Main Engine Cut Off - T+88: CubeRover, Michael Provenzano and Andrew Horchler

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

Michael Provenzano and Andrew Horchler of CubeRover and Astrobotic join me to talk about the project, the rover itself, and the future of robotic exploration on the Moon (and beyond). This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 38 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, Stan, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, and eight anonymous—and 176 other supporters on Patreon. CubeRover CubeRover (@CubeRover) | Twitter Home | Astrobotic Astrobotic (@astrobotic) | Twitter Homepage - CMU - Carnegie Mellon University - CMU - Carnegie Mellon University Daily Planet | Science News and Video Clips | Discovery This is CubeRover - YouTube 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

Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I'm Anthony Colangelo, and we've got some special guests here. We've got Andy and Mike from CubeRover. Hi, everyone. Anthony, thanks so much for having us here today. We're really excited to be on your podcast for the first time and hopefully give a little bit more information about what moon companies are doing. Yeah, we've vaguely touched about moon stuff, mostly policy related on the podcast in the past, but not a lot about actual payloads going to the moon, things like that. So I'm pretty excited to dig into it. So before we get into the technology stuff, the design of Cube Rover itself, all that fun stuff, I would really like to hear the roles that you two have on the team and what you're working on day to day. So

Mike, you want to start? Yeah, sure. So I'm the president of the Cube Rover division here at Astrobotic, and we're soon spinning that out as its own company, Cube Rover. And I'm the principal investigator on a NASA contract under which the Cube Rover is being developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. And that's the Small Business Innovation, what is it?

What is the term? SBIR. Yeah, I forget what the R is. The type of contract used to develop technology focused specifically towards small businesses like Astrobotic. And that was a 2017 award, but that came pretty recently. Is that right? Yeah, there was these coming phases.

So we had a phase one, and then we repropproposed for Phase 2 for more dollars and much more exciting and bigger development on the project. Leading to that point is kind of interesting, because, Mike, you mentioned that CubeRover is soon to roll off on its own, and you've got these CubeRover small awards coming from NASA now. So it seems like an interesting history there. I'm curious to find out how did the project itself start and maybe now the full company, what is the origin story there? Yeah, I can take that. Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon have been working together

for 10 years since the Astrobotic's inception. And we've developed a lot of rovers over those years. CMU students and professors have developed their own planetary rovers over the years, all mostly targeting the moon. And it's only been recently that our government has switched its focus much more towards the moon and started investing in development of technologies, including rovers, to go towards the moon. So what we do is a heavy collaboration with CMU students to develop this rover. It is very challenging because of the small size that we're developing, but we have a lot of heritage and learning over the years to lean upon. So what phase would you say CubeRover, both the actual technology,

but the company, is in at this point in time? Yeah, so we're pretty far along with technical progress. We're at what you would call a TRL-4 going into TRL-5 technology readiness level. So we have a prototype working, driving around in the lab. What we're doing right now is we're trying to build that up to be a flight-qualified rover. So by the end of 2000 or by the middle of 2020, we're aiming to have this rover be ready for flight, tested for all space environmental testing, and ready to send off to NASA if they decide to fly it. On the company end, we're incorporating right now. We're looking at our location, which I unfortunately can't say where we'll be incorporating, but it will be very soon.

We're hoping to have more information on that by the end of the summer. it will be very soon. And we're hoping to have more information on that by the end of the summer. But yeah, we're actually on that note, we're going to be hiring for CubeRover in probably November or December timeframe. So check out our website for updates on that. Could you talk at all about the decision to roll out as its own standalone enterprise of sorts? Because it seems seems you know from from someone like me who's a little bit outside and looking in it seems like a good fit with what astrobotic is offering that you could you know extend these services to not just a lander um but you know then have some mobility on the surface so it seems like a good fit there

um but i'm curious where you see it it absolutely is a good fit. It really does align well with Astrobotic's model for our lunar lander, which is to provide these end-to-end services for customers who want to deliver something to the moon. And a lot of our customers are interested in roving mobile payloads, doing science, exploration, marketing, from something that can drive around on the surface. It's a lot more exciting to many people to do that. And there's no solution out there that you can really go out and buy. So it does align well.

However, it is, it's an interesting diversion, It is, it's an interesting diversion, if you will, away from that lunar lander. It's in terms of the pie there and because of investment opportunities and other options that are out there in space, we've chosen to break it off as a subsidiary, if you will, from this. So it really comes down to the investment opportunities and aligning well. We'd love to continue doing it. We are still continuing to do it through this NASA contract, doing a lot of work. But I think it'll make sense because of the differences between what we do in the lunar lander side and what we do on the research and development side here at Astrobotic. I think, and to segue onto Andy's

comment, I'm sure you're probably going to jump into this about, you know, what is different about the Cube Rover, but we really pride ourselves on how we've developed this in that it's really lightweight. It's two kilograms, which ultimately equates to really low cost in sending it to the surface. They're reliable. As Andy kind of mentioned, we have heritage, space heritage here at Carnegie Mellon University at Astrobotic and Building Space Technology, which has absolutely been integrated into our rover design. And they're scalable and modular, which means that they can be adjusted so they can hold different instruments on board. They can do a lot of different science missions

or exploration missions. So between all those things, we like to think that we're very different from what the market currently provides and that we're an order of magnitude less than what it would cost. If you look at Sojourner, which has a little bit different cost because that was sent to Mars, but you're looking at a $75 million mission, $25 million just for the rover.

We're a fraction of that. We're talking less than $5 million to buy the rover and to send it to the moon. The other reason to go to a separate entity or company is we see the Cube rover as a product line. It's not a one-off that we're building, we hope at this point. We have to develop this first version and prove it, but we want our own customers for this product and to actually build it into something that can scale larger CubeRovers with different and greater capabilities. And that's just yet another reason to really turn us into a separate company focused on this technology. So does that mean that you are lander agnostic to a scent?

Maybe the initial projects will be astrobotic landers, but it does give you some flexibility into the future? Yeah. So one of the strengths of CubeRover is that it is lander agnostic, but it's been built configured to Astrobotic's Peregrine lander. And obviously a lot of the missions are going to be supported, at least in the near term, Astrobotic is going to be launching and we're going to be launching with them. If there's a timeline that a customer needs to meet, or if there's specific instrumentation needs that need to be met on a different lander, then the benefit of KubeRover is that it can be lander agnostic. And would this be a situation where you build and operate these or are you building and

supplying them to customers to operate on their own? I think the interesting part here, and it's part of why we think that the KubeRvers are interesting to customers, is that they would operate them. They're teleoperated by the customer. And that has a lot of benefits for many reasons. The customer has access to their own data. Also increases STEM education in their community, the awareness. The more people you can have involved with this experience, the more you can share this. And as we've seen with countries that we've talked to and promote kind of space education,

that's a that's a critical factor that a lot of these countries are hoping to kind of include now is these rovers. I mean, imagine driving a rover here on Earth that is eventually going to go to the moon. And a kid being able to say that they did that is a really powerful statement. The name Cube Rover comes from or is inspired by the CubeSat world. And in that world, people design and build their own CubeSats, and then they fly them, they operate them, they pull down the data, and they update the CubeSats operation on the fly as it goes. So this is very much in the same model with respect to that. And that helps you guys scale as well. You don't have to have an entire team of drivers sitting in some warehouse in Vegas or something like that, like a drone operator.

But you can actually build a, you know, theoretically build a production line to keep these things rolling off and kind of manage your scale that way and, you know, deliver as many as you need. So that is a nice forward looking vision, I think, than other avenues. There's a whole other side of the market, though, that we're also considering, which is providing data so there are lots of customers who are not interested in how particular science data is acquired exactly but they are interested in that data when it comes down so just as satellites can sell their data as a as a as a service it's possible we could look at you know nasa or learner scientists or others who are interested in that data, particular types of data, and that we could actually provide that to them. Yeah. And also on your other note, Andy and I do want to drive the rover at some point. Yeah, right. I'm definitely coming out to drive one of these.

Well, we're going to let the customers do it. We're going to find some time in there where we can get to drive it a little bit too yeah that's a that's a good note to make keep that asterisk in the contract uh let's get into some of the rover specifics um you sent over a video that was posted i think it was daily planet right uh that you two were actually out at glenn research center doing some tests in regolith Simulant. And that was posted. The date on it was like May 2018. I don't know when you actually did those tests, but it seems fairly recent. Yeah, early May.

We were out there May 7th or May 4th or something like that. Okay, cool. So can you go through some of the goals that you had with that testing, maybe some of the outcomes as well? Um, and then if there was any changes that you've, you know, implemented since that. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, the facility at Glenn is, is a great one. Um, they have these large sandboxes, if you will, um, full of high quality lunar simulant.

Um, so it's very fine sand like material. It can be a little liquidy so it's challenging for rovers to drive on. It's also, as you'll see in the video, you have to wear special protection when you're in there to avoid silicosis or breathing in some of those particles. But it's a very unique facility and allows us to test our rovers and to confirm that our wheel designs and motors all work and can provide the traction necessary to drive through this soil,

as well as even climb over obstacles, rocks and other things without getting stuck. So we have a small version of this that we use at Carnegie Mellon University for designing our wheels and testing a little bit of mobility, but this facility really allows us a great deal of flexibility. You asked about what we learned from those tests. The first thing I think we were all surprised how well the rovers performed. You know, there's it,

because of how fine the particulates are, you know, there's a possibility of them effectively swimming in this sandy material. And we did test in another box that they had nearby of much, much finer sand, which is not actually really found on the moon. And it did basically dove into it and got stuck. But in this material, which should in Earth gravity match the behavior of the lunar soil in moon gravity, it performed very, very well. So we're going back. Right now, it's a matter of optimization. We want to optimize the mass

of our wheels and really refine exactly what their shape is to get better at mobility and climbing over stuff. Ultimately, it comes down to power saved. We have a limited amount of power and a limited mission duration, and we want to get as much done as possible going forward. That might shed some light on the next question I was going to have about the wheels specifically. The design are two wheels and a tail or a skid of, I don't know what particular term you use for that. But that's interesting.

And I think a lot of people look at it and go, well, how's that not going to get stuck if you have to back up? But even in this video, you were driving it backwards, quote unquote, and it was skidding across service just fine, which I found pretty amazing because that was one of the first things I saw. I was like, man, if you had to back up, that looks like trouble. Apparently not. So could you maybe talk about how you ended up at that solution?

What decisions were being made? Is it a power savings thing by not having to drive more than two wheels? Or is there something else about the environment? It all comes down to mass. Mass costs money. As you know, anywhere in space, whether it's a rocket or a lander or a rover, it costs money to get it to its destination. And NASA gave us this requirement of two kilograms. They're willing to pay to fly two kilograms, which is very extreme for a rover, especially on the moon.

There are lots of challenges from power to thermal to mobility due to that. So really that two wheel design comes down to saving mass. You only need two wheels. We can hopefully make a tail lighter weight than we can two wheels and motors or suspension type system like the Mars rovers have. So obviously there are obvious limitations and challenges that come with that type of design. You mentioned the tail and

driving backwards. Yes, we absolutely have to drive backwards. We have to be able to turn and turn in place. And that tail needs to not get stuck. So we've carefully designed it to float. You know, again, this allusion to a fluid, that tail needs to float above the surface and not get stuck no matter which direction it goes. It needs to provide the stability to the rover so it doesn't just tip over at some point, both while driving but also when it's dropped down from the lander onto the lunar surface. It needs to be a stable platform as much as possible. We're continuing to lighten all of our designs as we go forward from the wheels. The wheels may end up looking very different.

In fact, a lot of the systems at this point may end up looking really different as we go through and really optimize the configuration and everything about the design. And we try to get the mass down. A lot of systems really don't start out with such severe limitations. And so it's been a constant challenge and battle with mass. One important note on that is the rover we're talking about is what we're calling our 1.5 view rover. So as Andy kind of mentioned before with the CubeSat model, we're trying to leverage that model and that we're hoping we can build more scalable rovers. So if you're familiar with CubeSats, they're usually based in U's or units. And we hope to be able to build a 3U-sized rover and a 6U-sized rover, maybe even beyond that.

Those rovers will ideally not require much reengineering to scale up to that level, and they probably will have four wheels on each of those. It's even possible, as Andy said right now, that we're doing a lot of analysis. It might even be possible to get four wheels on a small one. But the technical team would probably kill me if I say that too loudly. All of it is still definitely in discovery right now.

We have a lot of good results, but we're always trying to be better. And the bigger Rovers should absolutely have four wheels on them. Yeah, that's good to hear, because whenever I'm doing interviews, I toss the announcement out to some of the Patreon supporters and give them a chance

to ask some questions, and there was a lot of skepticism about this whole skid system. But I think understanding the driving inspiration behind this initial version of cube rover is important in that because um you know even in a world where you got stuck the idea is you keep you kept it cheap enough and light enough that you could fly another without too much of an issue right so that's something that i find interesting where

you're not sending something to mars and saying it's got to work for 90 days for six years whatever it is so it can't get stuck on anything but it's like in a new world where something is so much cheaper you know we talk about this a lot with launch vehicles where you're saying distributed launch that if one fails you can send up another no problem that model has to extend beyond launch at some point um and that's why i really like seeing that from you that you took this initial design put it in some testbed scenarios and are working your way up in size and up in capability and i'm encouraged to see that overall yeah this two-wheel design is not a new new concept nasa has looked at it. They've developed actually quite large two-wheel rovers with tether systems included in them. They've developed also very small ones out there.

And the idea has been used in law enforcement and security-type robots to make them, again, very lightweight and compact robots. So we're leveraging many years of work by others in this area. And I think it's really important to distinguish, because we've heard that skepticism as well with the skid system. The missions and the applications that the smaller rovers are going to be used for are not the same missions that larger rovers are traditionally used for as well. So the things that we're looking at may be characterizing what the regula looks like, or maybe looking at the temperature profiles of shadows or looking at, it could be a wide range of things, resource prospecting. You don't need much more than a camera or a spectrometer. Now, things that you're going to be drilling, and if you're going to be harvesting resources,

and you're going to be carrying things back and forth, then you do need a larger rover. But these applications for these smaller cube rovers, I think, are perfectly aligned for that. And, you know, why pay more for a larger rover if you don't necessarily need it? You're not going to use the capability that comes with the six wheels and a suspension system. Then, you know, it's just extra cost. You're landing extra mass and it just starts multiplying quicker than you can get a handle on. So it makes a lot of sense. And especially, as you're saying, you know, considering it as a

piece of a larger program and not as, you know, an end-all be-all program in itself, though it can be that, it can also be an ex-galant, you know, assistant or something like that, or even something like Mars Insight, where we see it's deploying something a little farther from the base lander itself. You know, there's all of these different concepts that involve a mothership and a smaller something going out and uh i i do like seeing those kind of things um yeah one term we love is it's called the marsupial concept where you have a large rover and a small rover so a small rover can drop down or deploy from that larger rover around, get a different vantage point, take risks that you would never take with that large, expensive asset, like driving into shadows or into a crater where it is a very high, large possibility it might not come back out.

Right. But that's okay. Because that's the reason it's there on that mission. So yeah, that's really cool. There's a communications relay. You can do many, many things you have have that sort of idea. In terms of the actual systems on CubeRover itself, what's the power situation? You mentioned your power constrained and mass constrained, but, you know, is it batteries? Do you have

some solar panels? What's the deal there with power? Yeah, so people often surprise that we do not have solar panels at this point. And that, again, is a design decision, a careful design decision that comes out of our highly restricted mass. It's not that solar panels are necessarily that heavy, but what they do take up is area on the top of the robot. And that area is very valuable for cooling. When you're in a vacuum of space, you need to get rid of every bit of heat generated by the rover itself. That processor is not 100% efficient. The batteries produce heat.

Of course, the motors produce heat. And if it doesn't get radiated out, it stays in and builds up and ends up overheating the rover. So you need a large radiator that's pointed out at the black of space to get rid of that heat. You don't have an atmosphere convection to do that. So we want to maximize the size of the radiator. And on a small rover, there's not a lot left over for solar panel area. The other reason, there are many other reasons. There's cost. There's not a lot left over for solar panel area. The other reason, well, there are many other reasons. There's cost.

There's complexity, certainly, in the concept of operations of the whole thing. To have solar panels, you might need to sit around and do nothing for that period of time, which doesn't necessarily work out. There's a limited mission duration, ultimately, for this rover. We're designing this not to survive the lunar night um so it's gonna last uh maybe eight days uh eight to ten days on the lunar surface um and our calculations show that we can accomplish what we need to do um to a good level of certainty with just batteries. These are very high performance batteries, and we can do a lot with those over that period of time by careful engineering.

Our avionics and parts of our system do support solar power. So, Mike alluded to the larger future rovers. Those, the same system will support plugging in solar panels to recharge as we go forward. But on this small rover right now, we don't really see even the need, even though it would be nice, but to add that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

How about communications? Is that a situation where you're relaying back through the main lander and then up to Earth? Or I assume that's the case with as limited resources as you have here. Yeah, communications is so important. We don't even know what we're doing without it. So we rely on the lander for that communications. A small rover doesn't have the mass and power to put a big dish on it to point back at the Earth. So it relies heavily on that lander. Right now, that's the Astrobotic Peregrine lander, and that lander provides Wi-Fi communications to deployed payloads. So it's

really the same Wi-Fi you have at home. It's great for customers because you can use Wi-Fi anywhere in the world to test versus other wireless protocols might not be illegal in certain countries so we want to be open to the whole world for all of our payloads but especially the cube rovers here so yeah everything goes to Wi-Fi to the lander and then the lander handles all that transmission back to Earth at the rates. And communications is yet another challenge. This is not high-speed internet like what we're talking over for this interview. The data rates here for this interview are considerably higher than what we'll get from the moon. considerably higher than what we'll get from the moon. And so the live view, even the teleoperators,

what they're going to see is going to be pretty limited in terms of the rates and in terms of the quality of the image to be able to drive this. And that's a real challenge going forward, just to get those rates. And if we want to acquire a high resolution image on the surface, it's going to take a bit of time just to transmit that back. It's not the Wi-Fi connection that's slow, that's very fast. It's the connection back all the way to Earth to some giant dishes sitting there receiving that information. So that's always a challenge. We can't just stream back HD video in real time. We can't just, you know, stream back HD video in real time. We could certainly record it, but it would take a while to get it back to the Earth. And that's certainly a challenge with astrobotic, you know, this isn't the only payload on that lander. So there's going to be

the same way that Deep Space Network has to handle multiple transmissions from different spacecraft that's handling, I'm sure, you know, I don't know dozens of payloads uh and sending all the data back so um yeah but again i think you're you're painting a good picture of this is a constraint driven design process which you know in a lot of ways is what you need i do software development and design on my day job um and whenever you don't have constraints things get out of hand very quickly but when you do have constraints i think it brings a lot of clarity um and it clears up a lot of decisions that you have to make and you know in the way you're talking about solar panels and we don't really need it so toss them out simplifies things that amount gives you a little bit of mass back

and you can keep moving on uh through that series of decisions yeah and, and this is such a cheap relative to other sort of rovers out there. In the future, people can use these type of rovers as technology demonstration platforms. So someone wants to test solar panels on this and really look at the real-life performance. Or other things that we've considered are recharging methods. performance or you know other things we've considered our recharging methods no rover to my knowledge has ever used anything other than solar panels or nuclear power to to keep itself warm and provide provide the actual power for operation Roombas can plug themselves in could we do that with the lander or can we use wireless power or other things like that?

It's a great opportunity to explore that, and that'll open up whole new realms of possibility for not just our rovers, for other rovers, just to develop that technology and enable new types of missions going forward. So in terms of selling this to customers and what they would use it for, what are the payload

accommodations? You mentioned cameras and smaller sensors like that, but is there a standard suite that you're going to be offering or is this more of a, here's the vehicle, you can put onto it whatever you would like. If you just want to put a picture of your mom and drive around the moon for a little bit, go ahead. What's the deal there with the payload accommodations? Yeah. So there's a lot of different applications that we've talked about supporting. So the first one that comes to mind is camera, like as we mentioned. You could do a lot of, you could stream media. Obviously, as Andy said, not at the rates that we'd prefer, but you can still stream media. You could do resource prospecting. You could use a spectrometer also for resource prospecting.

We've talked about things like a penetrometer to go below the surface and measure different mineralogy aspects. We've talked to groups that are interested in using something called the Langmuir probe to measure electrostatic effects of the lunar surface. So actually the abrasive material and the regolith, when it collides with each other and interacts

with each other, actually creates an electrostatic effect, which is helpful if we can measure that and actually provide some analysis on that. We talked to groups that are building a magnetometer. So that would essentially be used to measure magnetic anomalies in the magnetosphere around the moon. And ultimately, with the end goal of finding where we might be able

to put human civilizations where they're shielded from radiation, we've talked to groups about helping to find water ice in the lunar poles. There's a whole slew of different instruments that we're trying to gather this consensus of what you could potentially do with a cube rover and where you would put these things on them. Ultimately, all these instruments have design implications for what the rover looks like, different attachment points, whether it's inside the rover, outside the rover, on a

boom. So we're trying to gather all these as much as possible. But we've seen that there are lots of space agencies, there are lots of universities that want to engage with the moon, and even companies and organizations that have different instruments in mind. We're trying to serve that market, the three different segments, with all the instruments that anybody comes up with. I'd also mention, too, that there is a niche here for terrestrial rovers

and just driving them around here on Earth and just, as I kind of alluded to before, educating the community about what can be done with the rover, preparing for lunar missions. So we're also building out a terrestrial rover product line as well. And again, as far as payloads go, we've already defined some interfaces to our electronics. So payloads can transmit data back through our comms system to the lander. Those are pretty standard and defined, nothing special. We don't want payloads to necessarily have to do a lot of space design and analysis and simulation to get their thing to work.

So we're using pretty standard interfaces for that. The rover has a large volume to insert these payloads within. The mass is still limited. Right now, the base rover includes a high-resolution camera and a variety of other little environmental sensors on it. And there's allocation for a small sensor payload within the two kilograms. And we think even though we're designing to that two kilogram limit, the rover itself will be capable

of carrying payloads above that limit. So that opens up new possibilities, even at this small scale for the different types of science and sensing? I'm glad you asked that question, because a lot of people ask, you know, what is there to do on the moon? And I think that the answer right now is, it's mostly exploration and science activities until we build an infrastructure to go further. So I think in the grand scheme of things, NASA has kind of led the charge on going back to the Moon, and a lot of other countries are very interested in going back to the Moon

as well. And we're seeing now with lander contracts, small and medium-sized landers, we're seeing that with the Lunar Orbiting Platform gateway, I guess, that's going to be in orbit up there. But all of these things, the more stuff we put up there, the more we're going to have a need for infrastructure monitoring and servicing. And these cube rovers are also a really good example of how we can help service those infrastructures. And maybe once we start getting resources and sustainable energy up there, these are the methods that we would do that. So I think early on, science exploration beyond that is going to be probably an ecosystem, sustainability,

and kind of keeping a community alive alongside humans with robots. And I assume someday rover racing, you know, you can bet on it and be some sort of force up there. I don't know. We've talked about that. I think that's up for debate if you've seen the speed of the rover. I didn't say it would be exciting. I just said that it will exist. We drive them pretty slow because that's power efficient, that's safe, and ultimately there's going to be teleoperation bandwidth. With more infrastructure, however, we'll get better data rates. We might have astronauts controlling them from orbit around the moon, which will definitely help in terms of bandwidth and what we can do.

And right now, this rover has very little autonomy, except for safety-critical functionality. It is designed to be teleoperated, and that's because computing in space is not that great and eats a lot of power when it does. So we really have minimal computing on board, and we rely on the communications and teleoperation to do everything. But in the future, yeah, autonomous, higher speed, rover racing on the moon, sure. NASCAR is popular.

Why not? First drag race from the lunar surface would be pretty sweet. Let all of the power out at one moment. Uh, so I'm looking at some pictures on the website here. Um, and as we're talking about payloads, I think people might look at photos and wonder where does their stuff go? So we have this sort of wedge shapedshaped body uh between the wheels and that skid is there a particular area on that that is defined as the payload space yeah the the payload space is a pretty large empty volume uh within that space

so payloads can be mounted to the front surface where the camera is mounted they can be mounted uh to the belly if they want to point down at the lunar surface. The top space is reserved really for the radiator. So that's a large space pointing out at the black space as I mentioned earlier. We'd probably limit the amount of payloads that could actually protrude through that for thermal reasons.

So really it's the bottom and sides that they could protrude through that for thermal reasons. So really, it's the bottom and sides that they could protrude through that thermal insulation. But there's a lot of empty space inside because all the electronics are mounted directly underneath that radiator for maximum thermal efficiency. As are the motors and all that as well? The motors are mounted near the side, and they are thermally connected up to that radiator.

There's a good video on our website that shows a little diagram of how the rover is put together. There's an animation of things moving around inside of it. You could probably get a good look on the internal workings through that video. As Mike mentioned, obviously different payloads will have different requirements and will require some level of customization for mounting and poking through that insulated surface of the rover.

So we expect to define some level of standardization there, but ultimately it's gonna, we can't over standardize with respect to that because the payloads can be very very different um and we want to provide those payloads as much thermal protection uh and protection also from the the dust as well on the surface um that could you know get into stuff and damage it um so that that volume is really helpful there. And the wedge shape that you alluded to is designed with two things in mind. That's for thermal reasons,

so that it points away from the surface. It's actually the sun is not that big of a deal. It's the soil, the regolith, that gets very hot through the lunar day that you have to watch out and insulate from gets much much hotter than anything else and so we have to be very careful uh to keep as much of that heat away from the sensitive parts inside and the other reason for the shape is is climbing over obstacles we don't want to get trapped on those obstacles we want to sort of naturally fall off those rocks if it has to go over something like that makes a lot of sense

um future stuff i'm curious about uh what you know obviously don't have to give away any strategic details if you don't want to but where do you see cube rover in two years, five years, 10 years? What does that roadmap look like? So two years, uh, that puts us in 2020. Um, it's very possible by the end of 2020 that a cube rover will be on the moon driving around. Uh, we have a pilot partner already ready to go on that. Uh, we have a schedule booked, uh, with astrobotic on their lander. So hopefully the goal is 2020 to have our first cube rover up driving on the surface. Five years, we will also be incorporated at two years, but we're hoping to have a company of fairly significant size working on larger cube rovers, something that we'd call our 3U and 6U rovers, as I mentioned before. Those rovers, ideally, will be working towards surviving the lunar night and potentially

having much more rechargeability, longer mission durations, heavier equipment that it could carry, and hopefully at that point, more infrastructure monitoring, given that there may be two to three landers on the surface at that point. 10 years, I would like to see a cube rover on Mars. I think that the idea of having a planetary rover is that the moon is much harder to survive than Mars. What we're doing right now is pretty much the hardest challenge we could possibly take on. Going to Mars after that is going to be a different challenge, but it's going to Mars after that is going to be a different challenge but it's going to be a lot easier in a lot of different

ways so I'd like to see a cube rover on two different planetary bodies at that point and multiple cube rovers on the moon working together in swarms to kind of do autonomous tasks and hopefully we'll have some people up in a moon base

controlling those rovers let's hope fingers crossed And hopefully we'll have some people up in a moon base controlling those rovers. Let's hope. Fingers crossed. It's a curious time, because the timeline you outlined at the beginning of the show, how this idea came about, was sort of done outside of all of the political stuff that has happened since, in which the US here specifically has turned its sights back towards the moon and started funding smaller landers and things like that. So, again, this might be a touchy subject of some sort, but there are these contracts out there for these smaller

landers right now, and we've heard rumors of medium and large size lander contracts coming in the next couple of years. Do you see yourself as a component of those lander missions? Or is there something, I guess, you've already got this relationship with NASA, so you might not be too concerned with it. But I'm curious how you see that political process playing into your plans. So the lander contracts are specifically for the landers. But we do see that there's a program that NASA's released called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, the Eclipse, people call it. That is to fund technologies

that would be going payloads to the moon. And a lot of the same way that you have space flight that has ride sharing right now with rockets, NASA would be funding ride sharing essentially on Astrobotics Peregrine Lander to the moon. So we see the Cube rover as a very critical piece of the CLPS program. On the lander program, I think that that is specifically geared towards the small and medium scale landers and eventually large, maybe potentially human engineered landers.

But I think that we're definitely a critical component in any of these payloads that are going to be developed for lunar instrumentation. There's also another program out there called the Development and Advancement of Lunar Instrumentation Program, which is to fund those technologies that will go to the moon. So they're funding both the development of lunar instruments and the transportation method to get there. And I think that we play a role in both of those pretty significantly. There's just no substitute for mobility on the surface. You can only do so much from a lander, especially when that lander damages, for lack of a better term, the spot where it comes down. It's blasting away that regolith. It's transforming the material

properties. And there's fuel left over in the space around it. So a rover, it can drive away from that site, can find more pristine areas to investigate. It's also, it's always true that the best science is nowhere near the best landing sites. So having that mobility, even when we, Astrobotic is working on precision landing and hazard avoidance technologies for our landers

and for NASA, but there's still no substitute to be able to drive away and go visit something up close as an astronaut would do. And this lunar scientists and geologists always tell us, they would prefer to be up there walking around with their hammer knocking at the rocks. But if you can't do that, then send a capable robot to do it as a proxy. So with where you're headed, you gave us a very good timeline of what we should see in the future from you. where you're headed. You gave us a very good timeline of what we should see in the future from you. Is there anything else that people should be watching day to day over the next

year or two leading up to that first launch, if they're all jazzed up about Cube Rover at this point? I'm sure we both have opinions here. What I'm really excited about is ISRU. I've been following pretty closely out of manufacturing, which is being done on the space station, and also to build, you know, I guess, habitats potentially in space. I think that that's going to be very, very important as we go further into deep space, as we learn to live off the land, as it's been phrased. But ISRU is taking those resources in in-situ resource utilization, is taking those resources in situ resource utilization, using them to actually make materials that you need.

So we think of the concepts of maybe turning the regolith into glass, using it as solar panels, using the water as rocket fuel to go further to different destinations, or also using it as oxygen and just water for humans to go up there. I think that I get very excited about that because I think of the mobility aspect of the Cube Rover and putting an additive manufacturing device on top of that and driving around and supporting humans. I would look into additive manufacturing. I think there's a lot of exciting things going on in the industry.

And then I would also look at moon, just moon momentum, I guess, is if you want to call it. There's just a lot of stuff. There's a lot of interest in going to the moon, not just in the U.S., but Japan and Russia and China and India, all building land, even Israel, which is hoping to launch by the end of this year, all different things that would be going to the moon and for different missions. Yeah, I'm excited about all types of mobility on the lunar surface or other planetary bodies. Astrobotic is fundamentally a robotics company, maybe more so in a space company in many ways. We're not a traditional space company. We come out of CMU, Carnegie Mellon, and their decades of work in robotics.

So I'm excited to see much more robotics and more computation, more AI, more intelligence, autonomy in all of our rovers and landers going forward. I see rovers working also with propulsive drones on the moon, so little rocket-propelled quadcopters, if you will, flying around, exploring parts of the surface that rovers can't get to. There are these pits and lava tubes on the moon that have been observed over just the past five, ten years have been discovered that are fascinating. They're by far maybe the most exciting part of lunar exploration. We'll get down into these areas and see what they're really like to get up close to the geology and the history of the moon in these areas, and ultimately to examine them for future habitats. They would be, you know, protective from micrometeorites and radiation and much more like Antarctic temperatures where we've already shown that we can live. So those those are really exciting for me.

All aspects of robotics and more robotics coming into space going forward. A fun fact about that cave exploration is because of the microgravity on the moon, caves can be a lot larger on the moon than they could be on Earth. So it's very possible that there could be a cave the size of Pittsburgh up on the moon. And I guess we won't know until we're in there, but it's nice to think to use your imagination. Yeah, you've already got the funicular system worked out, so that might actually be really helpful on the moon out there.

You could take what's over on Mount Washington and bring that to one of those caves. So what else should people check out about Q-Rover that I didn't mention or that you'd like to point them to before we get you out of here back to work? So I would say follow us on Twitter, follow our website. We have a lot of exciting updates coming up. We're working with a group called Space Nation. We were

just out driving around in Iceland. And there's going to be a web series coming out on that. And Q-Rover will be included in that um yeah check out the website you know we're hoping to to grow and hire uh later this fall um and we'll have news uh with regards to what we're doing um with with the company the website is cuberover.com by the way very easy to remember um also check out astrobotic.com for uh, for, you know, info on our lunar lander and, and their first, uh, lunar mission. Um, you can follow us as well on, on Twitter, uh, at astrobotic. Um, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Just at astrobotic and at cube rover. And all those are in the show notes so that people don't have to type. It'd be very nice. Thank you guys so much for joining me on this all Pennsylvania episode of a space podcast which is I think a unique thing that doesn't happen much when you've got

just Pennsylvania talking about space so it's always a good thing but thank you two so much for doing this bring it home to Pennsylvania absolutely and I mean I'll extend it if you're ever I know you're in Pennsylvania but if you're ever around you want to stop in the office you're more than welcome to yeah it's a long drive over there but if I're ever, I know you're in Pennsylvania, but if you're ever around, you want to stop in the office, you're more than welcome to.

Yeah, it's a long drive over there. But if I'm ever on the western half of the state, I think people always are like, you're in the same state. It's like, I don't know, for East Coasters, it's a long drive. It's really through a lot of nothing. So, but if I do make it out west, I'm definitely going to stop by. I love Pittsburgh. I've always enjoyed my times there.

So I'm hoping to come back through sometime soon. Great. Well, Anthony, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you guys for hanging out. It's been great. That's it for the show this week, but before I get out of here, I want to say a huge thank you

to all of the supporters of Main Engine Cutoff over at patreon.com slash miko. There are 214 of you supporting the show over there. I could not be more thankful for your support. This particular episode of Main Engine Cutoff was produced by 38 executive producers. Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Jameson, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee,

Jasper, Chris, Warren, Bob, Brian, Russell, John, Moritz, Tyler, Joel, Jan, David, Grant, Barbara, Stan, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, and eight anonymous executive producers. Thank you so much for your support. I could not do it without you and everyone else over at patreon.com slash Miko. Until next week, don't forget, follow on Twitter at WeHaveMiko if you want to hear what I'm

talking about between the shows and check out the blog over at mainenginecutoff.com. Thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you next week