design ourselves into into those those specialties that we don't necessarily have at NanoRacks. You know, we'll be accommodating of those kind of things, but we don't want to limit ourselves to something that can only be operated robotically or only be operated with crew. So that's a conscious decision on our part. yeah it's a that's conscious decision on our part so is is this some sort of project that um maybe you personally or nano racks at large see as living outside of next step in a way in that you know if things go your way and next step great you'll follow along with that if things don't is this something that you could see nano racks taking further either in their own goals or selling to others is something that would live outside of it in the way that we've seen SpaceX live outside

of their initial contracts with NASA? Yes. I don't think it's any secret that we, you know, our ultimate goal is to have our own space stations and to be the destination in LEO. And I see this as being a really good way to figure that out and to make that happen. Even outside of NASA, there's a lot of applications for this.

And really, in one flight, another country could have an entire space station. With one launch, you could have a pressurized volume in which you could do just a ton of science. There's obviously military applications for things like that. In general, we think it's a good idea. And it's a, it falls in line with what we're doing as a company. NASA contracts and move forward with it on their own plans and how it played into what they're working on. And you see other particular companies not necessarily taking advantage of that sort of symbiotic relationship as much. So it's good to see somebody else out there on a completely different project within NASA kind of say, hey, this does play to our ultimate goals here and latch on and work with them

as best as possible. But keep in mind your not ulterior motives, your other you know influences that led you down this direction in the first place and I don't think it's any surprise that you talk about nano Rex having their own stations because Jeffrey members said that in Congress himself that's definitely not like it you know that's on public record out there I don't think anyone's surprised to hear that. Yeah. Well, thank you, Anthony, for the compliment, the comparison to SpaceX. You know, those guys are just doing incredible stuff.

And yeah, I guess the context of my statement is people that know NanoRacks and have had interactions with NanoRacks probably have different experiences. We have a lot of stuff going on. We have educational experiments that are, you know, they're small mixture tubes, things like that. We have small nanolabs, which is, you know, kind of where the name of the company came from. And, you know, these small experiments, we have satellites, we have scientific research platforms on the station. We've got a bunch of what would at first appear to be scattered interests. But the reality is that all these things are part of our ultimate goal. They're all things that we need to do to have private space stations. We need to know how to do science. We need to know how to have commercial utilization of satellites, things like that. We need to be able to build structure, hence the

airlock. All these things fit in line with what we're doing, and let's make our own station. Yeah, that's an incredible way to tie it together, because sometimes talking, you know, things that Jeffrey members said in the past or, you know, talking with other members of the team, it's been like, well, we kind of just went from this one thing and then said, hey, we could do that. Hey, we could do that and pile on these abilities. But that certainly sounds like a grand plan that you just laid out there that you had this like master plan written somewhere on the office that I didn't actually see when I was there. No, that's in that secret room. That would be a good job. And it is one of those things that when you're looking at the industry as a whole, you need a goal.

You need something inspiring. You need something commercially viable. You need a target to aim at. And that's been the case. So I put out a call for questions from the members over there on Patreon. And there was one interesting one that I would like to get your take on. This is all personal opinion stuff. You don't have to be speaking in company manner on this, but Ryan wanted to know what your thoughts are on 3D printing in space,

on-orbit manufacture, that sort of side of the industry that seems to be emerging these days. What is your take on that and where do you see that going in the future? Well, hello, Ryan. That's a good question. I'm excited about it. Now, I'm of the opinion that we need to just build a bunch of these machines and shoot them out and then figure out what we're going to use them for later. I think we're going to see some pretty amazing technological developments in a couple specific areas with 3D printing. I think we work closely with MainSpace, and I really like what they're doing. And printing tools and printing wrenches and things like that, that's ultimately extremely useful for long-duration stuff. But I think where we're going to see really big leaps and bounds in this industry are in making structures for antennas, synthetic aperture, stuff like that.

Structures that can't exist on Earth. And in order to do that, we're going to need additional precision in the machines, which they're working on. But then the ability to print multiple materials, to have stuff that has wires in it. Get something that has a fiber optic cable in the middle of this while they're printing. So it truly can be a composite structure. I think that's really where we're going to see some big leaps and bounds.

Because for now, aerospace is a little bit behind, honestly, other industries. We don't, you know, the station's made out of 7075 or 6061 aluminum and it's our other allies. And, you know, there's all these other amazing materials out there. We're hesitant to make giant changes because we have people's lives on the line. We've got a heritage that's really important. So I think that's where we're going to see it, is in things that we physically can't build on Earth. That's a very interesting answer because that's something that I feel like a lot of times people

take it in the, well, it's better to manufacture these things in space and bring them back back down to earth and things like that but you know that's an outwardly looking vision of what this could do for us what it could enable into the future yeah no and and you know not to discount that the in-space manufacturing like uh you know right now on space x13 um uh made Made in Space flew a fiber optic manufacturing thing. And gosh, I hope it works. That could justify everything. Every dollar spent today in space could be justified if we have a product that can only be made in space that produces a benefit for people on Earth. That's wonderful.

produces a benefit for people on earth. That's wonderful. And that's why we still do all of these mixture tubes and just really nano experiments. It's because for something to stick, you have to throw a lot of things at the wall. I want to see that happen. So looking forward in the next year or so, if somebody out there was particularly inspired by Nanoracks,

what should they be watching for in 2018 or, you know, in the run-up to the airlock launch, what is it that they should keep their eyes on? Well, keep a, keep an eye on our job posting sites. Nanoracks is hiring. Uh, we're, we're looking for expansion. Um think keep an eye on us for, to paraphrase Pinky and the Brain, for world domination. I think we're going to see expansion into other markets. You know, the United States has just been wonderful for us. States has just been wonderful for us. We've had other customers that are from other countries, European unions, from Malaysia, from here or there, from China. I think that's really where a lot of the exciting expansion is going to happen in Anoraks. We're going to have a lot more experiments from that. I think it'll be an area of growth in our company will be the expansion into those.

Very cool. Is there anything else that you want to kind of plug before? I don't want to hold up too much of your time. And I've got a lot of stuff going on down there, as we've talked about, quite busy down in Webster. So is there anything else that you wanted to plug or send people to look at, you know, to read up on some of these projects? Yeah. No, thank you. So again, apologize for my long-windedness. No, this is, no, this is, you have not listened to all the interview shows on this show.

If you think this one is long-winded. No. We can definitely take some time on interviews on this one, so. Nice, I like the long form. Now, I would like to point people to nanorex.com. It's a, you know, It's an outdated website with misinformation, but it's a good place to start. Follow us on Twitter at Nanoracks.

We have Facebook and Instagram as well. And across the headlines of your local newspaper, hopefully. Listen for us on Manage a Cutoff. It is a quite frequent topic. It's wonderful. We're all huge fans, and when you were down here, it was really fun to walk you around, and everybody's like, that's Anthony.

So you're kind of a rock star down here. Yeah, a very, very, that's Anthony. Like, so you're kind of a rock star down here. Yeah. Very, very, very local celebrity. Still a celebrity. Well, thank you very much, Mike. I love having you on the show. Love talking with you. Hope to get down to visit you in the not too distant future. Yeah.

No, thank you to you. Thank you to all the readers and everybody who supports your podcast. This is a, it's an excellent source of info. We appreciate it. Keep up the good work. Thanks again, Mike, for coming on the show. And thank you so much to all of you out there that made this show possible by supporting the show over on Patreon. There were 131 of you supporting this show, and that includes 23 executive producers who made this particular show possible. Chris, Mike, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, and five anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for all of your support in making this show happen

and keeping this thing going strong through 2017 as we come down towards the end. If you want to help support the show, head over to patreon.com slash Miko. And there's some good perks there. If you give $3 or more a month, you will get access to the headlines show that I do every single Friday. Running through the headlines of the week, the lesser talked about stories that are still important to keep on your radar. And $5 a month will get you access to the Discord where we all hang out and chat about space and other things. And just generally a good place to hang out and talk about space with some other space fans. Thank you again for all your support. Thanks for listening to this show and I will talk to you next week.