Main Engine Cut Off - T+82: Jon Goff, Altius Space Machines

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

Jon Goff of Altius Space Machines joins me to talk about how he got to where he is today and what’s ahead for Altius—including satellite servicing with Bulldog, propellant depots, cryo couplers, and wet labs. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 31 executive producers—Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Jamison, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, and six anonymous—and 161 other supporters on Patreon. Jonathan A. Goff (@rocketrepreneur) | Twitter Selenian Boondocks | Random Musings from the Warped Minds of Jonathan Goff, Ken Murphy, John Hare, and Kirk Sorensen Jonathan Goff | Selenian Boondocks Altius Space Machines, Inc. AltiusSpaceMachines (@AltiusSpace) | Twitter Cryo Coupler SBIR Phase II Win » Altius Space Machines STARPOST 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, Spotify, 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

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. I've got a special guest here today, John Goff of Altius Space Machines. He is an incredibly interesting person to hear from and I'm really excited that we've got him on the show to pick his brain a little bit about the future of in-space services. So it's going to be a great conversation. Just wanted to give you a quick note up front. I'm actually on vacation this week.

I'm out of the country, over in Italy. And so I did this podcast right before I left so that you'd have something to hold you over until I get back. So I just wanted to give you a heads up. This is a little bit time shifted, only about a week or so, though. So it's not too bad. But I did just want to give you a heads up.

And I will be back live with you very shortly. So until then, thank you all for supporting the show over at Patreon.com slash Miko. And let's get into the interview with John. John, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. It's great to have you here after quite a long time of hearing people say, you got to get John on the podcast. Hey, thanks, Anthony. I'm looking forward to it. So let's maybe start with, can you give us a short-ish version of the John Goff origin story, like how you ended up where you're at today? Yeah. So let me see. When I was in grad school, I ended up coming up with an idea for a

reusable sounding rocket company and found out that somebody who actually had money was already doing it. So I ended up becoming a founder or co-founder of Mass and Space Systems back in 2004. I was part of the original four-person team that started that and then stayed there as the lead propulsion engineer through summer of 2010 when I left to start altius um i thought i was leaving to start a company that was going to be doing reusable small sat launch and uh ended up instead uh pivoting fairly quickly after afterwards into um you know focus that's now more focused on space robotics and satellite servicing. And, you know, I've been running Altius ever since. Coming up on, yeah, coming up on eight years this, let's see, June, I think, June, July.

I lose track. That year is a blur. But, yeah, so coming up on eight years this summer and we've done all sorts of different projects for most of the big rocket companies you can think of. NASA, DARPA, and we're even, uh, you know, raising money right now to get into, uh, satellite servicing, uh, for, for Leo satellites. So yeah, pretty, yeah, pretty busy and pretty crazy, but, uh, that's, that's sort of my, you know, short version of my backstory.

So when you, uh, before we get into the current projects, I just want to zoom in on one That's sort of my short version of my backstory. So before we get into the current projects, I just want to zoom in on one piece of that there. How you talked about pivoting from small sat launch to more of what we're going to be doing in space. That is something that I feel like you sound like you're eight to ten years ahead of everybody else in the industry because we've got a thousand small sat launchers right now. And surely some of them are not going to work out and end up pivoting towards other space services of some sort. Can you give us a little insight on what caused you to make that decision? What factors you saw at play that led you down that path? Yeah, sure. So like a common theme that's been going for about, oh, I don't know, 10, 12 years now, I've been a big advocate of in-space refueling, propellant depots, that sort of in-space infrastructure as a way to lower the cost of travel in space, providing markets for RLVs, those sorts of things.

And when I started Altius, I had recently written papers with ULA and some Boeing people about propellant depots and provided feedback to the Augustine Committee on propellant depots and missions you could do with them. And shortly after, right around the time that I started Altius, there was an article in Space News where somebody who's now a really good friend did what I thought was a hatchet job on propellant depots where he made the argument that, you know, like he was saying that, you know, look at the cost per, you know, dollars per kilogram of launching a Falcon 9 into low Earth orbit. And, you know, depending on when you're looking at, you know, that number somewhere in

the two, three or four thousand per kilogram, you know, quite a bit cheaper than pretty much anybody else at the moment. And, you know, it was cheaper than the number, you know, quite a bit cheaper than pretty much anybody else at the moment. And, you know, it was cheaper than the number, you know, Mike Griffin had given a number that said, you know, NASA could buy propellant on orbit for 10,000 bucks a kilogram. We'd do it. You know, if somebody already built a depot and was stocking it, you know, we'd take advantage of that. And so a lot of people in the depot community latched onto that. And this guy just made the argument that he's like, you know, because they said, look, Falcon 9 is cheap enough that, you know, that's, you know, two, three, $4,000 per kilogram. And I can sell it at 10,000. You know, there's a, you know, there's a potential market

opportunity here. And his argument was like, wait a second, look at how much payload Dragon can actually precision deliver to a facility where you have to do rendezvous and capture, you know, where, you know, you're not just launching into an orbit, but you're actually physically connecting two objects in space. And he said, you know, you look at the dollars per kilogram delivered on Dragon, and it's about an order of magnitude more expensive. Like right now, most Dragon flights are about $130 million. And if you look at the last several flights, it works out to like $40,000 to $50,000 per kilogram delivered to a facility. per kilogram delivered to a facility. And so his argument was, hey, unless we come up with something that's dramatically better than what's being done for commercial cargo, the numbers don't

close. You don't get to that magic, you know, 10,000 bucks a kilogram point where it'd be, you know, cheaper and better than using a heavy lift vehicle. Sorry, so that's kind of a long segue. But I saw that I'm like, you know, right around that time, it was right after I had started Altius and we'd been doing a project for ULA on this thruster gimbal that we're still doing work on occasionally. We were doing the initial feasibility study. And so we had seen, learned a lot more about the capabilities of like a Centaur stage. And I was realizing that, wait a a second these are fairly sophisticated stages i wonder if there's a way to come up with a rendezvous and capture system

including robotics where the upper stage can rendezvous directly with the space facility like a depot and then the robotics can sort of take up the slop that the upper stage can't handle by itself and enable you to just use an upper stage and not add this big, expensive, fancy, you know, prox ops vehicle wrapper, you know, onto the tanks you want to deliver. Because, you know, if you can enable a Falcon 9 upper stage or even a Vulcan upper stage to rendezvous directly with a vehicle or with a depot, your dollars per kilogram now drops back down to close to the dollars per kilogram of the stage itself or of the launch vehicle itself.

So you're back down below that $10,000 limit, even with current expendable vehicles, and it just gets better from there. So starting to think about that and how I would actually do the robotics and how I would enable an upper stage to do the rendezvous, that's what really got me starting to work on space robotics. electro adhesive sticky boom that we even did a flight on a zero G aircraft that we raised the money to design, build and fly that, um, you know, that was all internally funded,

but the SBIR then took that and, you know, took it a bit farther. And then we've done some DARPA work and then various bits and pieces, uh, you know, asteroid redirect mission and, um, you know, asteroid redirect mission and, you know, a lot of internally funded stuff, a couple other NASA SBIRs that, you know, went in that direction.

So just over time, we've basically developed a core competency in, you know, capture mechanisms, capture robotics. We're trying to expand that out now into somewhere where we can address a real market need that we can actually raise investor money to go after basically the whole scalable and sustainable business model thing. And that's what we think we can do with low-earth orbit satellite servicing. But anyway, yeah, propellant depots servicing but but anyway yeah propellant depots and the how do you make propellant depot logistics work that's what got me to kind of make the

transition from rockets to space robots so that's kind of the guiding vision overall of of altius is is building those fundamental things that you're seeing a need for in various architectures? Or is that kind of the path that you've led down and you have a grander vision overall? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, so for a long time, the focus was, you know, let's try to develop these missing pieces that people eventually need when they go to do commercial space stations or propellant depots. And the problem is, is that developing something too far in the future when you don't have a big bank account is kind of a recipe for being a starving artist. So, you know, so we've done a lot of contracts and other government and commercial

contracts along the way. But really, in order to raise actual investor money, they want to see a existing near term problem that desperately needs to be solved, that you've got the best solution for, and that is going to grow your value very rapidly so they can sell their trunk in a couple of years and get a 5, 10, 15x return, depending on the details. And so for a long time, it's like I wanted to develop these technologies to solve these longer term problems, you know, for propellant depots and commercial space stations and other sorts of things like that. But, you know, we were looking for a market that, you know, is investable, you know, because it's like, you know, if you take the superset of problems that need to be solving, there's a smaller set of problems that you can actually make any – that anyone wants to pay you for solving.

There's a smaller set that you can actually profitably solve. And then there's a much, much smaller set of that that is – has the exact right parameters to be something that you can get venture or angel investment for. And usually, they're looking at something that can turn into $100 million plus a year market, preferably a billion dollar a year or more market, and, for every dollar of investment you raise to get to market, you know, that you can deliver, you know, that you can tell a convincing story that you can deliver $10 a year of revenue for every dollar it takes you to get to market. So for $100 million a year market, they're expecting, okay, $10 million to get to market, and then you open this $100 million a year market. And the thing is, there's all sorts of problems that you can solve profitably that don't fit

that mold. So, so one of the things that took a while, the reason why we're like eight years in as a startup is, you know, finding that sort of product market investor fit. Um I think we're getting pretty close on that. We'd actually had a... So for the LEO satellite servicing, we're developing this vehicle. We're calling it Bulldog. And the idea is you've got people developing big constellations of satellites, OneWeb, SpaceX, Boeing, Telesat, Leosat, Kaskilo, and some others. And they're building enough of these satellites, and most of them are flying at a high enough altitude that if you have a failed satellite, it's going to be with you forever, hundreds of years, possibly thousands, depending on the specific altitude. And you now have to track that, you now have to dodge that. And if that

dead satellite ever happens to hit something else because dead satellites can't dodge, now you've got debris sprayed all over your constellation operating altitude. So really, it's in the best interest of these guys to both, A, you know, they're already working on trying to make their deorbit propulsion the most reliable part of their spacecraft. But you need a plan B. That plan A on a mass-produced spacecraft is never going to be good enough by itself. So make your plan A as good as possible. But we want to be the plan B. We want to be the tow truck that can allow you if the satellite fails in spite of your best efforts we can then take it tow it out of the way um and you know drop it into a quick disposal orbit that'll burn up within a

couple years um you know we had looked at stuff related to that four or five years ago. But at that time, the biggest constellation was Iridium. And when you looked at their total revenue stream for that whole constellation, it was low enough that I just couldn't see them wanting to spend more than a couple million bucks a year for these sorts of services. So we'd sort of put that on the back shelf. million bucks a year for these sorts of services. So we'd sort of like put that on the back shelf. And then about a year and a half ago, two years ago, it came to our attention that, wait a second,

people are looking at launching, you know, thousands of satellites into Leo. And it's like somebody needs, you know, they're going to need help. So yeah, so we started working on that. Got a couple of competitors competitors good competitors out there uh there's a great company out of singapore and japan called astroscale it's trying to do something very similar um there's a lot of guys working in the geo belt but kind of the unique thing we're trying to do is you know the next step past just being able to do those de-orbits is expanding that out into more sophisticated satellite servicing. One of the things we realized was if you have a way of connecting to a satellite cheaply enough that you can do a de-orbit as inexpensively as these guys need, deorbit as inexpensively as these guys need, it's like we're talking trying to get the deorbit price point into low single digit millions per satellite. You don't want your deorbit costs being dramatically more than your cost to launch a new replacement satellite.

Even though those two are unrelated numbers, it's still a psychological barrier that we're trying to stay below. But if you can do that, it means that you might be able to do other things. And initially, the easy ones are being able to grab the satellite and move it somewhere else. We don't just have to move it to a disposal orbit. We can grab a satellite and give it a plane change or a reboost or other things like that. or Reboost or other things like that. But we're also working on a whole suite of what I'd call cooperative servicing interfaces. So the idea here is, I mean, have you seen like what Goddard does

with their satellite servicing program office with trying to interface with legacy satellites and refuel them. Yeah, that's been a hot topic lately. And I know that that's, I don't know, I'm not too privy on the ins and outs of it, but I'm not sure like how long that kind of stuff has been around, if that's ideas that they're still pushing actively or if it's kind of like these legacy systems are so old

that it's, you know, MacGyvering your way into the satellite or what? Yeah, so they're still pushing on it. And the reality is interfacing with a legacy satellite is ridiculously hard. You know, the Goddard guys have actually demonstrated some of this. It's like, you know, you look at the, you know, the fill drain valves for a satellite and typically, you know, it's a, you know, a valve that has like an AN fitting coming out of it. And after they fill it and close the valve, they safety wire the valve shut. Then they put a cap over the AN fitting and they safety wire that on. And then

they put a tertiary cap with an O-ring seal, and then they safety wire that on. And so Goddard had to make a robot that could, using machine vision and a suite of tools, go through, clip the safety wire, remove one cap, clip the safety wire, remove another cap, clip the safety wire, connect something up, and then actuate the valve. And they could do it. You know, their robotics foo is amazing. But they also started realizing this is really obnoxious. You know, and so one of the guys had the brilliant idea of, couldn't we design a valve that had all of the same sort of redundant seals and everything else that met the same requirements

that this setup is meant for, but was designed explicitly to be really easy for a robot to interface with. And their goal was, can we do that and make something that is about the same size, about the same weight, about the same cost, and has the same level of sealing redundancy and everything else can meet the same qualification standards, but is super easy for a robot to interface with. entire industry. But to a certain extent, you have to get some baseline level of functionality or operability to do this on a scale that isn't so specific. Because what you're talking about here with the legacy satellites, there's only so many legacy satellites, right? You're going to run out of that pretty quick. So you can't build a business on that without getting some critical mass of people over to the new thing. So how do you see that going forward?

Well, the thing that kind of helps is that with these mega constellations, if they make it to market, which I'm still fairly bullish on, right now there's, I lose track, somewhere around 1,200 operating satellites in the universe, the known universe. somewhere around 1200 operating satellites in the universe, the known universe, um, you know, between SpaceX,

Boeing, and one web, they're talking about putting up another 10,000. So that means that, you know, I only have to convince a couple of customers, you know, to go with one of these fill drain valves,

for instance, and all of a sudden you're on the majority of the satellites flying. That's true. Yeah. It turns out they brought the extra zeros for your scaling issues. Exactly right. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, for Boeing and for OneWeb and most of the others, you know, they're

probably pretty open to this. We've been talking with them about some of the various cooperative servicing interfaces, and we've gotten at least some interest from a few of the companies. SpaceX is always a tough nut to crack because they're kind of pegged hard over on the do everything in-house, even if there's a better solution out in the market kind of thing. in-house, even if there's a better solution out in the market kind of thing. So I don't know. I love SpaceX, and they do absolutely amazing things on launch reuse and things like that. But we're still trying to talk with them and trying to convince them. And with these cooperative servicing aides, and we're making a whole suite of them.

So we kind of took the general concept that Goddard did there. We're trying to expand it out into a full suite of things like grappling fixtures that make it easy for you to rendezvous with and capture your satellite, even if it's dead and tumbling. Plug and play interfaces, think of them like USB ports for your satellite that you can plug modules into without having to know in advance exactly what module you're gonna plug into it. It could be a battery extender, it could be a spare reaction wheel, it could be a laser comm upgrade, whatever. Yeah, so grappling fixtures, plug and play,

power data, as well as fluid interfaces, low pressure fluid interfaces, and then these various flavors of cooperative servicing valves. You know, we're working with, we've got a research license with Goddard to see if we can close a commercial case, you know, that would get us a commercial license from them for doing their cooperative servicing valves. They're kind of, you know, the ones they've done are focused on like standard spacecraft

propellants. So xenon, hydrazine, nitrogen, tetroxide, helium gas, you know, stuff like that. So high pressure gases and storable fluids. And then the cryocoupler that we're doing is very, very similar, but for launch vehicle cryo fluid couplings that serve as a T minus zero disconnect, but also can be reused on orbit for making refueling connections. So basically, so we're trying to develop these interfaces, find people that are willing to be early adopters on them so that we can start turning them into de facto standards. And then our goal on these interfaces is we don't want to make our money off the interfaces.

We'll try to mark them up a little bit so we don't explicitly lose money on them. But otherwise, we expect to make the money off of providing the services. Yeah, so you're going to be actually operating the spacecraft that you're talking about. Exactly, yeah. We want to put the interfaces on satellites that create more markets for Bulldogs and eventually propellant depots and other stuff like that. So would you be manufacturing the Bulldog spacecraft as well? We'd be doing a good initially our plan is to partner with somebody who can where we can leverage as best possible

you know a nearly cots bus you know there's there's several small bus providers out there that are trying to develop standardized or semi-standardized buses that you can integrate different payloads into. And so we're trying to start with one of those and see how light of modifications we can do. But then we would be integrating in our payload. So our secret sauce, our main secret sauces are rendezvous,

prox ops and robotics, you know stuff, and the plug-and-play interfaces. But when it comes to building a bus and doing the star trackers and the reaction wheels and the TT&C comms and command and data handling and all those sorts of things, a lot of those don't end up being wildly different from other satellites. So at least for initial demos, we want to try starting leveraging, you know, the fact that people are trying to build hundreds of thousands of smallsats, you know? Yeah, they got to come from somewhere. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, I mean, some of those are doing them in-house like SpaceX, but a lot of them

are, you know, like OneWeb and others are, you know, spreading, you know, subbing out various pieces to industry. So where possible, we'd like to leverage that. I mean, there's a lot of great, you know, just to rattle off a few of them that I know of. There's a ton. Maybe I shouldn't try to rattle off a few just because I'm bound to leave somebody out that I'm going to feel bad about. You're talking like production lines of small, small sets. Cause I feel like the past year I've heard about, you know, one web, they obviously have to build a bunch of satellites up front, but they want to also have a production line going that doesn't run out when they get their whole constellation up. I've heard similar things from Spaceflight, I think, recently. I was talking up a similar service. So you would be looking towards that direction.

Somebody that's already working on a production line that you could maybe use initially and then see where that takes you. Yeah, because I mean, realistically, long term, you know, this is a very physics driven business, you know, orbital dynamics, you know, so in the long term, I think our bulldogs are going to end up becoming more and more specialized and more and more, you know, like basically a solar electric propulsion system with a great rendezvous and capture package on it and some sensors, you know, so it's going to be a lot more propulsion biased than your typical spacecraft, because typically with a spacecraft, other than like some deep space probes, you know, your propulsion is kind of secondary to your main mission. Yeah, you're station keeping and doing some maintenance, but nothing, you know, on the scale that you're talking up here. Yeah, and maybe you do some orbit raising and orbit lowering at the end of life. But for us, we want something that, ideally, we'd love to get to the point where we build one of these buses that's low cost, and we can get a couple dozen deorbits out of it over the course of its five-year lifetime. I don't think we'll be anywhere near that initially. Initially, we're shooting for a handful, two or three or something like that. But we're working on all the different technology bits and pieces to optimize it.

I mean, basically, our system optimizes very differently from a lot of other satellites. So long-term, it's going to get more and more customized. And maybe at some point we're doing enough work where it just makes sense to pull all the bus stuff inside. And if you're doing telecoms or if you're doing Earth observation, you know, there's a lot of sense to trying to partner with either, you know, one ofatellites or Blue Canyon or Tyvek or General Atomics, the former Surrey Satellite US group or MDA or Spaceflight or Moog. There's probably at least three or four

that I forgot. There's so many companies that are doing trying to do these semi-commoditized spacecraft buses that if you're doing something normal, you know, or even remotely normal, starting there is probably your best bet. And then, you know, if you need something fancier, more customized down the road, I mean, you know, reasonable people can differ, but that's my opinion. I mean, you know, reasonable people can differ, but that's my opinion. Size-wise, what are you looking at for Bulldog itself, but also for the satellite market that you're targeting? Do you have a particular size in mind for either or both of those?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so initially for Bulldog, we're targeting something in the 50-ish kilogram range, you know, 50 to 75 kilograms, you know, trying to keep it small to start with. And it would be targeting initially the, you know, stuff in the sort of one web to SpaceX range, you know, 150 to 500 kilogram range for de-orbits. That's classified as the new hotness, I think. The new hotness, yes. That's the technical term for that size.

Yeah, and then some of the other guys, Leosat, Telostat, and Boeing, have been talking about things more in the 700 to 1,000-kilogram range, which we might be able to do that with the Bulldog 50, but we may do a slightly scaled up one, full ESPA equivalents. And we've also looked at doing a CubeSat version, like a 12U CubeSat version. Right now, we're mostly focused on that initial 50 kilogram one

because it's a good size range where it's small enough that launch costs aren't too ridiculous. It's small enough that the physics work nicely for deorbiting stuff in the 150 to 500 kilogram range. And you don't have to hyper miniaturize everything. For our robotics, it's in a size range that we've worked with in the past and that i know that the people who are making the various elements already have tooling for

working in that size range so um you know we want to start there we go to scale up to the bigger vehicles the nice thing is some of the things won't have to scale up like the capture system that works for 150 kilogram satellite should work just fine for a six ton geo satellite yeah um you know might want to scale it up a little bit if we're using it for a propellant depot for capturing an upper stage that could be a couple tons or a couple dozen tons um so you might want to scale it up for that for like satellite servicing you know the the stuff we're doing for bulldog 50 should scale up pretty easily. Scaling it down to CubeSat scale, we're pretty sure we can do. We've done some work in that area, but I was realizing it's like, you know, yeah, we save a bit on launch costs and a little bit

on bus costs, but now we have to spend a whole bunch of time not just building the robotics, but making them small. So Bulldog 50 just seemed like a good starting place for us. Yeah. Cool. So how about, you mentioned launch in there, and that's probably a big question that people have out there. How do you envision getting these into orbit? Would you see them as a ride share? Do you think you would buy maybe a dedicated small set launcher to launch a handful? Or is it tricky because you don't know exactly what plane you're heading into, what altitude uh because that's customer dependent so i would say yes um we're so the nice thing about these buses is that you know if you've got a 50 kilogram bus that can grab

something in that size range and tow it down um it's delta V capability without a payload on it is kind of ridiculous, like in the several kilometers per second range. Yeah, so we can put up with getting launched into suboptimal places and maneuvering from there. But that said, we've surveyed the market, and it's like the vast majority of the market is kind of clustered into a couple of orbital inclination ranges. And you've got some polar and some synchronous. And we can get back and forth between those two without too much headache. I mean, it's painful, but it's not impossibly painful. And then a lot of the other ones tend to cluster around 40 to 60 degrees,

so plus or minus ISS inclination. So kind of what I envision is, you know, so we're talking with a mix of dedicated and ride share, but on the dedicated guys are small enough that in most cases, we'd be ride sharing on a dedicated small set launch so um you know so uh you know we've also talked with some of the big constellations about could we piggyback on some of your launches and you know since we're servicing your vehicles and going the same inclination you are that'd be convenient yeah putting like a lifeguard in there, right?

Right alongside the rest of their satellites going to that plane. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cause I mean, here's the thing is like, uh, you know, say you have a launch failure and it drops them off at low altitude, you know, we can do all sorts of things and we could, you know, grab the stack of satellites and we won't be able to move it too far, but maybe we can at least station keep for a while while they launch the satellites individually and check them out. Or we could grab the satellites one by one,

tow them up. I mean, there's yeah. You know, lifeguard sort of services there, you know, or if one comes off and doesn't activate right away, you know,

even if they're taking the sort of Doritos crunch, all you want, we'll make more philosophy to their to their constellation it's like they probably still want to know what the heck happened you know um like even if you're mass producing you know thousands of satellites you know if you have a failure you want you want to know what happens so that you can see is that just statistical fluke or is that something that I can prevent in the future? Would you have some cameras on this to be able to send some visual checkout to your customers?

Yep. Yeah, we already need a decent sensor suite for the ProxOps anyway, so being able to provide inspection services is a relatively easy thing. Anyway, yeah, so there you know, there's, yeah, lots of different options there. But, you know, primarily, we're looking at, you know, various flavors of rideshare for our particular case, because we're not as picky about where we go, because we can, you know, if somebody drops us off in sunsink, we can make it to polar orbit and it'll cost us some of our propellant load but we're also working on ideas for being able to refuel uh refuel these things so um

anyway probably don't want to go into too much of that quite yet but um you know we i'm a big fan of in-space reuse i'll just leave it at that yeah yeah you're keeping an eye on um what orbital the atk has been working on with the mission extension vehicle and robotic vehicle uh that's obviously the way higher end of the uh mass scale of the market but do you have any thoughts on on how that's going so far they seem to be attracting attention from intel sat and others um is there anything you can glean from that yeah it's pretty exciting i mean i don't i heard this at a public event so i think this is public information but it sounds like they're planning on trying to launch their first servicing vehicle somewhere near the end of the year plus

proton yeah yep so i'm pretty you know i'm I'm, I'm friends with some of the original, you know, MEB team members from back when it was, you know, back when it was the ATK side of things. And, you know, so I've been a big fan of what they're trying to do, you know, and they were trying to go after, like, you know, if I was starting this back then and I wanted to find a market, you know, the legacy market was all there was at that point. So, you know, and it is a market. I think they'll be successful. I mean, I don't know how successful, but I expect them to make good money on that because there's geobirds and there's economic reasons for wanting to eke more life out of most sorts of

geo birds, you know, or being able to service them or repair stuff if it goes, if something goes wrong early. And so SSL and orbital ATK are doing with their respective geo satellite servicing vehicles. I think that's really valuable. You know, what we're trying to do with Leo ends up driving you in different directions. With LEO, because you're dealing with so many different planes, and it takes time to get, even in the same inclination, being able to get from one orbital plane to another takes

either time or a lot of propelling or both. And so you end up wanting to do something where you're doing lots of servicing with lower cost servicers that you can sort of, where you have a mini constellation of servicers. So like the big geo buses, you know, like what they've looked at for DARPA Phoenix and RSGS and, you know, the medium-sized ones, the Orbital ATK and Effective Space are doing. And those are all interesting, but in order to hit the kind of price points we want to hit, you know, you'd have to be doing like, you know, well, I think I've seen the numbers on some of them. You'd have to do about a dozen services or so in order to break even. And we're trying to

get something that breaks even off of two or three. Anyway, so I think what we're doing is pretty complimentary. I'm sure that they would absolutely love to have a grappling standard that everyone starts using, that people start putting on their satellites that's easy to work with. Because grabbing Marmon clamps or grabbing nozzles, I mean, they've got a solution that works um but people also made the f-117 fly you know you know it's like with enough clever

engineering you can brute force your way through many problems that you really wish there was a better solution for um so do you see a uh upcoming for for your own projects do you see an upcoming, for your own projects, do you see an upcoming demo flight of any sort? Or are you kind of waiting to see some of these initial constellations get up before any hardware makes it up to orbit? Yeah, so our challenge right now is we're still pre-investment. We've been doing a lot of this just bootstrapping off of what little profits we make from government commercial contracts. We're trying to change that. We're trying to raise the seed round and move faster and all this. We're also trying to find public-private partnership opportunities, things like, anyway, there's various public-private partnership opportunities that we've seen with NASA and DOD.

We're looking at a couple different channels. If we can raise the seed round and get onto that sort of venture-funded path where we close the seed round, we can show enough proof of market and technology progress that we can then raise a series A. Our goal would be, we're trying to get to a flight demo as soon as possible. We're not waiting. We're waiting on, we're trying to raise the money so we can, I'd like to have something up there by the end of this decade, late 2020. That's obviously going to depend on us either landing some serious investment or some contracts. But that's my goal is get something up by the end of the decade. Because by 2020, OneWeb and SpaceX and a lot of these other guys are already going to have a lot of satellites up

there. And the most likely point for them to have a lot of failures is early on. So I'm expecting that by the time our thing is flying, it's going to be busy as heck, cleaning up some of the initial learning experiences. Even if they're not in the operating altitude of the constellations, they're dropping them off. Most of them are planning on launching them into some intermediate altitude and then spiraling out from there as part of their checkout process. But these intermediate altitudes are just barely below the altitude where they'll deorbit on their own within the 25 years, which means that if they have any sort of early failure that happens after

they've started spiraling out, they're still going to be in an orbit that needs help to get down with it. It's compliant with the 25-year guidelines. Yeah, I didn't consider that factor either about the, you know, you're going to be more useful on the front end of their deployment. So, yeah, that's some good motivation for you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so business model-wise, what we're trying to do is we're trying to minimize their upfront cost. You know, so like these dog tags, I don't know if we'll hit this number. The number I've been targeting is trying to keep them around 1000 bucks and 250 grams. So it's like totally in the noise for one of these satellites. Even a mass produced satellite is going to that's a tiny fraction

of a percent we've got fancier versions that we're looking at that could include some RF transponder beacons those might get up into more of the $2,000 range or something but I'm trying to keep those cheap

so it's front loaded because especially for the deorbit services you don't know in advance which satellites are going to need them. Yeah, exactly. You can't plan that. Yeah, exactly. So for all these constellations, business wise, you know, they're fighting to raise the money that they need to get to market, even SpaceX. I mean, it's like Elon said, five to eight billion to get Starlink flying and, you know, OneWeb's saying like, I don't know, like three and a half to four billion or something like that. They're already like three in, so. Yeah, yeah.

And so it's like they don't want to have to raise extra money to pay for something like this. They'd much, much rather pay for it after they're operational. So our idea is, you know, keep the front-loaded cost to a minimum. You know, if you're going to have to put it on every one of your satellites, keep it as cheap as possible so it's just still a no-brainer. And then, you know, they just buy the services for the satellites that actually need it. You know, so unlike putting a deorbit kit on every single satellite, you know, where you've got deorbit kits now on satellites that don't end up needing it.

You know, so we're trying to avoid that sort of thing. You know, that's where we think sort of the sweet spot is. Yeah, yeah. You know, yeah, yeah. And same thing with all the other interfaces. So like the mag tag, you know, USB ports for satellites, you know, we're trying to keep the passive interface light enough and cheap enough that even CubeSat operators might put them on some CubeSats. You know, like the whole idea of satellite servicing on a CubeSat sounds crazy, but

you know, think about it. It's like launch costs for a 3U. Once you've factored in launch and build costs, you're probably looking at least 300, you know, a third of a million, you know, it's like, you know, a couple of years ago, you could buy a good house in Denver for that, but it's gotten a little more expensive since then. But, you know, but you could buy a couple of Teslas for the cost of the three U CubeSat. Yeah. And so, yeah.

So it's like, if you can find a way to do satellite servicing that's sufficient, all it is is economics. Can you service it for sufficiently less than the replacement cost? That just makes sense to keep it running. And there's some CubeSat constellations that they're like our technology goes obsolete

every two years. Okay, so maybe in that case, they're fine with launching two years okay so maybe in that case they're fine with launching new satellites but even in that case if they can make the obsolete part of their technology fit into something that can plug and play on that interface where i'm launching a half u replacement module instead of a full three u that's still saving tens of millions of dollars over a constellation every time you go to right yeah. Yeah, anyway. That's cool. Sorry. I don't want to keep you from work for too long today. So is there any other projects in particular

that you wanted to mention? I know this is where most of your time's going these days, but I don't know if you wanted to mention the work that you're doing on some of the wet lab stuff, which I've talked a lot about in the past, particularly excited about it. Yeah, I could touch on a few other things. So let's see. So I already talked a lot about in the past particularly excited about it yeah i could i could touch on a few other things so let's see so i already talked a little bit about what we're doing with

cryocoupler so this is a cooperative servicing valve for launch vehicles for cryogenic you know fill drain connections um yeah the whole idea is all all launch vehicles have some sort of connection for fueling them on the pad, and they usually leave it attached literally until the rocket is lifting off from the pad and committed. Because if they have a last-second abort, they want to be able to drain the tank safely. So they usually have these umbilicals that are designed to rip off of the launch vehicles as it launches. that are designed to rip off of the launch vehicles as it launches. And so what we're trying to do is just make a version of that that can do that function,

but that the part that is left behind on the launch vehicle is still usable and still easy for a robot to interface with to remake the connection in space so that you can do in-space refueling. We have a NASA Phase two SBIR on that. We're about halfway through that. We've been doing a lot of work on some magic seals that make the robotic part a lot easier. But we've also lined up some, you know, at least one company that wants to test our concept out. So we may get a flight demo within the next year or two or three. Um,

fun guessing game, figuring out who, yeah, yeah. And it's not for refilling. It's just for demonstrating that it works as a T minus zero disconnect. So that's not quite as awesome, but, uh, but it's still, you know, like my, my thought is since they already need this interface, if we can make a T minus zero disconnect, that is, you know, like my thought is since they already need this interface, if we can make a T-0 disconnect that is, you know, cost competitive, mass competitive, and has some nice features where people would want to use it as a T-0 disconnect anyway, then they can just bake it in even if they don't believe that refueling is going to come for, you know, another several years. is going to come for, you know, another several years. And then when someone goes to do refueling,

all the cars have fuel receptacles that can interface with the standard gas nozzle, so to speak. Yeah, exactly. And there's a lot of upper stages floating around out there. Yep. Yep. Yep. So, uh, so let me move on from that one. So that one's plugging away. Um, you know, we're working, we're, we've been supporting, been supporting the NanoRacks team on their outpost, you know, wet lab habitat stuff. You know, they got a great team there with them and MDA and ULA and Paragon and a bunch of other cool companies. And we were working pretty closely with ula and ssl you know ssl mda is doing the maxar i guess is the name these days you know they're doing the main robotics for that but what we're doing is sort of the smart structures so like when you go to kit out your wet lab um you know for their the idea that they had for Skylab was actually building the floors into the

tank in advance, you know, they just had them iso grid so they could drain, but that ends up, you know, limiting you a bit in, in how you do things. There's some pluses and minuses, but it definitely makes it hard to put any sort of like, you know, anything fancier than structures. Let me leave it at that. You know, is, you know, that works okay for walls and floors, but not much else. And only if you're okay with having holes and everything that you can see through, um, you know,

and it also increases the risk of FOD getting into your holes and everything that you can see through. You know, and it also increases the risk of FOD getting into your stage and everything else. So, you know, so they took a minimalist approach. You know, what's the minimal mods we can make to, you know, Centaur, Centaur V, or Asus, or whatever, that can allow us to attach these structures. And I'm trying to be very, very deliberately vague on some of this because I don't know how much they want to let out.

So we did a lot of work on how to make structures that interface well with robotics. I think there's a video out of that now on that new page that NanoRacks put up a week or two ago. Yeah, that shows it. So yeah, all those composite panels and stuff like that, we designed all of that. Okay, cool. So yeah, there's like these foldable segments or unfoldable segments, I guess, that create the support structures and some of the floor structures to create what you would essentially

call a floor layout inside of the tank. I'll link that video in the show notes so people can watch along as we talk about that. Yeah, that'd be good. Yeah, because that still glosses over a lot of the details. But yeah, so we did a lot of work on how to build those and the hinges and the latches and all the different mechanism events and how to integrate as much functionality in it as possible. Because it's like the big drawback of inflatables and wet labs tends to be that you can't fully outfit them and test everything on the ground and so we're trying to cheat and find a way to make it as testable on

the ground as possible while still being you know something you can outfit and still have a lot of functionality built in you know longer term i mean you know yeah anyway um so so we did that and we also helped a lot with the, just figuring out how to lay this thing out. So we tried to design it in a way that works well, both for zero G as well as artificial gravity. So, like, if you had one of these things on the end of a, you know, a tether of sorts and it was spinning,

like these things will work just fine in a quarter G environment. Now we're talking. That's the thing that gets me excited because I have not, that's something I feel is lacking out there. So the fact that you're kind of putting thought towards that is encouraging. Yeah. Yeah. They had at least a couple of NASA people that are interested in that.

I don't know if that'll go anywhere near term, Yeah, they had at least a couple of NASA people that are interested in that. I don't know if that'll go anywhere near term, but I've got some ideas for how to do a kind of a Hermes on the cheap. So like skip the solar electric propulsion instead of nuclear electric propulsion. You've got some ideas for how to do like crazy high power to weight solar arrays. And, you know, I think you could actually launch something that would be a pretty good artificial gravity, you know, earth to Mars and back sort of vehicle, you know,

that you could put up in, you know, low single digit numberit number of Vulcan or Falcon Heavy class launches. So I think there's some real potential there. It's not the direction NASA is currently looking, but if we can ever convince them to change their mind, I think the pieces are there. We can definitely convince them to change their mind, whether it's the direction that you hope is the different question. Changing the mind is the easy part. Fair, fair. Yeah. So we were supporting that. We're still waiting to hear back formal word on if they're going to fund follow on stuff. So

I'm keeping my fingers crossed because that would be pretty exciting to actually build some of these. It's one of those where it sounds kind of boring. It's like, oh, it's floors and walls with hinges and latches. In the space robotics

world, we end up doing a lot of mechanism-y stuff too, spacecraft mechanisms. This one's going to be pretty cool. If we get to phase two, I'm going to be pretty excited about what we're going to be able to show off at the end of this. Anyway, so that's cool. I'm just trying to think of anything else we've got going. In the long term, we've been trying to think of anything else we've got going. And long term, you know, we've been trying to develop this concept for micro depots. But that's kind of, you know, it relies on the same technology

we have to develop for Bulldogs. So Bulldogs kind of our first priority, you know, but you take Bulldog, you take cryocoupler and some of these other, you know, some of the lessons learned from what's being done on Outposts, et cetera. And you could do a pretty good micro depot for refueling small sat launch vehicle upper stages. So enabling the, you know, you look at all the dedicated small sat launchers, so, you know, Rocket Labs, Virgin, Firefly, Astra, Generation Orbit, et cetera, almost all of them are using LOX kerosene. Almost all of them have second stages that have crazy amounts of delta V capability on them, like six kilometers per second with their full payload, because they're doing most of the acceleration to orbit. And most of them can barely make it to, I mean, they can make it to Leo,

but they can't really make it much further than that without their payload dropping off really far or without having to scale up quite a bit, quite a bit more than any of them want to deal with. So what we're trying to do is saying, instead of scaling up to service markets further out, refuel the upper stage you know so you have a micro depot co-orbiting iss uh you know same plane and altitude as iss but a

little bit you know behind it in the track um and you launch a dedicated small sat launch to you know to rendezvous with that, you know, use the direct rendezvous technology that we've been developing both for Bulldog, but also, you know, what got us into space robotics in the first place. You know, we think we can get it to the point where most of these upper stages should be able to rendezvous with the depot. We capture it with some of our sticky booms, pulled in, ref refuel it recharge it if it's got batteries um it still has its payload attached to it then when we let it go it relights and does a um you know an injection burn um you know depending on how long live the stage is or if

it's got a kick stage after that um you know we can send like if you can launch a 400 kilogram you know like whatever payload you can launch to leo with one of these small sat launch vehicles with the refueled upper stage you can send it almost anywhere in the solar system yeah anyway yeah i mean you can't quite do i i think for most of these stages you can do up to about like 60 to 80 kilometers squared per second squared c3 before the payload completely drops off but like you can get your full payload yeah you can get your full payload out to like a 30 30 to 40 kilometers squared per second squared c3 um so yeah yeah moon yeah, moon, Mars, Venus, you know, a Juno kind of trajectory where you do a Venus flyby.

You could get to Pluto. You just have to do a Venus-Earth flyby instead of a Jupiter gravity assist like they did. So I mean, anyway, yeah, you can do all sorts of crazy things with this. like they did so i mean anyway yeah you can do all sorts of crazy things with this and the price point that we're trying to target with this is you know like we ran the numbers like two years ago we were trying to decide do we do bulldog or do we do oasis you know this micro depot thing and we decided bulldog was near term and a better focus near term but when you ran the numbers it looked like you, you know, you could do a lot of these missions for under, you know, under about half the cost of a Falcon 9 flight. You could do,

you know, to quite a bit less, depending on how small you're going. You could have a dedicated launch to anywhere in the solar system where, you know, if you're going to some oddball place that's not popular, you're not going to Mars, you know, during a Mars window or, you know, or the moon or geo or something like that, that you can ride share. Then you have to buy a dedicated launch. Falcon 9 is a great dollar per kilogram, but if you want to launch an ESPA class science mission to Mars or Pluto or wherever, you're going to be forking over enough money to buy a full Falcon 9 or Atlas 5 or Vulcan or something like that. But with us, you can do that now for like half or a quarter of the price, depending on how small your vehicle is. So, yeah, I mean, that one's a bit longer term, needs more pieces to fill out.

Yeah, but it's not as long term as some space projects that are talked about often. It's just like, you know, very foreseeable in the current environment. So the fact that you've kind of worked through those numbers even is telling. Yeah, it's the kind of thing where, you know, if we had, you know, if somebody came to us with, you know, that could write a $100 million check, you know, the kind of investment that SpaceX put into Falcon 1, you know, for comparison, or Rocket Labs put into Electron or, you know, that kind of level, we could probably build the Micro depot and build and launch the micro depot for that kind of level of money.

And the problem is, going back to that earlier comment about VCs, I can show I can close a profitable business case if I add the $100 million, but it's not going to be a billion dollar a year market, most likely initially. Um, you know, so it's, it's, it's harder to tell that story that works with the VC model. So we're, we're looking at, you know, we, we do have some biz dev irons in the fire looking for other ways of doing that. But, um, technologically, I mean, technologically we could, could you know we could be developing that directly today if we had the money we don't so we're focused on bulldog initially because we think we can get the money for that and there's a big market um you know and and it develops all

the all the technologies that aren't on the shelf right now that you'd need for micro depots bulldog develops yeah you can tell how this architecture builds on itself and you're putting the components in place that enable a lot of these projects that you've got in mind. So, you know, it's really amazing to hear a roadmap like that that's put together sensibly because a lot of times people just talk grand vision.

They don't get into the details. They kind of hand wave away a lot of the details. But when you are talking through this roadmap about, this roadmap about down to the couplers and interfaces and seeing how it builds up from there, it starts to really come together as a picture in your mind on how to get from where we are today to where we are. And at the beginning of the show, I said that you sound like you're 10 years ahead of the rest of the industry in that know, this is where we are heading. Everyone's working on launch now, but there's not a ton of people working on what to do when we get up there in, uh, this type of architecture way. So that is, is why I'm drawn to what you're working on and, uh, why I love following along. So where, if anyone out there has not been aware of your online presence, where can they go to keep an eye on what you're working on day to day? Where should they be looking out for the things that you're working on?

So I mean, probably the, you know, I mean, there's the Altius website and blog. So altius-space.com. That's A-L-T-I-U-S. So that's a good spot. Um, we have a Altius space, uh, Twitter account. I also have my personal Twitter account that tends to get more attention except for right now I'm on a, you know, a two month Twitter hiatus while I write some proposals and do some other stuff. But, um, yeah, uh, that one's rocket trep render. So Rocket and then like Repreneur from Entrepreneur. Sort of a portman too. And then my blog is Selenium Boondocks. And all of those have kind of suffered while I try to run a company.

Yeah, while you're productive, you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I look forward to the day where we're big enough where I can afford to have, you know, a couple of like, you know, interns or grad students or whatever that just crunch numbers for me so I can write cooler. You know, because when I write blog posts on Selenium and Boondocks, i usually like having graphs and numbers and you know stuff to back it up you know not just a hand wave i mean i'll write the hand wave you ones occasionally but it's always it's always more fun when you know that the numbers actually support you um yeah you've got some cool ones there about uh i remember there was a new shepherd pop-up uh two stage to orbit post on there there was one about using Mastin vehicles

as strap-on boosters for Vulcan. So there's a lot of these fun ones that I can link to in the show notes that I love reading. Cool, yeah. And somebody absolutely needs to do a fully reusable small sat launch vehicle. It is totally technically doable.

And if you can launch small sats for the same price, you could launch on expendable big sats or big sat launchers. You know, if you could get, you know, Soyuz or Proton or Falcon 9, you know, expendable prices on a fully reusable small sat launcher, you know, like you would own a good chunk of the market. You wouldn't get everything, you know like you would own a good chunk of the market you wouldn't get everything but like you could be pretty you could be pretty happy with that someone needs to do that um someone needs to do that so i don't have to do that i was gonna say you're gonna get sucked back into launch from the space robotics side please no i want someone else to solve that

problem you know it's like i love launch. I love rockets. But, you know, my whole point with Altius is exactly kind of trying to do the next steps thing. You know, everyone's focused on, you know, launch. And when I started, everyone was focused on suborbital launch. And it's like I wanted to take the next steps after that so that when launch is a solved problem, the next piece is solved too. But, you know, anyway, so if nobody does it and we're successful enough with Altius, you know, maybe I'll revisit that a couple of years down the road.

But I really, really hope someone solves it before then because like someone needs to do this, dang it. I think you're timed particularly well. And I wouldn't be surprised if that is something we see in the near, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is something we see in the near future. So we'll be hopeful so that we can see some of these projects that you're talking about on the horizon, because that would be particularly exciting. So thank you very much, John, for coming on. Thank you so much for spending some time talking through

all this stuff. I'm sure everyone out there is having a good time listening and following along to this kind of stuff. Excellent. Hey, thanks, Anthony. I'm glad we finally made this happen. Yeah, exactly. After however long we were talking about it on Twitter, reminding you, hey, we still got to talk. So thanks again, John, and I will talk to you soon. Okay. Take care, Anthony. So that is it for us today. Thank you so much for listening. Hope you enjoyed hearing from John. I know I enjoyed listening from this end of the mic. So thank you again for listening. And thanks so much to all the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash Miko. As I said up front,

this is a time shifted episode. So this list might be a little out of date at this point. But right now, as of the recording of this, we've got 191 of you supporting Main Engine Cutoff over on Patreon. And this episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 31 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for all of your support. Thank you for keeping this thing going week in and week out, even when we're on the road.

So that is it. Thank you so much for your support. Again, if you want to reach out about this show, Anthony at ManagingCutoff.com is the email, or on Twitter at WeHaveMiko. I will be back with you live next week, and I'm very excited to talk to you then about all the things I missed while on the road. So thank you so much again for listening, and I'll talk to live next week. And I'm very excited to talk to you then about all the things I missed while on the road. So thank you so much again for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.